*
Alex closed the panel. It had once blended so seamlessly into the wall that one could barely tell it was even a panel. Now the edge was dented and bent out of shape, the smooth gray paint scratched off in many places.
The ship's computer had refused to open it for him, even with his captain's override. It was not programmed to know or care that the earth was a dead husk now. Everyone below was either dead or dying, he knew. To even go down and look for survivors would doom them to death by radiation sickness.
The panel had not closed sufficiently, and he put his foot on it to make it close better. Sometimes these systems would not operate right if they detected a panel ajar.
A crash came from the hallway as Nathan threw something or other about. He had been off and on sobbing in his bunk and having rampages that destroyed anything he could find. It did not bother Alex. Nothing seemed to bother him anymore.
If anything, the rampages had been convenient. For the first three days after their arrival at once-earth it had been intoning constantly that he was not authorized to try to open this panel, or prop open that window. He had merely ignored it, but finally Nathan had systematically destroyed every vocoder unit on the ship. He saw the lights blinking where the vocoder had been in every room, the computer still trying to tell him he was not authorized.
That had to be the last thing he had to re-route. His first attempt to take them into hyperspace had resulted in failure. The computer refused to allow it with a window cover stuck open.
After that, neither he nor Nathan had known what to do.
“I say suicide,” Nathan had said first. It was an option Alex had considered as well.
It wasn't that he was so grieved he wished to die. Perhaps it was shock or he had been away so long it no longer had any meaning to him.
Mainly it was that unless they took their own lives, they'd live out the rest of their days in this coffin. The recycling systems were so good that they would die of old age before it broke down or was unable to reprocess their waste into food or water or air.
“I don't want to live out the rest of my life on this ship,” Nathan had told him. “We should kill ourselves.”
“I don't want to do that just yet,” Alex had replied.
“Then when? What is there to wait for?”
“I still want to see what hyperspace looks like.”
Alex had merely rolled his eyes. Anymore he had only contempt for everyone and everything mentioned. “The reason they close the windows is probably just a precaution. You know you won't see anything out there. They don't hide it for some sinister reason, idiot. There's just nothing to see.”
But nothing Alex said had dissuaded him. He had heard Alex attempting to kill himself, but each time he stopped before doing the deed.
The ships - coffins, he liked to call them now - were designed so there was almost nothing hard. No sharp edges, no knives. He had long believed it was for safety, in case the ship was rocked or turned sharply. Having an injured crew member on a two-man ship could end a trip quickly, everyone had said.
Now he realized that had been a lie. There was nothing sharp so that someone could not take their own life.
Aside from his rampages, Nathan had spent days breaking off pieces of doors, walls, anything, and trying to make it into a knife.
Once he had, he lacked the nerve to actually do it.
“You're the captain. You should do it,” he had said, offering Alex the knife.
Alex looked at it, and turned back to his work.
Nathan had raged and begged, even threatened him. For some reason, it struck him as the first funny thing he had heard in months.
“Are you threatening mutiny?” he asked, then laughed long and loud.
Nathan had run out and broken more things, but nothing important. He was too afraid to even break the air recirculators.
All of it only made him despise the man. He had once thought they were friends, but he had merely been mistaking a working relationship for this. Having no one else to talk to made one keen to imagine they liked the only person available.
He headed towards the cockpit. A funny hold-over of a name. There was little navigation to be done here, only the pressing of a few buttons and letting the computer do the work.
Perhaps the ship would not move at all. Perhaps the computer would completely lock him out. If that was the case then he probably would do what Nathan asked.
He sat down on the chair. It tried to conform to his back, but had placed a broken-off panel on the back of it. The unyielding hardness was comforting.
Silently he began to press buttons.
Finally, the screen accepted the instructions he had given it. He turned the key and then sat back. After a moment's further thought he reached over again and twisted the key, snapping it. There was no going back. Literally. He had deactivated the overrides that would take them out of hyperspace after five days.
Footsteps on the floor made him look back. Nathan walked in, leaning against the wall. He was gaunt, unshaved. Discipline no longer existed.
“Alex, I'm sorry,” Nathan said after a few moments. “I just have nothing left. There's no reason to be alive. Hell, it's not even like we could repopulate the species somewhere.”
Alex didn't reply. He just had nothing to say. Forgiveness also seemed to have no meaning anymore.
