Nightmare sky, p.15
Nightmare Sky, page 15
A viewing window confirmed her fear. Hundreds of pinpricks of white circles appeared and spread across the Earth’s surface. Gabriella’s body shook. Tears streamed from her eyes as nuclear fire expanded over the surface. She punched the window and screamed until her throat cracked raw. Curling into a ball, she shuddered.
Gabriella thought of her father. When she was young, he would take her to the pier at night and set up his telescope. Spending hours hunting comets or watching meteor showers. He would give her a quarter for every constellation she could name by sight. After high school, when she told him she was going to college for Astronomy and then to work for NASA, it was one of the few times she had seen him cry.
“Gabby, I’m so proud. Your name will be a part of history.”
She dug her fists into her aching eyes. Through blurred vision, Her father’s home, Boston passed by below. It changed from greens and browns to blacks and reds. Her only comfort was he died quickly.
She went over the events in her mind.
The EBS wouldn’t have had time to tell the world, and even if they did, Dad didn’t watch much TV. His phone was on the charger in the kitchen. He’d be asleep in his chair with a Crichton novel in his lap. Moxie chewed a bone at his feet. There’d be a loud bang, Moxie jumped and ran into the bathroom. Dad sat up for a moment but lay backward. The quakes and shocks came next, but shortly after, everything would have been consumed in a million-celsius fire. There are worse ways to go.
Gabriella rubbed her swollen face on her sleeve and watched the corridor for Victor. He would come for her, eventually. A vodka bottle spiraled slowly past her. Plucking it from the air, she got an idea.
The entire station shuddered. Gabriella grabbed onto the sides of the module. Once the turbulence calmed, she snatched her drink pouch and knife. At the far end of the hall, Viktor glided in.
“What’s happening, Viktor?” Gabriella called down the hallway.
“The thrusters controlling the degrading orbit have failed.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It's true. I disabled them.”
“The entire station will crash.”
“Da.” His gaze lingered on her utility knife. “What you going to do with blade, zhenshchina?”
“Whatever I need to.” Gabriella held it in front of her.
Viktor scoffed. “This station…” He waved his finger around. “…will crash. I’m taking the escape shuttle to the Earth and landing in Russia.”
“Russia’s gone, you moron. Everything is gone.”
“Untrue. It looks bad from here. Once the fallout lands. I will be safe with my family underground. Promises were made to me.”
“That’s how you justify killing your crewmates?”
Viktor looked back at Maxim’s body strapped in his sleep pod. “That was regrettable, but he wouldn’t have had the steel to dispose of you Americans. His sacrifice will be remembered. In the New World. The Russian World.”
Gabriella scoffed. “You gonna kill me too?”
Viktor shook his head. “Nyet. You remain onboard.”
He turned and swam toward the long hall toward the shuttle docking.
Gabriella grabbed the edge of the capsule and yanked herself forward.
Viktor torpedoed himself with fast-grasps of the walls. He approached the door lock and typed in the access code. The latching mechanism clicked a few times, then, with a loud clunk, the door popped open.
Gabriella tackled Viktor against the wall. They rolled around like sharks in a fishing net. Viktor’s size and strength weren’t as advantageous as he had imagined. Gabriella slashed her knife at Vic, opening a wound on his hand. Blood spread out through air in a collection of wobbly bubbles. Viktor braced himself with his legs and grabbed Gabriella’s knife hand. His other hand closed on her throat. He squeezed.
Gabriella choked and let the knife spiral away. Viktor grabbed her with both hands now. Her head filled with incredible pressure as she gasped for breath. She snatched her juice pack from floating nearby and sprayed it all over Viktor’s face and up his nose. Viktor released his grip and leaned away, coughing and swiping at his face. He coughed. “Tea can’t save you,”
“It’s not tea, comrade.” She lit a match. The spilled vodka hung in the air making a fuse. Viktor’s eyes widened as he watched the ignited liquid follow the path to him. His face burst into a fireball. Gabriella grabbed the capsule’s door frame and kicked him, launching his body somersaulting down the hallway. Fire engulfed the clothes and the end of the hallway. She slammed the door shut and launched the escape vehicle. Her head smashed into the top of the shuttle as it launched. Before her vision darkened an explosion rocked the shuttle.
