Caution: Memories is a dark, morbid, and rather violent story. Consider it PG-13 for violence, or whatever the equivalent rating is in your part of the world.
Memories
They say you never see the shot that kills you.
At least, that’s what they always told me.
Life on the stations has always been hard, but life on the surface is unquestionably harder. Here we have trifling little problems like getting sucked through a docking port into vacuum. On the surface they have to deal with overpopulation, disease, war, and crime.
The Yaki may cause some trouble now and then, in the less sheltered sectors, but we have no crime. I’ve seen only one pirate transport in the sector in my twenty four jazuras, and it had been captured by a patrol squad and was being escorted to the shipyard for impound.
I’ve always wondered about the shipyard. Those who have been through the gates say it’s just past the one we call East. Of course for the laboring class there is essentially no hope of ever getting through a gate, let alone to something as massive and glorious as a shipyard.
When he deigns to visit us, the Senator almost always says something about the glorious equality that we all have in the Argon Federation. Only the naïve and sickeningly fortunate upper class ever believes it. The rest of us just sit in our stations, knowing all about the reality of the class system, and become increasingly bitter.
All in all though I’d rather be here than down on the surface. Argnu are fairly docile, and even the most excited ones are usually drugged back to comatose bliss by the worker drones long before any of the station hands have to worry about anything. Usually we wind up inventing weird sports. There’s a sort of local craze going around that we’ve somehow come to call Hardball. Unfortunately the only rule that anyone can seem to agree on is that it involves a ball of some kind. Concocting new variants of the game often consumes most of our leisure time – that, and waiting for the good shows to get beamed up from the low-orbit entertainment satellites.
Sometimes we get illegal broadcasts. Jentha tried to explain how they work, but the comms systems have always been a mystery to most of us. I remember the first one I ever saw, back when I was six. I was a bit young to witness it, but life is hard out here, and you have to grow up fast to survive. I saw the full brutality of what the class system can really do to people… but I try not to think about it.
Every few tazuras, Edyn Harell comes over from the bakery and picks up a shipment of beef. He usually can’t stay long, but we all enjoy seeing him around. Apparently the bakery pays him rather well, because he’s getting close to being able to buy his own Mercury.
Edyn is a natural-born (not to mention addicted) pilot. A few mazuras ago he got his hands on a beat-up old Discoverer for only a few hundred credits. I have a suspicion that there was some not-quite-legal dealing done to get the thing to him, but of course none of us was going to say anything. After his shift he’d buzz over from the bakery and give us tours of the sector during the rest cycle. The poor thing was so abused that it barely moved faster than the Mercury he used for work, but it was a joy nonetheless. The sensation of moving free in space captivated me from the start, and every now and then I’m struck by a craving to feel it again.
The cravings usually stop quickly, though, once I remember that harrowing final run. I’d scored a lucky shift that overlapped my rest cycle with Edyn’s by almost three solid stazuras. We’d planned a secret trip out to the East gate, to see what it was like going through one. A long time ago, when both of us lived on the ranch as children, we scrounged up and fixed an old pair of video goggles that some pilot had thrown away. That night we’d stayed up for ages, watching ships drift into the shimmering sheet of energy at the gate and get yanked through it into nothingness. That jolt of speed, and the odd glow as the ship disappeared, looked frankly excruciating.
Needless to say, we’d both resolved then and there to try it for ourselves.
We came so close to getting our chance that night. The glow of the gate was clearly visible in the distance as we crawled forward in the Discoverer. Both of us were overcome by a hushed awe, a kind of thrilled but partially terrified expectation of the adventure to come. Looking back, it’s surprising that will all the quiet going on in that ship we never heard the warning signs.
Of course, even if we had heard them, there was precious little we could have done. Jentha told me later that the power generator had developed a crack in the sealant and started venting reagents into space. It took very little time for the fuel and coolant to completely leak out of the core, leaving the reactor to start consuming its own internal mechanisms. We first sensed a problem when the power started to flicker randomly; unfortunately, given the condition of the ship, we thought almost nothing of it at the time.
It wasn’t until the temperature in the cabin started to drop that we became fully aware that something was going wrong. Having two fully grown Argon inside a one-man cockpit was more than enough to keep the air warm, even when the climate modules decided to go to sleep (as they had a habit of doing). Then the instruments totally went dead; no indicators, no half-working and pathetically limited gravidar scanner, nothing.
As much as I like the feeling of flying I’ll never shake the horror of flying blind. We could see stars, planets, and clouds all around us, and even other ships; but with no computer power we were as good as a chunk of dead metal. The gate was utterly forgotten; even if we managed to drift all the way to a station, we had no way of signaling the docking controllers to let us in.
I’m not sure if it’s just me and Edyn, or if all friends behave this way, but the sheer anxiety drove us to fight like we never had before (or since, for that matter). We probably would have ended up in a physical struggle if the reactor coolant lines hadn’t ruptured from exposure. It was almost comical seeing Edyn cut off mid-shout by a jet of oily liquid assaulting his face. The downside was, being only an arm’s length from him myself, I got just as potent a blast as he did.
