CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories

by J. F. Posthumus

  “Chickens can fly.” Gertrude sounded indignant. She walked behind Bas on the narrow path, so he could only imagine her expression. “They just aren’t very good at it.”

  “It’s flapping, with style,” Bas joked. He stopped at the leg and looked at the open door. “Huh. That’s not right.”

  Gert came around him to see. “What’s wrong?”

  “That door.” Bas pointed at it unnecessarily, as it was the only door in sight. They were surrounded by an open grove of trees, young ones, and grass and weeds over the shallow soil of the park. “Should not be open.”

  He set his bag down on the grass and pulled his tablet in its rugged case out of the outer pocket. “Here. The work order for the core doors was closed… four days ago.”

  Gert went to the door and put her head in. “Ew,” she said, wrinkling up her nose. “I think I know how the chickens got into the core.”

  “They can’t climb ladders on their own,” Bas came over to her. “Can they?”

  He could see what she meant about the state of the floor. There were piles of chicken poop under the ladder. Really, all over the once-pristine flooring. Feathers and dust, some dead leaves that had drifted in from the park added to the detritus.

  Bas tilted his head back and looked up the smooth white tube into the core. Dust motes sparkled in the light beams. “Oh, sh… er, crap.”

  “They can climb ladders.” Gert piped up from her position by his elbow. “We use something like a big ladder for their roosts, remember?”

  Bas, still looking upward, saw motion high above them, in the core itself. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing. He could guess, though. He retreated to his bag and got out a pair of heavy work gloves, also stuffing a few things in his pockets.

  He turned to Gert. “I haven’t got another pair like this. Some thin disposable ones that might rip, sorry. You’d better stay here.”

  Gert glared. “I’ve touched worse. I wash.”

  Bas sighed. “I’m just going up to look. Do you know how the air system on the station works?”

  She shook her head. “I know how to catch chickens, though.”

  “On the ground. Up there?” He pointed up at the careening bird flapping wildly.

  “I’ll need to see to learn.” She folded her arms over her chest. Bas tried not to notice the pleasant configuration this created.

  “I’ll go up first and try to knock the worst off, at least.” Bas bowed to the inevitable.

  The ladder got less disgusting as they went up, at least. At the top, Bas carefully moved out of the way to let Gert emerge into the core. He grabbed her arm as she tried to take a step.

  “Hold on,” he ordered. “There’s nothing to keep you from flying away without magnetic boots or a rope.”

  “Oh.” Gert got a hold on his arm, put her feet down carefully, and they stood there clasping forearms for stability. Bas kept his grip on the top of the ladder for anchoring.

  Bas stared down the length of the core. They were roughly at the halfway point, but it never failed to impress him how big the station was. You didn’t see it from the ground floor—the shell of the vast tube floating through space. Too many walls, or trees, in the park. Up here? It stretched on forever, vast and empty.

  Well. It should be empty.

  “Chickens are funny floating like that.” Gert said what he was thinking.

  There was… Bas could only describe it as a vortex of chickens swirling down the length of the core. Some flapped. Others soared serenely with their wings stretched out. Still others were attempting to simply walk in midair, looking about them in utter confusion. The noise was indescribable. There was no order in the flock. It was Brownian motion come to life, Boyle’s gas law illustrated with feather particles that clucked, crowed, and squawked as they collided and produced an equal and opposite reaction. Chickens without gravity will fill the container they are provided.

  Bas turned and looked in the other direction. “Gert, how many chickens…?”

  “Four hundred and forty-six chickens,” Bas told his boss. “Give or take a few. Ms. Saar seemed to think some have met, ah, unfortunate ends.”

  Sam grunted and leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk between them. “Not unlikely. Some find the plague of chickens the worst part of this malfunction. How many in the core? Not all of them?”

  Bas shook his head. “It was impossible to get a firm count. They kept moving. But at a rough guess, fifty or sixty.”

  Sam spread his fingers out flat on the desktop and glanced down at his hands. “Filthy animals. A chicken, son, is a basketball-sized bundle of hate, greed, and shit.” He looked back up at Bas, his gray eyes calm. “What’s the plan?”

