Racing The Void

Chapter One: I, Killer

 

The static faded as the transmission wiggled across the monitor screen. Lucille adjusted the frequency until the data drew into sharp focus.

Warrant Report: Case 3542 – The Vulture Crew – Status update – Ship identified leaving the Pike Nebula.

“How do they always know where we are?” she moaned to an empty room.

Her tattered, scavenger-class ship appeared on the screen, shooting through the endless void of space, white thrusters flaring behind it. The view zoomed in until the ship dominated the screen. The Vulture, according to badly worn letters along the neck. With wide black wings that absorbed solar radiation, a bulky body, and a pair of giant robotic grappling claws underneath, it could almost pass for regular salvage ship. But weapon mounts and other non-standard components cluttered the hull, and every inch was covered in blast residue or welded repair plates.

Lucille frowned at the sight. Maybe someday she would have the resources to clean it up and paint it. Perhaps blue with green highlights, like the sky and trees on the Earth that was lost. Perhaps soon, when she took her father’s place as captain.

The Vulture has crippled Dakota Rising and was last seen heading toward sector 235.

A media file was attached to the report, but Lucille hated listening to the obnoxious announcer and his snide remarks. How could anyone mock people who were fleeing for their lives?

The bounty for the Vulture and its crew has officially doubled to 40,000 if proof of capture or destruction is provided within 180 SOL days.

“Wow, 40,000.” Although the bounty increased the likelihood that the ship’s crew would be killed, Lucille couldn’t but be proud that the Vulture merited such a reward. As far as she knew, few raider crews survived long enough to see their ship reach a bounty that high.

The Vulture’s design specifications and photos of known crew members, including Lucille, marched up the screen with embedded files offering more detailed information. A physical description of the ship included the words damaged, dozens of burn marks, and ugly.

Lucille read it again. The text description actually called the ship ugly. (she already acknowledged this)

She switched off the transmission.

“That’s not very nice.” She looked around the medical bay. Cords and wires hung from the ceiling. The monitors in front of her were different sizes, and parts salvaged from a multitude of different wreckages were everywhere. Yes, it was ugly, even on the inside. Vulture was a dirty clutter of desperation, but it was the only home Lucille had ever known — other than a cell, back when she was little.

In a way, the Vulture was just another cell. A flying cell housing desperate fugitives in the uncaring bleakness of space.

She shook her head. Unfortunately, those families were not always as united as they should be.

One of the monitors displayed panicking adults on an internal security feed. They were packed into the mess hall, flinging chairs against the doors and banging their fists on anything that could make a noise.

“Turds,” she muttered with anger.

Two adults worked a control console desperately trying to find a way out. A few of them stared at the camera, mouths pleading with Lucille to be reasonable. She had the sound turned off.

“Give up, there is no way out,” she boasted to herself. Lucille had sprung her trap and pressure-sealed the doors, capturing fifteen adults while they were having a sinister meeting. The mess hall now held all the adults on board, except one — her father.

“I got them Papi.” Lucille inspected her father laying next to her. He rested in a stasis pod, looking peaceful. She didn’t like the word “coma.” It sounded so infinite. To her, he was merely resting. Eventually, he would rise and smile, hug her, and resume command of the ship. She didn’t care what the AI insisted, or what the life-support monitors displayed, or the fact that her father hadn’t twitched a muscle in weeks. He was coming back to her. He wouldn’t abandon his little ‘Lucy,’ and she refused to believe anything else.

Lucille startled as Ajax wove between her legs. She lifted the small alien creature into her lap. His bony paws dug into her thighs as he found a comfortable position, and he coiled his long tail around Lucille’s arm to guide her petting. Lucille had learned that he liked long, firm strokes, no scratching behind his giant ears. Ajax may have looked like an odd cat with a pug face, but was far from feline. He only ate what humans ate — at a proper table, not on the floor. He also seemed appalled when people dangled string in front of him.

Leaning to see around Ajax’s rabbit-like ears, Lucille hit the intercom link to talk to her hostages. “Believe me yet?”

“Damn it, Lucille.” Henry pounded his finger into a keypad. “Stop messing around and open the bloody doors!” His eyes darted back and forth across a console.

