M.I.A.

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

She was doing her best though. Kayla had shot out of the damaged airlock, spinning vertically and the video feed allowed us to watch her in a repeating tableau. Her face kept coming back into view and in the dead silence of the bridge, we watched her, the spin taking her face, in the helmet, in and out of sight. Nobody doubted that she was screaming and whatever the dynamics of sound in the vacuum of space, and an apparent total loss of communication through her comm connection, we all ‘heard’ her screaming. As she spun away into the vacuum, no one pushed the button that would have kept the image in focus, repeating the image of her silent screaming with every turn of her body.

“Damn,” said Captain Toval, “what the hell are we waiting for?”

Kurdok spun away from the view screen, back at his station and started fingering commands. This went on, as Toval moved toward the station, in a hurry.

“Well?” he wanted to know.

“Transporters are off-line, sir,” Kurdok told him, continuing to push, prod and manipulate functions on his instrument panel, his head bouncing up and down from panel to status screens. He shook his head, puzzled. “No tow beam function, either . . I don’t . . . no indication of any significant power loss, sir. It just . . . neither of them are functioning.”

Kurdok turned his chair to look directly up into Toval’s eyes. Toval spoke through comms to our engineer, Chris James, who was headed to the cargo bay and its damaged airlock chamber.

“Chris, we’ve lost transporter operations and tow operations,” he said. “Anything you got that’ll tell us why? We’ve gotta grab Kayla before she runs out of air. It looks as though there’s some damage to her helmet. No cracks or anything, but we’re not hearing a thing.”

“On it, sir,” said James. “I’ll reroute over to engineering and have a look. Not much point getting into the cargo bay at the moment. It’s open to the outside, but locked down otherwise.”

“Copy,” said Toval, turning back toward me, standing a few feet away behind him. “Take a shuttle. Maybe the transporter aboard the Caylus is functional.”

I was moving before he’d finished.

“Carl!” he said to my back, “we don’t know what happened and there may be something out there that caused the explosion. Keep your shields up.”

“No indication of any vessels within range, sir,” Kurdok told him.

“Yeah,” said Toval, heading back to his chair, “like that’s always an indication. Scan again, look for visual anomalies, fluctuation in images that might indicate a stealth vessel.”

“Already did that, sir,” Kurdok told him, without a hint of resentment that he’d been given such an obvious command.

I was in the lift and gone before I heard any more.

The treacherous bitch!

She knew damn well I was on to her and had opted for suicide rather than capture, arrest, humiliation and the rest of her life on some godforsaken ore-processing planet at the outer rim of the galaxy. Fine with me, except for the part that I wasn’t a step closer to figuring out who she’d been working with and what sort of danger said person or persons represented to ongoing ship operations. I knew for damn sure that she’d done something to the transporter before she’d blown the hatch and started her spin into space. I was half-hoping that the shuttle transporter would work, but I doubted it. She had pretty much total ship access and if the lady didn’t want to be caught, it’s unlikely that she’d have missed a step, whether it was disabling the Caylus transporter or any of the other shuttle’s transporters.

I got down to the shuttle bay and climbed into the Caylus, initiating pre-flight checks quickly and firing her up within a matter of minutes. The doors slid open, I hit the gas (so to speak) and shot out of the bay, angling to port, steeply to get out in front of the ship. As I came around to the front, I didn’t spot Kayla right away and leveled off, scanning the viewscreen toward the right, trying to judge the angles and trajectory of her uncontrolled flight path.

Not in sight. Could she have gotten so rapidly out of range? I flicked the comm switch.

“Dulles here, Captain,” I said. “Where the hell did she go?”

“What do you mean, Dulles?”

That gave me pause. I knew that without a word, no one on the bridge had wanted to enhance the visuals to watch her screaming face go by, up close, repeatedly on the wide viewscreen, but given the short amount of time that I’d been in the air (so to speak), I couldn’t imagine that the image had gotten that far out of range.

“I’m out in front here and I don’t see her.”

“What do you mean you don’t see her?”

