Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (21 page)

Nothing happened.

Removing his hand, he read the labels posted around the
joystick’s base. Lifting a tiny red-tinted plastic door next to it, he flipped
the only switch in the little square hole he’d uncovered. A button on top of
the joystick began to glow red. The joystick was armed.

His first attempt at fixing the spin made it worse,
then he changed it from a simple circular motion into a complicated
figure-eight. He felt a growing lightheadedness.

Reducing the fastest portion of the spin left only a
slow waddling motion that eased his lightheadedness but made him queasy. This
waddling motion also made the supplies—still pressed centrifugally against the
floor, ceiling and walls—slide gently into new locations; though most remained
out of his way.

And then the sun came out.

The pod’s cabin became filled with light that was both
painful and overpoweringly brilliant. Blinded by it, Mike raised both arms to
cover his face, but within seconds could feel the heat seeping through his
suit’s insulation and threatening the skin on the back of his arm.

Flipping his gold-plated face-shield down, he glanced
very briefly through the front window. The sun was big—bigger than an orange
held at arm’s length. He blinked a few times, then closed his eyes in an effort
to make the sun’s after-image go away. It lingered, emphasizing its intimate
proximity.

Leaning forward, he held his gloved hands level with
the top of his faceplate to form a sun-visor while he tried to read the labels
on the control panel. Within his suit, he smelled plastic burning.
Stay
calm! Stay calm! Stay calm!

An alarm buzzer rang so loud within the cabin that he
could hear it through his helmet. It was the lifesupport system voicing its
concern over the sudden influx of vast quantities of heat. The machine had
become concerned enough to notify human beings that something might be wrong
and that somebody might want to consider doing something about it.

Mike continued reading.
It’s got to be here somewhe—

There!
Lifting another tiny red plastic door, he
flipped another solitary switch in a little square hole. A new red light
glowed. This one was located between a pair of twin throttles, much like the
throttles on large commercial airliners.

He tilted and twisted the joystick until the side of
Corvus that was away from the sun—its dark side—appeared in the window. He then
eased the two throttles forward.

Thrust from the pod’s main engines pressed him gently
into his seat’s well-padded back. Anxious to observe a change, he watched
closely but nothing seemed to be different. Then slowly, very slowly, Corvus
began to grow. Sixty seconds later it was getting larger and larger and—

All the sunlight disappeared from the pod’s cabin.
Corvus had blocked the sun.

With the sudden drop in ambient light, Mike was again
as good as blind. While waiting for his eyes to adjust, he smiled and laughed
and even let out a joyous little yell. He was about to ask how Tina was doing
when his eyes adjusted enough for him to notice that the dark side of Corvus
was still growing.

He grabbed the joystick again and stared at the main
view monitor. Rotating the pod until Corvus was visible in the pod’s rear
camera, he increased the main engines’ thrust. When it looked as though Corvus
had stopped growing, he cut the thrust to zero, then stared for a full minute
at the image of the giant tumbling ship trying to make sure the pod’s location
was genuinely stable. Satisfied, he searched for and reset the thermal alarm
buzzer, then turned to his co-pilot. “Tina? Are you all right?”

Glaring at him, her mouth moved rapidly but no sounds
seemed to be coming out.

He glanced at the base of her helmet just above the
neck attachment, then reached over and flipped her suit radio on.

“…the hell don’t you answer me!?”

“Hey! Calm down. Your radio was off. You must have
bumped the switch; or maybe it was hit by a flying food envelope or something.”

“You didn’t hear me yelling at you for the last five
minutes?”

“No; and probably a good thing too; I didn’t need any
extra distractions.” He looked her vacuum suit up and down. “You all right?”

She shifted in her seat and raised both hands to her
faceplate. “I think so.” With her anger fading, her voice sounded shaky. “I
almost threw up.”

“You can relax now. We should be OK. At least for a
while.”

“Where are we?”

“In the shadow of Corvus. This is where we’ll make
solar passage. If we’re lucky, enough of Corvus will stay together to be our
sun-shield.”

She turned and studied his face. “You ran simulations
on this?”

“Yes.”

“How did it look?”

“It was the best—”

“That’s not what I meant! What are our odds of
survival?”

He hesitated for a moment, then decided she had a right
to know. “Thirty percent.”

_____

Thirty percent?
thought Tina.
This is even
better than I’d expected!

Mike unfastened his seat restraints and climbed into
the pod’s rear section to check on Kim.

Tina smiled inside her helmet.
I love it! You’re
going to die a slow, horrible death and I’ve got a ringside seat!

