My Sweet Satan

by Peter Cawdron

  She held out her gloved hand so her fingers brushed lightly against the shapes. Like the wall near the iris, the surface reacted like water.

  “I hope you’re seeing this,” she said. “The best I can describe this, it’s like dipping your hand into a stream, or hanging your fingers over the side of a boat. The different shapes just flow right past as though my fingers weren’t even there. They don’t appear to have any substance at all, and yet I can feel the flow, it’s causing me to drift slowly to one side.”

  She pulled her hand away and again, any fine specks that clung to her gloves slowly fell away, falling horizontally back into the wall.

  Just the softest of touches had imparted some sideways motion so she corrected her drift and backed up a little.

  “Whatever this is, it’s active. It’s like it’s a processing unit or something. Maybe transporting parts for manufacture? Although not parts as we would think of them. Perhaps some kind of tiny components?”

  She was guessing, but guessing was good, keeping her mind occupied.

  “Left or right?” she asked the darkness. “I’m left handed, so we’ll go left.”

  With that, she rotated the MMU, bringing it to a halt staring down another tunnel.

  “You’re still with me, right? Don’t leave me?”

  A light touch of her fingers on the MMU controls activated her gas thrusters and she drifted forward.

  “Nice and slow.”

  The tunnel wasn’t straight. It twisted and turned, forcing her to adjust her drift with her jets.

  “Is it just me,” she asked. “Or is anyone else wondering about the lack of adjacent rooms? There could be doors spaced all along here, flush with the wall, and I’d never know.”

  As best she could tell, she was now moving parallel with the outer hull and even though it was pointless, she mentally kept a map of where she was. Slowly, the realization sunk in that the numerous, tiny course corrections she'd been making were deceiving. Rather than moving laterally, she was heading deeper into the heart of the alien spacecraft. She was slowly becoming more and more lost.

  Another bar dropped from her signal strength. Jasmine tried not to notice, but her heart couldn’t help but skip a beat at the implication that she would soon be alone. The transmit icon continued to flash. For now, she was getting a signal out, but the signal was weak.

  “I can see a dull red glow up ahead.”

  On she drifted, making course corrections as the tunnel slowly twisted.

  “These guys sure like curves and circles,” she said. “I haven’t seen any right angles, no rectangles or squares anywhere within the craft.”

  As she came to the end of the tunnel she gasped at the sight before her.

  “There’s a grand hall in front of me. It’s huge, like the inside of a cathedral.”

  A vast chamber lay ahead of her. Where the dock had been a half-sphere, this chamber was an elongated cylinder well over a hundred feet wide. A thick rod some ten feet in diameter ran long ways through the middle of the cylinder. Thousands of tiny lights lit up in erratic patterns around the walls, glowing in a soft red color, allowing her to see hundreds of feet in either direction. They sparkled. Patterns flashed in front of her.

  “Wow. This is beautiful.”

  Jasmine rotated slowly, wanting to pan her camera so those back on Earth could take in as much detail as she saw.

  “This seems to run the length of the ship. I can’t see any end. Although I’m tempted to describe that central column as a spine, the irregular shapes on it remind me of the cam-shaft in my Dad’s old straight-eight Camaro. I swear, that car spent more time in the garage than on the road. And that shaft is polished, it looks like it’s made from silver or aluminum or something. It’s the first thing I’ve seen in here that isn’t black.”

  As she completed a slow circle, she came to a halt facing the way she had when she first entered the chamber.

  “OK, let’s try something different.”

  Jasmine adjusted her controls and the MMU rotated forward, turning head over heels. She was giving the team back on Earth a three dimensional view, turning upside down while floating in place and giving them a better feel for the size of the chamber.

  “Hey, I’m really getting the hang of this.”

  As she slowly came around to the point where she started she caught sight of something on what from her perspective seemed to be the roof. In space, there was no up and down, and in the alien craft, there was no notion of a floor, wall or ceiling, but it helped Jasmine to think in those terms.

  “Did you catch that?” she asked. No one replied, but it felt more natural to act as though someone might. “I’m going to take a closer look.”

