Drift: An Expansion Era Story

So many miles of monotony translate into so many days of isolation.  They stopped four times, each one lasting no more than a day, but, somehow, breaking up the nothingness that formed the building-blocks of their routine.  Certainly, they passed another ship in the perpetual night, but the constant orbits of planets meant that no path along the same well-traveled route remained the same. A few hours’ difference in departure time could radically alter the route between two dynamic points across the system.

 For one-year rotations, the crew of eight earned vast sums of compensation while spending their days either enhancing or ruining their bodies and minds.  The isolation, boredom, and close-quarters enhanced personality conflicts to the point where a captain’s duties were split between those of master technician on one of the most advanced feats of engineering made by man, and counselor.

 For those who gawked each time one of the Guppies made one of those four stops along its route, casting shadows on all other ships milling about the unusual concentrations of activity that far out, their enormous size belied the cramped living area.  The size itself evolved as an adaptation to the never-ending monotony and its resulting expensive psychological damage.  The large capacity meant that Sadko Transportation needed fewer crews, which meant fewer payouts of outrageous benefits packages needed to entice recruits to haul materials and goods from the asteroid belt to points much further from the sun. 

Economics ruled.  Every aspect of life and business in the outer planets reduced to numbers examined by PhDs and MBAs at Ephemeris Engineering, Qinlin Mining, Lamb Higley & Hilbert, and especially Sadko.  Their spreadsheets calculated every aspect of cost to better maximize shareholder value or merely stay afloat.  While no one who didn’t experience the life said it, the vast majority of those living and working that far out remained motivated almost entirely by cash.  For everyone on Earth, they were pioneers forging a future in the stars.  Among themselves, they talked about little other than plans to spend their hard-earned salaries.

This Guppy, the Natalia,was no different.  Ruslan, the engineer endured his fourth run in a fierce drive to accumulate capital to build his own dry-dock.  He kept a set of plans plastered to the bulkhead next to his bed with an ever-lengthening list of investors.  Leonid, the first mate devoted these years of his life to build a resume.  With a few more runs under his belt, he could compete for one of the coveted system pilot slots making well into seven figures as he navigated ships through local hazards for only a few days at a time. His grandchildren could be kept quite comfortable for years to come.  The physician’s assistant had years of student loans to pay and avoid before heading to medical school. 

Even the captain spent the monotony perfecting the designs of the monstrous house he would build for his family on a Bahamian beach upon his return.   Of those who were married, only one of the deck-hands, Pasha, was on his first wife.  Being that their marriage occurred only two months prior to his last rotation, it was highly likely he would need a replacement spouse upon Natalia’s return.

Others, who kept their feet on the ground, or in stations much closer to home, might not understand their own motivations at all.  As many more would question their motives in leaving family behind for extended periods of time for no reason save wealth. 

Arkady, as captain, did everything he could to shout down the doubt that lingered in the back of his own mind.  He tried, generally successfully, maintaining the requisite self-delusion to such a toxic mix of boredom, stress, and responsibility.  Although the captain’s duty kept going around the clock on these long trips, updating the course and making sure all the gauges stayed green only filled so many hours.  He spent the disproportionate amount of time inspecting the cargo.  The cavern that dangled beneath the living decks could encompass the remainder of the vessel more than eight times over.  Nearly every cubic yard was filled with over-sized containers of various sizes and shapes,all floating suspended while caught in a web of anchor cables.

Directly forward of the center of mass between several dozen tons of weightless cargo secured with netting, he could always find one particular spot during his “inspections.”  Getting down into the hold itself took a strong stomach.  The yellow-jacket striped room that separated the operational portion of the ship from the cargo took Arkady down a ladder past the point painted on the bulkhead where gravity briefly intensified before disappearing. Then, the captain floated down between bundles of crates secured and organized by place of origin.  In one perfect spot, he could shove both feet under hooks against the hull and look through the cargo-master’s window, large enough for a hemispherical view that caught just the edge of the bridge’s underside where the docking clamps engaged.  Empty space filled the remaining view, making it a perfect escape.

