[Children of a Dead Earth 01.0] The Ark

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  Benson swallowed a curse and nudged the pod forward just enough to close the gap once more, but burned up another few tenths of a percent of the remaining propellant to do so. Benson reached out again, more gingerly this time, trying to match his movements to the body’s rotation. The last of the fluid squirted out into the vacuum like a new constellation.

  With a last frantic grasp, Benson reached out and snagged himself an ankle. Fortunately, the claw was run off electric actuators instead of hydraulic pressure, so he didn’t have to worry about Laraby’s remains drifting off again. As soon as Benson had the body secured, he spun the pod back around to face the Ark, then burned for home, using as much of the remaining propellant as he dared. It earned him a meager two meters per second relative speed. Considering he was over three kilometers out, it was going to be a long trip back, maybe too long.

  With the imminent threat of oxygen starvation chewing at his nerves, Benson passed the time going over the body in great detail, trying to reconstruct the last few terrible minutes of Laraby’s life. The man was underdressed for a spacewalk, in the same scrubs Benson had seen the other environmental techs wear. No pressure suit, no helmet, missing a shoe. He had probably dressed for work the same way every day for months.

  The exposed skin on his face and hands was too discolored to get any sense of bruising or signs of a struggle. Hopefully, an autopsy would be able to tell vacuum damage from other injuries, if any. The trouble was, with almost everyone dying of old age, the two doctors who served double duty as coroners had about as much experience examining potential murder victims as Benson himself did.

  The other option, of course, was Laraby had simply decided to go for a swim without his trunks for his own reasons. Suicides were not unheard of, but still rare for several reasons. First, the most effective methods, guns and drugs, were nonexistent in the case of the former, and tightly controlled in the case of the latter. Coupled with the fact the seed population for the Ark had been screened for psychological disorders just as thoroughly as they had been for disease and genetic defects meant their great-great-great grandchildren were still largely free of depression and anxiety, at least as chronic conditions.

  So what would convince a young man, respected for the work he was doing, and living in an enviable home, to off himself in just about the most violent and terrifying way possible? A few people over the years had taken a long step off the top of one of the residential towers, but to Benson’s recollection, no one had ever voluntarily blown themselves out of an airlock.

  As a method of suicide, it didn’t make much sense. As a way to get rid of an inconvenient body, on the other hand, it was very convenient indeed. A decomposing body would be very difficult to hide anywhere onboard. The smell alone would be nearly impossible to contain. And the best way to get rid of a body, through the recycling process, would leave genetic material all over the place even after it had been dissolved, and that was assuming you could convince the reclamation techs to process a body “off the books” in the first place.

  Benson thought back to Laraby’s absolutely sterile house. If his instinct was right and it had been scrubbed intentionally, then the hypothetical killer wasn’t one to take those kinds of chances. Shoving someone out of an airlock left no body behind to confirm a murder had even taken place.

  But that scenario had problems of its own. First, locks were all under camera observation. Second, and more perplexing at the moment, was why Laraby’s body was still here at all. As massive as the Ark was, its native gravity field was still extremely weak compared to Earth normal. Someone standing on the surface of the hull could achieve escape velocity with an overly-enthusiastic hop. Somebody who went to all this trouble surely would have known that and given Laraby’s body a healthy enough shove to ensure he floated clear. So why hadn’t they?

  And how did the Monet fit into all of this, and what about the extremely convenient plant system glitch that had let Laraby’s disappearing act go unnoticed for hours? Discovering the body hadn’t really done anything but confirm what Benson had already known in the back of his mind. Instead of answering the hows and whys, Laraby’s body only opened up more vexing questions.

  None of which would be answered if Benson didn’t bring his attention back to the sixteen kilometer ship growing in the canopy at an unsettling rate.

  He glanced down at range and speed indicators. The pod’s speed had grown from two meters per second, to nearly five. He hadn’t hit the thrusters again, yet even as he watched the number trickled up. He was falling towards the Ark. Weak or not, its gravity was pulling him in.

  “Stupid!” Benson actually hit himself on the side of the helmet. The low oxygen was affecting his brain. He hadn’t factored in the extra speed now piling on from the Ark’s gravity. Did he have enough propellant left to avoid a collision? How much more punishment could the pod take? The next few minutes were about to get very interesting.

  He reopened the link back to Command. “This is Benson. I’ve completed recovery operations, but I’m low on O2, almost out of propellant and am in danger of crashing into the Ark. Please advise. Send.”

  The response came quickly. --Ah, detective, we’re glad to see your communication system has miraculously healed itself.--

  “Hilarious, Feng. I’m in a bit of a jam out here. Send.”

  The Ark swelled beyond his field of vision, yet still it grew. Benson and the pod were being pulled ever so gently towards its center of mass, which happened to be the giant habitat modules spinning at hundreds of kilometers per hour. They were the absolute last place he wanted to crash into, except maybe the nuclear bomb vaults back in engineering.

  Stars traced little paths through his field of vision. Benson grew dizzy and gulped for air.

  “This is serious! Send!”

