“Fuck me.” Larsen exhaled in shock before continuing. "Command needs to know about this." She told me, turning to face me.
I paled for a moment, Carver's words sinking in, Larsen's echoing through my mind a moment later.
I felt the urge to utter a string of curses a light-year long well up inside me, but I buried it with all my discipline. "I agree with you, Larsen, but there's nothing we can do about it now.” I grimaced, my mind racing at the news.
"What about the Sarin gas?" Chen asked.
"What about it?" Carver asked.
"Wasn't that stuff outlawed two centuries ago?" Chen asked.
Carver nodded slowly. “It was, officially, but you know how things are. I'm sure we have kilos of the stuff in a lab somewhere tucked away for a rainy day. I’m pretty sure whoever did all this had enough to kill everyone on board at least a hundred millions times over and that’s not an exaggeration. Why they needed that much, I don't know. Anyone smart would only bring as much as they needed to do the job.”
I frowned. "Yeah, that one's got me scratching my head too. Were they just amateurish and they wanted to be sure they got us all?"
Carver shook his head. "No, I don't buy it. That's not a very effective tactic if they wanted to kill everyone on board. They had to have better options. They wanted us off the ship, not fighting to retake it. I'm not sure if the data dump was their only goal, but I can only hope. Do you know how much data is on a ship's cores? Damn it, none of this makes any sense. FUCK!" He exploded, seething over the mystery.
A dozen uncomfortable seconds passed, but eventually Carver composed himself and Larsen asked the question that I was also thinking.
"So where'd they get the stuff?" Larsen asked as she wiped sweat from her brow.
Carver shrugged. “No idea. Most likely, they made it and smuggled it onboard. From where, is anyone's guess. There are very few places in Terran space that could do this and all the legit ones are heavily regulated. The greatest concentration of gas was situated near the Bridge, but a sizable portion was inside the environmental system’s filters. I think it’s safe to say the entire bridge watch is dead along with the entire crew. If it was the original compound, maybe I'd give us better odds, but I'm almost certain that the modifications involved making sure it could get through seals and filters."
"How can you know that? You've barely looked at the data." I asked, disbelievingly.
"I know, okay?" He insisted, scoffing. "Trust me. It would be pretty stupid of them to go to all this trouble to use an outdated chemical weapon that can't even get through a sealed vacsuit."
I contemplated the news Carver had shared. There were plenty of cleaner ways to kill the crew of a ship while leaving the ship intact. His theory fit. Leaking the entire classified data core was bad enough. The fact it had been done deliberately and sent to someone relatively close, in astronomical terms was worse. That meant there were probably two ships here, if not more.
I frowned. “Okay, to recap, it was sabotage, an ambush and someone wanted us off the ship. Maybe they wanted to capture it? Gas wouldn’t have done any good against sealed battle armour or vacsuits if it wasn't modified, but it would’ve definitely been enough to pull the ship from patrols for a while and make anyone not in armour a corpse. What do you think?”
Carver considered my question. “They got the data out and the crew are all dead or fleeing the ship. I guess we’ll never know, will we? I’m certainly not going to be able to figure it out now. Anything I could say would just be conjecture, even this is mostly guesswork based on what I have.”
I grunted, not liking the idea of playing into enemy hands. I liked even less the fact that I had no idea who had just taken out an entire cruiser in minutes or how they’d found us, to say nothing of the fact the very classified and very secure data on the ship had been transmitted in its entirety to God only knows where.
A loud klaxon wailed, one, two, three seconds. Then it stopped. Carver suddenly threw himself at one of two consoles in the pod's main living area. "Damn it! Just what I was afraid of."
"What? What's wrong?" Larsen asked.
"The retrorocket's toast. It's not firing. Comms aren't working either. I'm getting only minimal power. Not enough to reach anyone. The main bus connecting to the reactor just went down." His fingers were a furious blur and his eyes and implants were probably moving at a similar pace. I waited a few moments.
"Well?" I asked him.
"Well what?" He snapped at me, concentrating, but with a grave expression on his face.
