Dead Ship

But not even a nightmare hurts this much.

Blood escapes my lips, riding the leading edge of a groan. A closed-lipped cough sends droplets in an expanding half-circle. More blood.

If I cared, I’d wipe the remnants from my lips and assess my situation, or at least dress my wounds, but I don’t because all I can think is holy living fuck where in the hell is Tricia?

I try and blink the blurriness from my eyes; my vision goes from shitty to just less-shitty, and I can settle for that. Something is ringing, and at first it’s just my head, but it starts oscillating and I realize that it’s an alarm and oh, fuck me, that’s a bad sign.

That’s the last thing you want to hear on a space ship. Not that I wasn’t expecting it. Then again, the fact that I’m hearing it means there’s still air.

I know I’m in microgravity because nothing has as flat a trajectory as the blood I just coughed up in an environment with gravity, so I push off the bulkhead. Something made out of steel screams in agony, and the gravity’s b—

Head: meet floor. Floor: head. My stomach is doing cartwheels and I’m seeing spots, and can we please decide on gravity, no gravity, something?

Butterflies beating their wings in my stomach inform me that, once again, the gravity is dead. With a groan, I sit up.

I become conscious of what I’m seeing, and for a second my heart leaps into my throat; everything’s red.

Wait; emergency lights. Right. So the power must be out.

And I’m not the only thing floating around in the communications bay. Aside from the dinner I ate longer ago than I can remember, microphone headsets both intact and otherwise, pieces of the comm set I’d taken apart to work on, and the tools with which I’d been working on it, it looked like there was somebody in here with me.

Whoever it is is facing perpendicular to me, and all I can see is the side of their head. Eyes closed; maybe he’s unconscious.

“Hey,” I say, reaching over to shake him awake, “Any idea what happ—“
His leg catches on the work bench, turning his body and head, which was only half there, and proving me right: it was somebody.

Some body.

Rick, actually. Lead engineer. Jesus Christ, he must have come up from the engine room to give a damage report to the Captain when we…the ship…

What the hell even happened?

Somebody had to know. I take a deep breath to shout, which is loud enough for anyone to hear in a ship that measures only about forty meters from bow to stern – bad idea. Pain in my chest immediately reduces me to a racking cough that rattles in my throat like I’m trying to crush gravel into dust with my Adam’s apple, and more blood finds its way up to my lips but fuck it I’ll just go up to the cockpit myself because even a man on his deathbed can maneuver in zero-g so just kick from the wall, and smoothly, smoothly, there we go, don’t even look at the body, and why is it so fuckin’ hard to see in this red light, and is anyone still alive and where the fuck is Tricia?

Aaaand, we’re in the hallway, wait, whoa, whoaaaa, stop.

I make it out into the main corridor that runs the length of the ship’s operating deck, and wow, whatever the hell happened must have been extra-shitty with a side of suck. When this ship was constructed, and for as long as I’d been with her, this corridor was straight as an arrow. The shipbuilders on Mars had called it the spine of the ship; the central passage from which all of the other functional elements of the ship stemmed, and through which all traffic, so to speak, would be directed.

Looking in the direction of the cockpit, the walls have been crumpled in like an accordion, bringing the end of this hallway a good thirty feet closer to me than it should have been. The back, which I remember is where the engines are (which are 80% of the mass of any ship in our class), has been twisted a full quarter turn. I bet air is leaking all over the place.
Before I go in either direction, I slide back into the comm bay and pluck my ID card and acetylene torch from the air. I’ll need these.

For the first time since I was formally brought aboard as a crewmember, I have to stop and consciously think to remember where the medbay is in relation to myself. It comes to me, and I kick off towards the rear, hoping the compartment hasn’t been sealed shut by the deformation of the ship’s hull or the decompression failsafes keeping a breach from killing everything else. Mother of shit; if she was in there during an explosive decompression, I’d rather have just met the black in whatever instant of silent violence killed this ship.

Nerves buzzing like an electric toothbrush, I hold my ID card up to the reader and hold my breath for a second that stretches into infinity before it beeps and the door slides halfway open.

It catches on something, and the electric motor grinds and squeals before giving up the fight and falling silent. A red maintenance light comes on over the door.

I’ll put in a memo to engineering, I’m sure they’ll get right on it.

