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7fragment · 10 months

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Some said it was the height of stupidity to travel the reaches of space alone. They would probably be right. I almost made a living roaming the between spaces looking for salvage, and sometimes the long silences got to me. I was far from the only one out cruising. Away from the main space ways where the bigger corpos had control of even salvage ops there were plenty of us. Teams of two or three and the occassional soloer rattling around in tin cans looking for something interesting. I hardly ever saw them mind, but we kept comms open and every now and then someone came into range for a bit. Never for long, but enough to break the silence for a bit.

This run had been quiet. It was late in the cycle for this system, the local solar storms could be nasty and bigger ships couldn't navigate through them. I could manage if I did everything manually. I could, but it was a pain. Still, I'd rather deal with that than try to find money for docking fees for the next couple months. There weren't any regulations against being out right now but there were restrictions on entering deep space.

I reached over to turn on my speaker when the commlink started flashing. I was drifting, most of my nav tools folded away so I could almost manage to lay down and catch some sleep without fucking up my back too badly. The signal was weak, spotty. Because of distance or the next solar storm ramping up I couldn't tell. I only got a few words. Catastrophic. Aid. Emergency. Bits of the script from nearly every pre-recorded sos call. I shut off the speaker and tried to go to sleep. The wreck would still be there after i'd gotten a few hours of much needed rest.

After a few minutes though, I rolled over and pulled myself up to the comm array. If I waited, I might get scooped and this run hadn't exactly been a fruitful harvest so far. I needed at least one good find to even break even. The message was a bit clearer now, if still dropping maybe one word in ten. I listened to the quality, my eyes on the reciever to try and manually triangulate the direction it was coming from. I nearly missed when what I had thought was a prerecorded voice swore. Prerecorded sos beacons couldn't swear, they had a pretty stiff formula to follow in fact.

Tentatively, I tapped the intercom, not quite pressing it yet. I wasn't a rescue vessel. I barely fit in my cabin much less anyone else. I might be able to rig liveable conditions in my cargo bay- maybe. I didn't do rescue, I did clean up.

I pushed the button.

"This is the Kraken, you hear me, over?"

"Oh, hey," the voice said, "Dom owes me a drink he said no one else would be dumb enough to be out here."

"What're your coords? I'm a salvage rig not a rescuer but I've been keeping my ship going on grease and miracles for years now." I couldn't just walk away now I knew someone was out there. Dying stranded in the void was the worst nightmare of anyone who did regular space travel. I wasn't a people person or i'd have a different job, but I wasn't that much of a monster either.

I heard a sound that might have been static, or the person moving their intercom around. Then, "Last reading we were three clicks off the edge of the centauri-six cluster, but we've been drifting for a while now. I might be able to send a ping if I can get it on manual controls."

"Don't bother, my nav's too old for most all p2p. I'm near Prion right now, heading your way." I paused. I wanted to know how much time they had, if I was talking to someone who was already dead. I should have asked. Everyone who traveled deep space knew the protocols. If you got a distress call you got the situation and timeline first to determine if it was even worth your time going for. I had enough fuel to get to them and then the waystation between centauri-six and disteria, probably. If i didn't take on much more cargo. Or passengers.

"What sort of trouble you having?"

It took them a minute to respond. I busied myself setting up my nav arrays and gearing up to ease as much speed out of my little pod as I could. "Engine blew. I think it was... a solar flare."

"Could've been. They're nasty this year."

"What's your name?"

"Kalé."

"I'm Lyndel. So, what has you out in the middle of fucking nowhere?"

"I'm a salvager. Wandering around the void is a good ninety-percent of the job."

"What's the other ten?"

"Five percent haggling with bastard scrap dealers, five percent boredom, and a dash or two of cool stories. What about you?"

"Oh, just a merchant ship with a fucking dumbass captain."

"That sucks." I turned away from the comms to fiddle with the nav relays, coaxing my engines back up to speed. "Can you see a return signal on me?"

"Yeah, I'll let you know if you drift off course too much."

"Thanks. Usually I can triangulate myself fine but usually i'm not in much of a hurry."

"No problem. Just glad I could have someone to talk to. You know."

