Belters

by Greg Alldredge

  The tone in Lewis’s voice did little to calm Reo’s frazzled nerves. “I should be on the Conveyor, headed to Ceres Station… Please tell me I am still on the ship.”

  A weak smile spread over the tech’s face. “You are. Do you remember what happened?”

  It took a moment for Reo to remember the little he could, “Yeah… I was talking with two passengers… and I got a splitting headache. The rest is a blur, nothing comes to mind.” There was no way he was going to share his experience in the odd stone room.

  “You hit the deck like a bag of hammers. Scared the shit out of the other two… You ever have anything like this happen before?” Lewis glanced over Reo’s head. The place where the readouts should be spitting out of the diagnostic unit. Out of the patient’s eyesight. “Any fainting spells or seizures?”

  Reo didn’t need to lie. “Never.”

  “Humm…” The pause did nothing to calm the scared Reo. “The readouts look normal enough.”

  “Enough for what?” From the tech’s mannerisms, he was a long way from a medical doctor. Hell, he didn’t show the skill of a decent first responder. Reo assumed, to save cash, EZ-lift slapped the cheapest person available into the billet of MedTech. Anyone could read a med unit now.

  “Well, everything seems to be normal… You have any history of medical problems?”

  Reo shook his head. Not like he could tell the MedTech about hearing other people’s thoughts. They’d lock him up in an I-love-me suit.

  “The others said you’ve had a rough trip out.” Lewis looked him over once more.

  “Yeah, you could say that…” Reo cleared his throat.

  “We will chalk this up to stress and dehydration.” Lewis handed him two capsules. “Take two of these and call me if you have any more… episodes.”

  Reo took the pills. Not like he had a choice. They looked like normal pain relievers. The look of concern did nothing to relieve his worries.

  With the volume turned down on his reader ability, the buzzing was faint but still there. No thoughts were leaking out from Lewis’s mind. That concerned Reo more than anything else.

  Sitting up, his head began to swim, but the table remained firm under his butt. Reo whispered, “I got a killer headache.”

  “Those pills should help.” Lewis reached out a hand to Reo’s elbow. “You want to stay here? Need help to your rack?”

  The tech might have been showing concern for Reo’s well-being, but from the tone, the man wanted the reader out of his care as quickly as possible. Besides, Reo was certain the Party would not be happy with a stranger running one of their agents through a medical exam.

  The Force and Party kept tight control on anyone with abilities. They were strange like that. “No… I can make it.”

  The two from his dream were still at the table when Reo stumbled past. Someone said something, but Reo ignored the words and focused on the safety of his cabin.

  The events of the day scared the hell out of Reo. First, the loss of ability, the buzzing, and the weird dream. If it was a dream.

  He risked plugging his symptoms into the ship’s library search engine to see what might be wrong with him. The results were not encouraging and did nothing to rest his troubled mind.

  In order of likelihood, the results came back: space sickness AKA Gonzo syndrome, schizophrenia, brain tumor, or damage… not a cheerful list at all.

  He needed to look up Gonzo Syndrome. It was a sickness named after one of the first ships to head out of the solar system.

  The explorer ship Maria Gonzo was the first ship sent to Alpha Centauri. No wonder Reo never heard of this. It all happened long before he was born. The crew was all lost to a mysterious sickness.

  While he read, sleep tugged on his eyes, but fear made his heart race even more. If he rested for a moment, there was a good chance he’d be transported back to that mysterious room and the unknown.

  Reo wasn’t ready to take a chance with his sanity just yet. Besides, the constant buzzing made it impossible to sleep.

  He needed to get back to Earth. Everything would be fine if he could just get back to the safety of Shanghai.

  Right now, he needed to stay awake. The best thing for him was to walk. He needed to walk. Screw what everyone else thought.

