Seclurm: Devolution

by Noah Gallagher

  Rosalyn couldn’t help but give off a soft chuckle. “You can’t be serious. Do you think I want to be stuck here?”

  She didn’t answer, face frowning as she worked her eyelashes.

  “What exactly is concerning you?”

  She turned to look at Rosalyn, fire in her eyes. “What’s concerning you, ‘Captain’? What do you care about? Why are you even out here? I know it isn’t for the money—you don’t do anything with it when you get back. Got a big pile o’ cash you like to sit on, I guess. But I think you prefer it out here, don’t you? Where you can have your little dominion over some subordinates. The chances of us being dead before we get back home are getting higher and higher every single day. All of us would love it if you could start worrying more about that than about what you’re gonna look like to FAER. We all have real lives to get home to.”

  That last “all” seemed deliberately non-inclusive. Rosalyn stared at her for a moment, chagrined, as Terri turned back to the mirror with vitriol in her eyes.

  A frown came on Rosalyn’s face too, and her eyes moistened. She pointed a finger at Terri and said firmly, “Shauna was absolutely a better captain than I am. What happened to her was a complete travesty that was nobody’s fault. I feel terrible about it anyway. And no, I don’t ‘want’ to be the captain, Terri. But I’ll do whatever I find is necessary to keep us all alive.”

  She strode past Terri with a heavy, frustrated sigh, not bothering to see her reaction.

  That energy within her was still boiling, but she had better uses for it. Much better uses.

  Her stomach rumbled, and she regretted not stopping to eat earlier. After getting dressed she made her way to the pantry in the kitchen. Reaching around shelves of boxes and containers, she unexpectedly felt her hand touch a gritty pile of grain.

  What in the world? she thought as she examined it. She found a cardboard box of dry porridge with a large hole in its corner that looked like it had been chewed into. Searching swiftly through the rest of the pantry, Rosalyn found a few more cartons and boxes had been eaten through. Not a significant amount to threaten their survival, but it was undoubtedly concerning.

  And worse, she had no idea what had done it. Was it Brady? Or…something else?

  ♦♦♦

  The engineers had been assessing the coolant pipe damage for nearly forty-five minutes amidst much straining and the latest round of jokes about them being “the Three Stooges”. With engines off it was strangely cold here. It was important, of course, to know the scope of a problem in order to deduce a specific and effective route to remedy it. They had come decently far. The stress of the situation was definitely bearing down on them, a palpable, looming threat of death by starvation—or worse—unspoken but felt and known by each of them.

  And there was no rescue; unless a ship was sent for them and was close enough to reach them swiftly, if they weren’t able to save themselves, they truly would die. Even if they were able, somehow, to create their own fuel from the planetoid’s materials as Rosalyn had suggested, if they stayed here too long they may well not have enough food to last them all the way home.

  Starvation…that had to be the worst way to die, in Mitch’s opinion.

  He grimaced suddenly at the thought that that could be interpreted as a fat joke. Had he just insulted himself?

  He grimaced again at his own silly thoughts and shook his head. Time to start worrying about real problems. Like where Brady was! That little guy was a real pill sometimes. Mitchell normally didn’t care about Brady going his own way a bit, but the stressful circumstances at hand…well, this was exactly the time when he wanted a cat with him. As long as Brady was there, things were essentially the same.

  But maybe he was kidding himself. Shauna was dead, as far as any of them could realistically assume, and that was the most haunting thing of all. None of the crew members really wanted to face that yet, such as by holding a funeral for her, though that was partly because they had no time for things like that if they wanted to survive. But he felt that the reason it hadn’t been discussed was mostly because they wanted to hold out hope that new information would turn up.

  Had something…had something eaten her? The same thing that may have been stowing away on their ship and breaking through their pipes? It seemed too out there to be a real possibility, but there seemed no reasonable alternative. Maybe the liquid she’d imbibed was really acidic after all and had dissolved her body.

  Oh, hell, he thought, again throwing his thoughts away. They tended to get out of hand if left unchecked. So morbid, so unsettling. No wonder nobody was talking about it; there was no pleasant answer to the question of Shauna’s fate.

  “I don’t know if we have metal pieces this size,” Al said. He was standing atop a step-ladder to get a close-up view of the fractured pipe.

  “We might be better off if we just build it piecemeal,” Sam offered from where he stood holding the ladder.

  “Maybe… But that could take even longer. Gah, this shouldn’t be that difficult to fix! If only we weren’t in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That is definitely a major source of our current problems, Al.”

  “Hey, Mitch! Instead of standing there like a pole, why don’t you go check the boiler room or something for stuff that could be used for the pipe! Pretty much anything with a concave curve to it, but longer is better!”

  Sam smiled. “Boy, am I glad Randy wasn’t here for that.”

  “I’m on it,” Mitchell said. He started up the ladder to the main part of the engine room, put off by the cold in place of heat on his bare arms and palms and fingers as he climbed.

  He came into the main catwalk room, his black boots clamping on the perforated metal and echoing through the cold darkness. Maybe it was just him, but the place seemed darker than usual. He could still see, but not very well.

