Authors: Stephen W Bennett
The bodies were slowly bloating, eyes, tongues, and other tissues
swelling as they out gassed, trying to equalize pressure. The bins with assorted
parts and intestines were silently bubbling, as the partially coagulated blood,
at ship temperature, was warm enough to boil in a vacuum. It was too late to think
now about how they could have foreseen this, and tied tablecloths over and around
the remains. However, what sane person would be expected to think of such details?
Mirikami informed Telour that they would next switch off artificial
gravity in this compartment, the only place on this passenger ship where they could
do that by design. The translator’s stiff lips could be seen wriggling, but nothing
came through that the men could hear. He must be using ultrasonic frequencies, talking
to the other three Krall.
The other Krall had no black audio patches stuck on their helmets,
but quickly moved to grasp reinforcing beams or other bulkhead-attached hardware,
so it seemed they could hear each other via those bulges over their ears.
Mirikami warned the men to activate their magnetic boots, and
pointed to his boot soles for the benefit of the other seven men out of the communications
loop. They all slid the activators on their suits for the battery powered shoe coils.
He felt his feet click to the deck with a sticky sort of sensation.
He ordered Rigson to switch off the hold’s gravity. Actually,
Jake controlled the gravity but it did not require a direct order if the appropriate
code was entered at the touchpad. Every member of the crew knew that code.
Instantly, Mirikami experienced the usual gut twisting as weight
was removed from his organs, and the familiar feeling of falling came over him.
Virtually every Spacer had to train extensively for zero gravity, and would never
graduate from any world’s equivalent to Space Academy, let alone be hired to work
in Space if they couldn’t easily handle the experience.
The corpses were lifting and separating, courtesy of the tissue
swelling, and the revolting little random biological gas jets.
In a rare departure from the rigid rule of polite public conduct
that Mirikami and most citizens chose to live by, he couldn’t restrain himself.
“The Goddamned Krall probably see this sort of disgusting scene often enough, but
I’m proud that we have become civilized enough to never have seen this.” He didn’t
care what the Krall thought about his statement.
It was a sincere and heartfelt sentiment, but it ignored the
comparable horrors that the human race had once inflicted on themselves, within
the last three hundred or so years.
The Captain asked the other three men to join him in pushing
the two body piles out the big opening. He was able to see a lot of stars out there,
but not Mother, nor any of the Krall ships.
The four of them pushed the larger group of bodies towards the
opening. They had no weight, but their mass resisted the movement, and Mirikami
realized they should have tied the bodies together, or wrapped them in the tarps
rather than cover them. They didn’t all move as one, and were spreading out from
under the tarp as they drifted. At least they were going out. Next they grabbed
the slowly drifting bins, and pushed them gently out as well, trying not to let
their vile contents spread. Finally, the smaller collection of bodies was pushed
out to join the first.
The dead men and women continued to drift away from the ship,
spreading apart from one another. The Captain didn’t know how the Krall expected
to gather them into a Jump Hole, even if that ridiculously small device had the
ability to create one. He saw no heavy power lines for it to use if they were going
to use the ship’s fusion power plant.
Staring at the drifting remains, he despised the feeling that
they had just thrown the dead out like trash, with no ceremony or any other service
to show respect, to allow time for their friends and kin to grieve and say goodbye.
Mirikami was agnostic, but not in the manner of most that doubted
the existence of God. He felt at core that he was an atheist, but one that had doubts
that there could ever be proof that God did not exist. However, some of those that
had died here belonged to various faiths, even though an appreciable number of the
scientists did not believe in any deity. Faith or not, there should be some words
spoken on behalf of those that had died.
He mentioned this to the four men that could hear him, asking
if any of them wished to speak a few word. He would do it himself if they declined.
The gesture of decency was rendered moot when they were roughly shoved aside by
the two Krall warriors carrying their device.