“I have a plan. Back in my time on the academy they said that there was an emergency kit in the forward section under the nose. In case the ship ever crash-landed on an uninhabited planet. It had things like seeds, water makers, tents. Survival equipment.”
He finally could not ignore the man anymore. He still didn't really care, but his conscience prompted him to at least reply. “What's the point? We're not on a planet.”
“They used to say it also had a gun. For defense, in the case of hostile life-forms.”
“That's ridiculous. We've never encountered life on another planet beyond bacterial.” The words popped out automatically.
“Well, that's what they said. I think we should get under there and check. It might be an easy and painless way to end it.”
It was all back to that again. Alex turned his chair around to face him.
“If you help me with that, I'll help you get the ship into hyperspace with the windows open, if you want. If you agree to kill me afterwards.”
“Kind of a moot point now. We're in Hyperspace, and the port window is open.”
Fear and surprise went across Nathan's face. Alex got up and walked past him. He wasn't rushing. There was no reason to rush anymore, for anything.
Nathan followed him into the port cabin. The cover over the quartz window was indeed open.
Slowly, Alex went closer, peering out. Outside of the window, it appeared to be like space-like. Blackness, but without stars.
There was, as Nathan had predicted, nothing to see.
Nathan laughed. “Happy now?” he asked. “You fucking idiot.”
Pulling up a chair, Nathan sat down, looking out the window.
“I guess that's why they chose you to hold the key, huh? Because you're too dense to catch the obvious.”
The insults rolled off him like water off a water fowl. But after a moment he turned to look at Nathan.
“Tomorrow we can look for the survival kit. I'm certain it's not there, but we can look.”
“And if it is there?” Nathan asked. He sounded as hopeful as a man about to be released from prison. Almost an apt description, really.
“Then I'll kill you, if that's what you want.”
Nathan smiled and left. Alex turned back to the window.
Upon closer examination he blackness was not the same as space. It was like the difference between black silk and black coffee. One seemed infinite and inky, the other textured darkness.
The black of hyperspace seemed to almost have a texture. It seemed a contradiction; nothing out there was supposed to make sense to human eyes. They should not see anything.
He might have fallen asleep. It was hard to tell when your eyes were closed when you were only looking at darkness.
When he saw the light he knew he was awake. That, or dead. A ball of light was outside the ship. He stood up suddenly, the stool falling over. It sounded unnaturally loud, and made his heart race.
Stepping closer, he peered out the window, pressing his face to it to see out. The thought that they windows were actually heated to prevent skin from freezing to them crossed his mind. Even despite that it was extremely cold against his cheek.
The light seemed to be gone.
A moment later it was back, coming from his blindside. It stopped outside the window. He recoiled in surprise as it stopped outside the window. It was almost as if it was lighting up the outside, and it almost seemed like they were in a tunnel with undulating, moving walls.
The scientific part of his mind told him that it was an illusion; whatever was out there was certainly not a moving tunnel. His mind was merely trying to interpret something so foreign that it created a strange image.
But the ball of light was still in front of the window. He knew they were “moving” through hyperspace. As much as one could be said to move in such an alien world.
How did it stay there? Why? He wondered if having the window open somehow attracted it, like iron shards to a magnet. Perhaps that was why they covered the windows.
Yet that seemed wrong. It was not an inanimate thing, the ball of light. It was regarding him with as much curiosity as he regarded it. Somehow he knew.
Forming the thought suddenly sent a chill down his spine.
The utter silence was broken by a sound. It was like the sound of metal being stressed and bending, protesting loudly and warning all near of its imminent failure. He jumped away from the window and looked around, but the sound stopped. Looking back to the window, the ball of light was also gone.
The lights on the ship flickered - or had he simply blinked? Sweat suddenly came down his forehead, making his eyes sting.
The light in here was earth-like, like the sun. But it seemed differently suddenly. Perhaps he was dazed from staring into the bright ball of light. The light seemed red.
The emergency lights had come on, he was slow to realize.
On a nearby wall, the light was blinking. Had the vocoder been working, it would have been saying something. He went over, and opened the small screen.
Foreign material detected.
Something was on board the ship that was not supposed to be here.
“Nathan!” he called, his entire body tingling. There was no answer.
He rushed out into the hallway. There was nothing. The lighting was back to normal. If it had ever even actually be different.
“Nathan?” he called again. He checked the man's quarters, but did not find him. He checked the bridge, the john, every room, but found nothing.
The ship was not that big. He could not have disappeared.