  Bas gaped at him for a second.

  Sam chuckled. “I know you have a plan or you wouldn’t have come to me yet. And that girl of yours loves those birds, so it’s a plan that doesn’t involve dead birds. Which,” he leaned forward again, intense eyes drilling into Bas’s, “is a good plan. Chicken dirt in all the air filters is bad enough. Shutting down the whole system to asphyxiate them? Too much trouble and social unrest.”

  Bas choked. “You saw the chickens in costumes too, sir?”

  Sam blinked but remained stone-faced. “Humans will make a pet out of anything.”

  Bas nodded, thoughtful. “Nets, sir. We thought…”

  “We?” Sam broke in.

  “Gertrude Saar and I. She was in the core with me earlier. After we found the door open and evidence of the chickens.”

  Sam was very good at reading between the lines. “That’s going to be a nasty clean-up job. I’m assigning it to a certain tech who signed off on work he didn’t actually do.”

  Bas shook his head, but opted not to comment on the shortcomings of his team member. “We think the birds were trying to roost. Gert says chickens have a pecking order.”

  Sam smiled. “Where the term comes from, yes.”

  “So they kept going up the ladder to compete and they couldn’t get out of the core once they got into it.”

  “Giant chicken trap, really.” Sam turned and leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs out. “Nets would work. Big ones, and propulsion packs. But!” He sat up with a thump from the chair back. “No one wears a pack without training.” He poked a finger at Bas’s chest. “You hear me?

  “Yessir. Safety first, sir.” Bas nodded emphatically. “Can we have the husbandry techs in magnetic boots?”

  “Ayuh. You’ll need their hands, too. This won’t be a walk in the park.”

  Bas remembered that prediction a few hours later, as they all assembled at the access leg. Gert had adamantly refused to wait until morning.

  “We don’t know how long they have been without food and water!” She threw up her hands. “Besides, didn’t your boss say they are gunking up the air system?”

  There had already been complaints of the smell. Bas didn’t want to think about what would be said if the air circ started to reek of death.

  Nets, it turned out, were not in demand on a space station. It had taken some creative scrounging and then bargaining to get the two they had. On the upside, the cargo nets stretched nearly from one side of the core to the other. Which was moot, Bas had thought at first, given they only had three propulsion packs. A brisk brainstorming session had hashed out a plan that seemed plausible. Three engineering techs would don the packs. They would herd the chickens into the nets, which would be held by the husbandry techs, stationed as anchors with their magnetized boots firmly on the shell of the core.

  This time, Bas sent Gertrude and the other husbandry techs up first. They were using the access leg in the service area, where to the best of his knowledge, no chickens had the temerity to intrude. The ladder was clean. Bas and another of his team, Helen Knapke, rigged the nets into neat bundles and ascended with the apparatus to pull it up after them on a pulley system, along with the propulsion packs.

  Bas was still on the ladder, moving slowly enough to not catch up with He
len, who was directly above him, when he heard Gert’s voice.

  “Bas! Bas, hurry!”

  He looked up. She was framed in the opening. Helen clambered up and out of the access, moving carefully. They all had magnetic boots on, now. “The chickens dying?” Bas asked with a bit of exasperation.

  “No, worse than that!”

  Bas hauled himself up over the edge, moving with exaggerated care to keep himself grounded. His head swam, then settled. He was fortunate not to suffer from the gravity sickness some felt in zero gee. Gert pointed, and he stared.

  It was quite a spectacle to behold. Gaven Chamberlain, parks manager, was adrift in the core. He was roughly at the midpoint, which meant he had climbed the befouled access ladder. He had either come unprepared for the lack of gravity, or had been overeager… he flailed in midair, his face a truly alarming shade of purple.

  “Get. Me. Down!” he roared at them. The impact was lost by the distance.

  Bas looked at Gert. She seemed to be suppressing an attack of the giggles. “What… What is he holding?”