Three of the men, Mirikami included, lost contact with the deck,
and but for the safety lines, would have drifted out of the bay. They quickly pressed
the tether button and reeled themselves to the bulkhead attachment points, and stepped
farther back into the hold.
The two warriors moved the device they had brought with them
right to the edge of the deck. Their feet seemed to have a firm grip, though Mirikami
couldn’t see an electromagnet in the translucent feet of the body suits. The K’Tal
moved to stand next to the device, which also seemed firmly stuck to the deck now.
He held a six-inch oval object in his hands, with multi colored
lights or buttons. He did something by tapping talon tips, and the dish on the pedestal
suddenly tilted and pointed straight out into space from the center of the opening.
In a matter of several seconds, the three small cone projections
on the dish edges began glowing dim yellow. Mirikami had often seen that shade of
amber on N wave projectors on hulls of ships. It was a byproduct of a Trap field,
but that low glow only started when a closed field had caught a passing low energy
tachyon. The brighter the glow, the more energetic the otherworldly particle was.
This was a soft glow, so it didn’t seem to be enough to generate
a Jump Hole, but the fact that it had started to glow so soon was startling. It
usually took five or ten minutes to catch even a weak tachyon, and this seemed to
have trapped one quickly, assuming the glow was due to that. He couldn’t guess what
in the pedestal was generating the energy for an N wave powerful enough Trap a tachyon.
If they had already caught one, then the energy of that tachyon
could be used in a bootstrap manner to increase the energy fed to the projectors,
in an effort to deflect and catch a much more energetic passing tac for the next
increase in energy.
He guessed only time would tell. However, suddenly the cones
blazed with a brighter yellow glow that made him squint. It seemed impossible, but
had they just caught a higher energy tac in only a few minutes?
As he thought this, he could see the drifting corpses, tarps,
and bins, all start slowly moving towards an area directly in front of the dish,
perhaps a couple of thousand feet out. This wasn’t how a Jump Hole normally worked,
which formed a spherical shell around the ship generating the fields. Here this
dish was behaving as if there were a strong gravitational field generated at a focal
point in front of the three apparent field projectors.
The entire cluster of debris and bodies was now clearly drifting
towards the invisible gravitational focal point. In a matter of several minutes,
they had coalesced to form a lumpy spherical mass about ten or fifteen feet in diameter,
with a few bits of plastic bins or bones jutting out in some places. The sphere
was physically that small if his estimate of roughly two thousand feet out was accurate.
However, the gravity was very far from being powerful enough to form a Jump Hole.
Telour told the four men to turn their backs, as all four Krall
suddenly faced into the bay. The four humans quickly turned around. Mirikami looked
at the other seven men, and made a fast rotating motion with a hand and down pointing
finger, urging them to turn away, hoping they would understand. He also crossed
an arm over his faceplate, squeezing his eyes shut.
Within a few seconds of turning around, Mirikami, simultaneously
experienced an intense dazzling flash through his eyelids, and a brief jerk felt
over his entire body. He also felt a bump through his feet, magnetically attached
to the deck, demonstrating that the entire ship had also twitched.
It was fortunate that Gravity was about ten to the fortieth times
weaker than the electromagnetic force; else, they would probably never have known
what hit them. Clearly, the pulse was the result of an intense gravitational wave,
generated by a collapsing Jump Hole right outside the hold. The energy had propagated
and passed through them, the ship, and the fabric of local space-time itself.
Telour told them to activate the hold’s gravity, but to leave
the cargo door open. When the humans looked out, all traces of the ball of human
bodies and plastic bins was gone. Of the eight hundred ninety-nine souls that had
been Mirikami’s responsibility to lead, serve, and protect fifty-six were gone.
It might be difficult to keep all 843 others alive until they reached their mystery
destination.
Mirikami urged his men to move from the back bulkhead over to
the side, as far as possible. The two Krall warriors moved the Jump Hole device
out of the way, and positioned themselves on the same side, to watch the eleven
humans.
