Half Full – Half Empty
By Matthew L Williams
Copyright 2012 Matthew L Williams
Cover Art by Matthew L Williams
******
Slowly and painfully, Jurac opened his eyes. Where was he? He couldn’t remember and his head hurt abominably. From somewhere nearby came the sound of someone moaning.
He looked at his surroundings. Everything was blurry but starting to clear. There were small flashing lights in front of him, their blinking accompanied by several different types of beeping sounds. He reached up with his hand to wipe his eyes in order to see more clearly but his hand hit something solid an inch or so from his nose. It was the face plate of his helmet.
Abruptly, like a dam bursting his memory returned, and as it did his vision cleared enough to take in the shattered cockpit he occupied. He remembered there’d been an accident, they’d had to make an emergency landing but there had been complications and the ship had crashed.
Snow and ice blew in through the smashed windscreen and Jurac groaned inwardly as he recalled that they’d been forced down on a class four world. Uninhabited, and uninhabitable.
The small maintenance ship with its crew of five had been out on the galactic rim, repairing and servicing navigational relay satellites. They were only one third of the way through a two-month stint when without warning all hell had broken loose. Jurac had been in the cockpit when something very small and traveling incredibly fast had punched through the aft end of the ship, breaching the main reactor core. They had lost Aarons, the ship’s engineer, then and there as the reactor compartment’s bulkhead doors automatically closed and locked on him along with the white-hot radioactive plasma jetting from the ruptured containment vessel. It would have been mercifully quick. Within seconds of the breach the emergency pumps hammered to life, working to vent the super-heated material from the ship before it slagged them. That was expected but the pumps, composed of ultra high temperature ceramics, only had one job to do and they were designed to sacrifice themselves doing it. The question was, did they get enough plasma out before they died and if not, would the reactor compartment’s reinforced walls contain the rest? The remaining four crew members held their breath for a nervous couple of minutes, waiting to see whether the chamber’s self seal would plug the holes the object made as it passed through. By some miracle it held.
During the eighteen hour interval between the accident and their disastrous planetfall, the four survivors theorized on what could have caused the damage. Mark, the co-pilot, believed it had been a micro meteor, but Jurac had never heard of a micro meteor being able to penetrate a ship’s hull, much less punch through the reinforced shielding of a reactor chamber and then continue on out the other side. A later damage analysis showed that the hull self seal had indeed plugged both an entry and an exit hole. Whatever it was had passed through the ship totally unhindered, like a bullet through a cardboard box.
Terran, the ship's navigator and by far the most imaginative member of the crew, had ventured the notion that perhaps it had been a micro black hole as theorized by Stephen Hawking over a millennia ago, or maybe even a chunk of neutron star. Jurac had just shrugged. Whatever it had been the results were the same; the rear half of the ship was inaccessible and they were now dependent on the limited power of the auxiliary generators.
A look at the astrogation charts showed they were a hell of a long way from anywhere and radiation was slowly starting to creep forward through the ship, meaning they would have to get out pretty soon or they would die. With only the auxiliaries to power the engines that meant a maximum of one quarter thrust, and this drastically limited their options.
After carefully studying his charts the best Terran could come up with was a class four planet, identified only by a long alphanumeric code; it didn’t even have a name! The one and only thing in their favour was that the planet did have a tracking and communication relay station based there, though the database reference was somewhat dated to say the least. Regardless, it was their only shot before they all ended up glowing in the dark.
Jurac had turned on the distress beacon and guided his crippled vessel toward its new destination, shutting down all the unnecessary systems along the way in order to conserve power for landing.
The first sight of the planet was not particularly welcoming; a white and grey cloud-obscured ice ball where a temperature of minus twenty would be considered a summer heat wave. What had he expected? It was class four after all, which meant the only thing going for it as far as they were concerned was that it had a viable atmosphere for human life.
As they began their approach, Terran ran a scan and Jurac had been heartened by the fact they had picked up a directional pulse transmission coming from the relay station below. Who knew? It might even be manned, although Terran’s attempts to raise a response went unanswered. Without further ado, Jurac strapped himself into his chair and began to guide his ship into the planet's atmosphere and the roiling clouds encasing it.
Jurac had intended to bring the ship in and have Terran guide him to the relay station, so that he might land reasonably close by. The little base probably had landing pads but they would only be large enough to handle small intra-atmospheric hoppers, certainly not a ship the size of his own. Even if he could set down there he wouldn’t have. The radioactivity leaking out wouldn’t be healthy anywhere within a thousand meters after a day or two. Almost immediately the ship began to buffet from its passage through the planet’s turbulent atmosphere. Soon systems began failing and the craft plummeted.
Jurac went through backup after backup before one finally held. By then they had broken through the cloud’s ceiling and were plunging through a blizzard. He managed to pull the ship out of its dive, leveling out low over a wide glacier lying between two grey, sharp granite ridges. They were still descending though and there was no time to deploy the landing gear or anything fancy like that as the ground rushed up to meet them. The last thing Jurac remembered was Mark screaming into his helmet pickup as the ship slammed down hard into the snow, then the impact hurling him forward against his seat restraints and into darkness.
Feeling as though his neck was filled with crushed, broken glass, Jurac turned to look at his co-pilot. Mark sat slumped unmoving in his seat, the straps holding him upright. ”Mark?” Jurac groaned, then louder, “Mark?” There was no reply.
Dimly he became aware of the moaning again, coming over the com. “Terran, is that you? Are you okay?” There was no answer save for the moaning that continued on as before. “Keller?” he addressed the fourth surviving member of the crew, but still he received no answer.
With a grimace, Jurac reached up and popped the clips on his harness straps and stiffly got out of his seat. He first checked on Mark. His co-pilot was dead; the other side of his helmet’s faceplate had been smashed in. Whatever had done it had pulverized Mark’s head also. Looking down, Jurac saw what was probably the offending projectile - a blood smeared chunk of ice about the size of a baseball.
“Jesus,” he muttered as his stomach did a back flip on itself. He turned to the navigator’s station where Terran sat, still strapped to his seat. A quick once over showed him to be in one piece, merely unconscious. His suit readouts were steady and in the green. Jurac tried to rouse him with no luck, then moved aft to the little compartment just behind the cockpit where Keller and Aarons sat during takeoff and landing. After a brief anguished look at Aarons’ unoccupied seat, he turned his attention to Keller who was indeed the one moaning.
Keller was the ship’s satellite repair technician and at nineteen, the youngest member of the crew. He was still new to the ‘Rim Corps’ and missed his family back on Earth. He t
ended to look up to Jurac as one would an older brother.
The man was conscious to the extent he was making noise but totally unresponsive otherwise. The compartment bulkhead supporting his console and monitoring equipment had buckled in the crash and crumpled back onto him, pinning him to his seat at a bad angle. The bulk of it seemed to be pressing into Keller's midsection hard enough to have bent his seat supports. Jurac figured he was looking at multiple broken ribs and possibly internal injuries also. He hoped fervently that this last wasn’t the case as Mark had been their only trained medic and Jurac had only the slightest notion as to how to treat injuries of this sort.
Jurac got a hold on the console and tried to pull it off his