"Did you get it fixed?"
"It's barely been five seconds! I can't even tell what the full extent of the damage is yet!"
"Well, hurry up, damn it!"
We all waited in tense silence for a minute or two, but finally Carver pushed off this console and made a disgusted noise.
"Fuel line works, conduits work, the retrorocket's fuel intake is damaged and our comms cables work, but not at full power. The connector between the reactor that generates power and the rest of the ship is damaged, and no, we can't repair it." He groaned, rubbing his eyes vigorously. "Why didn't I pick up on this before? Damn it! Here we are stuck in an unarmed pod and we can't use the only two essential systems we need to survive. The signs were there before we even launched." Carver threw his hands up in resignation and walked off into the adjacent compartment.
"So you can get it fixed right?" I called out.
"No, no I can't and because of that we're now facing a slow death from dehydration. Look, the power conduit that feeds power from the reactor to the rest of the pod is only partially intact. We're barely getting twenty-percent of maximum." Carver said in exasperated and panicked tones. It sometimes amazed me how the man's mood and emotions could swing like a pendulum, shifting faster than a chameleon could change colours.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
"Calm down, okay? We can get through this, we're not out of options yet."
"Well, we're out of good options, aren't we?" He responded bitterly.
I glanced at Larsen and Chen. They were listening intently.
"Maybe, but we have options left. Don't give up just yet, not until we try everything."
While the pod’s food and water were good for months, if we weren’t found soon, we probably never would be. In other words, after about a week, we were utterly fucked. We did have options, but they weren't ones that would lead to being saved. It was more like how we wanted to go out. I suspected everyone knew that but there was no sense in saying it out loud and dragging morale down even further.
"Sure, sure. Do you want to try praying our way back to Earth?" He asked.
Carver continued, filling the silence where the rest of us were mostly too drained to do so. "Well, I suppose if we're stuck out here I can at least solve a mystery first. Do you mind if I have a peek at your suit recordings, Chen?” Carver motioned with his hands in a grabbing gesture, his foul mood practically flowing from him like water to encompass his every motion.
At Carver’s question, I took another look at Chen. He looked less panicked than Carver, but that wasn't exactly reassuring. Something strange was going on with him.
“Sure. I’m feeling fine now, I think.” Chen replied calmly, looking alert and awake, almost excessively, if such a thing can be said.
“Fine?” I asked indignantly, my ire rising. “It’s hardly been a few minutes. How can you go from looking like you’ve seen a ghost to ‘fine’ in less than ten minutes? What the hell is going on with you?”
“I don’t know!” Chen laughed incredulously, joyously. That set off alarm bells for me. Every red flag in the book and then some. “I don’t feel like someone was examining my soul under a microscope anymore, though.”
“Send us your suit recordings, and go lay down. Hell, send us your vitals too.” I insisted. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were high or crazy.” I stared at him with suspicion, my expression only hidden by my opaque helmet. I had to make a conscious effort not to move my hand towards my sidearm, which was riding low on my hip. Not because I believed he was a danger to me, but more out of habit, I suppose.
“I don’t know what you’ll find, I feel fine.” Chen insisted, quite level-headed by all appearances.
“Yeah, and that worries us.” Larsen pointed out.
“Was he exposed to the gas? Or something else?” I asked, directing the question to Carver in a low murmur.
Carver responded in an equally discreet voice. “What are you, an idiot? Sarin gas doesn’t make you see things or turn you stupid. It kills you.”
I rolled my eyes. “I know that dumbass. I’m grasping at straws. Do some digging anyway and let me know if something comes up. I’m going to have a look around.”
I got up, letting my rifle hang from a small strap on my armour.
Despite my intention to look around, there wasn’t a lot to look around for, but there were a few different rooms in the pod and it had been years since I’d looked at one from the inside so I felt like doing it. Needless to say, conducting an inventory of things was also an inevitable chore that needed doing and I saw no reason not to start early.