Gabriella awoke floating in the cabin. Pain throbbed from the bump on her head. She rolled her neck and strapped into the pilot chair. Forcing a glance through the windows, debris from the station filled the area. The Earth was still burning. The opposite window filled with a dull blue light. She leaned over and the moon glowed against the black void. It seemed so close, yet she knew it was two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away.
“Two hundred thirty-eight thousand, nine hundred miles away.” She heard her father’s voice in her head. He hated when she rounded up anything in astronomy. He was gone now. Mom was too. And she never got to make it to the moon like she had promised.
Wait. Why not?
There was a standard two-week supply of food in the cabin. Mostly protein bars and a couple of jugs of water with cleaning tablets. She aimed the ship at the moon and turned the thrusters to full. The small ship blasted toward the rocky satellite. Although her ship wasn’t technically built to make the trip, Gabriella would make it to the moon or die trying.
A week and a half later, Gabriella could make out geologic patterns on the surface. She would prefer to land on the moon, not die in a crash on the surface, but technically, either would fulfill her promise. Aiming for the smoothest patch of rock, she descended. Slowing the ship’s descent used the rest of her fuel, but she wasn’t leaving. The craft buckled and shook as she entered the moon’s light atmosphere. Her shuttle landed rough and scraped to a complete stop. Gasping for breath against the restrictive harnesses, she could see the blackened planet she once called home.
She read her instruments. The celebration would be short. She had two protein bars left and maybe twelve ounces of water. These things didn’t really matter, with only two hours of air left.
She smashed the air gage panel. Spending her last moments counting down like a New Year's Death party wasn't ideal, so she sang a few songs she loved. A Bowie favorite seemed appropriate. She knew the air grew thin when the hallucinations began.
She stared at the gray rocky surface of the moon.
“I wasn’t the first human on the moon, but I would be the last.”
There was a comfort in that.
She smiled as a tear rolled down her cheek. “I did it Dad. I had to improvise. But I did it.”
Green and yellow lights encircled the remains of Earth. Voices echoed around her shuttle. A male sounding one and a female sounding one.
“What a shame.” The female one said.
“Yeah. I thought we had it this time.” The male replied.
“They always end up blowing themselves up. I told you they don’t need nuclear power.”
Gabriella trembled. “Uh, hello. Is someone out there?”
Silence.
Then the female spoke. “I thought you said they were all gone?”
“I checked it. Zero survivors on Earth Ten. Only a few deep-sea animals and some microbes.”
“Well, somebody’s left. And now they have heard us.”
“Hello. I'm Gabriella. Who is out there?”
“Hello Gabriella. Umm. You can call me Alicia.” The female voice said.
“Alicia?” the male voice questioned.
“I like that name. Just pick one,” Alicia said.
“Okay. I’m Tree. Where are you Gabriella?” The male voice said.
“Tree? That’s not a name?” Alicia snickered.
“Uh, I’m on the moon. Where are you?” Gabriella asked.
“That’s it! That’s why she didn’t register in the Earth program. A-lish-a.”
“You didn’t allow for anywhere else?” Alicia asked.
“They barely got anywhere with space travel. They hadn’t since Earth 4, remember?”
“Are you God, then?” Gabriella asked?
Silence.
“Yes,” Tree said in an ominous tone.
“Stop it, Tree. Don’t fool with the lady. She just watched her planet die. Poor thing,” Alica said.
Gabriella coughed.
“Are you okay, dear?” Alicia asked.
“Air’s almost out. Going to suffocate soon.”
“Tree, give her more air. Hurry!”
