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Underground > Creation >

The Fallen Star

  
 
All Acting Regiment
15:46 / 11.04.05
1

With a blinding flash, the blazing lance of concentrated light from the main lasers of the Uthe smashed into the midsection of the Grozius Star, shattering the forward dome into a spray of white hot smithereens. The whole ship lurched from the blast, the intercom rattling with howls and screams, twisted into new agonies by the collapsing telephony.

As the shockwaves from the laser strike abated, Merchant Captain Lucius Harding rose to his feet, shaking dust from his grey uniform. The command deck had not been hit full on: if it had, he knew that he would have been vaporised instantly. Still, the massive force of the Uthe's main lasers had rocked the deck and burst open monitors. All around him, his crew were dazed.

"Try to hail them!", he called above the din of malfunctioning circuitry. "Tell them we're a Free Merchant Class vessel, for fuck's sake!" His voice was breaking; the middle aged Star Captain almost sounded like an adolescent. "Tell them we mean no harm! Tell them that the attack is illegal!"

Vaporised instantly. As he glared out of the glass windows- a rarity these days; inches thick glass- he saw bodies drifting listless in space; in amongst the cargo containers that had spilled out of the blazing wound in the Grozius's forward dome. Maybe it was better to be vaporised. The knifeish black silhouette of the Uthe hung still like a vulture above them. No lights, save for the looming white strip of the main laser as, slowly yet inevitably, it began to recharge. A silent, black knife in the void. She had yielded only her name and no more; she had shared no human details with the Grozius Star.

"Sir! Sir!" Harding spun on his heel. A young man, one of his minor apprentices, named Braker, stood with his hand on his temple, blood dripping through his fingers. "Permission for Holding Bay Alpha crew to access Escape Pods, sir!"

"How many of you are there?", barked Harding. The boy's eyes were wide. "Just...me, Sir, the others have already…" Harding swore loudly. In truth, it seemed that the game was up. "Yes. All of you.” Harding shouted at the room in general. “All hands to the Escape Pods, do you hear? All of you!"

The remaining crew needed no telling. They upped as a body and ran to the great airlock that led down to the cavernous escape bays. The apprentice halted just inside the airlock, for a reason he never would work out, and peered back into the command deck to see the Captain standing alone, bent over the control console. Then a hand grabbed the apprentice and he was pulled back as the doors closed with a final hiss.

No-one talked of honour in the long run to the Escape Deck; no-one spoke, though a few cried out involuntarily as the gantries swung and buckled under bursting pipes and shattering bulbs.

The ship was dying. Captain Harding glowered at the cracked console screen as, sector by sector, the map of the ship in front of him turned from green, then to amber, then red. It was dying, but he wouldn't leave it.

One last time he punched the keyboard. HAIL. Nothing. Again. HAIL. For a second, there remained no answer, and then a voice filled the control room, a voice from the other ship. It sounded almost drunk, slurred, a mere slurred breath and the occasional hint of a chuckle. No words.

"Damn you!", shouted Harding. "We are a free...a Free Merchant Class Trading Vessel! We are the Grozius Star! We are not a military facility..." No answer came, just the slow, steady breathing. Before Harding's eyes, he could see the escape pods screaming away from his crackling ship. As he watched, thin beams of white light struck out from the Uthe, eliminating the tiny escape craft like a child crushing glow worms. Harding continued to talk as tears began to trickle down his face. "We carry no weapons...we are transporting simple farming machinery..."

The main laser fired again, and a searing heat came to the control deck. There was no knowledge of it for Harding, no sensation; just a scream in the abyss as the Grozius Star exploded like a bead necklace dropped on the ground.
 
 
Withiel: DALI'S ROTTWEILER
16:45 / 11.04.05
There's something rather special about that. I very much like the way you've dealt with the "Captain always goes down with the ship" tradion without any macho bullshit. Also, it reads as almost elegaic (to me at least), despite all the explodeyness of the subject matter. There's something very muscular about the prose, too... Very much looking forward to the next installment. [insert hideous smiley thing here]
 
 
All Acting Regiment
19:59 / 11.04.05
2

The apprentice felt the vomit leave him as the Escape Pod wrenched from it’s mounting and span at a hellish speed away from the Grozius Star. In the zero gravity, his sick floated amid blood and buttons, bandages, spanners, the drifting detritus of a crew in chaos. All around him people clung to their seat units, their faces each a unique mask of terror.