Suddenly, she had to fight an urge to laugh out loud;
the urge seemed more than she could stand. She fumbled for the switch to her
suit radio but the impulse faded before she could turn it off.

I’m going to enjoy watching you die, McCormack.
Enjoy every minute of it.
She thought about the item she’d taken from Nikita’s
dead body.
And if somehow you do happen to survive, I’ve got a little
something to take care of that too.

Glancing into the back, she saw that Mike had removed
Kim’s helmet as well as his own and seemed to be kissing her lips. Hoping to
interrupt, Tina asked, “How is she?”

Mike withdrew his face from Kim’s and spoke into his
empty helmet like a giant microphone. “I think she’s all right. At least I hope
so. She’s still unconscious.”

“I hope she’s all right too,” Tina lied.
I wish that
stupid woman would just go ahead and die. What’s she hanging on for, anyway?
Unfastening
her own helmet, Tina thought,
I don’t know; maybe it’s good that she’s not
dead yet. Maybe worrying about her increases his suffering. Maybe. At least I
can hope.

Chapter Fifteen

Twelve hours later, Mike was again holding Kim in his
arms while floating peacefully behind the pilot’s seat. It wasn’t particularly
romantic, they were both in vacuum suits—including gloves but minus helmets—and
she was still unconscious, but it was all he could think of to do for her at
this point. He had already checked her body for broken bones, changed the
dressing on her head wound and inspected her vacuum suit for ruptures, system
malfunctions and other damage.

During those same twelve hours he had also inspected
his own suit for damage, had shown Tina how to inspect hers and had stowed all
the supplies so that everything was tied off securely and nothing was likely to
start bouncing around the cabin again including that pea-green travel case.

He’d even been able to take a two hour nap after he’d
discovered the pod’s location jets. Similar to attitude jets, location jets
didn’t rotate the pod, instead they simply adjusted the craft’s location in
three dimensional space. With them one could push the pod gently up or down,
left or right, forward or back. They were perfect for a non-pilot trying to
hide in the shadow of a large tumbling spacecraft. They were so easy to use,
even Tina felt comfortable with them; so comfortable in fact that she had
agreed to take the helm during Mike’s nap.

This restful period, Mike knew, would soon come to an
end. He now estimated they would make closest approach to the sun in something
like six to ten hours.

“Miieeek,” Tina almost sang the word. “You might want
to get up heeeer.” There was no joy in the song, however, only a hesitant and
uncertain fear.

Mike strapped Kim to the rear wall to keep her from
floating about the cabin, and climbed into the front with Tina. As he strapped
into the pilot seat, he asked, “What’s up?”

Tina pointed out the front window. “Look at Corvus.”

He looked. “What about it?”

“The hull. Don’t you see?”

He examined it more closely. Portions of Corvus’s hull,
especially the ribs along the edges of the mirrored panels, glowed a dim and
very dull red. “Yes. Yes, I see.”
So, it’s begun. Well, good. I’m tired of
worrying about it. Let’s get this thing over with. Live or die, at least it’ll
be behind us.

Three hours later Corvus’s entire hull glowed red. Mike
was at the controls when a window up around deck two, possibly in the
passenger’s lounge, exploded. Glass fragments and a cloud of smoky black air
blew away from the big ship, followed immediately by several pieces of
blackened furniture and a large rectangle of heavy blackened cloth that might
once have been carpeting or a decorative tapestry.

A few minutes later another window exploded, then
another and another. Within seconds windows were exploding like popcorn in a
frying pan. Glass and smoke and blackened furniture—broken mostly, since most
of Corvus’s windows were small—along with the charred miscellanea of everyday
life were flying outward, leaving the ship in an ever expanding swarm of
tumbling fragments.

After two minutes of excitement, however, just as fast
as it had started, it stopped. And once again the great red-glowing ship
rotated quietly; though now with a few hundred, mostly small, mostly round,
darkly glowing holes where its windows had been.

In the long dull minutes that followed little seemed to
be happening and Mike found himself becoming more and more groggy from lack of
sleep. So he again turned the helm over to Tina and let himself drift off into
a nap.

He dreamt of farms and fields and forests, of rivers
and trees and breezes, and of many other things outside his normal daily
experience. Of good things. Of things desired and desirable. And he dreamt of
making love to Kim. All this he dreamt in only forty-seven minutes of sleep.

“Mike, wake up! Something’s wrong! Something’s
happening to the window.”

