Mercury

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

I can only guess how many screams have been voided into silence, unheard, around Delta 17. And I wonder, more with every passing moment, if my voice will be swallowed into that number.

It could be about eight weeks since we landed on Delta 17, though we no longer have an accurate way to tell.

Our instruments have stopped measuring time according to the revolutions of a planet that orbits a sun 3.2 parsecs away. And now that we have no measure of time in those terms, it strikes me what an odd way it is for us to measure time.

I have never been to Earth. Even my grandfather left there as a small child, an orphaned refugee. It’s strange to have so much of what you know about yourself, and the way you think about the universe, tied to a place you have never set foot in. That you’ve only seen in pictures, and heard about in stories.

A ‘day’ on Delta 17 lasts for about one Earth week. A night can seem never ending. There’s an ongoing debate about its status as either a dwarf planet or a small moon. In my humble opinion, it’s a desolate shithole, either way. Lifeless and barren for blood-red sandy miles in every direction. Nobody visits there for fun, I’ll tell you that much.

Usually, my ship, ‘Jabba’ was a courier vessel. We’d deliver supplies to a few of the colonies on the outer limits of Epsilon Eridani. Mostly, we carried farming equipment and terra forming chemicals for ‘the Shire’ planets where most of our system’s food is grown. Occasionally, we’d get paid in produce if money was tight for them. ‘Granny Smith’ apples, “Roma’ tomatoes, and a slew of other types of plant produce, genetically copied from earthly ancestors. If there was more than we could eat ourselves, we could always take it to a boutique market in any of the great cities on ‘Pacificus’ to make ourselves a tidy sum. The people who reside in soaring planes of gleaming glass, swathed in the highest qualities of neoprene, still like to think they are “in touch with nature” when they buy a few vegetables “from the land”.

When I was little I used to dream of a life on Pacificus. To a kid who grew up on ‘the junk yard planet’, on the outskirts of our solar system, Pacificus seemed like the glamourous centre of the world.

Nowadays, there is nothing in that world that I wouldn’t trade to regain my former life on Jabba.

Jabba didn’t look fancy, because he wasn’t . He was built, ground up, from other people’s scrap metal and parts, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t built well. He was fat, “like a bumble bee” (so I’ve heard, I’ve never actually seen one). That meant he was roomy inside for a ship his size, too. He still had faint traces of graffiti, from when all my neighbours tagged him for me, to bring luck on my first voyage. I’d get him protective coating whenever he needed it, but I vowed never to paint over his tags.

Jabba is the name of my mother’s favourite villain in my grandfather’s favourite fairytale. When I was young he would tell me a grand story called ‘Star Wars’, filled with imaginary creatures and the imagined lives of humans from a long time ago in a galaxy far away. I think he felt kinship with the orphaned boy at the heart of the story who became a great hero.

My grandfather had to become my hero, when he raised me, alone, after my mother died. He helped me finish the project she and I started together, building Jabba, as a way to process our mutual grief. For a while the only conversations we could manage were ones about making a seamless join, and careful wiring, but they were the place to plant our focus, and alleviate the silence. Until we could finally break our silence about all the ways we missed her.

That was a lifetime ago. My family, since my grandfather died, has been my Jabba crew: Angel and Carrie.

Angel and I went to school together in his mother’s front room. She skilled herself up as a teacher, to make sure all the local kids, who couldn’t afford the expensive distance learning programs and paywalled knowledge caches from Pacificus, could still get an education.

I don’t exaggerate when I tell you Angel is a genius, but he’s also a ‘dwarf’, so people frequently underestimate him. About half of my job is making or finding equipment to help Angel access the parts of the ship he finds hard to reach. He’s pretty good natured, but definitely has his moments. It can royally piss him off, at times, that he has to live in a world that just wasn’t built for people like him. I feel kind guilty about that, cause I know when I built Jabba I was only thinking about my own needs.

Carrie’s people were farmers. Her uncle Ben used to insist on riding with us, to see his produce to market personally, until he finally trusted Angel and me enough to let Carrie do it instead. She was only about twelve then, but even at that age she towered over both me and Angel, being unusually tall for a girl. She’d ask me to let her fly Jabba sometimes, and I’d let her because she was really good at it.

Carrie was on a trip with us when her family’s farm was raided by bandits, no survivors. The poor kid had nobody left. So, Angel and I told her she could stay with us, if she wanted, after she had buried her aunt and uncle. She took us up on our offer, and she has been with us for the decade and one half since.

My name is Sarah, but everyone I’m close to calls me Weaver. It’s a nickname my mother gave me. She said the way I could climb and help her with the rigging when I was small made her think I must be part spider. I might be, for all I know. My mother could never bear questions about who my father was, so after a while I learnt not to ask them. She died leaving most of them unanswered, and sometimes I feel like my whole life has been about piling up unanswered questions.