  Jasmine changed her orientation, rotating so the dark shape stuck to what she thought of as the ceiling finally appeared in front of her. Slowly, she moved forward, highlighting what looked like musty, worn blue fabric lying on what she now thought of as the floor. Others might be able to think abstractly about floating in space, but Jasmine had to hold to concrete spatial notions. Without them, she’d have gone crazy, she was sure of it.

  “Whatever this is, it’s not part of the ship,” she said, thinking out loud. Something clicked, and Jasmine realized what she was looking at. “It’s—Oh, my God. It’s them!”

  Her spotlights illuminated a crumpled form roughly the size of a child. What had looked like cloth was skin pulled taut over a skeletal frame. There were limbs but they had collapsed, with some of them beneath the creature, making it impossible to tell if there were six, seven or eight arms and legs in total. The limbs she could see had multiple joints leading to fine points.

  “They’re dead.”

  In the back of her mind, Jasmine knew that was an assumption. She really had no idea, but there was no movement, no sign of life as she understood it. She looked around. Several more bodies lay in the shadows.

  “I’ve seen this before. I remember something similar to this. Argh, the word I’m looking for is on the tip of my tongue. What is it? Damn it!”

  Stressing wasn’t helping. Jasmine slowed herself down.

  “I remember studying Otzi the iceman in high school. He died over five thousand years ago high in the mountains of Italy, I think. His body was preserved in ice, but even in the cold, his soft tissue shriveled. His skin turned a disgusting shade of yellow. His face shrank. All the hair on his body fell off and his chest cavity collapsed. He was desiccated by the cold. That looks like what’s happened to these guys. I doubt this is what they looked like way back when. Mummified, that’s the word I was looking for.”

  For her, this was a fresh memory, something drawn from the last couple of years, but Mission Control wouldn’t know that. They’d think she was drawing on memories from decades ago. She only hoped she made sense. She worried she might be babbling and making a fool of herself. Oh, well, she thought, if that’s the worst thing I’m afraid of in the dark heart of an alien spaceship a billion miles from Earth, I’m doing OK.

  With no fear, she powered closer, stopping within arm’s reach of the shriveled corpse. Breathing deeply, she stretched out her arm and took hold of one of the pale blue limbs. The outer layer crumbled in her gloved hand. Within the limb, she could feel some kind of bone. She thought about pulling the limb closer to the camera, but somehow that felt wrong, as though she were desecrating a grave. Instead she pulled her hand back. The fine ash-like dust hung in front of her without settling as the astonishing material from the wall had.

  “Bestla is a ghost ship. A cemetery. It’s a mass grave.”

  Jasmine swallowed the lump in her throat.

  “My grave.”

  She choked up.

  “There’s nothing here for us. Nothing but death.”

  Three soft beeps sounded in her helmet. The readout at the bottom of her HUD displayed a warning: CO2 filter must be replaced. Again, Jasmine canceled the alarm. Just moments before she’d felt buoyed by the fascinating array of soft lights in their seemingly
random patterns, now she felt sad. There was nothing for her on Bestla. Nothing beyond the quiet solitude of a graveyard.

  Jasmine felt numb. Without consciously thinking about it, she proceeded forward down the shaft. Her spotlights lit up one carcass after another. Some of the bodies were clustered together. Their limbs were intertwined, making it impossible to distinguish one creature from another, and Jasmine found that strangely comforting. She was aware she might be reading too much into the odd clusters of alien bodies crumpled over each other so she never spoke out loud, but it seemed to her they were clinging to each other in their last moments of life. To her, they died holding on to each other, and that spoke of a universal sense of love and care.

  She wasn’t sure how long she had drifted, but after several minutes the thought struck her that she was lost. Once again, tiny course corrections to drift over various carcasses had disoriented her. Even if she wanted to, she doubted she could find the dock again. She’d passed so many other tunnels at various points it would have been impossible to find the one she’d come down. It didn’t matter. Like the aliens, she too would die on Bestla. As much as she didn’t want to think about that, there was no longer anything else to lift her spirits.

  Jasmine drifted on in sullen silence.