Henry probably thought he’d find some easy computer trick to undo her sabotage, but Lucille was sure he wouldn’t. All door controls had been disconnected. The mess hall was pressure sealed using emergency air-breach systems, and everyone else was too far away to hear any banging from the mess hall.

Lucille cut the line and checked another security monitor with a split-screen. Jeremy, her sweet brother, was inspecting the jellyfish in the water tanks. He talked to the strange alien creatures with loving baby gibberish, but so far the creatures hadn’t responded. Watching the fish seemed to calm him.

Lucille touched the screen. “Don’t worry Jeremy. I’m going to save father.”

On another video screen, the young Nolt brothers tended the garden in the forward hanger bay. Markus and Jane were in the bunkers — flirting of course. Lucille winced, but there was no time to be bothered by the two mushy love birds. Tyrell was in engineering, tinkering as usual. Cindy and Madison remained in the lounge, plugged into a virtual simulator — one of the few luxuries they had managed to salvage from a damaged luxury cruiser.

Good, the kids were all occupied. No chance they’d interfere, just as Lucille planned.

She checked the adults again. Several gave up trying to force their way out. Henry stomped about, mumbling obscenities.

Ajax used his long slithering tale to swing off of Lucille and he sauntered away.

Lucille opened up the comm. “Just look at the maintenance scan of the emergency hatch.” She forced the monitors in the mess hall to light up with ship schematics. “You can see the explosives wired to the emergency escape hatch above you. And you can confirm the programming connection to my console. It’s the same trap you set up in the cargo bay in case bounty hunters got on board. I just moved it to the mess hall.”

She lowered her tone, like her father’s. “If I push the Execute button, everyone in the mess hall will be sucked out.” She returned the view to herself and wiggled a finger over a button with a printed E on it. There was a safety cover for the button, but she had raised it up to add to the threat.

“You wouldn’t,” Henry sneered.

“Go ahead, verify everything.” She forced a big smile, trying to look as confident as possible. “The button is live. I’m not bluffing.” She was. Lucille knew she would never hit the button, but she had to be convincing. “My father has killed many people. It’s in my blood too.”

Henry stuck his face near the camera. “Lucille, listen to me. Your father killed slavers and bounty hunters, to keep us all safe. He killed Paul because he was stealing rations and tried to assault Marria.” His voice grew warm. “But look at us. We are your friends. Your father was our friend.”

“Then why did you plan to kill him?” she snapped. “I heard you. I recorded the whole thing.” She slammed her fist. “He rescued you all. This is his ship, not yours. And you were planning to turn off his life support!”

“Damn it, Lucille!” Henry growled. “Your father is half dead. Even in stasis, he is slowly dying. We need to let him go, out of kindness, to him.”

“Kindness?” She scoffed. “You’re just worried about the only working stasis unit and the limited nutrition packs. You don’t care about my father.” She fought back tears. “In fact, I think one of you poisoned him. I think you all want Wayne to take over command.” In her secret recording, she’d watched as the adults had sat around the large mess table, making their terrible vote. Without hesitation or remorse, they had unanimously affirmed the captain’s fate. They even cracked jokes and teased Wayne about his new role as captain. It still boiled Lucille’s blood.

Henry shook his head. “Ridiculous.”

Marria pushed Henry aside. “Lucille, I assure you, his illness had to come from the ocean planet, when we collected the jellyfish things.” No one really knew what to call them, but ‘jellyfish’ fit well enough. “Your father contracted something we’ve never seen before. We can’t stop his organ failure. Dios confirmed this. You know I was close to your father. It pains us to let him go.”

Maybe Marria was being honest. She had always been kind and supportive, but Lucille refused to relent. “You will hand over your security codes, all of them, or I will blow the hatch and all of you will die.” She tried not to blink and intensified her angry glare to help her threat seem real. “Hand the codes over, now.”

“If we give you the codes, what are you going to do?” Henry grunted, looking about. “Take control of the ship and leave us in this room forever?”

“I’ll convert them to one master code I’ll memorize. Then I’ll let you out. If anything happens to my father, I’ll be the only one with control of everything on board, including life support. Dios will only obey my commands from now on.” She had disabled the ship’s artificial intelligence, but they’d need its help eventually to stay ahead of the bounty hunters. Luckily, the AI wasn’t as sophisticated as the ones on expensive ships, so it shouldn’t be able to stop Lucille. She hoped.