We didn’t often do passenger runs on Jabba, but at the start of this trip we were ferrying a team of four investigators.

Mirren was leading the team. She had to be in her fifties, at least, but wore her age well. She was calm and polite but had grit beneath her smile. She laughed heartily and often; a far cry from being a stuffy academic. She welcomed questions, and answered them with patience. She never lauded her evidently vast intelligence over others, and I liked her a lot for that.

Richard directed most of his conversation to the rest of his team, especially Mirren, but we could tell he wasn’t a snob or anything, just shy and out of his comfort zone in new company. He was making occasional attempts to be sociable and friendly with us, and they were getting a little less awkward each time. He was about late thirties, I supposed. Just slightly older than me and Angel.

Dennis was a cheerful, burly guy in his forties. As well as being a highly skilled physicist, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge about the creatures that used to live back on Earth alongside humans. Given he was also a keen practical joker, though, we never really knew whether or not he was being truthful when he told us about the bizarre ones. He and Angel had a playful ongoing feud over whether or not something called a ‘platypus’ truly existed.

Gale was a little older than Carrie and had a gait like I imagined a ballerina might have. She seemed like she had never had an empty thought her life. She would lock something into her analytical, almost trancelike, gaze, then suddenly break into and an animated musing about it, gesticulating with an infectious kind of enthusiasm. She and Carrie were already becoming good friends.

Mirren’s team were checking out Delta 17, because it seemed to be at the centre of some type of “dead zone”, or maybe even a kind of small black hole. That was Mirren’s theory, anyway. The fact was eleven ships and their crews had vanished in the vicinity of Delta 17, in the last decade alone. Her team was hitching a ride with us to go there and find out why.

The team had to do things on the cheap because they were funding their own research. Delta 17 had been declared ‘non-viable’ decades ago, so it wasn’t a priority to find out what was going on there. Official advice was basically, “stay away from it”. In fairness, ships went missing all the time all over the system, exponentially the further people ventured away from law enforcement patrols near Pacificus. The authorities already had their hands full with pirates and bandits and land feuds and power jousts. Potential “small black holes” were probably only interesting to the scientific community, at this point in time. And even they seemed to find them far less interesting than attempts to rebuild the hyper-path to Earth.

Still, Mirren and her team wanted answers, and we were happy to brave the territory required to help them find them. They were scientists, and we were spacetaskers. All of us were pragmatists, and believers in rational explanations. So, inspite of the mysteries to be solved, none of us took the wild stories people loved to tell about Delta 17 too seriously.

Maybe we should have.

We were barely in range before the instruments started to malfunction. In ways I have never - not in nearly two decades of owning this ship - seen them behave before. Screens flashing out unrecognisable symbols like the AI equivalent of speaking in tongues. Every light strobing, while the engine screeched in a way that sounded almost … bestial. Whatever demon ghost had possessed our humble machine seemed determined to damn us to a fiery end.

“We can’t prevent a crash, only brace for it.” said Angel, looking drained.

“What about the safe? We should all just about fit in there, right?’ said Carrie, hopefully. “It’s another layer to shield us from …”

“Let’s do it.” I nodded.

The ‘safe’ was basically a large, lockable cupboard we'd put work into reinforcing a month or so earlier. We had originally used it to store our valuables on pick ups and drop offs in some of the fiercer areas in the system. Following increased reports of lethal pirate attacks, even on smaller vessels like ours, we decided to put a lock inside it and give it an oxygen store that would last us up to four hours.

The seven of us just fit inside it, standing together, with as much possible surrounding space packed in with mattresses and bedding, to brace for the impact. We sure as hell felt the crash, but we were packed in so tightly that nobody so much as got whiplash, or broke a bone.

We all knew it was nothing short of a miracle that each one of us walked away from the ship alive. The mess that was left of it, anyhow.

We also knew we had no time to dwell on it, because we could see the emerging sunset. Darkness was well on its way and, when it came, it would last for 152 hours, though we could only estimate how long we still had the light.

“We’ll scope the terrain, you scope the damage.” I told Angel and Carrie, as I prepared to set on off on reconnaissance with Mirren and her team, leaving them to assess our chances of repairing Jabba. I could already tell, from the look on Angel’s face, those chances were slim.

Gale’s anxiety was showing, too.

“We shouldn’t be able to breathe this air, unassisted, should we?” she said confused. “And the temperature … it’s so warm.”

She was right. We’d packed thermal suits with oxygenation units precisely because of the freezing and toxic conditions supposedly awaiting us on Delta 17.

“It doesn’t make sense”, fretted Gale.

“No, it doesn’t”, Richard agreed. “Though, considering the state of our equipment, I’m pretty thankful for how wrong our information turned out to be.”

Gale nodded with a faint smile, but I could see in her eyes she was plagued with doubt.