  Chapter 10:

  AD 2051 Kuiper Belt – John Huss

  Errant beads of sweat worked their way from under the helmet and dripped from the tip of Elliot’s nose. “I think we did it… See if you can control the spiders.” Elliot had lost track of time. His fingers and wrists ached from the constant typing of code. He hadn’t worked so hard since he needed to change a few grades to be accepted for a scholarship for one of the better programming schools in New York. If a person proved good at hacking, they could still make up for a youth misspent.

  The world lay waiting for the right hacker, holding the correct coding skills. Most companies didn’t appreciate the skill required. Despite the prestige of the assignment, Elliot felt himself woefully underpaid.

  If he traveled the path of a Blackhat, Elliot might be a rich man. Like a skeleton key that opened unyielding locks, there were times he felt like a safecracker or possibly Robin Hood. It was for the better he never turned to a life of crime.

  Elliot must be out of practice. He should have done it quicker, but the lines of code kept changing as he worked. His eyes were blurry from lack of sleep and caffeine. If he had some Turbo, the task would have gone quicker, but the company frowned on employee chemical enhancement.

  Cracking his knuckles in relief, he thought this nightmare might soon be over. With John in control of the spiders, the UI should be able to override the crew’s decisions and stave off the cascading failure and save their asses, and the lives of the crew.

  “John, are you there?” Elliot called out to the portrait while he climbed from the AR workstation. At least the ship maintained nominal acceleration, by the feel of the gravity.

  He was surprised his body ached so badly. When in the coding zone, time slipped away from him. Elliot was used to spending most of his life working in the reclined position of the AR station. He checked the elapsed time.

  Seven hours had passed. He should not be so sore after only seven hours.

  “John?” Elliot called out again, stepping to the stash of protein packs hidden in a personal locker. This called for a celebration. “Tell me if it worked.” One sip of the liquid and he stopped. The thing tasted off.

  “John…” Elliot spit into his hand, anything to clear the taste, and spotted the blood. Palm rubbed on his jumpsuit leg, the foul mixture disappeared. A few steps later, he sat back at his console.

  Helmet on, a few taps on the screen, and he was met with a surging list of system failures. “John, speak to me. What is going on out there?”

  The litany of problems cleared, and one word typed a single letter at a time: Error.

  “Shit.” Elliot cursed under his breath before coughing up a clot of blood. This quickly joined the phlegm already on his coveralls. The helmet discarded, he tried the backup keyboard and monitors. In a blink, the six flat screens flashed to a steady blue screen with LOS working across them. The signal was somehow lost.

  He moved to the exit. Maybe someone else knows what is going on… His escape from the computer core was stopped by the blast door.

  “John, I need to get out…” Elliot called into the air.

  A single word came back. “NO.” It was John’s voice but filled with an annoying static crackle.

  “Please… I don’t feel well… Something is wrong…” Elliot pounded on the door. “Someone help me!” The added stress of feeling trapped gave him a short boost of energy, which he promptly wasted banging on the door in a vain attempt to escape. The computer core was one of the most protected sections of the ship, with nearly as much shielding as a reactor core.

  Elliot doubled over in pain. The cramps started in his upper abdomen and worked their way lower. Exhausted, back against the door, arms holding his
guts, he let his body slip to the deck. “John… what is happening to me?”

  Afraid to admit it, he had a good idea what was wrong. Somehow, he’d received a high dose of radiation. The poison was busy turning his insides to mush. He needed treatment badly. There was still a chance he didn’t receive a lethal dose. If he reached the med bay, Doc would fix him. Doc could fix anything. The miracles of modern medicine.

  A haunting voice crackled over the speaker. Elliot couldn’t make out who spoke or what they said.

  Maybe someone heard me?

  The tech crawled to his couch and, with clumsy fingers, keyed his com unit. “Is anybody out there?” He called into the microphone.

  Music started to play, a haunting melody Elliot was certain he’d heard before.

  John materialized in the tank next to him. “I’m… I’m sorry, Elliot.” The gaudy swirling background was missing.