A few of the adults murmured to one another in the background. Henry corralled everyone to talk away from the camera.

Ajax strolled back into the room and made kissy noises at Lucille. With a slight tilt of his stubby face, his long ears perked up. It could mean anything really. They had never seen his species before, and his behavior was hard to interpret. Ajax always seemed to be inspecting the crew, but otherwise tended to stick to himself.

He tapped his paw and wiggled his tail. Maybe he was bothered that the mess hall was closed off or something, but Lucille didn’t have time to figure it out now.

“Lucille, we don’t believe that you’ll blow the hatch,” Henry announced, calm and cool. “We know you. You’re a sweet girl. We give you our word that we’ll be kind to your father, but we won’t hand over the security codes. No one person should have them. It’s too risky.”

Wayne stepped up to the camera. “And you know that you can’t handle the responsibility. You’re not ready.”

Lucille frowned. As always, Wayne was trying to act like some wise sage dishing out harsh wisdom.

“Your father wouldn’t want you to do this,” Henry added. “You are not a killer. You won’t do it. So just let us out, now.”

The life-support monitor printed out another report on her father’s status.

“You vile turds!” Lucille discovered her finger trembling over the Execute button. The safety cover was up. One little button push and the traitors would be gone, and she could keep her father alive.

Ajax climbed up on the medical boxes near the computer console. His long tail reached for the ceiling and hooked onto some pipes. He curled in his paws and legs and hung upside down like a possum, eyeing Lucille and the computer screens.

“Well?” Henry asked with a sigh.

Lucille’s heart pounded. Her finger grew heavy as she imagined her father comforting voice and gentle hugs. All she had to do is let her anger finish the job. Wouldn’t he do it? Wouldn’t her brave father crush any back-stabbers without a second thought?

Her finger rubbed the button. Just push it and flush the turds into space.

“Lucille, honey,” Marria cooed, edging Wayne and Henry out of the way. “Come on. Be reasonable. This isn’t you, and we’re not going to comply. So let us out.”

Lucille cut off the camera, slumped, and closed the cover over the Execute button. The vile turds did it — they called her bluff. She was no killer.

“I’m sorry Papi. I don’t have your courage. Please forgive me.” Her handsome father, with his tightly trimmed beard that he kept tidy every day, heartbreakingly motionless as if his mind was far away dealing with more important matters.

Ajax eased himself down on the console table next to Lucille. With a paw push against Lucille’s shoulder, Ajax turned her.

Lucille’s eyes met Ajax stare, and he inched closer on the table. She put her arms around him. He always seemed to know when she needed a cuddle. His silky fur was soothing. “I can’t do it, Ajax. I can’t save my father.”

Leaning head to head, Ajax wrapped his long, wide ears over her like a snug cap. She felt a wave of emotion being drawn out, and her tears ran free.

Ajax had done this before, but no one believed her. It was as if he was trying to siphon out her painful memories. Flashes of her father’s illness zipped by, along with angry thoughts about the crew’s sinister plot.

A strange thought flowed through her. Don’t worry.

Ajax dribbled a tear of his own and Lucille couldn’t help but smile. He was stubborn, rude, and demanding at times, but he was also a loving creature, when he wanted to be.

Too bad Ajax didn’t have some magic-like alien power that could save her father.

An explosion rattled the ship and Lucille flinched. “What the…” Was that a meteor hit? She hoped so.

She flipped on the security monitor. The mess hall was a whirlwind of dust and debris.

Shock rippled through her bones.

 Did the hatch malfunction and go off on its own?

It didn’t. She found the cause right next to her. With the cover raised, the pointed tip of Ajax’s long tail rested on the Execute button.

“No!” Lucille checked Ajax’s cute mushed-in face and big eyes, wanting desperately to see evidence that this was a bizarre accident.

It wasn’t. His unblinking gaze was calm and a dark whisper seeped into her mind, presumably from Ajax’s ear cap connection. It had to be done.

“Lord of Stars!” Lucille wailed, sliding away from Ajax.

He sat back and slowly wiped his wet eyes with his paw.

She called up the ship’s rear-view on the monitor. In the infinite darkness, the ship sped away from a stream of debris. Mangled bodies and broken chairs floated into the ever-reaching silence.