Scott Lowther
MASS DISAPPEARANCE
Want to piss me off? Violate the laws of physics right in front of me. Don’t ask me why, that sort of thing just rubs me the wrong way.
So, like most other freighters, most of our trips were dull as dirt. Ferrying frozen colonists or other passengers and their doodads from civilized systems to civilized systems, stuff like that. Even so, on occasion some wacky crap happened. There’s some weird stuff out there, trust me, and some of it ain’t near to being explained. Some of it probably never will be explained, and is probably best avoided. Like the time we went to Gunston Station. Yeah, that Gunston Station, in the Gunston System. Yes, I know, nobody goes there anymore. Yes, I know the whole system is quarantined. But once upon a time it was a hundred thousand people in an O’Neill set up shop in a quiet backwater system, busily mining tritium by the gigaton out of a friendly little gas giant with an unlikely abundance of the stuff. We were the last commercial transport to go there before the whole place went to hell. Well, I think. Let me explain.
We came out of hyperspace on the tenth day out of our home base on Atlantis. A little off the mark: one hundred twenty AUs from the primary. We’d planned on ten AUs. Sure, you expect to be a little off… how accurate can you possibly be when aiming at a target dozens of lightyears away while flying blind in your own little pocket universe? But being off that far was, at least for us, unprecedented. George, the ships aivatar, was particularly annoyed; he wouldn’t even talk to us, just grumbled and tried to blame human error. That’s just the kind of guy he was. A bit of a dick. He got better after he took a shotgun blast to the central processor, though. Different story.
Normal procedure would’ve been to contact Gunston Station by hyperwave and update the flight plan then do a quick hyperjump the rest of the way, but George was too upset… he just recalculated and jumped right in. We popped in a hundred thousand klicks from the Station, which was in the L5 point with the primary and the gas giant. Couldn’t see the gas giant real well from that distance, but the star was nice and bright. Too far to make out the Station as anything other than a speck in the distance. The sublight engines drove us the rest of the way in.
From there we should’ve been able to easily contact the station over regular radio. Hell, we should have been able to hear all kinds of radio and hyperwave chatter… from the Station, from the facilities orbiting the gas giant, from the prospectors among the asteroids and comets, from the ships going every which way. But all we got was static.
The station was clearly there… we could see it through the telescope, bounce radar off it, pick it up on infra red. The neutron and gamma detectors picked up the faint traces of a large, functional fusion reactor. So, it was there, they just weren’t talking to us. All of our scopes were focussed on the station, at first to see that it was intact, then to look for damage or other ships… of which we saw none.
It was a standard O’Neilclass="underline" two hemisphere-capped cylinders, gleaming metal hulls five kilometers in diameter and twenty kilometers long, side-by-side and linked with big crossbars at the fore and aft hubs. Big fusion reactor sticking out the tail end of it, big zero-g docking area on the front-end crossbar. There should have been a swarm of ships around it… transports to and from the gas giant and the asteroids, transports from out of system, maintenance bots, the works. Not a one. The outer surface of the cylinders were nearly mirror smooth; that kept us from noticing right off that the cylinders weren’t turning. George of course noticed it first.
A colony station like this is a hell of a thing to see up close. Just gigantic, you know? But to see the thing sitting there dead as a mackeral, with no lights on and the cylinders stopped… that was just disturbing. I’ve seen my share of Marie Celestes over the years, and there’s always just something terribly wrong about them. But a Marie that big? Ugh.
Best as we could see on radar and visual, it was perfectly intact. The cylinders are of course dotted with hatches for escape ships; none of them seem to have been opened since they were installed. No responses to hails.
All five of us were on the flight deck, trying to figure out what to do… me in the pilots seat, Captain Sarah in the co-pilots seat, our Thessi fix-it critter Loff standing, George surrounding us all and our one passenger, Mr. Cranston, just standing there all jittery. The ships cat was… who knows. For once, she wasn’t prancing along the instrument panel.
We’d come a long way, after all, and wouldn’t get full payment until we delivered our cargo at the destination. Cranston had family on the station, so he was bound and determined to get on board. Sarah and Loff and I all had an unpleasant feeling about the situation… but heck, along with the money and the wasted time if we split, we were all curious. George of course just sorta sniffed at us. It was clear he felt that this must all be some humans fault.
This just wasn’t what we’d planned.
About two weeks earlier, this fare came in looking to go on to Gunston Station. One in-the-flesh passenger, four in cryosleep and a few hundred downloaded into a storage matrix, all staff from some R&D firm on Mars. Their papers and their story checked out and their cash was good; a nice, bland milk run of a trip. We’d used the spaceports hyperwave comm system to reach out to Gunston and file the plan. We heard ‘em clear as day… everything out Gunston way was fine and dandy, no problems to report, come right on in we’ll leave the light on for you thank you good day. So… off we went. Ten days we spent in hyperspace, cut off from the universe and entirely uneventful. Our in-the-flesh passenger - Mr. Cranston - pretty much kept to himself, stayed in his cabin except to go to the cargo bay a few times a day and check on his charges. Squirrely little fella, a bit excitable. Had a sister on the station he was going to see; real proud of her, meet him in the dining area and he wouldn’t stop yapping about how she was a physicist or some such, head of the project at Gunston that the passengers were heading out to work on. And then, just as we should be getting ready for some simple docking and payment collection, all our plans went kerblooey on account of nobody being home.
With nobody minding the store there was nobody to operate the docking bays, so George sent out a bot. It accessed the manual door controls next to one small docking bay, found that the power was still on, got the doors open. A whiff of atmosphere puffed out when the doors opened. That’s odd, you know… should have been zero pressure in the docking bay, or full atmospheric. Slight pressure meant that a slow leak had built up within the bay, coming from the rest of the station. Station maintenance was off their game. Well, the bay was unoccupied, so we just slid on in, the landing gear clamped to the floor grating. George had the bot shut the door, pressurize the bay and turn on the gravity field. A bunch of junk rained down when the gravity came on in the bay… surprised the bejesus out of us. There was all kinds of stuff that had been left floating around. A shoe — a kids shoe — landed on the canopy right in front of me and just sat there.
So there we sat. Cranston was all for dashing out of the ship; Loff was lost in thought. To my shock, Cap’n Sarah finally decided that we should go exploring. No answers seemed to be coming our way, so if we wanted ‘em, we’d have to go get ‘em.
In retrospect, we should’ve simply had George send out a bunch of bots. Heh… at the time we probably thought of that, but we wanted to go see for ourselves what was going on. So we suited up. Loff didn’t… his people aren’t nearly as naturally curious as ours, he was just as happy to stay behind and mind the store. Sarah and Cranston donned the standard ships environment suits. I put on one of those too, but with some tactical armor and a whole lot of guns. There’s no dangerous situation that can be made safer by walking into it ignorant and unarmed. I would’ve packed a few tactical nukes as well, but Sarah had never allowed me to bring any of mine on board. Damn.