by Jake Elwood
Escape from Enceladus
By Jake Elwood
Copyright 2015 by Jake Elwood.
This is a work of fiction. A novella. Totally made up. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, space pirates or monsters is entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
The dead body was the first good news they'd had in days.
James Chan, supposed captain of the ship he called the Albatross, was getting desperate. The crew was mutinous, the close confines had become unbearable, and they had used more than half the fuel that had cost them all of their combined savings.
Variam Singh, who gave himself the grandiose title of First Officer and Chief Engineer, looked up from the console in front of him and nodded. "I'm sure," he said. "It's a vac suit. Flatlined." The corpse, and whatever ship had been carrying him, were lost somewhere in the jumble of Saturn's B Ring. The suit's transponder, though, would lead the Albatross right in.
Singh gave Chan a tight grin. He had the dark, glittering eyes of a fanatic, his black hair cut short and his beard trimmed to a point under his chin. Back on Coriolis Station he'd always made Chan a bit nervous. Twelve days cooped up in this stinking lifeboat had taught Chan that he'd been right to worry.
"Do you think it's the Mary Alice?"
Chan turned his gaze to Vogel, the youngest member of the crew, and nodded. Vogel was a mutt from the Belt, with ancestors from every continent on Earth, a planet he'd never set foot on. He had worked beside Chan in the sludge tanks of Saturn's Coriolis Station, the light in his eyes and his ready grin fading just a little bit every day as they waded through waist-deep crap. Chan didn't ever want to go back to that life, but above all he wanted to keep Vogel out of it.
"Suit batteries don't last forever," Chan told him. "I bet it's the Mary Alice." He reached up to pat the grimy bulkhead beside him. "I think the Albatross is coming home."
The Albatross had been the lifeboat on a water prospector called the Mary Alice. The ship had suffered engine failure and spent a day drifting, getting colder and colder while her crew attempted repairs. At last they'd given up and boarded the lifeboat, arriving at Coriolis Station three days later. There they had abandoned the lifeboat and booked passage on a ship to the inner planets.
The parent corporation was based on Mars, and they wouldn't be claiming their abandoned property any time soon. James Chan, a former merchant marine officer beached on Coriolis Station and surviving doing day labor, had looked at the abandoned lifeboat, thought of the lost freighter, and seen an opportunity.
It had to be better than cleaning the slime from water filters in the bowels of the station. Anything was better than that. He had recruited a crew, based not on their skills or personal merit, but on their willingness to chip in for gas.
"It better be the Mary Alice," growled Elizabeth Jones, the pilot. "If I have to spend another day cooped up with you people, I'm going to start breaking necks."
They called her Liz. She was about thirty, ten years younger than Chan, slim and blonde and pretty in a severe kind of way. He would've found her quite attractive if he'd been less afraid of her.
"Have you got a bearing?" Chan asked, and Singh leaned over his console.
"Uhhh... Maybe that way?" Singh made a vague gesture with his hand, then scowled. He'd been in the Mars Navy for fifteen years, and he liked precision. "Sorry, Jim, this civilian crap is just... crap."
Chan didn't bother replying. The seat pushed gently against his back as Liz engaged the engines and the Albatross surged forward. They were fifty kilometres or so above the plane of the B Ring, high enough to avoid most of the floating ice chunks. From this perspective the ring was a glittering plain stretching ahead of them for thousands of kilometres, the curve lost in the distance.
The plan had seemed perfectly straightforward back on Coriolis. A five-minute chat with an engine man from the Mary Alice had given Chan a pretty good idea of the ship's location. The ice miners would have been orbiting Saturn with zero velocity relative to the ice. The engine man had told him they were near the inner edge of the B Ring, in line with Tethys. That gave Chan a pretty good idea of where to look.
A "pretty good idea", though, had translated to something like a hundred thousand square kilometres of tumbling ice. It was a tiny area compared to the full vastness of the rings, but the huge, trackless expanse had eroded Chan's natural optimism until almost nothing was left.