“I can’t just give her more air. I’d have to write a code for that specific shuttle. It would take longer than she has.”
Gabriella slumped in her chair. “Goodbye.”
NECRONAUT RETRIEVAL FAILURE
NECRONAUT
RETRIEVAL FAILURE
KIM Z. DALE
“Rest in peace among the stars.” That was the company’s tagline. The advertisements showed a smiling actor being propelled into space. When the airlock seal hissed open, the fictional client relaxed their head against the back of the capsule. They closed their eyes and fell blissfully into death while floating into star-speckled vastness. No pain. No terror. No soul-eating alien lifeforms.
The reality of assisted space suicide differed significantly from those advertisements. First of all, no one was truly allowed to “rest in peace among the stars.” Leaving a bunch of dead bodies floating around in space went against the UN’s Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines. No one wanted astronauts crashing into a corpse on their way to the ISS. That’s where necronaut retrieval came in. My job was to collect, process, and return the remains of people who paid millions of dollars for the privilege of dying in space.
Dying in space can take up to two minutes, but people become unconscious after the first fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds may not sound like much, but it’s an excruciatingly long time for someone asphyxiating in a vacuum while the gases in their body expand and stretch their skin to its limits. Virgil warned me that the faces of retrieved necronauts often froze in expressions of agony and terror.
Virgil, the senior retrieval engineer, was on the very first necronaut mission and has been on every one since. No other retrieval engineers came back more than once. I asked Virgil how he felt about all the time he spent on Purgatory, the necronaut retrieval station.
“Purgatory is my home. The company makes me go back to Earth periodically for physical exams and mandatory time off, but if I had my druthers, I’d always stay up here with them.”
“The necronauts?”
“The stars! On Earth I can only dream of them.”
“I admit it’s different, but you can still see the stars from Earth.”
“Only with my eyes!”
Virgil was a bit strange, but I was trying my best to get along with him. He was the only other person on the retrieval station who was still alive.
By the time the necronaut capsules reached the retrieval zone, their passengers were already dead and frozen solid. Upon their arrival, we used the station’s large robotic arm to transfer the bodies to the cryomation chamber. Once everyone was inside the machine, I hit the button to make the interior mechanisms vibrate. The vibrations slowly increased in intensity, shattering the frozen corpses into dust. The remains were then vacuum-sealed in pouches the size of throw pillows for easier storage.
At first, everything was the same as in my training simulations. The sensors indicated that the newest set of necronauts were being effectively disintegrated. A gage showed the volume of residual metals—such as dental fillings and medical implants—being separated for recycling. I watched the machine out the window, pleased with how well I was handling my first set of retrievals.
Then, I saw the lights.
Hundreds of tiny lights were seeping out of the cryomation chamber. I worried they were sparks. I thought something had gone wrong with the machine, but sparks usually radiated out from their source. These lights darted back and forth like tiny fireflies. Like they were alive.
“Virgil! Are you seeing this?”
Before he could answer, the swirling cloud of twinkling flecks shot at the window of the station. I jumped away as they thwacked against the glass. Unlike bugs hitting a car windshield, the lights continued to move after impact. They slid across the smooth surface until they formed letters: S-A-V-E U-S.
Save us.
Virgil let out an angry swear, which was almost as startling as the weird lights since I’d never heard him say so much as darn before. He hastily closed the shutters as the lights shot away into the darkness.
“Why’d you close the shutters?”
“They’ve never been able to communicate before. It’s a troubling sign,” he said, more to himself than to me.
“Who are you talking about? What were those lights?”
“The couriers.”
“What type of couriers? They looked like nanotechnology. Are they some sort of experimental project?”
“In a way.”
“They flew out into nothing. Where are they going?”
“The couriers return to the stars. It’s their job. Just like your job is to feed them.”
“Feed who? Or what?”