  She bit her lip, and then managed to speak, her voice unsteady. “I think… I think it’s a butterfly net.”

  “What are you waiting for!” bellowed the floating man.

  “Helen.” Bas turned to her. She was bright pink with her own effort to keep the laughter inside. “Would you do the honor?” he asked.

  She knelt and popped the pulley onto the edge of the shell where it met the core. Bas pulled off the knapsack he’d carried equipment in and grounded it with a strong magnet. Working efficiently, and ignoring the incoherent gusts of rage erupting periodically behind them, they got the pulley system working and the nets ascending. Other members of the engineering team helped the packages ascend smoothly while they were coming up the ladder.

  The first propulsion pack having come up, Bas swung it onto his shoulders. Helen checked Bas’s gear after he’d strapped in, then stepped back with a snappy thumbs up. Bas headed for the center of the core. Chickens drifted past him, and he realized that they were figuring out how to maneuver when they scattered, flapping, as he pushed the throttle. He was hoping to grab Chamberlain before the man had an episode. Or Bas lost control of his laughter.

  Chamberlain was failing his arms and legs madly, swiping at a nearby chicken with the net. He was nearly gibbering with rage.

  Bas swooped around him, reluctant to get too close to the net. “Would you like me to take you back to the access, sir?” he asked politely, from a safe distance.

  “I’d like to kill all the chickens!” Chamberlain shouted. “Kill them and rip their foul heads off!”

  Bas winced. He hoped Gert was out of earshot. “We are going to corral them, sir. But you are currently in the way.”

  “Corral them and run them through the mincer!” Chamberlain didn’t seem to notice that he was drifting slightly. Not through his own efforts, which were vigorous, but the slight Coriolis effect of the spinning station. It was more noticeable closer to the shell of the core, which was the physics behind the vortex of chickens. At the moment, disturbed by Bas’s passage through them, it was a loose Brownian motion cloud of chickens.

  Bas continued his slow orbit around the older man, considering his options. He wasn’t worried about the damage that butterfly net—or Chamberlain—would do to him. If the man got a solid hit on the propulsion pack, though…

  “At least let me take you to the shell,” Bas offered. “Are you wearing magnetics?”

  “Magnetics?” Chamberlain echoed with a look of confusion.

  This was the first time he had responded coherently. Bas took it as a mixed result. Good, he had his attention. Bad, no way of anchoring the man.

  Bas gritted his teeth and forced out the next words through gritted teeth. “We need you to leave the core. So we can catch the chickens.” As he was speaking, Bas triggered the com unit that was clipped to his uniform shirt collar. He thought Chamberlain might respond better to Sam, speaking as the voice of authority.

  Afterward, Bas was never able to learn just what went through Chamberlain’s mind. He conceded it was possible Chamberlain himself might not have known. At the time, Bas didn’t have the time to analyze it, though.

  With a roar of rage, Chamberlain lost any shred of restraint and began striking out with the net. Bas, startled, squeezed the propulsion controls and shot away from the park manager. He could see that the man was literally foaming at the mouth, his spittle not falling as he ranted incoherently.

  Fascinated, Bas halted his retreat as he realized the net was actually propelling Chamberlain directionally. Before, he’d been battling chickens in all directions. Now? The object of his homicidal intention hovered in one place. Bas moved closer. Chamberlain propelled himself, like some bizarre sort of fan-powered boat, backwards. Bas started to herd him in reverse.

  Bas tried to make a plan on the fly. He couldn’t force Chamberlain back into the access tube. The raging man was in no shape to climb down the ladder, and the fall would kill him.

  The only other option was to point him toward the gaggle of techs gathered at the far end of the core and get help securing the madman before returning him to safety.

  Bas clicked the comm on and spoke. “Connect to Gertrude Saar.”

  “Connecting,” the mechanical voice droned.

  An odd sound blasted in his ear. Bas tilted his head away from the little speaker. “Volume down.”

  Gert’s voice came through, gasping. “S-sorry, Bas! We can’t help it!”