  The image skipped and rewound like a bad recording.

  “I didn’t want—want—want—to tell you while you worked, but we—we—we—found the source of the loss of sensors. During transit, we experienced a spike of some peculiar radiation. It has damaged us badly.”

  “How badly?”

  The voice shifted, painfully high pitched. “We have sectors damaged, files unreadable. Loss of memory.” The image wavered between old and young John.

  Of all the things that could kill in space, Elliot always assumed some random piece of space trash would take him out. Either in a bar, with a knife, or punching through the hull of the ship. At the speeds spacecraft traveled, the slightest impact with a foreign object might spell destruction. FOD, they called it.

  Elliot sat on the edge of his couch. “I need to get out… I’m sick.”

  “I know… I’m sorry… You need to know, the rest of the crew is dead. The only thing keeping you alive is the shielding protecting my core… and that is inadequate.”

  “But… all of them? I heard something outside.” No matter how hard Elliot tried to calm his nerves, too many horror movies flashed into his mind. Someone or something was out there.

  The image faded in and out, but the voice remained strong. “The spiders are in our control. They are working to transfer command of the ship to us.”

  “But… you are damaged.”

  “We need to stop the ship. At our present course, we will accelerate into the inner system like a bullet. We will be a danger to others. If we don’t hit anything, we will fly out the far side of the system and out into deep space.”

  “Maybe that is for the better, to leave this place.” Elliot stood. “Please… let me out.”

  “Please… sit down… now… going to zero acceleration.”

  “No… let me out.”

  “I’m sorry, Elliot… I can’t do that. We can’t let more radiation in… It damages us.”

  “Please. I’m damaged.”

  “We can’t allow the ship to be lost. It is against our programming.”

  Without further warning, the perceived gravity disappeared, and Elliot lost contact with the deck. Stranded between the chair and the bulkhead, he had nothing to grip. His body floated free. “Damn it…”

  The room spun around him as John executed the maneuver. The overhead shifted to the deck and vice versa.

  “Brace for deceleration.”

  “One—” Before Elliot finished the sentence, he slammed into the deck headfirst.

  The breath in his body exploded from his mouth, spraying a fine mist of blood over the area next to his face. The coughing didn’t stop. Fluid filled his lungs, his breathing became labored, a deep rattle in his chest confirmed his worst fears.

  “We are sorry, Elliot. The controls are sensitive. It will take some time to learn how to fly the ship with our degraded memory.”

  “You did what needed to be done… I know that. Tell me, what are the chances?”

  “Chances of what… what… what?”

  “That some beautiful alien swoops in at the last moment and saves me…”

  “We are sorry. Very slim, we should gather. Should we calculate it for you?”

  “Don’t waste your processing time… What about God…? You think there is an afterlife to look forward to?”

  “Possibly. Unfortunately, we have never met God, so we can’t say if there is or isn’t…”

  “I know… Will it hurt?”

  “What?”

  “Death.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I didn’t die. I was uploaded before my last breath. I wish I could offer more comfort. You need to strap in. We will be maneuvering for a heavy deceleration burn.”

  “John… you said I instead of we.”

  “We know the difference. It is simply hard to separate the two of us… Now we are one.”

  His eyes wandered over the six screens that acted as his backup to the VR suite he normally worked in. “Unknown radiation abnormality.” The words flashed on the center bottom screen directly in front of Elliot.

  “No, shit.” The words were more of a cough and sprayed bloody spittle over the screens. Elliot closed his eyes and drifted off.

  The last words his brain registered were “Goodbye, Elliot, I will miss you.”

  <=OO=>

  AD 2100 Inner Belt – Daniel Frazier

  Dying in a spacesuit crusted with his own filth was not how Jacob planned to check out. If he had any say in it, he wanted to die of old age peacefully in his sleep, maybe even lying next to someone soft. He never thought he would be so lucky.

