The distant high-human and low-inhuman screaming ricocheted off the rocky walls of the tunnel.

The science officer was trapped.

The hatch before her would not open, as the airlock behind it was no longer attached to anything on the other side. The radio back in the operations room had not been answered in hours. And she’d reached this point just in time to hear the rocket engines fire and then fade.

“Bastards.”

She pounded uselessly on the door, but only once. She wasn’t one for the inefficiency of lamenting the irreversible. She looked at the tunnel behind her. Long, narrow, dark. Roughly squared walls, carved out in a rush by construction bots eager to assemble the tiny underground base.

Her flashlight had dimmed to a useless glow, but she didn’t need it. There was nothing to see in that tunnel. She could find her way by feel.

Or by the way the meat-rot and compost-must odor intensified in one direction, despite her mask.

She sucked in a filtered breath and went. Through the darkness, stumbling in the fractional gravity, failing to achieve a true running speed. The black blurred by, slowly graying, then reddening as she approached the doors. A single bulb on emergency power poured down maroon light, making the blood stains look like harmless wet spots.

“Marooned under maroon,” she said aloud. Her wordplay drove her crewmates nuts. Used to. Not anymore. Too short a trip.

She stopped herself, stretching her long arms out to either side to brace against the tunnel. Two doors side by side. She sucked air through her mask, panting and staring at them as though considering which was the correct one. Analyze, evaluate, choose the optimal path. But there was no choice. The one on the right was a no-go.

The one on the right screamed.

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She went left. Back into the operations room, which had gone cold and indifferent hours before. More red emergency lighting was the only thing that kept her from bumping into inert consoles. She felt a natural urge to tap at them, but resisted the pointless act.

The next room was storage. Beyond that, the smell got so bad it would melt her lungs, with mask or without. Even if she could stand it, there was nowhere else to go. The power plant was too far. The sleeping quarters were too exposed. The rest of the rooms were behind that impassable, screaming door.

She stood in the storeroom and looked at the six cryo tubes. This was it. Her last hope. Though she was not deluded: it was no hope. It was likely that the integrity of the chamber would fail eventually, at some unknowable point in the future, and she would be lost. Or she would be in there forever. Either end was better than what the others had met.

The first two tubes were no good. She stepped over the puddles beneath them and tried not to think about what had happened.

She tapped at the side of the third tube, where the diagnostics panel dimly glowed. It had just enough battery power to initiate a freeze. She went around to the front and yanked the hatch. Too hard. Instead of popping open, in the low gravity the tall coffin tilted. She should have just as easily broken its fall, but the looming machine caused her to flinch and jump out of the way as it crashed down against the one opposite, rendering them both useless.

“Shit.”

The abrupt clanging of metal and cracking of plastic was followed by a dreadful silence. The screaming had stopped. Somehow that was worse.

“Bad things,” she whispered. Or they whispered. And she repeated.

She maneuvered herself behind the fallen pod to reach the remaining two. The first one’s diagnostic panel was unresponsive. The other worked. She breathed a sigh into the mask and slowly, carefully, opened the tube. From the side panel, she initiated the freeze. It turned yellow and told her the sequence would proceed once the hatch was secured.

She got into the coffin, stepping into a plastic wrap that hung down from above. She closed the tube and stripped away her mask. Zipped the wrap from top to bottom, sealing it around her feet. Candy-scented gas fell in a cascade around her head. Darkness followed.

And two decades of nightmares came with it.

#

Early man walked away as modern man took control.

Their minds weren’t all the same, to conquer was his goal,

So he built his great empire and slaughtered his own kind,

Then he died a confused man, killed himself with his own mind.

We’re only gonna die from our own arrogance.

- Greg Graffin

(Bad Religion, How Could Hell be any Worse?)