Mike jumped—not easy to do while strapped into a pilot
seat. “What? What is it?” Then he saw.

The pod’s front window was tinted like very dark
sunglasses. He could still see Corvus glowing red from tip-to-tip but the view
was dim, and it was impossible to make out any detail. Looking at the sky
beyond Corvus, he couldn’t see any stars.

“Is the glass getting weak?” Fear made Tina’s voice
squeak a bit on the word ‘weak.’ “Do you think it will break like Corvus’s
windows?”

Unfastening and removing his vacuum suit’s right glove,
he reached out and tapped the window once with a fingertip, then again, then
three times. He pressed four fingertips to the window and held them there for
several seconds. “It’s not hot,” he announced. He pursed his lips in thought.
“When did this happen?”

Tina shrugged. “It must have been gradual, I didn’t
notice it until now.”

Twisting around, he looked at the little round window
on the pod’s rear hatch. He didn’t see any stars through it either.
Better
make sure.
He unstrapped and climbed into the back. The hatch window was no
bigger than the faceplate on the helmet he wasn’t wearing at the moment.
Grabbing a handhold on each side of the hatch, he pulled his face close.

The deep-black sky was full of stars all shining just
as brightly as he remembered them. “Whatever’s wrong is only affecting the
front window.” He pushed-off gently, grabbed the back of the pilot seat and
pulled himself over and then down into it.

While strapping in, he checked the monitor. The front
camera was dark, the rear camera was normal, and the top and two side cameras
were tinted somewhere in between. The bottom camera was, of course, still
showing static.

He rubbed his chin. “It’s got to be something in front
of us.”

Tina eased her helmet into her lap and casually
verified each latch was properly open as though preparing to put it on. “But
the only thing in front of us is Corvus.”

“Exactly,” Mike said as he removed his left vacuum suit
glove and opened a door on the control panel about the size of an automobile
glove compartment. Pulling out a pair of plastic claw-like gloves, he put them
on, then found and flipped their arming switch and waited.

During the earlier peaceful hours, he had used his
pocketsize to read about the features of Hyperbolic Shipping’s maintenance
pods. From this reading he’d learned a bit about their mechanical arms—perhaps
even enough to operate them.

A pair of skinny white robotic arms unfolded themselves
from a recessed compartment on the pod’s exterior just below the front window.
Though possessing only three-fingered claws, the darkened window aided them in
resembling the dead bony limbs of a human skeleton.

Once fully unfolded they mimicked exactly the actions
of Mike’s hands. He raised his right hand and the right mechanical arm came up;
he pointed his finger at his face and the arm pointed a claw-finger at the
window; he drew a circle around his face with his finger and the arm wiped a
circle of blackness off the window’s outside surface. Blackness accumulated on
the claw-finger’s tip.

Opening his hand wide, Mike forced the claw into a flat
shape and wiped it back and forth across the window. This produced a large
clean area, and allowed his attention to shift suddenly to something beyond.

Pointing at Corvus using his own hand inside and a
mechanical one outside, he said, “Corvus has developed a tail like a comet. The
solar wind is pushing it toward us. We must be inside it.”

Most of the clean area was on his side of the window,
so to see outside, Tina leaned closer to him. “But comets are made of dust and
ice,” she said. “Their tails are gases that sublimated from the ice; and dust
too, of course.”

“True enough, but aside from metal and glass, Comet
Corvus is mostly hydrocarbons: plastic and rubber and decorative
organics—leather and wood and cloth. So its tail would be made of hydrocarbon
vapors. And all hydrocarbons, when heated sufficiently, leave a residue of
plain old carbon.” He smiled, oddly. “Soot, by any other name, will smudge as
black.”

Clung!
A hard sound rang through the pod as if a
rock had hit the hull; not at meteoritic speeds of many miles per second but
slowly, as if thrown by a human hand.

“What was that?” Tina asked.

Mike glanced around the pod’s interior looking for a
cause. “I don’t know.”

Clung!

Mike turned to seek a cause in the back.

Cling! Clung!

He faced front. “What the hell?”

Clong, Cling, Clang, Clung, Pop!
That last sound
had been made by something hitting the pod’s front window on Tina’s side;
something small and heavy, and it left a mark.

Clong, Cling, Clang!

Mike leaned over to see the mark. It was a—

Pop!

One hit on Mike’s side.

The one on Tina’s side had left a lumpy, lopsided ring
of shiny molten metal surrounding the point of impact.

Cling, Clang!

The one on Mike’s side had left a similar ring, but of
molten glass.