"Getting stronger," Singh said as Liz nudged the ship to port. "Stronger, stronger. Stop! It's getting weaker."
She obligingly swung the ship back to starboard, making ever smaller corrections until Singh raised a hand. "That's it," he said. "Whatever it is, it's straight ahead."
Chan peered through the viewport and saw nothing but ice. "Anything on radar yet?"
Singh snorted. "Not a damn thing but ice. The ship must be below the ring." He peered into his console. "Hold it! Signal's fading."
Liz massaged the Albatross's helm controls. The lifeboat wasn't designed for delicate manoeuvring, as she'd told them a dozen times or more. It was built to make a straight run from the scene of a disaster to the nearest port. But it had a few manoeuvring thrusters, and she used them as best she could, bringing the Albatross to a halt and then moving it down toward the ring.
Chan gripped the edge of his seat. He was strapped in but downward acceleration still made him feel as if he was flying out of his seat. He wanted to tell Liz to take it easy, to not squander their precious fuel, but he shared her impatience. He was as frantic as she was to get out of the tiny, stinking lifeboat.
Tension rose in the cramped cabin as Liz manoeuvred them closer and closer to the elusive radio signal, Singh guiding her now with grunts and gestures. Then Vogel raised a pointing finger. "Look! What's that?"
They might never have seen the ship if not for the tumbling field of ice behind it. The long, sleek form was painted matte black, and Singh scratched the fingers of one hand through the greasy thicket of his hair, confusion on his face. "There's nothing on radar," he said.
Lifeboat radar was nothing to brag about, but the black ship was barely half a kilometre away. Chan stared, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Modern spacecraft operating this far from Earth tended to be blocky and solid. The black ship was slim, graceful, sleek. "She must have been built for atmosphere," Chan said. "Either that, or..."
"It's military," Singh declared. "Lines like that? She's built to avoid radar detection."
"What's a military ship doing all the way out here?" Chan murmured. The farther you got from Earth, the thinner the population and the less interest the big governments showed.
"If it's not military," Singh said, a new tension in his voice, "then she's –"
"Oh, shit," said Liz, her hands moving on the helm controls. "Pirates!"
"Hang on," Chan said, holding up a hand and leaning forward for a better look.
"What do you mean, hang on?" she sputtered. "YOU hang on! I'm getting us out of here." But she hesitated, waiting for him to explain.
The black ship drifted a hundred metres or so above the ring, tumbling slowly, giving them a view of the entire hull as it rotated. Chan waited for the nose of the ship to come back into view. "There," he said, pointing. "Do you see that? Look at the nose."
Vogel gave a low whistle. "I see what you mean, Cap'n. There's a hole in it!"
A jagged rupture marred the nose of the mystery ship, a hole that had to be three metres wide. As they stared, a pale shape drifted between the Albatross and the black ship, suddenly visible against the darker background. A human shape, tumbling limp in the void. A vac suit.
"There's our mys
tery broadcast," Singh said, his voice grim. He turned to Chan. "I don't think these pirates are a current threat, Jim."
Chan nodded. "It's not the Mary Alice," he said, "but we've found ourselves some salvage. Bring us in close, Singh."
Closer examination brought more bodies. Five vac suits floated near the ship, along with scraps of debris. The interior of the Albatross was perpetually too warm, an effect made worse by the fact that all of them wore their vac suits except for helmets, but Chan found himself shivering as he watched bodies drift past.
There were many slow and lonely ways to die in the depths of space. Had the crew survived some calamity, only to float helplessly while their air slowly ran out?
"Creepy," said Vogel. "What do you think happened?"
"Some of the wreckage doesn't match," Singh said, peering out the viewport. "That looks like a hull plate, painted white." As the chunk of steel floated nearer he corrected himself. "It's a hatch, with the hinges cut away. I think they attacked someone. I think the other side won."
"Serves the bastards right, then," said Liz.
"We should recover the suits," Chan said. "Leave the bodies, clean up the suits, sell them back on Coriolis."
