Hellions

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Sound depends on vibrations and so requires a medium, like air or water. If you're on a ship, in a pressurized air cabin, the vibrations hit your ear and your brain interprets the sound as the other people in the cabin screaming for their lives, as they will when they're in that much pain.

But what about after the bulkhead blows? When the hull is breached and the air rushes out into the void, so allergic to itself it would rather disperse into nothingness than maintain cohesion enough to be breathed, isn't there still sound then? The sound of the screams may be drowned out by the death-rattle of the howling wind, but you could still hear it if you were close enough to the bunk-mate who'd been right beside you when disaster struck. You might still be close enough to hear him that you'd reach for him, even if you weren't quite close enough to save his life.

And once you were vented, if you happened to be lucky enough to be equipped with a mechanical gelatin suit that would wrap itself around you and protect you, you might still be able to hear the screams over comms of anyone else who'd been lucky enough to have a suit when the bulkhead blew. Comms still carry vibrations, after all, and there is still air in your bubble under the gel, so you can still hear their screams as they are engulfed in the flames of the exploding ship.

So then you're alone in space, out in the void. Now you're safe from the screaming, right? Except that there are still bodies flying around you, floating lifeless in the dark, and you can still see their faces. Haven't you ever heard a picture? An image so thoroughly entangled with a sound that the one induces the other? When you see that face, the face of someone you knew, someone you served with, maybe even someone you could have grown to love, but now it's frozen in that rictus of agony and fear—how can you not hear that? The vibration doesn't have to go through any atmosphere if it's coming from inside your skull.

And then of course the scream you hear is your own.

The sergeant screamed inside his mecha-gel spacesuit for a while as he watched the Terran Space Force Ship Donwell disintegrate, body after body falling into emptiness as, deck by deck, holes appeared in it, made by that thing inside.

He hadn't gotten a very good look at it. The thing itself, whatever it was, had been reported to him less than ten minutes ago. He'd been cataloguing crew reports or checking weapons manifests or something routine—amazing how quickly routine chores can seem long gone and faraway when your fans clog up with excrement. He could never remember doing the chores once they were done, he only remembered now how he'd been reflecting on just how pointless it was for any of them to be out there, how this sector was empty and no one had seen or heard from the Spacefolk in, what, two hundred years? Since before Earth forces even managed to leave the solar system.

Then like clockwork, the universe decided to punch him in the face. Or, more specifically, in the spaceship. Alarms went off and in less time that it took to walk down to the mess for a cup of coffee, this is where they were. Not long enough for most of the crew to get suited up—even he wouldn't have if he hadn't had the mecha-gel implants in his arm, leg and eye, deployable on command at a moment's notice within twenty seconds, turning him from a dour, haggard sergeant-at-arms into a sleek, shiny, apparently faceless robot warrior.

From his desk, he'd dispatched orders for all units on duty to hunt for the unidentified intruder and all units not on duty to wake up and get to work trying to prevent this exact scenario from taking place.

But from the looks of it, it had already been too late. He could see holes forming in the hull at multiple locations simultaneously. This wasn't just a singular intruder. There were a lot of them.

"Sarge?" he heard faintly over the comms once his voice gave out. "Anybody! Is anybody still alive out there?"

The readout in front of him showed the name of the soldier in question.

"I'm here, Lee," croaked the sarge.

"Oh, thank God."

"Are you still inside the ship?"

"Are you not?"

"You need to get in a suit, get to an escape pod and—"

Screams. Screams and a hard-to-place chattering sound.

Then the comms went dead again.

I have to get back to the ship, he thought. I have to… But what could he do? Now?

So it was that the sergeant-at-arms drifted away from the crumbling ship. He had enough fuel to get back, probably even enough to destroy one or two of the intruders. But why? To save a few other crew members from a quick death just to watch them drift through the cold dark until they suffocate, like he was? Or maybe to earn a quick death for himself.

No, he decided. No, I don't deserve anything quick. Let me bleed out like the disgraced warriors of old.

He had oxygen. Again, not enough to do him any good this far out. Maybe I should just go ahead and die, he reflected. It would be easy enough, wouldn't it? Override the safety precautions and just open up. Weren't people always telling him he needed to open up more?

It would not be a pleasant death. It would not be quick, not like the squelching bite of being stabbed, ripped open, spine severed, nerves ended. It would take minutes—at least three—for his brain to shut down once he stopped being able to breathe, and in that time, his lungs would be screaming, blood vessels bursting, and that was to say nothing of the cold. Hell, maybe I should go back to the ship, he thought.

But then his decision was made for him.

Something had emerged from the vessel's corpse, something small but covered in spindly appendages. A spider, thought the sarge. Just my luck, first contact with confirmed extraterrestrials and it turns out to be giant space bugs after all. He had had a bet going with Lieutenant Cortes in engineering, one he was resentful of winning, under the circumstances. She'd insisted it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable, and had her money on humans being the aggressors. He tried not to think how she'd taken the news.