A few of them he recognised from his work: a woman who was part of catering, a young Spanish mechanic a little older than himself in the berth next to him- but most were strangers. A solitary computerised voice whined from the wall, muttering numbers. Distance from the Grozius: a hundred metres, five hundred, ten hundred: and then silence, followed by a great wave of heat and vibration that struck the enclosed pod and sent it hurtling this way and that. The mechanic turned to the apprentice with sad, raised eyebrows and said through gritted teeth: “She’s blown. That was her. She’s blown.”

The apprentice nodded, and then wished he hadn’t, as he moved his head the nausea returned. The mechanic was still talking: a coping mechanism, of course. “Who were they, eh? Who were those fuckers?” There was oil smeared on his face. The others were silent. The pod’s gravity generators were slowly beginning to come online. The various loose rubbish slowly sunk to the corrugated floor.

The woman from catering disengaged from her seat unit and stepped carefully across the floor, bending to pick up a purse. Her blue uniform was stained with soot, blood, oatmeal. As she rose she shrugged and said: “Shall I run a roll call?” There came no reply, a few bleary looks. She shook her head with a sigh. “We might as well. Just call out your names in turn. We need to know who’s here.”

The Spanish mechanic nodded. “I’ll start, eh? Miguel Paz.” The apprentice spoke up, realising how cracked his voice was. “Lyle Braker.” Slowly, each person in the tiny pod spoke up: sixteen in all. The catering woman- Ellen Sassier- typed it into the computer terminal.

Though they did not know it- the pod was windowless, engineless- they were alone in space. The Uthe had slipped back into the darkness from whence it came; it had smashed the Grozius Star with two blunt swipes and pricked out all but one of her escape pods. This one pod, pod Twelve, hung still in the blackness, one side burned black from the exploding Grozius. Lyle turned to Miguel. “You were in Reactor Two, yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m a grease monkey, eh. I seen you around. You look alright.”

The Spaniard seemed shaken; but whereas Lyle, a thin, pasty boy from Minnesota was genuinely shocked down to his stomach, Miguel seemed to be recovering quickly.

“This is your first crash, eh, Braker? I can tell.” He tipped his head back. “We’ll be picked up soon enough. I been in two crashes before now. Not ever like this though. I was in the Mining Rig over Titan, you remember that?”

At the mention of this incident, several others looked up. It was famous, and a story was attractive, a way to while away the boredom. “We had a stray asteroid swing our way. Took out our control tower. We had ten minutes to get out.” Miguel laughed. “Ten minutes. That’s what they said. We had five. Half of us didn’t make it.”

A thin man from the control deck looked up. “Then there was Planetfall?” Miguel nodded. “Well, Moonfall, my friend. The whole rig tumbled down to the surface. It was hell down there. You could see the fire from space.” He shook his head. The whole group was listening now. “The surface of Titan’s like a honeycomb, see, with all the mines. Massive collapse. Thousands dead. They put a plaque up in Washington.”

Miguel closed his eyes as the others murmured their acknowledgement. There were worse tragedies than what they had suffered. The man from the control deck turned to the catering woman. “You, Ellen. Check the monitors. Find out where we are.” She turned, stared at the screen, looked non-plussed. “You’ll have to tell me how.” The control deck man got up and limped over to the console.
“This is my password”, he said, rattling the keyboard. Ellen, a woman nearing middle age, raised her eyebrow. “You shouldn’t be telling us that?”, she asked, to which the man shrugged.
“No ship anymore. No more, uh, regulations. I’m just like the rest of you now.” Ellen smiled, and pointed at the gold chevrons on his shoulder.
“You going to take those off?”
“No. I, uh, I like them. Look. I’ve got our co-ordinates. The nearest world is…Glasnost Major. Anyone? Anyone know anything about Glasnost Major?”
Miguel opened his eyes suddenly. “Glasnost Major? We'll be picked up. Soon.” The control deck man swallowed. “I hope so.”
 
  
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