Most of the time, Arkady held his table tin his hand, barely clicking forward as his mind wandered while staring out into the void. Some of the newer Guppies had observation decks along their spines, but even those had little room for a day-dreaming captain among the relaxing crew.  Other times, he liked to read the markings on the crates floating next to him, as he did this time.  A smaller bundle, relatively speaking, identified itself as coming from Iapetus and bound for Ephemeris Station near Io.  The bundle contained only two identical boxes, each nearly twenty feet long, three feet wide, and five feet high, that screamed “Surface Comb,” one of the ice harvesting devices that roamed barren moons hoping to find ice water buried in the soil.  He reasonably inferred from the condition of the box that it was being returned to its place of origin for repair or replacement.

 Deep in thought, it took him nearly five minutes before he identified the sound. Noise traveled poorly there, one of the many reasons he liked the spot.  It often proved hard to distinguish the background noise of his mind from reality, and the rarity of anything outside of tedium of his transits trained him to ignore most of what he thought he heard.  There had been an instance, on one of his early voyages, where he had rushed into the cockpit certain that an alarm had sounded, only to be targeted by laughter from the rest of the more experienced crew as he realized the noise came from a movie they watched on the main monitor.

 After careful consideration, he determined that an alarm did, in fact, sound somewhere above him.  He haphazardly pulled himself along the nets past several stories of cargo to get to the ladder.  Hanging on, pulling himself towards the intense gravity center, and then back out, he stopped short of the hatch leading to the main area of the ship.  A red light flashed violently as he repeatedly slapped the button to open the hatch.  He pounded on the hatch itself,past the point where his hand began to hurt and swell.  Eventually, it slid open in small jerks, not from the electric motor, but from a manual override on the other side.  Hissing and rushing air flew along his back into the compartment above.

 “Of course.”  An oxygen mask distorted enough features of the face only inches away that the name-tape on the uniform provided the only identification.  Ruslan, the chief engineer, breathed so heavily the mask filled with fog.  “You’re down there when we need a captain.”  Air shrieking in some far-off corner of the ship forced Ruslan to yell each insulting word, muffled by the plastic encasing his mouth.  The younger man braced himself against the hatch with one arm while pulling Arkady into the corridor. 

Intellectually, Arkady must have understood the emergency.  The mask, the rushing siren’s scream pulling both grown men towards the bow, the hot wind finding every hair on his exposed skin as it tore past, all of it broadcasted a cause unbelievable more in its terror than in its improbability.  Every drill, every book, every drunk elderly crew member rambling in the back of a bar should have prepared him for decompression.  Instead of executing his emergency response plan, he looked at his engineer with confusion manufactured by both hope and denial.   

“A micrometorite struck the forward viewport.  We’re venting!”  The words came with a shove down the corridor, against the current of the rushing air.  Tiny scraps of debris otherwise unremarkable scratched against his face as escaping air grabbed them from their resting places and carried them towards the void.

“That viewport is five inches thick!”  His body remained unengaged while his mind slowly struggled to catch up. He knew his legs pumped against the deck, as he knew his eyes searched for an emergency oxygen mask. 

“I don’t know what to tell you.”  The engineer replied, tearing open a small red compartment on the wall to reveal a mask.  Arkady, to his credit, placed it over his mouth as instructed.  He wondered about the last time they had been inspected.  “It struck the cockpit hatch and went right through.  We’re venting all our air.”

“We have to get to the lifeboats!”  The captain exclaimed like he thought he was taking charge.

The engineer rolled his eyes, still shoving the captain backwards down the corridor.  “We’re already loading.  You’re the last one.”

“Is everyone ok?”

Ruslan didn’t answer.  The main corridor of the Guppy was nearly a kilometer long.  They passed the identical doors for six rooms, each belonging to a crew member pair.  Further back, the hallway became asymmetrical and inconsistent, branching into various living areas, storage, and engineering stations.   Each one was vacant, lit by emergency lights flashing off of the items dropped in place. Oddly, it reminded Arkady of how the ship typically looked within hours of putting in at a station, where every crew member abandoned their duties for four days, leaving the captain to wander around the empty ship among their detritus while they drank and ate and slept. Those times always carried the feeling of relief, of the end of a struggle. 

The dioramas he passed on his way to the lifeboats showed him a struggle that began amidst the every-day routine.  Cards, magazines, books, glasses half-filled with water, food packets, videos playing, even a game of chess doubtless played between his cargo-master and the navigator.  Everything froze, consumed by the red warning lights blinking throughout the ship.  The music endlessly playing from the living quarters, or the ramblings of the movie in the recreational room, sounds ordinarily loud enough to anger the captain,played second to the screeching alarm and the whistle of air running past every edge or loose piece in the ship on its way out the front viewport.