  --Hangar informs us that there’s a small emergency reserve of propellant aboard, but you shouldn’t be so low in the first place. One or more propellant tanks must have been punctured in the accident. Without telemetry from the pod, we can’t know if the reserve is still intact.--

  Benson’s stomach dropped to his feet, which was a curious sensation in microgravity. It came down to a roll of the dice. He goosed the joystick to angle the pod back towards the area of the hangars and away from the habitats, then began terminal maneuvers with the dwindling hope that the label wouldn’t prove prescient.

  The pod passed back inside the protective umbrella of the Ark’s forward shield. At the very least, he had survived the shooting gallery, not that the realization gave him much comfort as the engineering section loomed. His speed had grown to seven and a half meters per second. The distance dropped to one hundred meters.

  “Showtime.”

  He opened the taps on the thrusters. Harsh deceleration threw him forward into the harness and squeezed his chest. Already struggling for breath, Benson shook his heavy head and clung to consciousness. The propellant gauge counted down alarmingly fast as many dozens of cubic meters of gas escaped into the void between stars. In a handful of seconds, it reached zero. Benson’s heart froze in his chest just as solidly as the corpse outside.

  The thrusters continued to fire as the display turned red and the digits went into the negatives, eating up the emergency reserve. The pod’s speed fell back below four meters per second, then below three as the distance continued to drop away. His vision shrank at the edges, as though he was looking into a tunnel.

  Then, with forty meters left, the thrusters ran dry.

  “Thrusters are spent. Impact with the hull in, uh, some seconds. If you could have someone come and get me that would be great. Send.”

  The hull was only meters away, but his sight was too cloudy to make out any detail. Then the tunnel closed in around him. As Benson plunged into blackness, the last thing he saw was the canopy silently shatter against the hull.

  Eight

  When Benson woke, it was not floating on a cloud before a set of gates, or even falling into a lake of fire. It was on a bed, in a sma
ll room, with an uncomfortably large plastic tube shoved down his throat.

  He coughed violently as his eyes tried to adjust to the harsh white lights. The choking sensation became too much and he yanked at the tube sticking from his mouth. As soon as he did, alarms started to sound. The tube fought him all the way out, triggering his gag reflex twice before he finally pulled it free with a decisive jerk.

  Benson’s vision cleared just as the first person entered the room. It was a woman he didn’t recognize, but her long coat shouted “Doctor”. The second person, on the other hand, he knew quite well. Which is why it didn’t come as any surprise when Theresa waltzed right up and slapped him across the face.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” she demanded before the doctor intervened.

  “Constable, that’s not helping.” The doctor put herself between Theresa and her patient.

  “The idiot has a death wish,” Theresa shouted. “I can help him with that.”

  “I’ll have to ask you to wait outside, ma’am.”

  Theresa’s glare burned through the fuzziness still clinging to Benson’s consciousness. “Gladly. See you back at the office, detective.” She span around on a heel and stormed out of the small room like a tornado exiting a closet.

  The doctor looked back and put a hand on Benson’s shoulder. “Lovely lady.”

  “We’re just coworkers,” he said weakly.

  “Uh huh. Because a ‘coworker’ would have rushed down here and refused to leave until you woke up again.”

  Benson sat up and tried to shake out the cobwebs. “That obvious, huh?”

  “Don’t worry,” she smiled warmly. “I won’t tell anyone. Doctor/patient confidentiality and all that.”

  A terrible thought went through Benson’s mind. “How long have I been out?” He sounded a little more demanding than he meant to.

  “It’s OK. It’s–” she consulted her pad “–almost 19.00. You were only out for a couple hours. You’ll probably be discharged in time for the game.”

  “Game?”

  “Game Five. The Zero Championships?” She grabbed a penlight out of her pocket and shone it in his eyes. “Are you feeling all right? Dizzy?”

  “No,” Benson waved her off. “I’m fine. Just have a lot of other things on my mind besides Zero, for once.”

  “Well, I’m sure a near-death experience would do that for anyone, even you, Captain Benson.”

  Something about her inflection set off alarm bells. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked pensively.

  Benson tried to focus on her face, but her voice registered first.

  “I was an intern a few years ago, working extra hours doing sports medicine for the–”

  “Mustangs,” Benson finished for her. Her hair had been a lot shorter then, and most of her freckles had faded. “Jasmine?”

  “Jeanine,” she corrected. “Although most people call me Dr Russell these days.”

  It all came back to him. “After the Championship win in Eighteen, didn’t we get drunk and, ah…”

  She chuckled. “Yes, we did, and then you neglected to call.”

  Benson put up a hand in defense. “Sorry, I meant to, but–”

  “Sorry for what? I knew what I wanted, Zero Hero. I’ve hardly been wasting away pining after you.” She looked down at his naked torso. “Although I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to see you with your shirt off again. But you’re underdressed. Your ‘coworker’ wasn’t the only person waiting for you.”

  A sense of dread welled up into Benson’s stomach. “Who’s out there?”

  “Oh, you’ve attracted quite a following. Captain Mahama arrived twenty minutes ago, and someone from engineering just brought in the body you recovered.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes, and they seem very excited to see you.” Jeanine paused with a mischievous smirk. “Maybe ‘excited’ isn’t the right word.”