Something in their tone made my gut lurch. I'd seen the aftermath of too many wrecks to not know what odds we were playing with, but I still didn't want them to just give up and die. "Like hell. We'll have plenty of time to get to know each other in the like four feet of cabin space i've got."

They laughed softly, and I tried to coax a bit more speed from my little ship. I could feel the vibrations of the engines through my seat and knew I was approaching the limit of what she could handle.

"Where're you from, Kalé?"

"What is this, twenty questions?"

"Humor me." They coughed, a wet ugly sound that went right to my gut. Were they hurt? Engine problems could be as painless as they stop working, or a literal explosion.

I pushed away the sense that I was talking to a ghost. If I didn't believe that they would make it who would?

"Taurei- the smallest moon off Sera Decatur. Booked it after my parents died and never looked back."

"Sounds lonely,"

I shrugged, mikdly embarassed when I remembered they couldn't see me. "It was fine. Never been a big fan of people anyway."

We swapped bits and pieces of each other's lives for a while. I told them about my dream of saving up enough to get a home base planetside somewhere like Bruma. They told me about their family back in the Vega system. I told them about the time I managed to lose a raider ship in the Corus asteroid belt.

They still responded, reacting to my only slightly dramatized story, but they didn't reciprocate. The silence on the other end of the comm put ice in my veins.

"Lyn? You still with me?" I did my best to keep the fear from my voice but have no idea if I succeeded or not. I was no actor, nothing even close to a crisis negotiator.

"Yeah," their comm crackled and for a second I thought i'd lost them.

Then I got a ping on my radar. It was fourth hand scrap, and barely functioned at all. It could pick up electrical and nuclear signals within a pretty small radius. Enough to keep me from drifitng into shit while I slept if my also jank as hell anchors failed. That I got a ping meant I was close. Within an hour at this speed, probably.

"Hold on, I think I've got you clocked." I swiveled in my chair, hauling the radar readout closer to the nav screen.

"Sorry Kalé, I--I don't think you're going to make it."

"Like hell. I can see you." I could, just barely, glimpse an odd red light formation in the distance. Standard distress signal, I'd seen it countless times when I found a wreck fresh enough that it still had power.

"Ah, damn." they said something else, too quiet to come through the comm. I was barely listening anyway, focused on timing pulling up to the shattered ship.

The back half was blown off, debris bouncing off my hull as I towed myself in to disembark. My ship shook when it nestled up against the remains of the engine room floor and I did a quick check of my pressure suit before I pulled on my helmet and flung myself out of the ship.

The airlock between the engines and the main cabin was still in tact, and I had to try three different override keys before I could get in. The little bits if tech were one of the msot expensive parts of my job, but all licensed salvagers had the ability to get them for situations just like this- when we were first on the scene and peopel might be- people /were/ alive inside the pressurized zone.

The cycling of the air and hiss of pressurization had never taken so long.

When the cycle finished and the door opened I froze. The wreckage outside had been typical Tuesday sort of stuff. But when the doors opened the first thing I saw was the blood. No bodies, they were probably drifting outside, but so much blood.

I fumbled, trying to unclasp my helmet. It wouldn't unseal though. A dull red alert flashing across my vision when I tried.

A dull rasping sound broke the heavy silence in the cabin. I tripped over something as I lurched forward. The person propped against the main console shifted , and I veered towards them.

"Lyn?"

They didn't move again. I fell to my knees in front of them, reaching. I couldn't bring myself to touch them. I fumbled for the emergency oxygen mask on my belt. I pressed it over Lyn's face. The seal went green to show it was in place. A rattling gasp shook them, and honey colored eyes looked blearily at me.

"You... came."

"Don't waste your breath, we'll have plenty of time to talk when we get back to my ship."

Lyn coughed, the ugly sound that I'd thought was static or interference staining the inside of the mask.

"It's okay, you..." The words died on my lips and I had to swallow a few times so I wouldn't throw up, my brain only just processing what I was looking at. I had never had a chance to save them. Not really.

I stared blindly at the space where their right arm should have been. Was that what I had tripped over?

"I'm sorry," I said. Talking to a corpse. I reached out and pulled the mask from their face, tossing it to the floor. I'd have to get a new one, it wouldn't stand up to cleaning off the blood. Lyn smiled up at me.