Arkady fought the wind, grasping onto the metal railing running along the main corridor for that precise purpose.  The twin lifeboats straddled the spine of the ship behind thick metal doors wrapped in yellow and black stripes.  Staring at them necessarily meant facing the harsh red warning lights that blinded more than facilitated evacuation.  With only a few hand-holds left before he reached the starboard pod, the port hatch slammed shut in a hiss of hydraulic pressure.  For an instant, the percussion of the charges firing reverberated throughout the ship, drowning the noise of escaping air and throbbing alarm.  A responsible part of him knew that he should have counted heads before the ship ejected the lifeboat, but that portion was outmatched by his fear of not getting off of his own ship alive.

The captain stumbled into the only remaining lifeboat. Two of his youngest crew members, Pasha the cargo handler barely in his twenties, and Ruslan’s apprentice Vitaly, were already strapped into the padded bucket seats affixed to five of the six walls.  The captain climbed into the closest free seat and snapped all four straps together in the center of his chest, putting as much power as he could behind tightening them. The chief engineer followed with more dignity, securing the heavy door. For a few seconds, the rushing noise stopped, leaving the only sound the metallic clattering of Ruslan’s buckles as he secured himself.  

The engineer stared at his captain, but Arkady just stared back, still trying to comprehend what happened in the corridor.  Ruslan grimaced.  He reached out to one of the pair of hardened plastic boxes that flanked the door, and flipped off the latch. The front panel flopped down, and the engineer punched the red mechanical button inside.

A klaxon blared three times while all four members braced themselves.  The charges kicked them away from the ship with such force the captain worried about hurting his back.  For ten seconds they drifted away before the second set of thrusters fired, forcing them in the opposite direction into their harnesses.  Odd specks of debris began to float in the chamber.

Ruslan breathed heavily across from his captain.  Arkady and the boys sat silently, stealing glances at each other, hoping someone else knew what to do.  The engineer unhooked himself and began to float without gravity.  He visually searched the others,still strapped into their harnesses, but Arkady was the one who spoke.

“Is everyone ok?”  The other two nodded hesitantly.  The captain nodded to his own question in an attempt to validate the answer.

The engineer slowed physically, removing rather than yanking the radio receiver from the wall.  He stared at it for a moment before looking up at his captain.  “Vasily didn’t make it.”

Arkady didn’t process the information immediately.  He let the pronouncement slide past him before he chased after it. “How did he not make it?  It was an air leak, there should have been plenty of time.”  The captain spat at his engineer.

“The door shut on him.” Ruslan explained.  “Whatever hit the window and went through the bridge door triggered the containment system.  The door shut automatically.”  Arkady’s face went wide before his eyes narrowed again.  The engineer did not wait for the follow-up accusation from the man who had been reading in the cargo hold.  Arkady should have been on the bridge with Vasily, instead of leaving the young man alone. 

Ruslan pressed button on the radio receiver and spoke into it.  “Leonid, can you hear me?”

In the pause before the response, Arkady unbuckled the harness and pushed himself towards the small window cut into the hatch where he floated shoulder to shoulder with his engineer. His ship sat motionless, a long grey spine with its ballooning belly,occupying most of the view.  Glitter sparkled in stream slowly flowing from bridge, the only sign of damage or distress.  All of the running lights blinked as they were designed to.  Two pock-marks outlined in bright yellow broke up the line of the ship’s back from where the two pods had burst forth minutes before.  In bright red letters, torn and weathered from years making runs from the inner system to the outer facilities, Natalia was illuminated so that any approaching vessel could see her name from extreme distance.  Suspended on the other side, off in the corner of the view through the small window, a bright yellow capsule flashed rapidly with its emergency beacon.

“Yeah, we’re here.”  A voice crackled through the speakers so scrambled the survivors struggled to recognize the voice.