  He jogged through a line of cloudy steam rising from the floor below, feeling moisture cling lightly to his dirty uniform shirt. He knew he wouldn’t see Brady, but he darted his eyes to and fro every direction anyway, wondering if the little guy had maybe fallen from the catwalk, which would be a sad irony he wasn’t sure his crewmates would be able to refrain from joking about. Maybe convincing FAER and Shauna to allow Brady to come along had been a bad idea after all.

  He came to the hallway on the other end and entered the boiler room. The windowless door slid closed behind him. It was a hot and loud place, but not quite as bad as the engine rooms when they were powered on, so it felt like a comfortable sauna to him. Reddish lights dimly lit it from above, and the room opened up in nearly every direction with one large primary boiler at the far end of the room, about fifteen feet from the door. The hard, metal floor wasn’t perforated here in most parts, and in spite of covering a drop down into darkness, it was constructed without any holes or cracks large enough to fall through. There were other boilers and large machines and pipes throughout the room, with an order that only made sense to Mitchell because of his engineering training.

  He started browsing through piles of clanking scrap metal scattered around the floor, searching for pieces with a curve that could be molded together and strengthened to form a pipe the proper size. The main boiler rumbled nearby, pressure building within but carefully contained.

  Not many suitable pieces of scrap in that pile. He glanced around and saw an enclave behind the large boiler: a little, raised section carved out of the wall, just tall enough for a shorter man like Mitchell to stand in. Maybe there was something up there?

  A climb up a rusty-looking ladder attached to the wall brought him up to it. He could feel the heat from the boiler on the back of his head and neck as he stepped forward and found a much greater pile of scrap as well as an array of thin pipes from the large boiler connected into a hole in the wall. The hole was made large enough for the pipes to peek through, but with extra space to spare, that space blocked off from entry by a thin, metal mesh.

  Mitchell breathed quietly and bent down to start searchi
ng through the scrap. An old piece of a defunct oxygenator. A pile of nuts. A long chain. He felt moisture accumulating on the back of his head and wiped it off.

  Something caught his eye, then—a figure behind that mesh set in the wall, perched upon the pipes.

  “…Brady?” he said, standing up slightly.

  The figure turned and scuttled away.

  Wait a second… That was bigger than Brady…

  He had assumed for that first half-second that it was a perspective trick, but that couldn’t be. Whatever that thing was, it was much bigger than Brady. Maybe the size of a big dog.

  Sweat collected into beads along his neck again, and he barely felt them now. A shock coursed down his spine. He wasn’t sure what to make of what he had just seen. With wary eyes he continued sifting the scrap, the ever-present sound of the boiler working in his ears. His apparently irrational fear dulled as he focused his mind on the crucial task at hand.

  A column of steam whistled suddenly from a valve at the top of the boiler, attacking his eardrums. He spared some glances at the high ceiling above, seeing shapes in the shadows, thinking desperately of his family back home, who were dealing with earthly challenges that Mitchell was once glad to be away from. He had never thought much of what he did; he was quietly proud to be one of the pioneers of the latest and greatest frontier. But for the first time, thinking about all that was happening, he’d give anything to be back on Earth with his family, floods and other disasters notwithstanding.

  Somehow he found a few good pipe pieces. None of them very long, but they were a place to start. He would bring them back quickly, and probably ask not to travel alone from now on.

  Ugh, they’ll probably think I’m being paranoid.

  He approached the door, scratching at his head. The sounds of the boilers and machines began to grow distant.

  “Mew.”

  He stopped abruptly, holding the pipes to his chest.

  “B-Brady?” he called.

  He whistled a few times, hoping the cat would come out. When he didn’t, Mitchell sighed and looked around nervously. He figured he had better check if the little animal was okay. He walked a few steps forward, rounding the boiler to see what lay on the other side of it. A cloud of steam rose from underneath, and Mitchell had to walk through and wave it away with his free hand to see clearly. The smell of vapor and some strange, unfamiliar scent somewhat like dirt and soap came into his nostrils. He didn’t find Brady, but he did see a sizable space that the floor failed to cover. It was a virtually completely open panel with space for pipes to travel up and down, but had no metal mesh or anything barring it. Who designed this, he wondered? It was a terrible falling hazard.

  Taking a step closer, he saw that it had indeed been barred with thin, metal bars in a mesh, like that panel upon the upper wall had been, but these were broken through. He stared down with twitching eye into the dark abyss.

  Before he could think another thought, he saw a dark, gray tail whip out from the darkness below to stick into his chest like a swift arrow. The tail yanked back, pulling him down into the hole with a harrowing scream.

  In the dark he didn’t know what it was that he landed on—some assemblage of pipes and valves and other mechanical bits that bruised and pierced his body—but he knew it hurt, a lot. He tumbled head over heels a few times before he finally lay still, bleeding and screaming in pain.

  Something heavy dropped down beside him and hissed.

  He stopped screaming.

  PART TWO

  CAT AND MOUSE

  7

  For what felt like the first time, the surface of 730-X Zacuali was still. Clouds still churned in the sky and dove down low towards the ground in places, but there was light enough to see and the winds had slowed to manageable levels, for whatever that was worth on its barren surface.