There was a long and uncomfortable silence. Finally Vogel said, "I'm not pulling the catheters out of a dead body. Forget it."
Cleaning the surplus suits on the Albatross before this mission had been the worst part of the preparation by far. It was a shame to let the credits go to waste but Chan didn't much care for stripping corpses either. He let it go.
"It's a ghost ship," said Vogel. "Cool. How long do you think it's been out here?"
"Those suit radios don't last forever," said Singh. "Couple of weeks, maybe a month at the outside."
Chan thought of the lonely, desperate battle that had been fought here, and wondered why he hadn't heard anything about it. Either the survivors had made it back to Coriolis Station after the Albatross left, or the other ship hadn't survived. He didn't wish that crew any ill, but if there were two ships out here somewhere to salvage, he might never have to shovel sludge again.
###
Chan hovered in vacuum, watching the derelict tumble. It was wonderful to be outside of the lifeboat and thirty or forty glorious metres from most of his crewmates, even if he could still hear them breathing over the suit radio.
There was no name on the matte-black hull. He guessed the length at about thirty-five metres. Stubby protrusions like wings held powerful manoeuvring thrusters a three or four metres from the body of the ship. The main engine was behind the wings, and he felt his pulse quicken as he saw the engine outlets. It looked like a force engine, hydrogen fusion powered, superior in every way to the chemical rocket that powered the Albatross.
She might have been twelve metres wide, or a bit less. She wasn't very tall, no more than one deck, but there was enough space inside that a man could be completely out of sight of his crewmates, probably for hours at a time. To James Chan at that moment, that sounded like paradise.
A couple of tiny portholes decorated the near side. The only other viewport was on the nose of the ship, but most of the glass was gone. Whatever blow had struck the ship had taken it right between the eyes. Only the edges of the viewport remained, less than a metre of glass on either side. The rest was a gaping, jagged hole.
Vogel hovered beside him with a hook in his gloved hand, connected to several hundred metres of steel cable. They nudged themselves closer and closer to the derelict. There was a steel ring on the nose of the black ship, and the plan was for Vogel to snap the ring into place as the nose went past.
Chan was gritting his teeth to keep himself from telling the boy to be careful. He'd used the word a dozen times in the last five minutes, and Vogel's amusement was giving way to real irritation. Don't pester him, Chan thought. Let him concentrate. Oh, but for the love of Buddha, Vogel, be careful.
The nose of the ship came sweeping around, the jagged hole in the glass looking like a terrible cyclopean eye, and Chan saw they were a good three metres too far back. He would stay put, he decided, to give Vogel a fixed point of reference. They'd catch it on the next spin.
The thruster at Vogel's waist flamed, Chan felt his heart leap into his throat, and Vogel moved into the path of the tumbling ship. Chan's hand stretched out in a hopeless attempt to pull the boy back out of danger, the nose of the ship swung at Vogel like a hammer, and suddenly Vogel was spinning and screaming.
It took Chan several seconds to figure out that Vogel was whooping in triumph. The cable was moving beside him, and Vogel squirmed around, stopped his spin, and moved back several metres.
When Chan was calm enough to speak he said, "Good job, Vogel." You reckless idiot, he didn't add.
Liz was at the controls of the Albatross, and she edged the little lifeboat back until the cable was nearly taut. When the nose of the ship was moving away from her the front thrusters on the Albatross glowed red and the cable tightened. Both ships jerked, the cable went slack, and the thrusters flared again as Liz stabilized the lifeboat.
It took three spins to do it, but at last the black ship hung nearly motionless in the void.
Chan used his suit thrusters to move in close, then grabbed the scorched edge of the hole in the front and pulled himself inside the ship. His helmet light came on, and he looked around as Vogel and Singh floated in behind him.
He was on the bridge of the pirate ship. One pirate remained, or rather half a pirate. The bottom half of a vac suit was buckled into a seat at what looked like a helm station, directly in front of the hole in the viewport. Chan drifted down until the magnets on his boots clicked into contact with the deck, then fumbled for the seatbelt, trying not to look at the gory mess where the suit ended.