  A flash of light caught her attention.

  There was something moving on the far side of the shaft.

  Instinctively, Jasmine adjusted her course. Her CO2 monitor beeped three times, and another warning came up on her visor. Annoyed, she canceled it and focused on flying under the silver camshaft and over to the far bank of dim, flashing lights. Again, a bright light flickered across her visor, flashing in her eye for a moment like light from a mirror.

  “Hey,” she yelled out. “Wait!”

  There was another astronaut inside Bestla. She caught a glimpse of him or her wearing a pristine white NASA spacesuit. The distant astronaut turned away from her using an MMU. Spurts of gas vaporized in the vacuum.

  Jasmine’s heart raced. It had been the spotlights on the side of the other astronaut’s helmet that had flashed across her face.

  “Nadir?” She asked.

  The astronaut glided away from her in his crumpled white spacesuit, disappearing down one of the side tunnels. Soft jets of gas shot out from the MMU. Like her, a pair of thick gloved hands worked with the controls while the astronaut’s legs hung limp in the thick, padded suit.

  “Nadir!” Jasmine yelled. “Is that you?”

  The astronaut ignored her as she raced across the chamber. Whoever it was, they couldn’t hear her. Perhaps they too thought they were the only one still alive.

  “Wait, please wait.”

  Jasmine accelerated up to the tunnel and failed to reverse her velocity in time to avoid colliding heavily with the wall. She bounced to one side, frantically working with her controls to adjust her motion. For her, flying the MMU was like driving a car on black ice. Every correction she made seemed to be an overcorrection.

  “Nadir, please!”

  It took Jasmine a few seconds to stabilize her MMU and align herself with the tunnel. In the distance, the darkness was broken by the faint image of the astronaut gliding away from her into the bowels of the ship.

  Jasmine fired her thrusters, avoiding the temptation to go too fast, and sailed off after Nadir.

  Could Nadir have survived the engine blast?

  No, it couldn’t be Nadir, she thought. Nadir wasn’t wearing an MMU. Nadir had been tethered. And even if he had survived the exhaust bloom, his spacesuit would have suffered damage. This astronaut looked tantalizingly clean and crisp, just as Mike had when he’d exited the airlock in engineering. But this wasn’t Mike or Chuck, Ana or Mei. They were dead.

  “Who are you?” she asked, wondering if there was something she needed to do to transmit her voice so the distant astronaut could hear her.

  As she moved deeper into Bestla, another bar dropped from her signal strength, but Jasmine no longer cared. She was down to one bar, but she had to go on. When that last bar was gone, her transmission would be severed. Whatever happened beyond that point would be lost to Earth, but she had to catch up to the other astronaut.

  Jasmine lost sight of the astronaut. Her mind raced with the possibilities. No one else had survived the Copernicus, at least no one she knew of. Could there have been other astronauts aboard she didn’t know about? She tried to recall the number of pods in the medical bay. There had been six astronauts, but there were dozens of pods. She’d assumed the others were empty. Had there been a stowaway, someone no one knew about? Or someone known only to Chuck, as commander?

  Or could there have been another ship? A second mission? That would make sense as it would provide the Copernicus with redundancy, and that was sorely needed, but no one had mentioned a second craft—not Mike, not Chuck or Anastasia, not Nadir or Mei, not even Jason.

  Jasmine fiddled with her wrist pad computer control, flipping between menu items in her Heads-Up Display, trying to find something that might help her to open communication with the strange astronaut. She barely realized when the tunnel opened out into a vast chamber. The sidewalls dropped away and by the time she brought the MMU to a halt, she’d lost sight of the curved dome.

  Her CO2 alarm beeped again, chiming three times.

  “Where are you?” she asked the darkness.

  Jasmine doubted herself. Had she really seen another astronaut? Or had she seen what she wanted to see? Was she so desperate for life that her mind would fabricate salvation at the last minute in some kind of merciful delusion?

  “Will carbon dioxide cause hallucinations?” she asked.