Virgil reopened the shutters and gazed out the window as he spoke. “You know them as stars, but that’s not technically correct. Earth’s scientists can’t see many details of things that are very far away. They assume every dot of light in the night sky is a giant fireball like the sun. That’s true for most of them, but some of what people call stars are something else. Some of those stars are living creatures.”
“Wow. So that’s what I saw out there? Living stars flying around?”
“No! I already told you. Those are the couriers. They collect sustenance that the Overseers—the living stars—need to survive.”
“What do living stars eat?”
“Human souls.”
“Human souls?”
“Well, any souls really. It’s just that here, in Earth’s orbit, we specialize in supplying human ones.”
“What do you mean ‘supplying’ human souls?”
“The souls have to be broken into very tiny pieces for the couriers to be able to carry them to their luminary Overseers. Luckily, the cryomation process breaks down more than the necronauts’ bodies.”
“Why do the couriers want us to save them?”
“They don’t. It seems that for a few moments the souls were able to control their transports in order to send a message. I suspect some residual bits of your predecessors’ psyches found a way to communicate with the others.”
“My predecessors?”
“Yes, the previous people who served in your role didn’t approve of our arrangement, so they had to be sacrificed. It seems that even in death they maintained their opposition to our cause.”
“Our cause? I never agreed to be a part of this.”
“Then you will become another soul to be consumed.”
“Virgil, this is crazy, but even if it’s real, you’re an old man. I don’t want to hurt you, but if it comes down to it—if you try to kill me or something—I’m pretty sure I can take you. I’ll tie you up and call back to Earth and…”
“You are probably right. You are strong enough to overpower the old man, but you are not stronger than us.”
Virgil—or the body I had known as Virgil—opened his mouth. His jaw unhinged and his lips spread until I was staring into a void the size of a large wall mirror. Inside the maw was as dark as the expanses of space, but its center glowed with a murmuration of tiny, fiery parasites. It was a miniaturized version of the swarm I had seen over the cryomation chamber.
I ran. The station wasn’t very big, but I tried to get as far away as I could from my alien-infested coworker. I needed to get to the comm center and notify Earth. I needed to find a weapon. I needed to do something, but all I could think to do was run. I weaved through Purgatory’s metal passageways. Virgil’s footsteps echoed close behind me, moving with a speed I was sure the old man’s body wouldn’t have been capable of alone.
My thoughts swirled with all the recent revelations. Alien lifeforms! Soul harvesting! Murder! Unfortunately, my lack of focus caused me to run straight into a dead end—the worst dead end. I had cornered myself in the airlock used to exit the station for repairs. Of course, if I were exiting the station to do repairs, I would put on a space suit first, but I knew my pursuer wasn’t going to allow me that preparation.
“You should feel lucky. Most people have to pay a lot of money for the privilege of dying in space.”
“You don’t need to do this,” I said to the thing I once knew as Virgil.
“The Overseers require sustenance. This is how they survive.”
“I understand that everything needs to eat, and taking the necronauts makes sense. They wanted to die. Maybe they didn’t actually sign up for having their souls eaten by aliens, but at least they were already dead when it happened. I’m sure your Overseer star things didn’t intend for you to kill people just to get their souls.”
“They do not care about our methods. They only care that they are hungry. And they are very hungry.” Then, Virgil or the parasites within him opened the airlock.
Like I said, fifteen seconds may not sound like much, but it’s an excruciatingly long time for someone asphyxiating in a vacuum while the gases in their body expand and stretch their skin to its limits. Floating like a grotesque balloon, I pictured Virgil at the controls ready to retrieve my body for processing. What would it feel like to have my soul eaten by a living star?
Lights sparked before my eyes, but I wasn’t sure if they were the couriers or a symptom of my forthcoming unconsciousness. As dizziness took over, a thought entered my brain that was not my own. It was a message. I could sense it was instructions. I was being told how to warn others, but the details came in fuzzy like a radio station just out of broadcast range. I tried to focus on the thought. Just when I almost understood, my fifteen seconds were over, and I fell into oblivion.