  “Tell them I’m in an irreversible coma.”

  She leaned out of the door and called down the hall. “He’ll be out as soon as he gets dressed.”

  Benson grit his teeth. “Thanks a lot. I suppose I deserved that.”

  Jeanine smiled. “I suppose you did. Your vitals are all in the green. I’ll want to see you again for a checkup tomorrow, but frankly I think you’re probably in the clear. You lost consciousness from hypoxia, but they got you back inside before your heart stopped. No signs of edema, either. You’ve kept yourself in remarkably good shape.”

  “Thanks. Where are my clothes?”

  “We had to cut them off.” Jeanine nodded towards a chair sitting by the back wall. “Your coworker brought you some fresh ones to change into.”

  “Thank you.”

  She turned to leave, but Benson called out to her. “Jeanine, I mean, doctor? Who will be performing the autopsy on Mr Laraby?”

  She thumbed towards another room. “The body you brought back? I will, but it’s going to be a while yet.”

  Benson shook his head. “I need you to start right away. While everything’s still fresh.”

  “Fresh isn’t going to be a problem, detective. The man is frozen solid. I can’t start until he thaws out. Unless you want me to use a hammer and chisel?”

  “Can’t you just heat him up?”

  “Sure, I could cut him up into pizza-sized slices and use an oven. Or maybe engineering would let me stick him inside the fusion reactor chamber for a few seconds.”

  “All right,” Benson put up his hands in surrender. “That sounded less stupid in my head. How long, do you think?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t have much experience defrosting a seventy kilo steak. I don’t think anyone does, really. Two days? Three?”

  Benson tried not to let his frustration show. “OK, I understand. When you do get started, I need you to pay extra attention for signs of struggle. Bruising, abrasions, fractures. Any sort of defensive wounds.”

  Jeanine looked slightly lost for a moment. “You think he was fighting back against someone?”

  He nodded. “I strongly suspect so, yes.”

  “I don’t understand. He’s a suicide.”

  Benson’s eyes narrowed at the last word. “Who told you that?”

  “The captain did when the body came in. Said he threw himself out an airlock.”

  “Did she now?” Benson filed that interesting little tidbit away. “Never mind what you heard. I just want you to look at the body with fresh eyes and see whatever there is to see. OK?”

  Jeanine seemed to know she was missing some important context, but moved on. “Fine, but the body’s a mess. It’s going to be tough to single out bruises or any other minor injuries from all the damage the dermis suffered from vacuum and flash-freezing. Not to mention the arm.”

  “What’s wrong with the arm?” Benson asked suspiciously.

  “Well, aside from being missing, I expect it’s in the same shoddy condition as the rest of him.”

  “Missing?” Benson said. “Who cut off his arm?”

  “You did when you crushed the body between the ship and your EVA pod. Although the correct word would probably be closer to ‘snapped’ off. The crash didn’t do the body any favors.”

  Benson scratched his head. “Yeah, well, any landing you can walk away from.”

  “You were carried in on a stretcher.”

  “Close enough. Now, if I could ask you to step outside so I can get dressed?”

  Jeanine smirked devilishly. “Not even a peek for old time’s sake?”

  “Not after you sold me out to the buzzards outside. Shoo.”

  “That’s fine. How do you think you got into that gown, detective?” She winked. “I’ll schedule a follow-up appointment for tomorrow. See you then.” Jeanine closed the door behind her. Benson listened to her steps fade down the hallway, then stood up, somewhat unsteadily, and put on his clothes.

  As much as he loved microgravity, some things were just
plain easier when you could stand up. Putting on pants was one such thing. Careful his shirt was tucked in presentably, Benson left the recovery room and walked down the hall. Not being a man with much remaining shame, he propped a hand against the wall, embellishing his condition in the hope it might elicit some small measure of sympathy from the people waiting to tear a strip off his hide.

  He should have known better. Captain Mahama stood up just as soon as she noticed Benson coming down the hall, but Director Hekekia beat her off the line.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he shouted. Benson resigned himself to hearing a similar refrain several more times today. Although no matter who else said it, Theresa’s rage would probably remain the most intimidating.

  “Actually, I thought I did rather well, considering the circumstances.”

  “Oh, you do, do you? Hear that everybody? The shaved ape thinks he’s earned a peanut!” He pointed a finger at Benson’s face. “I told you I couldn’t afford to lose the pod.”

  “You didn’t lose it. I brought it back.”

  “Yeah, with more holes than a pasta strainer, a shattered canopy, and a body tangled up in its arm. Its remaining arm.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with the meteorite. I wasn’t entirely thrilled about it myself, I’ll have you know. Besides, if you’d have sent it out by remote like you’d planned, you really would have lost it. I’m the one who piloted it back. Without any training, I might add.”

  This took most of the steam out of Hekekia’s brewing rant, even if his expression showed he didn’t find the argument entirely persuasive.

  “Yeah, well, I had to pull my entire team off their assignments to clean up after your little stunt. And prying that meat-popsicle out of the wreck? Three of my guys have already asked for trauma counseling.”