Remembering the man's plan to search for the survival kit, he went to the storage chamber, little bigger than a closet. He was probably tearing up the floor panels to get to it.
When went in, there were scrapes on the floor. He had clearly been trying to open it. The tools he had been using were there.
But Nathan was not.
He searched the ship again, yelling himself hoarse. For four hours he looked in the same spots over and over again. These ships were not designed for one to be able to hide. He never found him.
Even if the man had killed himself, there was no way he could have hidden his body so well. He checked the computer, scanned the ship for the man. The ship found nothing.
It did not even note that they were short one crew. He asked it to check for anomalies of roster, cargo, and status.
It noted the damage to the panels, floors, and vocoders. It noted that they were on an unusual hyperjump. It noted that the window cover was open. The cargo was normal. The crew was normal, only Captain Alex Bordogin. There was no reference to Nathan at all.
His throat felt dry, and he realized that the computer was not as benign as he had always thought.
Panicked thoughts came to his mind, each more far-fetched than the last. He slowly dismissed them all as outlandish and absurd. Things were still not right, though.
He was good with computers, it was another essential skill for an astronaut. He set about cracking open the computer on the ship.
Breaking through the security on it was not the hardest he had ever done, but it was the hardest he had done in many years. Several times he had to start from scratch, but it was not designed to fully lock him out.
He had lost track of the time. Fear and adrenaline kept him awake and working. He often looked over his shoulder, but there was never anything there. Once or twice it seemed the lights had gone out in the hall, but after a moment they were back as if nothing had happened.
His irrational fears were playing with him. He had to remain rational, he knew that. It was the only way to keep going. He turned his fear to his advantage, telling himself that Nathan had let his fear take over, and now he was gone.
It had been days since he slept. Sometimes he fell asleep and woke up suddenly, taking up the work he had last been performing immediately. He did not want to admit even to himself that he was too terrified to fall asleep in his bed.
When he finally looked at a clock he realized that nearly a week had passed. How had so much time gone by? He had no way of measuring it but the chronometer, but it was an atomic clock that could not be wrong.
They were nearing the six day mark. The significance of that was not lost on him. Once he had been curious about the fate of those that stayed in. Now he was afraid to find out.
He had to crack the computer first. With the key broken, the only way to possibly stop the ship was to get inside the computer and order it to cut off the hyperdrive.
It had seemed a good idea at the time, breaking the key. He was ready to accept his fate. If Nathan had merely killed himself, he would still be willing to face it.
Now he didn't even have a corpse to talk to.
He cracked the computer. It took him several minutes to realize he had actually done it, and when he did, his heart raced in a way it hadn't for some time. He carefully went about looking inside the files.
It was arranged very neatly, with a very easy to use interface. It was designed so that someone, somewhere, could have opened it more normally and looked over all of the data easily. Not an engineer, this wasn't full of their type of jargon and oddities. It was more for a layman to look at. The upper ranks.
He could get to the hyperdrive in a moment. Now he was only consumed with curiosity. There was still time.
These logs made no sense. Some were from missions prior to his, he ignored them. He found the directory for his mission, and started to read them.
Minutes turned to hours, he kept reading. The same things, over and over again.
The files that the crew could normally see were the same as he had seen before; no registry of anything unusual.
But there was another file. Alerts had been moved there. Files on the crew had, too. The crew files had video of every action they had taken since setting out. Eating, sleeping, even on the john. There was one for him, one for Nathan . . . and a third one for a man named Adam Erikson.
It had to be a mistake. Opening the file, he read the reports. There were videos, too. The man was in the ship, doing work. Interacting with him and Nathan.
He head began to swim. He had never seen this man before. He had never known a third man on this ship.
All at once, the videos stopped.
There was one last file. Opening it, he saw it contained a list of alerts. Hundreds of them. All but two said the same thing.
Foreign material detected.
They all occurred during hyperspace jumps. During those jumps, something was coming on the ship.
The other two alerts said the same thing. One was about a week old. The other dated back to the time Adam Erikson had supposedly been on board.
Crew member no longer present.
His spine shivered. They knew about this. They knew all along.
Turning around, Alex looked down the hallway. It was exactly as it had always been, there was nothing there, and it frightened him to no end.
He was going to take the ship out of hyperspace, before it was too late.
Looking over, he saw the clock, and quickly calculated how long they had been in hyperspace.
It was the beginning of the seventh day.
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