Episode 604: Search For Closure, Part Five
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On cursory inspection we see they’ve been dead and have been for some time. The children appear to have been drugged, anesthetized, before they died. Why? Joshua suggests that they were drugged to spare them the pain of dying from lack of oxygen. Rather like the way we put ourselves under when our coolant loop failed eight months ago, to save our oxy and to buy us time to be rescued. The children look as if they simply fell asleep and never woke up. Their mother, however, died convulsing and unlike the evidence from the other bodies we’ve found, her convulsions look as if they had a cause other than oxy deprivation. Poison, perhaps? We won’t know until we autopsy her remains … and neither Arden or Kiera mention it in front of Boston.
Boston is understandably upset. We withdraw to give him a little privacy for his grief.
We finally find some answers in the other ships’ logs. The colony had problems with outgassing. Fluorine and other noble gasses had become trapped in the crust of Puck during terraforming, to slowly build and then work its way to the surface as explosive pockets or bubbles. Some of the outgassing occurred inside the ships. Bumblebee class ships were ultimately designed to be one-way means of travel, single-use ships built to survive one outbound journey, and then to be taken apart to build more permanent structures once on the ground. The seams at the bulkheads therefore suffered from fissures and cracks that allowed the gas access to the interior of the ships, setting off fires and explosions. That was the most probable cause of the kitchen fire we saw in the first ship. If the ground hereabouts is unstable, allowing for frequent outgassing, it would go far to explain why the colonists failed to thrive here. Further examination of the logs support the idea: the colonists first tried stabilizing the soil by adding concrete, to no avail. The outgassing ruined their crops as well, poisoning what it didn’t kill. The plants we’ve seen growing all around are poisonous and cannot be eaten.
Joshua gently asks Boston what he wants to do with his family.
Joshua: Mr. Boston? Are you planning to bury them here or would you want us to … ?
Boston: Well …
Joshua: Whatever you wish, we can do.
Boston: I think I’d like to bury them here.
Joshua: Then we can do that.
Boston gets up and starts searching the compartment for mementoes of his loved ones. No one stops him.
Nika: (slowly) As much as I hate to do so, I think we need to go ahead and finish taking a look at the other three ships we haven’t seen yet.
Joshua: I think two of us should go out and check this one out.
He points in the direction of the lone ship to the side, the one not connected to the others by rope bridge. It would mean going down to the ground and crossing over on foot.
Joshua: I don’t know what the frequency of the outgassing is but I don’t want to be here when it happens.
Nika: Yeah. I don’t want to be here for very long if that’s the case.
Joshua: So Rina and I will go over.
Nika: Go do that.
Beglan elects to stay behind with Boston to help the man take care of his family’s remains and to offer him support in his grief. We leave the two men on the third ship as Nika and the others check out the last three still roped together. Rina and Joshua descend through the decks of the ship to reach the ground, there to cross over to the loner ship on foot.
In the circle of ground surrounded by the ships, all the crew finally notices that there are little raised mounds in the soil. Shallow graves, rounded and smooth. There are about ten of them. On the rope bridge, Kiera spies something out of the corner of her eye in the ship closest to the landing pad. A flash. She sharpens her gaze.
Kiera: What in hell’s name is that? Did you see that? Captain, did you see the flash?
Nika: What flash?
Kiera: There was a red flash over there at the other ship, the first ship we went into.
Nika: Are you kidding?
Kiera: No. I am not kidding.
Crossing the ground below them, Joshua saw it too—a crimson red flash.
Joshua: Rina, did you see that?
Rina: No. What did you see?
Joshua: Crimson flash. From the other ship. Over there. (points)
Rina: Do you want to go on to that ship—(points at the loner ship, then at the other)—or do you want to go to this one? Or do you want to tell the others that we’re going to check out the flash?
Joshua: I’m going to tell the others.
He comms Nika and tells her that he and Rina will check out the flash in the other ship.
Nika: I thought you guys were going to check out the other sh—
Joshua: We are but—
Nika: Yeah, go. Go. Be careful.
Rina: Yes, Ma’am.
Joshua: When am I not careful?
Nika: Joshua.
They go. Nika and the others continue on the rope bridges to the last three ships in the chain. Rina and Joshua look at the ship with the strange flicker and Rina sees it for herself this time. It’s crimson red and she recognizes it from her memories in the Navy—she’s seen fires aboard ships from a distance before and they do flicker eerily like this one does. The color is odd, though. Why crimson red? What could burn and produce a flame that color? Some sorts of chemicals would—She becomes aware of Joshua trying to get her attention.
Joshua: Rina. Rina, float with me for a second. If there’s a fire in there and all these ships are open to each other, do we have to worry about the fire spreading across the bridges?
No. The rope would very likely burn through before it traveled the distance to the others.