  On the ridge low on the rocky, gray mountains was the Novara, currently missing its original captain and in danger of losing all of them if they did not fix the problems that were piling up at rapid rates.

  Interim captain Rosalyn Pulman sat alone in the computer room, resting her back in the chair. It had been an unconventional day in every sense, considering they’d not moved the ship an inch and hadn’t exited it either as they would in standard situations. It was getting late. There were so many pieces moving in this puzzle that was the Novara, and the oddity and stress was tough to bear.

  Video footage played on the large screen before her eyes. It was a bird’s eye angle of the medical bay from early that morning, just prior to when the camera footage had cut off. She had watched it over and over again, looking for any sign of anything out of the ordinary—intruders, explanations for Shauna’s absence, everything. Shauna lay there on the table in her slim black suit, motionless, looking healthier than she had when they’d brought her in. How was that possible when just a few hours later she would disappear?

  Then there was the matter of that hole in the ship. From the shape of the hole, it was clear to her that it hadn’t come from the outside in—as they had first assumed—but from the inside out. Something sickened her as she thought of it, but she could not help but feel that the hole and Shauna’s disappearance were more linked than they had wanted to assume. What that meant, however, she had no real guess.

  Only that ominous and sick feeling.

  She pulled up and reviewed for the second time the second response she had received from FAER almost an hour prior, which she had shared with the others via SNTNL’s intercom:

  Captain Pulman,

  We are incredibly shocked to hear of the disappearance of Shauna Beele and the damage to the ship’s hull and coolant pipe. We have never seen a situation like this in the history of the Foundation. We only wish we could be there to offer more direct help. You are in a very challenging situation, but be assured that our help is officially on the way. We have dispatched the Chalet vessel from TE-551 to travel to your location. It should reach 730-X Zacuali or else intercept your journey home to provide aid in about six to eight months. You will have our support continually. Please continue to update us and do not hesitate to ask for advice or anything else that is in our power to do.

  Sincerely,

  Foundation for Astronautical and Extraterrestrial Research

  It was strangely impersonal and general, as the last one had been. The others had made note of that back when she had shared it, and although she kept quiet about it, Rosalyn agreed. She believed it was due to the impending attention the entire operation would receive now and from then on through history. They wanted to look as professional as possible with every move they made.

  She was certain that this whole incident was greatly troubling to them for that very reason. Rosalyn couldn’t blame them. What headlines would there be for FAER—no, for the entire space exploration and mining industry—if the first contact with intelligent alien life ended in the deaths of all the crewmates?

  She couldn’t allow that. Her heart fell at the thought of her own failure dooming them all. It was horrid.

  FAER’s proffered “support” was mainly for show—the Chalet wouldn’t reach them nearly quickly enough to do a thing for them in the most likely scenarios—but that wasn’t their fault. This far out in space, the crew was simply on their own. They had understood that going in.

  Every waking moment so far since the disappearance of Shauna, Rosalyn had spent thinking about what their best options were, barely taking any time for eating or resting. She wondered if she would even sleep tonight.

  It had been an incredibly long day.

  She took off her glasses for a moment and rubbed her eyes, letting herself succumb to a moment of despair while no one could see.

  When she recuperated she went back to the camera footage, this time pulling up direct, live feeds from all the ship’s cameras. There was at least one in nearly every room except for in closets such as the pantry in the kitchen, as far as she knew. She watched Terri and Randy performing radar tests from the Bridge, emptines
s in most of the other rooms, and Al and Sam still toiling away in one of the engine rooms.

  With all that had happened, at least they had work to fall back on. They were resilient. Until all was right again, they would work.

  “SNTNL, patch me into the intercom on the Bridge,” she said, clearing her throat.

  “Alright, you’re on, Captain Pulman,” it replied a few seconds later.

  “Hey, how is the radar testing going?”

  “It’s positively nuts,” came the voice of Randy. “We’re seeing discrepancies of about sixty percent compared to the data from before.”

  “Discrepancies?” Rosalyn said, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “See for yourself,” answered Terri.

  Rosalyn pulled up the new data of the ruins on her screen and saw the comparison between that and the old one. Both images were three-dimensional representations of the mountain and ruins constructed from radar vibrations, each with only vague detail. The old one had less detail to go off of and was not dense, although rather expansive in size. The new one, on the other hand, had a few new places appearing, some closing up, and many, many more radar vibrations in many places. So much that most of it looked like noise.

  “Wow…” she said. “It’s like the place woke up.”

  She waited for a moment, contemplating. “Keep doing tests. See if you can gather more details and actually tell what’s going on in there.”

  “Will do,” said Randy.

  Suddenly SNTNL’s voice came on. “Excuse the interruption. Sam and Al wanted to speak with everyone.”

  They then heard Al’s voice on the intercoms in their respective rooms. “Hey, have any of you seen Mitchell? He’s been gone for over an hour now. Maybe two, at this point.”

  Randy looked at Terri, who shrugged. “We haven’t seen him. Sorry.”

  “I’ll check the cameras. Any clue where he might be?” said Rosalyn.