#3
Aiyela finds the Derelict
By J.S. Clark
Copyright 2012 Jesse Clark
Table of Contents
The Story
About J.S. Clark
Aiyela finds the Derelict
The “Iiiii gotta blitzen, new jetpack,” Aiyela sang as she spun about in a beat-up green desk chair she had for a captain's seat. “It’s titanium and yellow, Jack!” Ball bearings squawked and ground as she turned past seven o'clock, slowing her spin. “Hey,” she glared downward, taking a hand off an origami swan she'd been working on, to shake a threatening finger. “We keep you around to serve this ship. Spin well, and live.” She turned her attention back to the swan. “Don a helmet for my head. Drop the dareless boots of lead, cuz Iiiii gggottta fllyyyyy . . . ” Alright, it was a headless swan. A headless swan with a gimp wing. The lady who taught her had made a swan . . . She tried to sharpen the tail and stretch out the stump of the neck, but new creases formed and the in-betweens started to show fatigue. Push it back! The wrinkles deepened. Grrrr.
It turned from a swan to a paper meteor bouncing off the far wall. Space ships didn't need flocks of paper birds cluttering up consoles, anyway. She didn't even know why she'd bought the paper. She didn't have any other use for it.
Beepity-beep. Beepity-beep. Beepity-beep, said her console's communication system. A little black and green half globe showed an azimuth pointing in the direction of an incoming signal. A general distress call from a frigate, some mass-produced slave machine. Doesn't even have a name —serial number MKD1810.
Hmmm. It was a general signal so that suggested the person in distress didn't know who was out there, which made sense for someone really in distress. But they could still be fishing. It wouldn't be the first time someone had played possum to lure their lunch, and Aiyela was a bit more cautious since her run in with the pirate captain Retinbour. Even if he did turn out to be an OK guy.
Le sigh. What would Yasha do? Her brown eyes looked up to the speckled space. She knew the answer of course, despite a flurry of protests as she remembered the detour that got her captured by the Captain’s robots and thinking her coolant was cooked. Her fingers bounced through the navigating menus and her course changed from a beeline to Meldis to a beeline for no-mans space. It was a ways out. She had time for a bowl of Super Ramen; a vitamin drenched, protein bulked, resurrection of the universe's best comfort food. After that, she filtered the extra broth back to clean water and washed her brown hair over the utility sink. It was a well known fact that oil should be changed every three hundred light-years or three months, whichever came first. When it was done, she gathered up three fingers of hair toward the front, put red and green beads in them and braided them together—she wanted to try looking good for the guests.
By the time she had rounded out the routine with a quick nap, her proximity alarm indicated the frigate’s approach. She turned all her sensors to active and cranked up the juice. Time to see if the roaches scatter. Space sure looked empty enough, and there in the middle of her sweeps was a blunt-nosed blimp of a ship. Her '72 Mi-Kalat wasn't pretty by any stretch, but at least it had sentimental value and character. This other ship didn't even have that. Still, it didn't look damaged. Its main systems appeared operational including life support —though at a dangerously reduced output. Hmmm. Unless it ran out of gas there was no reason for distress.
She rang the doorbell with her comm. system, but nobody answered. The other ship continued to spin lackadaisically with no indication that she had been noticed. Aiyela deployed the magnetic grappling arms as she steered for a personnel port, lining it up with her secondary hatch on the Mi-Kalat's belly. Easy as scrap, she flicked a switch to let the computer make the umbilical connections.
Aiyela ran down to the engine bay and collected the All-Tool —just in case things got sparksy —and a small canvas tote that was green on one end and greasy on the other, from where it rode against her mechanic’s jumpsuit. She stuffed a few of her common tools in there. Then, because she was working on her undeveloped genteel side and hoping for guests, she threw in a canteen of water.
And because she was also working on her cooking, she went to the galley —the fold down kitchen next to her bunk —and collected a sponge cake that made her grimace. It was a bit of a sore spot for her. She have would liked to blame the cobbled-together-cookbook, which she'd got in-trade for a whole pint of H73-01 near magic, but for her the recipe didn't produce anything like a sponge. Hers was more of a clutch-pad cake. Becoming a decent cook was harder than turning a solar sail into an optical antennae.
With systems operating normally, the frigate's hatch opened without a problem.
“Oh, please no.” What was on the other side was a problem. A foul stench like the tentacle of death reached up and choked Aiyela. She'd never smelled anything like it aboard a ship. It was like some nightmare on a planet's surface where all the toilets backed up at once. “They're all dead. No reason to even check.”
Holding her breath, she climbed back up the ladder and ran to the nearest maintenance console. The computer tinned at her, “Enhanced air sanitation cycle commenced.”
She turned to a locker along the bay wall. “Distress signal, my greasy pockets!” She tried not to breathe as she grabbed a green and gray, environment suit with a respirator pack that she prayed worked against evil smells as well as odorless toxins. “If they called me here to clean their ship, they've got another think coming!”
Turning again to face the vilest threat she had ever known, she climbed down through the hatch. Aiyela paused carefully at the threshold of the frigate as her “downward” gravity met the other ship's “sideways” gravity. Her legs turned to plant on the deck, which from her perspective was a wall. She almost lost her ramen, as she almost always did with mismatched gravity wells. Then again it could have been the stench that was now trapped inside the suit. It had claimed her coveralls and was now radiating from the fabric, the suit’s filter failing to clean the air fast enough. Tears came to her eyes as she imagined it getting into her freshly cleaned hair. A tiny bucket of bathwater appeared in her mind. Why didn’t I put the suit on before I opened the door?
The frigate lights were lit, but dim and flickering, a haze made the dark even darker. “Hello?” called Aiyela. Creepy and stinky, my favorite kind of distress call. The mechanic produced a headlamp, making it a little better. “Well, no time like the present to uh . . . be present in the engine room. You know, see what's up with that engine.” She laughed at the darkness and blind corners just ahead. “Right.”
Aiyela made her way in the interior, a wrench clutched at belt level with both hands. Her boots clumped loudly on the grid-work deck plates, and every now and then she'd ask, “Is anyone there?” just to hear her own voice. It was unlikely that anyone would be conscious with the oxygen levels as they were, and the farther in she got the more she wondered where the crew had been hiding when they passed out. It was a standard layout for a frigate, not hard to guess where everything was, so it wasn't like she was checking every room, but she expected to find someone near the heart of the ship since it was the place that would be easiest to keep oxygenated and heated.
“Huh,” she entered the engine room. Active consoles blinked about a corral of controls. A mechanical heart still throbbed at a regular pace. No locks were in place, so it took her less than thirty seconds to figure out that the ship had been adjusted to run at low-level. They might have been trying to save fuel. There wasn't much left, but there was enough to get to a fuel depot if they had tried. Aiyela pulled up the nav program on the screen, but the destination and previous way points had been deleted. “Why would someone abandon a wo
rking ship in the middle of nowhere?”
Pirates. She clutched her wrench tight again. No, you scanned the area, there was no where to hide. She pulled out a little handheld remote linked to her ship. The skies were still clear for light-years, but a trap was the only thing that made sense. She swallowed hard. Better check the cargo hold; pirates would have emptied the bay.
The main level, which she was on, opened into a catwalk at the top of the enormous cargo bay. The bay was full of crates. “Don't that beat all?” She climbed down a ladder to the ground floor. “Corn, yellow, freeze dried,” she read the nearest crate. “Potatoes, dehydrated,” said another. Powdered eggs.