“How is everyone?” Arkady counted in his head how long it had been since the alarm screamed. Eight minutes?  Ten?  Would Vasily still be alive?  Could he still be conscious?  Even if all of the air had disappeared the instant the door shut, he could have survived off the air in his lungs and his blood for a few minutes.  An emergency kit on the bridge held extra respirators; hopefully Vasily got to them. Thecaptain imagined his crew member, stuck on the bridge while dark tunnels began to form in his eyes as he reflexively gasped for air that did not exist. While death measured in minutes was not prolonged, it was not slow,either.  The Vasily in Arkady’s mind lay crumpled on the floor next to stacks of communication computers and wires while a speaker overhead broadcasted every word between the two groups of his shipmates who had managed to escape.

“We’re okay.  Andrei has some scrapes and cuts from debris, but he will be alright.  Did you find the captain?”

Under other circumstances, Arkady would have yelled undeservedly at the voice’s deportment.  Ruslan tried to meet his eye, but darted away quickly.  “Yeah, and we’re . . .”

The same thing appearing to Arkady must have appeared to his engineer.  Near the bow of the cargo ship, something moved.  He had discounted the movement as debris, but it was moving against the current of air and momentum escaping that small hole in the bridge window.  In fact, the eddy created by the debris that moved around it drew their attention first.  Its matte complexion evaded the eye quite well,but, as it closed in on the adrift Guppy, they could make out the outline.

“Leonid, look just off the bow, do you see anything?”  Ruslan asked through the radio.  Arkady had forgotten the man even had it in his hand.

“Like what?”

Ruslan hesitated.  “It almost looks like a Mako, but it’s black.”

Pasha, about whom the captain had forgotten, spoke up.  “A black ship?  I’ve never seen a black ship.”

“Your two years of experience are reassuring.”  Ruslan spoke to himself.

Arkady knew the truth of Pasha’s observation irrespective of his experience. Ships needed to contrast against the empty sky for safety and so that foundering vessels like the Natalia could be spotted from afar.  Dark colors led to collisions and loss.  Still, a dark shape moved across the contrasting hull of their ship.  Its streamlined shape resembled closely the small Mako craft almost exclusively used by law enforcement.  From what little detail he could discern at such a distance, two bulges stuck out along the tail like swollen, vestigial wings.  The shape slowed, skimming along the surface of hull as it caressed the curvature of the great ship’s belly. 

 “Mayday, mayday, mayday.”  Ruslan called out through the radio.  “This is the crew of the freighter Natalia.  We have abandoned ship and require immediate assistance.”  He clicked off the radio.  Floating without the vibrations of the engine or the nearly perceptible hum of the artificial gravity, the universe had no sound.  Every exhalation seemed to shriek as it moved through each mouth.  The radio only gave the faint popping of the background noise of the solar system. They stared at the new ship still adjusting itself along the hull of the Guppy. 

 The engineer checked his radio setting, and transmitted again.  “Mayday, mayday, mayday. . .”

The Mako responded by coming to a halt a few meters off the bridge.  Two floodlights kicked on, examining the hull of the Guppy until they focused on the over-sized cargo door.

Arkady’s stomach began to sink.  Ruslan made eye contact long enough for the captain to know their thoughts aligned. Piracy was virtually unheard of. The tight constraints placed on anyone who left Earth and strict enforcement out in space made the prospect extremely difficult.  But not impossible.

Leonid apparently did not understand.  He sent another message on a broad-spectrum frequency. “This is the crew of the Natalia.  We’re not on board anymore.  We had to abandon ship.  We’re in the lifeboats a few kilometers off of either side…”

The Mako answered with an open airlock.  A single individual appeared,shimmering in the ship’s spotlights.  At the distance, they couldn’t see more than the general form, but no one could mistake its intention.  The figure drifted towards the cargo door, made contact with the freighter’s hull, and stopped.  They caught the interior lights of the cargo bay, and flashing emergency lights, reflecting off the person and the Mako.  The figure then disappeared into the Natalia.

Arkady and Ruslan ignored demands by the others to describe what they saw. Then, they couldn’t describe what they saw.  One of the long crates, the same ones that Arkady had drifted next to less than an hour before, slowly emerged from the hull.

“There’s no way he fits that onto that small ship…” Ruslan said.

The captain stared for a long time at the piece of cargo floating outside his ship.  “I don’t think he intends to try…”

The figure reemerged from the hold.  He lingered for a few minutes alongside his stolen haul before moving back to his own ship. 