Joshua: Let’s go check it out.
They have to climb up the landing struts to the lower-most airlock to get inside. Luckily, it’s not that difficult, even encumbered in the suits. There’s power going to the controls and the airlock’s iris door opens right up. Rina and Joshua go inside.
Rina: Do you want to seal it up, take that risk? Or leave it open so we can get out that much faster? What do you want to do?
Joshua: Seal it up.
Shhhhhnnnnnk!
Rina: All right. Captain, can you hear me?
Nika: I can.
Rina: We’re inside the ship.
Nika: All right.
Nika and the others have made it inside the fourth ship in the chain. As they enter the six-way junction just past the airlock, they see another body, a man’s. Unlike the others we’ve found so far, this one’s suffered violence—there’s blood spatter and wounds consistent with small weapons fire. The body is wearing a respirator mask. The man is not armed with a gun but is holding something rather like a tire iron. Kiera examines the spatter to determine what direction the shots came from. It looks like the shots came from above.
Huh.
Nika: Arden. You were right.
Arden: About what?
Nika: This was a bad idea. I’m not liking this. I really can’t put together what was going on here, except maybe they were getting desperate.
Arden takes the respirator off the body as Nika plans their next move. She wants to check the bridge of the ship they’re on before moving to the last two ships in the chain, the ones with the cargo container walkway. They’ll have to travel through the upper decks of the ship to get to the bridge and if the shots came from above … will they run into the person who shot the guy currently lying at their feet?
Back at the ship next to the landing pad and Equinox, Rina and Joshua have gained the six-way intersection just past the airlock and have taken one of the corridors toward what they believe to be the location of the ship fire. Rina looks for fire extinguishers mounted to the walls. She finds nothing but empty spaces where the extinguishers should be. They open the door at the end of the corridor and smoke billows out. Flames lick up and down the walls beyond, burning through panels and insulation, consuming wiring and circuitry. Looking carefully from where she’s standing, Rina can see through the gaps in the walls that the fire is travelling between the interior walls and the outer hull of the ship, crawling through it as fast as it can burn, following the path made by whatever flammable material it encounters. She knows that it’s very hard to put out a fire of this type on a ship. It’s difficult to flood the interstitial space between the hulls with fire retardant. There are always nooks and crannies the fire can hide in, to flare up later when no one expects it.
They hail Nika to tell her what they’ve found and find out that they can’t get through. They are too deep inside the ship to connect with their crewmates. Joshua and Rina back out of the compartment and close it up. They’ll have to get closer to the airlock, if not outside the ship entirely, and make their report there. As for the fire …
Joshua: Do we have anything to put out the fire?
No. The extinguishers are gone. And that’s not the only thing to worry about. Rina and Joshua check their air. She’s got 90 minutes. He’s got 40.
Back on the other ship, Nika and the rest check their suits and similarly find that they are approaching their last hour of oxy. Like Rina, Kiera has 90 minutes left but Nika and Arden only have 60. They push on. Likewise, Joshua continues to work on the apparent task at hand.
Joshua: So what are we doing? Do we have anything back on our ship to put out the fire? Actually, before you answer that question, do we care? (off Rina’s sigh) If the ship burns into small little pieces, would it hurt our ship?
Rina: It depends on how widespread the fire is and also it has the potential to explode and set other things on fire.
Joshua: How widespread is the fire?
Rina: From what little I can see it’s between the hull and the interior bulkhead of the ship. It’s in interstitial space. Think coal seam fire.
Joshua: That means nothing to me. Or to most people.
Rina: The hull is a sandwich. (holds her hands an inch apart) Outside. Space. Inside. This side we see when we’re inside the ship. In the between we run all our power lines and conduits and everything else and so on—that’s where the fire is. Hard to get to.
Joshua: Huh. See? You should have said that in the first place.
Rina: Interstitial says all that. Nice, neat, efficient word. Anyway, I don’t think we can put it out with what we have here.
Normally if one had an interstitial fire, you’d simply suit up and expose it to the vacuum of space. Snuff that sucker right out. Unfortunately, we’re in atmo and vacuum is a mite hard to come by.Besides, fluorine will burn quite happily without atmo and the vacuum wouldn’t much affect it anyway. Putting it out would be one bitch of a trick.
Joshua: Are we worried about the fire spreading to our ship?
Rina: I would be.
Fire itself aside, this ship also has a 125-foot tower on it and should it fall due to structural failure from the fire, it will hit Equinox and damage her.
Joshua: We should probably leave this ship and move our ship. Or leave and let the Captain know. Or maybe just take off on our ship and scare everybody.
Rina: We should at least take off in our ship and move it. I say we move our ship. Tell the Captain and let her decide.
Joshua taps the side of his helmet. Our comms are blocked, remember? He points back toward the airlock.