The craft slid smoothly and deftly into the hold, with almost
perfect clearance on all sides of the opening. It then came to a quick stop a mere
few feet from the rear bulkhead, clearing the hatch opening to its rear by around
ten feet, making it about seventy feet long, and larger than the Fancy’s two shuttles.
It settled gently to the deck. The cockpit windows were darkly tinted, so they couldn’t
see inside. If manually controlled, it had been a masterful job.
Again, at Telour’s order, Mirikami personally closed the hold
doors, and when sealed, pressurized the bay as quickly as the system allowed.
It turned out that the small shuttle had no airlock, suggesting
that it probably was designed for atmospheric use, but worked well in space. A roughly
ten foot wide section, near the left rear, on the side where Mirikami and his men
had gathered, raised high.
First out was a Krall warrior, without their version of a soft
suit. He was followed by eleven unsuited and fearful looking humans, seven women,
four men, and then another Krall in a brown uniform, who was possibly the pilot.
The people immediately noted the suited humans, but stayed clustered
behind the Krall warrior that had preceded them, obviously afraid to speak or join
the other humans.
Telour came around the rear of the shuttle, no longer in his
soft suit. Mirikami opened his faceplate to ask him a question.
“Telour,
are these captives now part of my ship’s clan, and my responsibility?”
“Your ship, human?” he spoke in rebuttal, “you no longer control
this ship, and you do as we say, as do these animals.”
“Of course. Yet Parkoda ordered me to take responsibility for
the actions of those humans aboard this ship, to guarantee that all humans obey
your instructions. This will minimize how many will mistakenly give challenge and
die before reaching Koban I was told. Are these people to join the prisoners here?”
he asked.
“That is what Parkoda has ordered. Yet they have not been granted
Ra Ka Endo, the training status we give to the youngest novice. I grant them that
honor now, in Parkoda’s name. I will send a warrior to mark them.
“As their new clan leader, it becomes your responsibility to
instruct them, and to enforce and honor the agreement with Parkoda. Send them to
the rest of your herd. Parkoda said you are to return to him for the Jump, in your
control room. You call it a Bridge. “
He spoke briefly into his shoulder com, while he simultaneously
plucked the communication pads from the four human faceplates, then left with most
of the other Krall and the Jump Hole device. One warrior remained, closing the shuttle
hatch, and clearly guarding the craft.
Left to their limited liberty once more, Mirikami offered a quick
welcome and introduced himself to his eleven new charges, followed as quickly by
an apology that he had to leave immediately. He explained that his crewmembers would
take them to the passenger decks, and would explain their situation and their new
status under the Krall.
Not daring to make Parkoda think he was tarrying, he asked two
Stewards to help him pull his soft suit off more quickly. He hurried to the closest
lift, hoping they were cleaned of blood. The first lift to arrive had a clean floor,
its cloth cover gone, but the spattered table cloths were still hanging, as they
were on the other lift, arriving seconds later. He called over Walters and Rigson
to take those down. Walters had to ride along with him to finish the job. He pressed
in the nonstop Bridge code.
The chime announced his arrival, and Noreen turned to greet him.
Parkoda had swiveled his head towards the lifts well before the chime, although
Noreen hadn’t hear so much as whisper prior to that. It was another example of their
keen hearing.
“Captain, Parkoda had me instruct Ms. Willfem to tune both Traps
to the highest energy tachyon we can possibly catch in either one. That was done
shortly before you started back up here.” She raised her eyebrow to indicate her
puzzlement.
Mirikami faced the Krall. “Parkoda, we will be ready to Jump
when either one of our Traps catch the high energy tachyons they are tuned for.
However, this does not tell me how many days we will be in the Jump Hole, and thus
how far we must Jump. The tachyon energy you ask for is the maximum that we can
Trap, and is rare and could take many hours to catch. This is much more energy than
we need to Jump anywhere that you order us to go.”