Inside, the red emergency lights show me a three-dimensional minefield of hypodermic needles, broken glass, and chemicals that I don’t even wanna know the function of. Some kind of bedside machine that was doubtlessly in use before the impact has been brained against the wall; a chunk of it is still attached to the patient. He’s dead.

My teeth find my lower lip, and with a small nudge I slide into the medical bay, bracing myself on the door and not daring to go any further.

The small flashlight I keep on my belt comes to life, and I search the faces of the damned. Someone groans, but it’s a man. It’s not Tricia; I don’t care. And besides, there’s nothing I can do for him. He’s a goddamned pincushion of hypos, and judging by the way his back is arched against that wall, I’d wager he’s got some sticking into him from the other side, too. I don’t even want to point the flashlight at him; his murky red silhouette will keep me up at night for a while as it is.

“Tricia,” I say. It’s not a question.

“Wh…what? She’s…I dunno. G-get, get over here, man…I’m hurt bad.”

I close the door and move down the hall.

My ribs are starting to bother me now that the fog of my unconsciousness is starting to lift. Getting folded over my work table sure as hell didn’t do anything for them, that’s for sure. I would have pulled some painkillers out of the medical bay, but I wouldn’t have known what to look for.

And besides, there wasn’t any time. I have to find Tricia.

Next down the line is the mess hall, and the door’s open. I bet it’s stuck.

I look inside, and immediately regret it. The lighting in here is pretty good; whoever designed the ship must have figured that, in an emergency, the mess hall would be one of the likely places where crewmembers would be when not at their stations. Well, he was right.

There’s no shortage of bodies.

I retch once, then again. This is too much.

Shatterproof plasticware coated in food and gore, both probably still warm, floats amongst a graveyard of trauma victims. This is one for the textbooks. Some crewmen were catapulted headfirst by the impact; when the ship stopped moving instantly and they didn’t, Newtonian physics would dictate that they would keep moving until they found something to stop them. For most of them, that something was the bulkhead.

More than a few brains are exposed to the air. See, the force of their continued movement propelled most of them against the tables they were sitting at. They mostly caught their legs on chairs as they passed, which of course were slowed, while the rest of them plunged headlong into-

Yeah. You know the rest. It’s not pretty.

I can’t decide who had it worse; the ones closer to the wall, who probably survived until their friends fell on top of them, or the ones who were sitting at the opposite end, and had time to process the fact that their death was rushing up to meet them, and were unable to do anything at all about it.

I bet this is what it looks like when people jump out of buildings. Except this isn’t just one person, it’s about twenty. Is one of them…

“Tricia,” I say once, weakly. I gather my strength into my diaphragm to call again, but the exertion of breathing sends me into a coughing fit. More blood, and I don’t even care enough to cover my mouth. It sprays everywhere, but no one is around to write me a hygiene citation.

Let’s do this again.

And breathe, and –

“Tricia?”

Still air replies.

I bow my head, and push off from the doorframe, moving downship towards the crew quarters.

A part of me dares to hope that she was in her bunk; that would have been her best chance of surviving the hit we took.

As I move further towards the engines, the torque they caused in the ship becomes a lot more noticeable. Fuck. These doors are gonna be the hardest so far to open. I’m glad I brought the blowtorch with me.

My fingers slide over the painted steel of the walls, counting doors in the dim lighting until I get to hers. And three, and two, and one, aaaannnd –

I grab the handrail to stop my glide, but my momentum has other ideas; it slams me into the wall, and the blinding shock of pain in my chest makes me retch again, a thin line of bile that I spit onto the deck. But I don’t let go.

The door is right there, and geez it’s in rough shape. I knock. Nothing. The rising tide of panic reaches my eyes, which tear up with the exertion of the adrenaline rush that’s now singing in my veins, but I fight down the self-defeating beast of Panic, leaving only the strength of adrenaline and my own determination.

My thumb finds the switch, and the torch comes to life in my hands, recoiling slightly as the hot gases streaming from the nozzle act like a tiny rocket engine, but I keep it under control.

Not bothering to turn my eyes, I touch the stream of flame to the steel door of Tricia’s coffin-like bunk and start making a circular cut the size of my head. First priority is just to know if she’s in there at all.