“I see something on the bridge.”  Ruslan announced suddenly,jamming a finger at the window.  Arkady confirmed a light flashing in the bridge viewport.  “It must be Vasily.  He’s still and trying to signal the Mako.”  For a moment, if only a moment, they cheered, knowing that their fellow crew member hadn’t died yet.

But then they stopped, perplexed.  The long bundle, stolen with such effort, started moving away from both ships.  It accelerated, slowly but noticeably, away from anything.

“They did all of this just to throwaway a broken piece of equipment!” Ruslan yelled.  “It’s just a broken piece of industrial equipment!”

The others, shocked by his outburst echoing in the confines of the lifeboat, charged the window to take their own look, and Arkady was shoved to the side. He fought his way back to his rightful place, as captain, staring out the window at events he couldn’t control. The Mako switched off its floodlights. In one smooth motion, it spun around and flew away from the derelict Guppy.  Something remained behind, an object that either fell out of the hold or discarded by the pirate.  Among the debris field, it didn’t justify another thought.

They watched in silence.  From the other lifeboat, Leonid, his pleas becoming more and more desperate, yelled out for help.  The Mako faded into the distance until, mere minutes after arriving, it had nearly disappeared against the blackness of space.

Then the radio screeched.  The lights went off.  The fans keeping the air flowing stopped whirring.  Everything became perfectly black and silent.  Only the chemical glow of emergency instructions placard gave any light.

 “What was that?  What happened?”  Pasha’s voice shook as he asked.

Arkady tried to find Natalia.  She still drifted aimlessly, but every external light, each warning beacon, had gone dark.  Only the light-gray skin, reflecting the small amount of sunlight that far into the system, kept it visible at all.

 “I can’t find the other lifeboat.”  The engineer announced. 

“It’s gone?” Pasha cried out.

 “Of course not, you idiot.”  Ruslan could no longer contain his anger.  “But it must have lost power, too.”

“How is someone going to find us? Without power…”

Arkady placed a hand on Pasha’s shoulder, to calm himself as much as his crew member.  “Someone will find us.  Natalia’s a big ship on a main transit route.”

At this, Ruslan burst out laughing,nearly uncontrollably.  “Of course they won’t!”  He shouted.  “No two routes are ever the same because the planets keep moving!  The next ship won’t come within thousands… tens of thousands of kilometers of us unless they left an hour after us.  And if they had, they would have heard our call already and responded.  We’re stuck here.  We’re going to die out here.”

“No we won’t.”  Arkady sounded stern, commanding for the first time in many transits through the system. “We’ll survive this.  Someone will be along.”

Ruslan shoved his face into his captain’s.  “Not before we suffocate.  Without power, we can’t make air.  Without air, we die.  With this many of us, we’ll be out of air in hours.”

“Ruslan, you have to stay calm.  We’ll find a way…”

 With a blur of motion, Ruslan struck Arkady.  Without artificial gravity, they both flew backwards against the bulkhead. The captain, not expecting such a violent outburst, struggled to recover after striking his head against the bare metal wall.  The virtually non-existent lighting made any effort to fight back futile.  Pasha and Vitaly tried to interfere, but Ruslan had already made up his mind.  His back against the wall gave him leverage and stability.  He beat both until they spun in weightlessness uncontrollably.

“I’m not going to die listening to you all grovel and plead for hours.”  He shouted.  “I’m not going to die hoping for something that’s never going to happen. I wasted too much of my life with you!” He jabbed a finger towards Arkady.  “I’m not going to die with you.  I’m going to die on my own terms.  I’m going to get this over with.”

Arkady’s breath caught in his throat as he realized what Ruslan meant.  He screamed as he fought to pull himself across the lifeboat towards his chief engineer. 

In the instant before it happened Ruslan closed his eyes.  He let out one last exhalation.  With venom draining from his eyes as they turned to calm defiance, he threw one last punch,striking the etched glass over an emergency panel.  Flecks of glass and droplets of blood rebounded into the lifeboat.  Arkady reached out, grabbing Ruslan’s right arm almost by luck.

With his left, Ruslan twisted and yanked.

 The mechanical clamps on the hatch released.

A burst of air. Unimaginable cold.  Fire in his lungs.  The tumbling sight of the drifting lifeboat blurred in his eyes.

 Then, nothing.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this story. The tragedy of the Natalia plays a key role in Void: A Wroth Worlds: Expansion Era Novel.