Clong, Cling, Clang, Clung!

With a mechanical arm, he wiped soot from the front
window, making a clear spot shaped like a fat lightning-bolt. But what he saw
through it—beautiful as it might have been in any other context—he did not find
pleasing.

Tens of thousands of tiny stars marched slowly past the
pod. They resembled the special-effect stars that swept so dramatically past
the Starship Enterprise while it flew at warp speed on that old two-dimensional
television show. But these were not stars. These were fat little drops of
liquid metal and liquid glass undulating, fluctuating and oscillating in the
sun. Those in Corvus’s shadow—the ones that had a chance of hitting the
pod—were difficult to see; they shone like dim stars, old and dying. Only those
out beyond the great shadow, in the full light of the sun, sparkled brightly.

Mike hunched low in his seat and drew his arms in close
to his chest, instinctively cringing from the molten rain. Imagining the damage
this would do to the pod’s externally mounted systems was much too easy.
Isn’t
a pod just about half plastic? And isn’t part of lifesupport mounted on the
outside of the hull?

Tina stared at the marching army of fake stars. Her
tone indicated more curiosity than fear. “What is that stuff?”

He was afraid to tell her. The co-pilot also had flight
controls, and if she understood the damage this was likely to do she might
panic and attempt to fly the pod away from the source of all this molten
stuff—right out of Corvus’s shadow and into that deadly sunshine.

Clung, Clong, Clang!

She looked at him. “I said,
What is it?
”

He tried for a calmness in his voice. “We’re being
pelted by liquid glass and stainless steel.”

“Shouldn’t we do something?”

“There’s nothing we can do. We’re just gonna have to
ride it out.”

Clang, Cling, Clung, Pop, Pop, Clang, Clung!

He closed his eyes and made fists.
God, if you’re
out there: Please, don’t let this stuff burn a hole in anything!
Deciding
that was a ridiculously impossible request, he revised the thought to,
just
not anything that’ll kill us!

Clang, Clang, Pop!

Fear came back into Tina’s voice. “Mike!”

Opening his eyes, he discovered a sliver of sunrise had
burst to life along Corvus’s right edge. Grabbing the location jet’s joystick,
he shifted the pod’s location to the left. The sun began to recede behind
Corvus, but before it was completely gone from the right it popped out again on
the left.

“What?” But no sooner had he asked the question than he
understood the answer. “Oh, that’s just great!”

“What now?” Tina asked.

“The closer we get to the sun, the bigger it gets in
our sky. So now it’s
too
big. In order to stay in full shadow we’ve got
to move in closer to Corvus.”

“Closer?” She sounded as horrified at the thought as he
felt.

“Yep.” He eased the joystick forward and Corvus began
to grow. He waited. Only when the great ship fully occulted the sun did he pull
the stick back and stop their approach.

Raising a mechanical arm, he began enlarging the
window’s clean spot. As he started to clean Tina’s side, a huge white cloud
exploded from an engineering deck along Corvus’s right edge. The cloud grew
nearly to the size of Corvus and, back-lit by the sun, glowed as brightly as if
it were sun’s surface itself. Even looking near it filled Mike’s eyes with
pain.

Seven seconds later he and Tina flinched as a hundred
clustered impacts rang through the pod’s hull like a bucket of gravel thrown
across a car’s metal roof.

He opened his mouth to speak but before he could say
anything another, though smaller, brilliant white cloud exploded on Corvus’s
left side. It too was followed by a hundred impacts gathered into one massive
assault.

“Get your helmet on!” Mike yelled. “Get it on and seal
it!” He grabbed his vacuum suit’s gloves and clipped them to his belt. They
flopped wildly as he climbed into the rear. Tina pulled her helmet down over
her head while Mike grabbed Kim’s out of a wall-mounted elastic fish net. Tina
finished closing her helmet’s fasteners as Mike slipped Kim’s helmet onto her
head.

After fastening Kim’s helmet, he pulled his own helmet
on and fastened it too. While slipping his gloves on, he spoke through his suit
radio. “I think these explosions are chemical tanks rupturing: oxygen,
nitrogen, water. Stuff like that. They seem to be throwing mostly molten stuff
at us so far but as Corvus gets hotter they may get worse: bigger, more
powerful. If they start throwing solids they might be able to—”

Another explosion produced another rapidly expanding
cloud and sent huge fragments tumbling away from Corvus. The fragments traveled
off to the right, away from the pod. Mostly these were irregular triangles that
glistened and flashed mirror-like in the sun.