It's no worse than shoveling sludge, right? Nothing's worse than that. He kept his eyes fixed on the seatbelt buckle, but he could see entirely too much in his peripheral vision. Most of the corpse's insides were black, bumpy, indistinct, but there was a pale gleam of bone that might have been spinal column. Chan took long, deep breaths, anything to keep his gag reflex in check. Vomiting inside a vac suit would be a disaster.
The sludge was bad, but nobody died. Nobody got cut in half. Nobody floated around in a vac suit, watching their air run out, getting colder and colder…
He got the strap loose and took the pirate by one leg, lifting and shoving, sending the remains floating out through the hole.
"That," said Liz over the suit radio, "is disgusting."
"He's just flying by the seat of his pants," Vogel joked, then shrugged when nobody laughed.
"All right, people," Chan said, "let's focus on the job at hand." Singh and Vogel touched down on the deck plates beside him and the three of them moved deeper into the bridge.
There were no more bodies, and not much more damage. The blast that had cut the pirate in half had melted the back of the seat and scorched a pressure hatch at the back of the bridge. The power was out, but Singh used a wheel set in the doorframe to crank the doors far enough apart for the three of them to slip through.
The corridor beyond was long, dark, and empty. Hatches lined both sides, all of them closed. The far end of the corridor ended in another hatch, also shut. Singh grabbed the wheel and heaved, then shook his head. "Locked," he said. "There's probably atmo on the other side."
"Atmosphere?" said Vogel. "Could there be survivors?"
"Not likely," Chan said. It took more than air to sustain life. The ship was icy cold. If there were crew aboard, they were long dead.
Forcing doors open could do nothing more than squander the remaining air. They turned their attention instead to patching the hole in the front of the ship. Back on Coriolis Station they had welded a cargo container to the side of the Albatross and loaded it with every tool and bit of salvage-related equipment any of them owned or could borrow, scavenge, or steal.
The salvage equipment didn't include anything as extravagant as a three-metre-wide chunk of hardened glass. Or metal, fo
r that matter. There was nothing among their equipment and nothing in the accessible areas of the black ship that was big enough to patch the hole.
Finally Vogel went out and snagged the hatch that had been cut from the other ship, the ship that had escaped. Chan helped him move the hatch into position, and they held it in place while Singh sprayed on Stick-All to glue it in place. Chan and Vogel were able to let go as Singh went to work welding the hatch to the black ship's frame.
"I must say," Liz said cheerfully over the radio, "that that looks absolutely terrible."
Chan didn't bother replying, but he knew she was right. The gleaming white plate of steel looked ridiculous against the black skin of the pirate ship, and it was going to look worse by the time they were done.
The nose of the ship had a distinct curve, and the hatch was perfectly flat. When Singh was done welding the big patch in place at top and bottom, there were half-metre gaps on both sides. They scrounged bits of metal from everywhere they could reach on the pirate ship and the Albatross, and finally cut the cargo box into pieces.
Stick-All was wonderful stuff, able to glue aluminum to glass, or steel to tin. Singh welded what he could, glued the rest, and put it all together in a hodgepodge of patches that was lumpy, discolored, mismatched, ugly, and, as far as they could tell, airtight.
The three of them re-entered the ship through a hatch in the ceiling of the bridge. It was darker inside with the patch blotting out most of the light from Saturn and the B Ring. They stood unmoving in the middle of the bridge, nervous, afraid to take the next step. Then Singh swept his helmet light across the bridge stations, stopping when he spotted a round handle set underneath the helm controls. He knelt, spun the handle, and a layer of dust rose from his suit as a jet of air sprayed against him.
Chan held one wrist up in front of his face. The suit's built-in pressure gauge began to flicker, then showed 0.08 atmospheres.
Singh closed the air feed and looked at his own wrist. The seconds crept past while Chan waited for the numbers to fall.