  Bas realized he heard laughing. He was close enough now to make out Helen and Lindsey clinging to one another, giggling.

  “I need you guys to net Chamberlain,” he barked.

  Bas didn’t have time to find the situation amusing. He had reverse thrusters for maneuverability and braking. Chamberlain did not. His speed was ever increasing. The only way to safely stop that much momentum was to gently slow him. Which the stretchy cargo net would hopefully do.

  “Got it, boss.” He heard from Helen.

  Before he could protest he was nobody’s boss, the crew scattered. Helen and Jake, who were wearing propulsion packs but had the sense not to tangle with the still screaming Chamberlain, stayed on the shell with the two husbandry techs and spread out with the net. It didn’t cover the whole cross section of the core, but Bas could aim the park manager. Chamberlain, Bas noted absently as he calculated trajectories in his head, was running out of steam. Chamberlain had grown hoarse, and the swipes of his net were slowing.

  Chamberlain hit the net feet first. His look of surprise was comical. He dropped the butterfly catcher as he tangled into the soft mesh of the cargo net, and the shock seemed to give him a second wind. He started kicking and thrashing. But this only made the tangling worse.

  Helen yelped. “He’s heavy!”

  Jake growled from his side of the core in response. “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Let go of your end, Helen,” Bas ordered. “Let him drift. Jake, anchor. Lindsey’s closest. She can come to you and add her weight.” Bas got around to the loose end of the net a minute later and brought it around.

  Chamberlain, tossing and turning against his restraint, making hoarse sounds and panting heavily, only made it easier.

  When the long strip of extruded plastic emerged from the access tube a little later, all of them were too worn out from the stress to be surprised. Bas tilted his head back as the thin plastic strip came up and up…

  Sam’s voice sounded irritated. “Come give me a hand with this.” He was still out of sight on the ladder.

  Bas got up from where he’d wound up sitting on the shell, near the sprawled form of Gert, who was catching her breath, and jetted up to the far end of the strip.

  Sam, below him on the ladder, barked. “Bend it. Let’s start threading net onto it.”

  “Uh, sir?” Bas wasn’t sure how to explain.

  Sam got his head up into the core and took it all in with a sweeping glance. Chamberlain, whimpering quie
tly, was rolled into one of the two big cargo nets. Lindsey and Helen were sitting on him, just in case. Jake was returning from retrieving the butterfly net and had snagged a chicken with it on general principle while he was at it.

  Sam didn’t even blink, calmly stepping out of the tube onto the shell. “One of those cargo nets will do. Ever see a crawfish trap?”

  “Um, nossir,” Bas admitted.

  “I have.” Gert stood up. “Bas, can you circle that around?”

  Bas could, he found. His boss had managed to coax the temperamental extruder into doing the near impossible. Soon they had a hoop the size of the core’s shell, with net strung on it, funneling to a center opening.

  “You’re going to walk.” Sam told the husbandry techs. “Along the shell, holding this. Helen and I will help so we have hands at the ordinal points. Jake and Bas will collect any that make it through.” Sam pulled off the knapsack he’d been wearing and pulled out two oversized mesh bags. Bas was afraid to ask where they had come from.

  “Also, while I am aware chickens can fly, Ms. Saar, I do not suggest throwing them into the chasm.” He pointed toward the tube.

  Bas choked as he caught the joke.

  Sam ignored him and continued. “I should have enough bags in here to hold all the chickens. We will then relay them, and, ah, the other bundle, down with the pulley.” He tugged out a length of tube. “Here’s the connector.”

  Helen took it from him and pushed the ends of the strip into it, finishing the hoop.

  “Uh, sir? Shouldn’t we send Chamberlain down first?” Jake pointed.

  Sam got a good grip on the hoop net. He glanced over. “Is that who it is? He’ll keep.” A sudden grin flashed over his face. “Let’s go chicken hunting. Bas! Head ‘em out!”

  Bas grinned back and squeezed the throttle, zipping between chickens who squawked indignantly. He swooped back and through the hole in the net, hollering as he did so. Jake followed right on his heels.