I grabbed their suit, as if I could drag them back to life if I tried hard enough. The edges of a name-plate cut into my hand. I wiped off the blood- not mine- to read it.

/Capt. Lyndel J. Morhan/

"Idiot." I whispered. I could almost hear the echoes of their voice 'fucking dumbass captain'. I'd heard the bitterness then but now it made all too much sense.

Fuck.

It was a while before I could manage to move. Even when I did, I set my claim beacon and then just stood there. My job had never felt like anything more than digging though trash. Picking up the detrius of other people's lives. This though, felt like grave robbing.

Instead of looking for valuables, I just started looking. Trying to understand, I think.

I took the blackbox and tucked it into a pocket before I started stripping the ship. I would need to hit that depot to refuel, and if I was going to be paying interstellar fuel prices I'd need all the value I could wring out of this useless fucking tragedy. I usually found a moon or something to drop into for that because it was significantly cheaper.

I left the ship and it's captain to drift and clambered back into my pod. The familiar confines felt off. Emptier, despite being packed to the gills with salvage.

It was nearly three months later, when I was treating myself to a stretch planetside on Gibdo that I finally got up the courage to crack the black box. I'd just got done being interviewed by the ITA about the wreck, pretty standard fare for the first salvage crew to find it. Properly I ought to have handed over the box to them for whatever investigation they'd do. I didn't want to put the contents of that last conversation into the hands of fucking government beauracrats. Talking about it again had made put me in a nostalgic mood I guess.

I didn't want to pull up the logs on my ship, because then everything in it would go into my own blackbox and eventually end up with the ITA anyway when I inevitably broke down or ran out of fuel or got hit by desperate raiders or any of the thousands of ways to die in the void.

I had used some of my money from Lyn's ship to buy myself a standalone transmitter that could read the blackbox discs. I still was in my ship when I booted up the transmitter and tried to comfortably settle the chunky old-fashioned headset it had come with properly. Getting one with a speaker would have defeated the purpose of not just using my ship's comms relay.

I scrolled through the ordinary day to day ship's logs. Maintenance checks, inventory, contacts with ITA and local check points. Boring stuff really. I was only looking at the last trip, so I didn't have too much to wade through before I started getting error messages.

One of the protocols built into every blackbox, every ITA-certified ship, was a trigger for automatic voice recording triggered on certain log entries. Pretty much any major engine error did it, and Lyn's ship had been no exception. The Nightingale, it had been called. Crew of four- Lyn, the pilot Sephicle, the navigator Misa, and Paul-the engineer. They'd been in the middle of running a basic maintenance scan when the first error hit. Fuel cell rupture. One of those things that sometimes just happened and except on ships big and expensive enough to have top tier failsafes, when it happened it was a matter of dying quick or dying slow. Suppose Lyn's crew had mostly been lucky in that.

I had to pause the feed when the first explosions happened- automatically dulled to tolerable levels by the decoder I was listening through. I reminded myself to breathe and hit play.

The screams were the hardest, until the quiet after. A video file opened automatically, and Lyn's face filled the small screen of the transmitter.

"For the official record," they said, pain drawing h

their face tight at the edges. "this is captain Lyndell Morhan, of the Nightingale. Our ship's main emgine blew today at-- I don't know, maybe ten minutes ago. Check the damn logs if you want to know. Took the back half of the ship with it. The cockpit's intact but it doesn't matter. Dead in the water, oxygen tank blown to hell. Guess that doesnt mattter either, got bashed by some debris trying to check for survivors. Fuck. They're all gone-" Lyn's face disappeared and thier voice got muffled, "- fuck." After a few more seconds the video died.

Almost immediately the recording of Lyn's SOS picked up. I skipped through most of that. It just hurt to hear it all again. I saw the text logs scrolling over my screen though. Something unfamiliar caught my eye, and I rewound a bit.

/Unknown A: Don't waste your breath, we'll have plenty of time to talk when we get back to my ship.

Cpt. Morhan: Thanks... for staying with me./

Even when I went back and listened to the recording I couldn't hear their last words. They must've had an implant comm.

Fuck.

#scifi short story #my writing #i kinda want to go somewhere with this #but idk if it needs more #space travel #lost in space #tw character death

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