That snapped us out of it rather nicely. Edyn dug up a roll of bonding adhesive from the cargo bin and sealed off the coolant leak just as the last few drops oozed out of the cracked, twisted conduit. Why the Discoverer’s designers had run a vital coolant line directly behind the pilot’s head is beyond me, but Jentha would probably understand it. It was odd to think of Jentha at such a time, but suddenly I found myself having difficulty thinking of anything else.
After a moment Edyn recovered from his frustrated shock and asked the dreaded question: “What do we do now?” Naturally neither one of us had any idea. We had no comms, no instruments, no propulsion, and life support was failing fast. Through the few patches of canopy that weren’t smudged by coolant, we could barely make out a ship or two, but nothing close enough to see us or recognize our predicament.
Crumpled in a corner of the dysfunctional cargo bay was the ship’s only emergency vacuum suit. As soon as Edyn remembered it, we started another argument – this time with each of us trying to convince the other to go for safety and help while we remained in the ship for a certain and miserable death.
We stood shivering in the cargo bay for far too long, trying to be brave and noble, with very little success. Finally the obvious fact struck me: there was an empty cargo crate lying in perfect, ignorant happiness directly underneath the hotly contested e-vac suit. I barely dared to think it, and certainly was scared to death of actually trying it – but our best chance was with that crate. As soon as Edyn realized what I was staring at in such sudden and somber silence, he guessed my thoughts.
We both knew all too well the tales of smugglers, stowaways, and refugees curling up in containers and being carted around in transports until they were discovered and set loose. It was depressingly easy to do, especially with self-sealing crates, and often destitute people had no other options. We knew equally well that very few people survived long in the containers, and risked slow asphyxiation from being sealed in with the same stale air for wozuras on end.
Luckily we also knew that it would hardly take wozuras for the crate to drift within range of the docking port of the ranch.
Edyn, being the more adventurous of us, had taken a crate ride across a docking bay once as a kid. This, combined with my own fear of being locked into the container for all eternity, made him the natural choice for the trip. Our plan was formed: I would suit up, launch the crate towards the station, and then drift behind it on the e-vac suit’s meager thruster power to steer it to the docking bay. The operators would certainly spot us on the external view monitors eventually, and send out the ranch’s old freighter to our rescue.
We were all set to go when, once again, the obvious facts belatedly joined the parade of brilliant insight running through our minds. The cargo door on the ship had long ago been welded shut. There was no way to get the crate – which now rather irrevocably imprisoned Edyn – out of the ship.
I sat shuddering in horrified paralysis for several mizuras, unsure of what to do, and nonplussed by the muffled pounding noises coming from Edyn’s crate. Luckily the cascading reactor breach (as Jentha would have called it) had gleefully ignored our proceedings the entire time, and finally decided that it had eaten quite enough insulation and conduit linings.
There is a theory, according to Jentha, that supernovas are sometimes triggered by a fusion reaction inside a star encountering large quantities of lizardmetal, and entering a runaway state with the complex molecular fuel in the substance. Apparently some Boron scientist had developed this concept. I never really thought I would ever have had a reason to care, until the casing compounds in the reactor core met up with – yes – the fusion reaction romping around inside that core. Our little dilemma of moving the crate out of the ship was ended quite quickly when the whole thing decided to give up on life and explode.
I guess someone out there likes me enough to try and keep me alive, because the thick, vacuum-proof walls of the cargo bay shielded us from virtually all of the heat and debris from the explosion. In fact, the only real damage to the cargo bay was very fortunate: the jolt of the blast had cracked the welds on the bay door, and the explosive decompression that followed popped the hatch off the back of the ship like the cork from a bottle of space fuel.
The rush of air carried us straight backwards – directly towards the welcoming arms of the ranch. It took almost a jazura to live down the humiliation of being hauled into the station by the freighter crew and dumped into the cargo processing center alongside Edyn’s battered container. Fortunately we both recovered from our minor injuries – and not so minor injures to our pride – in fairly short order.
I, however, have still not recovered from the horror of that event. Sometimes, when it is cold and quiet during the rest cycle, I can hear the agonized sounds of that old Discoverer and its slow death. On the darkest nights, I relive the overwhelming fear of being so close to a death of my own. During those times, the deep, dark memory of that old pirated broadcast stirs inside me, and for a few short and tormented moments I wonder how the poor man felt.
I had at least a small chance of surviving my experience. His doom was certain long before the recorders ever even arrived on the scene. Hate is something I still don’t think I understand – but it is all too clear what it can make people do. I will certainly never know his name. His murderers probably didn’t even know it. All they knew was that he was “inferior,” a lower class animal with no right to live.
The broadcast never said how long the man had been beaten before the execution, but it didn’t have to. His broken bones and bleeding gashes said plenty about that. As a child, the sight of him was enough to make me sick. Even now the memory churns my stomach.
Yet somehow, the two men who stood behind him managed to jeer, even laugh, as they watched the gunman draw his weapon. I think I know at least part of what he must have felt, kneeling in submission, watching the end of his life be carefully and methodically pointed towards his forehead.
They say you never see the shot that kills you.
At least, that’s what they always told me.
Good read Apoch