The overgrown arthropod came at him quickly—too quickly to just be coasting on momentum built up from the ship. It was accelerating. It was moving, and he couldn't tell how. Some kind of exhaust system? Was it farting its way to his location?

As it got closer, the spindly appendages opened up, revealing a central body or torso or whatever the science nerds wanted to call it. And in the center of that hard mass was an opening, and it glowed. An eye? thought the sergeant. Or a mouth?

He didn't wait to find out, but chose violence instead. He swung his arm down, instructing the mecha-gel to form into the biggest gun it was designed for and shot straight into the glowing mass in front of him. This did two things: a moment after he shot, the space-bug invader thing popped like a balloon, sending spindly legs (or whatever the hell) out in all directions. But none of that shrapnel reached him because before it even popped, the force of the projectile hurled him further out into space.

That solved the problem of whether he was going back to the ship, at least.

He turned off the chronometer on his display screen, then thought better of it and turned off the screen itself. He didn't need to know how much oxygen he had left, how much fuel, what the temperature was. He just needed to stare off into the middle distance as short bursts of red light showed him bigger and bigger pieces of his home, of his life, being blasted away, crumbling into nothing. Then he thought better of that, too, and turned away, craning his neck up to look at the stars above him. The weightlessness of space reminded him of learning to swim, of learning to float on his back in the pool, the shallow waves lapping against his ears, literally drowning ambient sounds.

That was a pale imitation of space, though, of how the silence beyond comms gives way to auditory hallucinations and the persistence of screams. He couldn't do anything about it now. Nothing to do but watch the stars drift down his field of vision as he tumbled over backwards into infinity.

He had no way of knowing how long he had been tumbling when he started to notice that he was short of breath. But he did know that it was around about that time that something large and unnaturally geometrical made its way into his field of vision. Still tumbling, he spent one spin thinking it wasn't really there, then when it was closer thinking that he had gone mad. On the third spin, it occurred to him that there was an infinitesimal chance that this ship belonged to the very enemy his people had been hunting for two hundred years. Wouldn't that be something? Whatever had destroyed his ship was definitely something else, so yeah, wouldn't it be something, ironic maybe, or one of those other hard-to-define adjectives, if, on the very same day, practically in the very same breath, this sergeant were to make contact not just with some random space-born alien species, but also with a branch of humanity that had taken to the stars a thousand years ago?

But by the time the ship pulled him into their airlock, he had managed to convince himself that it was a barge carrying him to the afterlife.

"Are you an angel?" he muttered to the pock-marked, bearded crewman who was trying to remove his helmet to check his vital signs. He raised his arm and the rest of the team searching him backed away, which confused him until he realized that arm was still shaped like a really big gun and he didn't have enough juice in his mecha-gel matrix to reshape it back into a glove. Oh, well. Hey, wait a minute, though, why would angels be scared of a weapon?

He didn't spend too much time on this thought, though. He was trying to make out what they were saying. It sounded like English. But like, really old English. The kind of English they would've been speaking before…

Oh, crap, they are Spacemen.

A thousand years ago, when things started going downhill, some cabal of rich bastards had kidnapped a bunch of scholars and artists and loaded them onto a ship (or three ships, or five, depending who was telling the story) and sent them out to the stars to find a new home while Earth descended into chaos. Legend had it that the artists and scholars and such were frozen during the journey, so yeah, their English was likely to have changed less in the time in between.

That's great and all, said his idiot brain, but what are they saying?

The sergeant had taken some ancient language courses back in the day. It had satisfied a cultural requirement, but more importantly he had been trying to impress a girl, so he leaned in, trying to make it out.

"We have to know what happened," said one of them. "Rose is going to expect a report."

"We can get that report from the survivor," said another.

"Assuming he recovers and assuming he cooperates—are we even sure he'll understand us?"

"He may not even know anything," someone else pointed out. "If it was something technical, he might not have the expertise to tell us what we need to know."

There was a moment of silence. The sergeant was slow, putting his brain back together, reclaiming rational thoughts. It took him a minute. It took him until he heard one of them say: "Well, guess we should check out the wreckage, then!"

"No!" the sergeant cried out. He shifted around on the ground, trying to regain his bearings, but he was dizzy. The crewmen were just looking at him.

"I'll go give the captain our recommendation," said one of them. He couldn't tell which, couldn't tell them apart. "You stay and see if you can get him to calm down."

"Don't go!" cried the sergeant. But his accent was thick, terrible, probably unrecognizable, especially through the helmet that still wouldn't open. "Don't go! They'll kill you, too! They'll kill you, too!"

But the orderlies strapped him down, suit and all, onto a table, then left him alone in the room. A few minutes later, they flooded it with some kind of gas. As he started to lose consciousness, it occurred to him that he had been perfectly willing to die out there in the vacuum of space without having to witness a second ship picked apart by those things.