Sparks burst from the steel, and I know I’m getting through. I work the flame slowly along the steel in a pretty rough circle, burning as fast as I can but not fast enough and jesus man this thing is fully open and it needs to hurry the hell up I can’t wait this is unacceptable come on comeoncomeon I don’t have all day just fucking hurry up and cut through the goddamned steel for shit’s sake and with about an inch left to go I toss the torch to the floor without bothering to cut off the gas – it’s got a deadman’s safety anyway – and punch inside the circle I’ve made, bending back what little steel I don’t have the fucking time cut through, and I get my pocket light out and shine it inside and fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!

She’s not there.

A couple of holograms smile at me; stills of her friends, her family, of me. Our wedding day.

Where is she? This isn’t funny. If this is someone’s idea of a goddamned joke, this is not funny.
All right? Just give her back.

I slowly gather breath into my lungs, ready to stop when I hit my pain threshold, but it’s on me before I know it’s coming; more blood explodes from my mouth, and I fold into a wad of shivering flesh and pain. This is bullshit.

Recovering, I straighten myself out, but my head hits something hard as it floats by. My hand flies out at the culprit, and I draw it to my face to examine it better in this terrible light. A wrench.

I just can’t catch a break, can I?

I wing the wrench overhand like it’s a tomahawk, and it clangs off a bulkhead and continues its spinning flight towards the engine room. The entire corridor rings with the impact, and suddenly it comes to me.

The space around me is populated somewhat sparsely, but in a few seconds I spot a pan, with the bowl of a wooden spoon sticking out of the handle, the standard configuration for these things in storage.

Suppressing another cough as I draw a breath in excitement, I snatch the floating cookware from the air and unsheathe the spoon. Blinking contemplatively, I look around me – I don’t know why – and then strike the pan with the spoon.

Slowly spinning around like some kind of insane matronly anachronism ringing a dinner-bell, I float towards the rear of the ship, banging on the pan with the spoon, and I’m wondering if maybe I’m not already batshit insane.

I beat slowly on the pan at first, figuring to save my strength, but find myself lapsing into old rhythms from nursery rhymes and childhood songs, tunes from a different era in my life that now bring only a sort of veiled comfort. Passing each bulkhead slowly and with a quick look inside, I make my way to the rear of the ship, beating “It’s Raining, it’s Pouring” onto the pan I’m carrying, hoping beyond hope to find the only thing in the universe that has ever mattered.
And, from the engine room, I hear the most incredible sound that has ever seen fit to reach from the heavens and grace my humble ears: a cough.

Tricia’s cough.

It doesn’t occur to me to wonder what she’s doing in the engine room; I quickly cut the hinges off the bulkhead door and pull it to me, discarding it down the long passageway leading back to the bridge, and pull myself through and—

There she is. Naked.

With the dead chief engineer. They were like this when the ship was put into whatever state it’s in. And now they’ll be like this forever.

You know, that word used to mean something to me.

For several moments, words fail me; she looks over and sees me, her body crushed under his against the wall next to the bulkhead, her ribs probably broken just like mine. I hope it hurts, because nothing has ever hurt me like this.
“Phil,” she says, weakly.

We stare at each other in silence. I remember the sidearm at my hip, the magnum handgun chambered in 12.7mm, and in an instant it’s out, and it’s pointing at her. She closes her eyes, anticipating the shot.

“I can’t believe you,” is all I can manage. I shift my aim just a little bit, to the window just behind her, the infinite starfield that has been my home for years. I’m going back to it.
She opens her eyes again, and I squeeze the trigger; the echo of the muzzle blast reverberates through the metal engine room, and the glass stars momentarily before spraying outward. The atmosphere in this room follows it momentarily, and Tricia, the dead engineer, and I float towards the exit, swept along with whatever other flotsam is in the engine room.

The pressure increases towards the window, and I hear the decompression alarm start to blare as I accelerate out into the immense frigid nothing of space, all but naked, still clutching a handgun as though it means something.

Now, everything means nothing. She used to be my everything. Now we’re both dead. I can’t quite see her as the air in my lungs is sucked out, but I know she’s going through the same thing, the same immense pressure inside trying to fight its way out of my skin, the nitrogen embolism burning like I’ve been filled with gasoline and set ablaze from the inside out.
I close my eyes, and put the pistol to my head. I deserve to die less painfully than this. I do. I do.
I do.