I didn’t want to engage in one of those “what do you mean what do I mean?” conversations that looped back and forth like a ping-pong ball. Some thoughts, not fully-formed, gripped the back of my neck and stiffened me slightly before I answered him.

“I mean, I don’t see her, sir. Am I on-screen?”

A pause.

“No,” said the Captain, hesitant and puzzled, before speaking to his crew. “Scan around the ship and see if maybe Mr. Dulles is just mistaken about which end of the ship he’s on.”

I didn’t hear the response. With each second, those thoughts got more insistent and I got a little more nervous. Where the hell was she? Where the hell am I?

“Nothing, Dulles,” said the Captain. “I assume you can see the ship.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re forward of us, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have weapons. Can you turn and fire on the ship?”

“You can’t be serious, sir.”

“I am, Dulles,” he said. “We’ve checked the feed we’ve got on-screen here and it appears to be functioning properly. No indication why you’re not visible. If you fire a quick burst at us, minimal power, our shields can handle it, but I am assuming we’ll know it happened.”

“Okay, sir,” I told him. “Give me a minute.”

Having never used a shuttle’s weapons before because there’d never been a need, as long as I’d been on board the Troubador, it took me a while to orient myself to the iconography of the control panel and figure out what needed to be done. Didn’t take long and with a quick “Incoming, Captain!” warning, I fired at my own ship.

“Nothing yet, Dulles,” said Toval. “Systems operational?”

“As far as I can tell, sir. I saw the pulse hit the ship’s shields. It didn’t register?”

“No, it did not.”

We let that silence go on for a bit, before either of us formed a reasonable next question or suggestion. I came up with it.

“Sir, could you give the ship a little power and move it somewhere?”

“I goddamn hope so, Dulles,” he said, and then, to Polk at the helm. “Forward, Mr. Polk. Low power. Let’s not run into Mr. Dulles and his apparently invisible shuttle.”

I watched the ship in front of me for a full minute before I dared to open my mouth. Toval beat me to it.

“Well?”

“Nothing, sir. You haven’t moved an inch.”

“Return to the ship, Dulles. I’ll meet you in the bay.”

“Copy, sir.”

I angled into a sharp 180 and headed back toward the starboard rear’s shuttle bay, initiating the lockdown of the bay and the opening of the doors. As I got closer and closer to the ship, the doors hadn’t opened and I had to power down to avoid crashing into them.

“Sir, shuttle bay door is not opening,” I told him, as I attempted a second time to initiate the sequence. No response.

There was a brief pause before he came back on, his voice a little edged with frustration.

“Other than this, Mr. Dulles, how is your day going?”

“Fine, sir,” I told him. “All systems here, other than opening the damn shuttle door, seem to be operational.”

“All right, give us some time to figure out what’s going on from here,” he told me. “See if you can’t . . . . Mr. Kurdok, course projection on our spinning body in space, please. . . Dulles, Mark 289.6. See if you can’t get on to that course and find her. Stay in touch.”

Like that wasn’t going to happen. I was beginning to think that every word I was speaking to the ship was going to be my last. What the hell was going on? Was I seeing the ship or some sort of mirage? And if it wasn’t the ship, how was I still communicating with its captain on the bridge? And if I were invisible to them, how was it possible that they were communicating with me?

Facts in evidence. I climbed aboard a very real shuttle craft and exited a very real ship. From that point on, things went haywire. I was looking at . . . something, but apparently not the ship with its Captain asking me about my day. Or the ship with a shuttle bay door that responded to commands from the shuttle.

I punched in the coordinates for Kayla’s trajectory, angled back around and headed in that direction. All systems functioning as if nothing whatsoever was wrong, except . . .

No Kayla. I went out to around a few thousand kilometers and there was no sign of her. In any direction. I idly turned back and was both surprised and not surprised at all that the ship I’d assumed was within view behind me was nowhere to be seen.

“Caylus to Troubador,” I said, with more hope than I actually felt. “Have you moved, sir?”

No response.

“Captain?” I asked, tentatively, feeling it in my bones that there’d be no response. And there wasn’t.

No response. No ship. And me in a shuttle, all revved up with no place to go.