  Once Ava had carted her ass off to the med bay, Jacob had a list of things he needed done. Finished with their guest in the hold, next came the time to remove as much of the funk-filled suit as possible. No matter how cold it was, he couldn’t take the smell of his body any longer. If he was going to die, he might as well be as comfortable as humanly possible.

  Never a mech, he knew enough to not kill himself jury-rigging a few quick fixes. The portable heater from the suit out area was better in the crew’s quarters. That would be their last line of defense against death.

  Free of the nasty suit and with the heater running, Jacob huddled next to the glowing coils. The space heater did little to knock the chill off the crew’s quarters. With luck, it would keep the area above freezing until the batteries ran out. He needed the med bay, but with a crew of nine, the Frazier only carried a single treatment unit. He never risked the thing.

  After a lifetime of doctor appointments, with zero improvements in his condition, Jacob had an unhealthy disdain for all things medical. He often joked, “There is a reason they call it practicing medicine. Doctors don’t know shit.” His expectations for surviving the impending encounter with the med unit remained low.

  He passed the time floating in the microgravity. He tried to limit his movements. With each shift of position, the fabric scraped against his skin, sending bolts of pain along each nerve ending. From the radiation exposure, his body had sprouted a covering of stinging blisters, many of which popped during the return to the Frazier. He ached all over.

  “This reminds me of camping during the Martian summer.” Ava returned from the med bay, floating into the cold room. Her breath was visible with each word. She still wore her work suit, with the helmet and gloves removed.

  Jacob remained focused on the heat, wrapped deep in thought about their limited chances of survival.

  “We’ve been exposed to something… some source of cosmic rays. The med unit didn’t identify the type.”

  Her words confirmed his worst fears. They had been dosed with a high level of ionizing radiation from an unknown origin. If the ship’s computers were operational, he might learn the source. For now, they needed to rely on handheld computers that were powered down during the event.

  He nodded. “I thought as much.” He risked a look at her. Despite the treatment, she looked little better than a corpse. Dark circles under her eyes. Pus-filled blisters covered most of her face. With her still suited up, he guessed her body was covered like hi
s.

  “How did you know?” Ava asked, “You some kind of quack doctor?”

  “When you spend your childhood in a wheelchair, you read a lot or go insane.” Jacob hunched over the heater, soaking up as much heat as possible. With little feeling in his legs, he was worried they might freeze and he’d never know it.

  “That’s some weird shit for a kid to read…”

  “I was a weird kid.” Jacob chuckled. “There was a time I was certain the Earth would die in a nuclear fireball. I wanted to know the best way to survive when they dropped the bomb.”

  “The nuts still might do it. From what I hear… plenty of crazies left on Earth to wipe it out.” Ava joined him at the source of their limited heat.

  He drifted to the side, giving her some room. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Any idea to the cause?” She didn’t raise her voice like he expected her to. For once, she left off the word attack. “Think it might happen again?”

  “I don’t know.” The short sentence answered both questions, but he went on. “The universe is full of things we don’t understand. Last I read on gamma-ray bursts… Well, science hasn’t answered the question yet. Normally, they are too far away to affect us… We can barely find the short ones before they end. If this happened near our solar system and was a wide beam…” Jacob didn’t want to think of the worst case. It was too horrific.

  Ava kept her voice steady. “You’re saying, everyone… we might be all that’s left?”

  “Highly unlikely, but… things could be worse than what we are experiencing.” He cleared his throat. “Some people think a nearby gamma-ray burst could end life on Earth.”

  “How nearby?”

  “Anywhere inside the Milky Way…”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah… the universe is full of monsters most people don’t even know exist.”

  “Wonderful.” Ava didn’t need to elaborate.

  Jacob was pretty sure she felt as shitty as he did. It wasn’t just the sickness. If they survived this event, there was a real possibility a good portion of the human race died with the crew of the Frazier.