James R. Stratton is a chameleon: by day, a mild-mannered government lawyer specializing in child abuse prosecutions, living with his wife and children in Delaware. But in recent years he’s been forging a dark alter ego of genre fiction author through publication in venues like Dragons, Knights & Angels Magazine, Ennea and Nth Degree Magazine. The appearance of his first foray into poetry in The Broadkill Review is but another step in his master plan. Soon he will step into the light as his stories appear in 2010 & 2011 in Tower of Light Online Magazine, Big Pulp, and Paper Blossoms, Sharpened Steel, an upcoming anthology of Oriental fantasy. His final reveal, the novel Loki’s Gambit, is under review for possible publication in 2011, when he will finally step into the brilliant light of day, triumphant.

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“Ms. Dorvilie, you’re late!” Roosevelt, the shuttle engineer, took her arm and hurried her across the shuttle hanger. “Papa Vincente wanted you on your way to the Eye of Odin by 1200 hours and it’s already 1215 hours. I’ve rescheduled launch for 1230 hours, so you must hurry.”

“Wait!” Marie Simone ran beside the tall engineer. “I don’t know anything about operating the shuttle. You’ll have to delay the launch.”

“Nonsense! The shuttle flies itself, you’re just a passenger.” He halted beside a narrow stall with curtain and handed her a package. “You can get into the travel suit and diaper in there. I’ll tell you what you need to know while you’re changing.”

Marie Simone made a face but took the package. It contained an adult diaper, a paper jumpsuit and slippers. Because of weight and economy considerations, the shuttle wasn’t equipped with a bathroom. It was intended only for short inter­ship hops amongst the seven vessels of the colony fleet. As the trip to the Eye of Odin would take 12 hours, Marie Simone had little choice.

Roosevelt slide a paper bag under the curtain. “Here, keep your uniform in this until you get there. Now this is all you need to know.” She stripped off her uniform as he talked.

“The Lord Nelson is just an inter-ship shuttle, right? That means it’s a single-hulled, airtight sphere with an air supply, an operations computer and communication gear. It does not have a rocket engine, just small thrusters for maneuvering. When I launch you, the Lord Nelson will have sufficient velocity and vector to reach at the Eye of Odin on schedule. I set your course when I launch you. It’s really rather boring for the passengers. Most people bring reading material or sleep.”

“Damn!” Marie Simone said. “I left my laptop back in my cabin. Can I…”

“Too late!” Roosevelt said. “You leave in 10 minutes. Now hurry up, I still have to strap you in and run the pre-launch checklist.”

Marie Simone stowed her uniform in the satchel. She wore the St. Christopher medal around her neck, and had a four leaf clover from the hydroponics garden. When she considered them, she felt a little silly. How can these help in deep space? She tucked both under her paper jumpsuit against her heart where Roosevelt would not see them.

As she strapped herself in, she examined the sparse controls as Roosevelt explained them. The communication system was a small box attached to the bulkhead near her right shoulder. You pressed the red button and spoke. The computer was a flat screen next to the communicator. All input was made on the touch-screen. The maneuvering thrusters were operated by a joystick built into the right arm rest of her couch, but Roosevelt advised that she wouldn’t be able to change the shuttles course. “The onboard computer will only let you turn the shuttle on its axis unless I give you the right codes. You could get yourself in trouble otherwise, maybe even push yourself off course.”

After checking her safety belts, Roosevelt said, “I’ve already worked out your launch calculation. It’s just like firing a bullet from a gun. All the aiming is done here.” He gestured to the heavy porthole, a meter across, directly above her head. “Relax and enjoy the trip. The view is glorious!”

Roosevelt stood and handed her a stick of gum. Marie Simone just stared.

“Thank you, but I don’t chew gum.”

“Girl, don’t you know anything about the history of spaceflight? The crazy white men who took the first flights into space started this tradition. The flight engineers would always give them a stick of gum before they launched. It helped keep the pressure in the astronaut’s ears equalized. This is part of the rituals for space flight. Now take it, you don’t buck tradition.”

Marie Simone took the gum and popped it into her mouth. “If I must, but I think it’s silly.” Roosevelt stepped out and closed the hatch.