  There was no reason to be cautious any more. She was dying. She could feel it. The CO2 building in her suit was starting to take its toll, giving her a headache. She felt confused by the simplest of menu options on her HUD and gave up on trying to find some kind of intercom. Confused and frustrated, it took a supreme effort to care. If she allowed herself a long, slow blink, her sight returned in a slight blur and she had to fight to concentrate and bring the HUD back into focus. Her breathing was labored.

  Jasmine touched lightly on the controls of her MMU. As she drifted out into the void, she caught a glimmer of light in the distance. Her heart raced as the strange astronaut drifted toward her.

  “Hey,” she called out, suddenly buoyed with hope. “Who are you? Where are you from?”

  The mysterious astronaut was drifting at an angle rather than coming directly toward her, but it was clear their flight paths would intersect. The lights on his MMU were blinding. Jasmine could see the familiar outline of his helmet, his gloved hands resting on the controls and the various pockets and patches on the spacesuit, but she couldn’t make out the face behind the visor.

  “I need help,” she cried. “I’ve got plenty of oxygen, but my CO2 is too high.”

  As they came within fifteen feet of each other, Jasmine activated her forward-facing thrusters, slowing her approach. The other astronaut slowed as well.

  Jasmine adjusted her orientation as the strange astronaut turned to face her. She couldn’t help but wave, it seemed the right thing to do. The other astronaut copied her motion exactly, and she burst out laughing.

  She could see the name tag.

  Jasmine was staring at the mirror image of herself.

  “Well,” she said, reaching up and dimming her lights so she could see her reflection more clearly. “That’s certainly not what I was expecting—a gigantic mirror, perfectly smooth and flawless.”

  Her eyes darted around the image, looking into the darkness, trying to pick up on some visual clue that she was facing a solid mirror, but the illusion of open space before her was overwhelming.

  Each gesture, even the slightest motion was reflected back at her in perfect symmetry.

  “I’m going crazy,” she said, just in case anyone back on Earth had any doubts.

  A sense of relief swept across her.

  Staring at herself in the mirror and taking in h
er bulky white spacesuit, she laughed. Her reflection laughed back.

  “I’m the goddamn Michelin man!”

  Jasmine had never liked photos of herself, but her reflection in the mirror was friendly. She’d grown up staring in the mirror each morning, seeing herself slowly changing from one year to the next. Although her face looked small inside the bulky helmet, seeing her own face was strangely comforting. That this meant there was no rescue party coming to save her didn't seem so important. She was relieved to have her fears doused by a mirror. Her heart rate fell and her breathing slowed.

  The CO2 alarm beeped. Rather than deal with the pop-up message, Jasmine used her gloved finger on the wrist pad to move the message down off the edge of her HUD screen. Her reflection dutifully mimicked her action, with a gloved hand reaching out and pressing the trackpad on the opposite forearm.

  “So this is what I look like,” Jasmine said. “All dolled up and ready to go to the prom, but alone and without a date.”

  Something was wrong.

  The image in front of her was perfect. Too perfect.

  Her blood ran cold as the chilling realization sank in.

  Static had caused dust to cling to her spacesuit, giving her arms a muddy look, but the reflection of her suit was clean. There was a tear in her right shoulder, leading down to her upper arm and exposing the complex layers within her spacesuit, but no such tear scarred her reflection.

  Slowly, Jasmine raised her left arm away from the MMU controls. She watched as the astronaut before her copied her motion perfectly. She ran her gloved hand down over the side of her visor, tracing the scratches cut into the glass during her collision with Bestla, desperately wanting to convince herself of what was real. Her doppelgänger copied her every move, only there was no scratch to trace.

  “Houston,” she said, addressing mission control directly for the first time. “Tell me you see what I see. I think this is First Contact.”

  Jasmine didn't expect a reply, but she wanted to make damn sure she wasn't the only one that had figured out what was happening. For a split second, her eyes darted down to the transmit display. One bar showed and the transmit icon continued to flash softly in dim red, assuring her that her message was being picked up by the distant communications satellite and relayed to Earth. That it would take an hour and a half to get there, and another hour and a half for any reply, was immaterial to her. So long as the message was on its way, that was all that mattered.