We walked for what we supposed to be two hours, in a roughly six mile circumference of the area surrounding the ship. The peculiar gravity made every step we took feel like we were walking through a wall of slime, and we saw nothing but flat planes of red sand the whole way.

As far a we knew, we were retracing some territory, already covered, to make our way back, when we were stopped, dead in our tracks, by a sudden and most incredible discovery: the spaceship graveyard.

A trail of shipwrecks stretched ahead of us, right up to the horizon. There must have been about fifty ships, of all shapes and sizes. It seemed unfathomable that we could have missed them earlier. I recognised an army freight, a few courier vessels slightly larger than Jabba, a host of smaller personal vehicles, and even a small cruise ship used, back in the day, when there were still tourist charters running this way.

Mirren’s team seemed giddy as they recognised more and more of the wrecks as the missing vessels at the centre of their investigation.

They noted the lack of damage to the ‘Mercury’, the most recent disappearance on their list. It was a medical vessel that went missing three years ago, and unlike most of the other ships around us, not to mention Jabba, it looked like it had landed here without issue.

Still, back then, that was a riddle solely for Mirren and her team. I was just happy that Angel might have a new source of spare parts to repair Jabba, so that Delta 17 didn’t become our graveyard, too.

I raced back to let him know about our find, then we tailed it straight to the Mercury. Because Angel reckoned it would be the best match for us, parts wise, from my descriptions to him.

Inside the Mercury we were struck by the stillness. For a good few minutes neither of us spoke, hesitant to break the quiet. The gleaming white metal walls were hospital clean. The whole ship was spotless and pristine; not a blanket unfolded, not a medicine vial out of place. The only thing missing was the medical crew who had boarded it, with only their neatly packed belongings left as a reminder they ever had.

“You know”, said Angel, cautiously, “this one’s in a lot better shape than Jabba”.

I nodded, but I couldn’t speak. I knew he was right. It made a world more sense to take the few parts we needed to fix the Mercury from Jabba, than the other way around.

We informed the others, then all of us made a mad dash to get the parts we needed, and bring our belongings and supplies to the Mercury from Jabba.

“Eh, Tranquillo, Weaver”, Angel tried to reassure me, on our final trip back. “Jabba’s just parked here till we can fix him, yeah?“

“I know”, I smiled, but, in truth, I knew neither one of us actually believed that. There just wasn’t the time or space, at that point, to air any heartbreak.

Angel, Carrie and I worked liked demons, in the last of the light, to get to get that ship into the air, then we set an automated course for Pacificus. There was a palpable sense of relief as the distance stretched between us and Delta 17.

I stood, looking out from a window on the side of the ship, watching the pitch black sky, so magnificently flecked with stars. I was thinking there were worse resting places for Jabba, knowing I was not really feeling it yet.

The day had been a lot for all of us, so after we ate, and drank a little to the fact that we were all still standing, we hit the sack.

The ship had individual sleeping cubicles for twelve crew members, and hospital beds for another twenty. So we could pretty much take our pick regarding sleeping arrangements.

There was nobody keeping watch that first night. Back then, we didn’t know there was anything we needed to watch for.

I’m not sure what woke me up, but I came to with an unsettling feeling. There was slight a chill in the air, and I felt a knot of dread in the pit of my stomach. Though I told myself it was probably the aftermath of a nightmare, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that we weren’t in the right place, somehow; that something was very wrong.

I sensed the alien presence on the ship even before I made my way to the flight control deck. I quietly grabbed a drill, as a makeshift weapon, from the box of tools left along the corridor, as I neared the door. I tried to tell myself it was a foolish move, and I would find nothing on the other side of the door, but I couldn’t make myself believe that.

The door openly silently, and I held my breath as I saw three figures standing, in silhouette, before the control panel with their backs to me.

I tried not to alert them, creeping towards them, slow and quiet, but suddenly they all turned to face me in one synchronised movement.

There was a woman and two men. All of them seemed to be in their mid to late sixties. Each of their faces was worn and lined, and they all seemed frail and weak. All three of them were wearing a doctor’s uniform.

“Did you sleep well?” asked the woman, with a warm smile.

“Who are you?” I asked her, with my heart in my throat. It was the tip of an iceberg of questions I wanted to ask.

“They’re the medical team on this ship”, said Mirren, from behind me. I turned to see her, just inside the door, looking as stunned about the situation as I was. "You must be doctors Elizabeth Chong, Christopher Micheals, and Gray Walker”.

“Correct”, nodded one of the men, smiling.

At that moment Gale walked in, and immediately also recognised the trio. She stared at them, agape.

I couldn’t put my finger on why, but way the three of them looked back at her made me anxious.

And then Gale fainted. Or, at least, that’s what we thought had happened, at the time.

In retrospect, I think it was the very moment they started to kill her. The very same moment they started to try and kill us all.