Joshua: We have to go. Over there.
Rina: Then let’s leave. Let’s go. Get out in the air, then contact her.
Nika and the others have made their way to the penultimate ship in the chain and are en route to the bridge. They find another body. It’s been beaten and hacked at, possibly with a blunt weapon. There are slashes across the face. It’s quite ghastly. Definitely not a suicide. But who—? As much as they’d like to investigate, Nika and the others have a limited amount of air and another ship to search. They push on to the bridge and try retrieving the log records. There’s no power left on this ship’s bridge. There’s nothing they can do to retrieve whatever might be left.
They push on for the container walkway that connects to the last ship. They find the door to it and pry it open and look inside the makeshift corridor. There’s canvas and boxes and suchlike scrap in there but no bodies. It’s just a walkway with some trash in it.
The next ship seems to be in better shape than the rest. There’s evidence of some kind of repair foam, the sort used in decompression emergencies. It’s a foam sealant that’s sprayed into small hull breaches which expands to plug the hole. Thinking to the cracks and open seams in the hulls of the other ships, it looks like some effort was made to make this ship airtight against the environment, to secure parts of the ship from the outgassing. Nika and the others note this and get to the bridge. The bridge’s computer records were erased. Nothing useful can be gleaned from them.
Going back through the ship, they notice that unlike the other ships, this one’s kitchen and pantry seem really well stocked, relatively speaking. Whoever lived in this ship hadn’t yet run out of food. Nika surmises that perhaps the survivors had withdrawn into this last ship and taken all their supplies aboard, either to wait for rescue or to save themselves as other people died.
Or someone was stockpiling supplies away from the others. Was this why that one man was killed so brutally? Did someone find out and mete out rough justice for it? And what of the one killed by gunfire? Kiera notes that they still haven’t found the gun.
Nika: Oh, I really didn’t want to hear that. Really didn’t want to hear that.
Because that implies that whoever shot that gun back then might still be alive and be gunning for us now. And really, right now Nika has other things to worry about.
Nika: All right. Finish searching this ship. Then we’ll head back the other way around, pick up our passenger and his family to take back to our ship. And we will get off this planet just in case. Cuz I really don’t want our ship burning up in one of these gas-friggin'-bubbles.
Arden doesn’t help her anxiety at all with this next bit of news:
Arden: The reactions between fluorine and other elements except for helium, neon, and argon, are often sudden or explosive. It is so reactive that border halogens and substances, even the generally nonreactive gas radon, burn with a bright flame in a jet of fluorine gas. It can even oxidize elemental nitrogen.
Kiera: Yay.
Meanwhile, back on the other (burning) ship, Rina and Joshua are making their way back to the six-way junction and the airlock. Rina’s still trying to puzzle out the odd color of the flames.
Rina: What color is fluorine gas? … Yellow. What sort of chemical salts burn that color crimson?
Joshua: How would you know, Rina? You’ve got no science.
Nothing like a formal scientific education, no, but Rina’s memories of ship fires tell her that there might be something in the insulation that burns crimson. Anyway, it’s not her main concern. Getting out into the air so as to contact Nika is.
Back on the other ship, Nika and the others have gotten to the six-way junction and the overhead hatch to the rest of the ship is stuck. The manual release lever looks to have been tampered with, too. They’ll need a torch to cut through it and gain access to the rest of the ship.
Kiera: Do we care?
Nika: You mean if there’s someone left here?
Kiera: Yeah.
Nika: Not entirely sure, no.
Kiera: No, that’s what I’m thinking. Leave them up here.
Leave whoever was capable of beating that guy to death here, she means. To say nothing of whoever shot that other guy to death. But we’ve also found no other signs of life. There’s no evidence that whoever killed those others is still here.
Nika: I wonder what the hell happened here.
As for the hatch, we’ll need tools to get through it. Kiera grouses that the tools are … let’s see, one, two, three, four ships away.
Nika: No. We can go right on outside and walk across.
Kiera: That’s true.
And speaking of outside and across …
Rina and Joshua have made it to the airlock corridor when they’re caught up by a sudden explosion. Rina is knocked to the deck by the blast. Joshua is thrown against the wall and suffers wounding and stun from the impact. There’s fire all around them, gouts of it shooting from air vents and power sockets and crawl spaces. Even though dazed, Joshua looks around him in wonder.
Joshua: Wow. This is cool …
Back at the other ship, Nika and Arden are sorting through the junk to find something to get that hatch open. A terrific blast outside the ship makes everything rock and shudder and slams everyone to the deck. Kiera picks herself up and looks through a porthole. She sees a torch of yellow flame shooting up and engulfing the ship next to Equinox, rising through the tower arm and cresting it. And she realizes Rina and Joshua are somewhere inside it.
Kiera: Oh God …
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