The next hour passed quickly after that and we settled into a comfortable silence as we immersed ourselves in studying Chen’s suit recordings and vital signs. Disappointingly, there was nothing in there that shed any light on recent events or Chen's odd behaviour. I decided to spend my time inventorying the small pod and poking around for something more interesting to do than busywork.
I tallied up all the things you’d expect after a thorough but mind-numbing search.
About three months of food and water for four people plus our rifles and sidearms. We had twenty-one spare rifle magazines between us and half that in mags for our pistols. All the other usual stuff you’d need to survive in space for a time like a pair of vacsuits and hand tools were also onboard. The list I compiled was longer and more varied than you might think, but in many ways it was much shorter than I’d have liked. We didn't have an FTL transmitter, unfortunately, those were reserved for actual ships. Someone in their infinite wisdom decided it was too expensive or too difficult to put them in an escape pod.
The hours passed quickly, then days. Days turned to weeks and soon it had been a month. By the time the seventh week had rolled around, rescue had become not just unlikely, but all but impossible. I could feel the boredom getting to me. There’s only so many rounds of cards you can play and movies you can watch before you begin going nuts.
I didn’t know where we were when we abandoned ship, but we were supposed to go out and patrol the frontier of human space beyond the fringe. The odds of being found out there were drastically lower than the more densely populated regions of human space. We had to have drifted far from the ship’s initial position by now too. If we’d ejected near the Core Worlds we’d probably all be enjoying a cold beer already, but as things stood we didn’t know when or if we’d ever be rescued. I was already beginning to lose hope.
After some discussion, the four of us decided to place ourselves in the pod’s stasis chambers, to reawaken someday, or not at all. We knew the odds of waking up were stacked against us and not by a small margin, either, but no one felt like starving to death or going crazy from the isolation. I certainly didn’t see much point in laying around and eating all the food until we started fighting over who got the last human thigh.
Standing in front of the stasis pods, naked and frankly freezing from the frigid temperature, we looked at the marvels of technology with a wary eye. There were four bulky cylinders fixed to a wall taking up all the space from floor to ceiling. A small screen above the pod’s door gave a readout of the occupant’s vital signs and the time in stasis elapsed.
I examined the tall, bulky pods with some amount of trepidation, though I did my best to pretend I wasn’t fazed. Honestly though, the thought of not waking up and being frozen alive scared me more than combat.
Fear was something you couldn’t show to those under your command. It created doubt and doubt created chaos and distraction. In other words, it absolutely destroyed a unit’s discipline and combat effectiveness to see their commander standing around pissing his pants in fear or panicking. That was one of the first lessons I’d ever learned about leading soldiers and it was foremost in my mind at that moment. I had to keep it together, at least until we all went into our pods.
“I’ve never been in one of these things before. Does it hurt?” I asked, an open question to the others.
“We’ll be fine.” Carver said. “You won’t really feel anything. You’ll fall asleep and if no one comes along… well, we just won’t wake up.”
I nodded to him, trying to speak firmly and confidently. “I’ll see you when we wake up then.” What went unsaid was that I hoped we would wake up, but there was no sense in voicing that thought, it would only cause problems. Besides, each of us was probably thinking the same thing at that moment.
I climbed into the pod in front of me gingerly, as though it might malfunction if I moved too suddenly. The rest of my team did likewise and I heard the soft sounds of doors closing as they each sealed themselves in.
The latches and locks clicked shut as we were entombed in our stasis pods. I felt a sharp prick in my arm and then, very quickly, the hiss and whir of the pod around me began lulling me to sleep. The specially formulated stasis drugs blanketed my mind in a dark, sleepy haze, but I had time enough to wonder a little bit as I fought the drugs in my system.
Would we ever wake up? Had we just given up our last days of existence for a quiet and painless death? Was I about to have my last conscious thought? I had no idea. All I knew was that our fate was now in the hands of whoever reigned over the black, unforgiving cosmos. I just hoped whoever it was kept me breathing, because I didn’t relish the thought of dying like a frozen sardine. When I died, I wanted a chance to fight back and take a few bastards with me.