---

The shuttle bay was on the outer edge of the rotating cylinder of the Star of Haiti. Launching the shuttle involved little more than opening the outer hatch and giving the shuttle a gentle electromagnetic push. Marie Simone found it anticlimactic. She felt a slight bump as the shuttle slid along its launch rails and out the airlock. Immediately, she was weightless. As Roosevelt had explained, his main task was timing the release so the shuttle was vectoring to the Eye of Odin.

Marie Simone spun Lord Nelson so she could watch the Star of Haiti recede. The pride she felt at the sight of the interstellar vessel gave her chills. Even in the faint starlight of interstellar space, the ship shown. The hull had a high albedo to protect against the launch laser, and to improve the vessels’ visibility to observers on Earth. Slowly, majestically, the ship turned below her. Even though she had studied the ship’s schematics for years in school, Marie Simone wasn’t able to identify what section she was looking at. Only when the ship’s name and registry numbers rolled in the view did she have a landmark to work from. Time passed, and the Star of Haiti receded until she could see the ship, from end to end, in the porthole. When the view lost its wonder, she spun Lord Nelson until she had the Eye of Odin centered in the porthole, little more than a white speck among the pinpoint stars. She watched it grow slowly. In time, she dimmed the lights and closed her eyes.

Marie Simone jerked awake at the sound of a wavering alarm. Flashing words flowed across the computer screen, “Pressure alarm—air pressure in the reserve tank is falling rapidly! Air leak in the primary hull detected. Time to loss of atmosphere is 25 minutes.” She felt the spasm in her gut as the words on the screen sunk in. She glanced at the Eye of Odin in the porthole, now as large as her thumb viewed at arms length. She was still hours away. She spun Lord Nelson around. The Star of Haiti was perhaps marginally bigger. It didn’t matter, the shuttle didn’t have propulsion to go back.

With trembling fingers, she pressed the communicator button. “Star of Haiti, this is Ms. Dorvilie onboard the Lord Nelson. I have to declare an emergency. I’m losing air pressure. Can you send a rescue vessel?” Marie Simone began to pant as the minutes ticked by. Nothing! No answer, no signal.

She pressed the red button again. “Star of Haiti, do you hear me?” The communication box remained inert, silent.

She spun Lord Nelson around until she could see the Eye of Odin in the porthole. “Eye of Odin, are you receiving me? I have an emergency! Can anyone hear me?” As time ticked by second by second, precious moments of her limited air, Marie Simone realized she was gripping the arms of the crash couch so tight her arms were shaking.

Damn! I don’t have the velocity to get to the Eye of Odin before I run out of air. When she glanced at the computer screen, the time to vacuum was ticking below 15 minutes. She groaned and hugged herself. No! Get a grip on yourself. There has to be an answer. She remembered the words of the dark presence and almost laughed. A lot of good your magic wanga have done me, Baron. Is St. Christopher going to fly by and plug the leak with his finger? Hell, where is the leak?

She looked about frantically, then noticed a faint whistling. She was out of her harness in an instant and followed the noise. Floating weightless, she pulled herself around the edge of the porthole. And there it was! The hole was barely larger in diameter of a 10 gauge wire, but that was all it took to create this crisis. She saw the wrongness of it immediately. It wasn’t a crack caused by metal failure or a puncture. It was a tiny hole drilled neatly through the hull. She shook her head. Not now, worry about how this happened later. Now I need to plug it! She remembered a story she had read as a teenager written by Isaac Asimov. Two men got trapped in a construction tunnel on the moon when it sprang a leak. They had no pressure suits or tools, so they used their own bodies, one after the other, to block the leak. The only problem was the vacuum of space caused them to hemorrhage where their skin blocked the hole. Marie Simone glanced at the palm of her hand and shivered. Yes, but they survived.

The St. Christopher medal drifted out from underneath her jumpsuit and bumped her chin. She started to push it back and then pulled it up in front of her eyes. It’s wide enough and thick enough to patch the hole, so how do I attach it? The answer came as soon as she remembered why she had the medal. Baron Samedi said I would need charms. She grinned and scooped the gum out of her cheek with a finger. After flattening the gum across the back of the medal, she took a deep breath and pressed the makeshift patch over the hole. This will never work. The gum will be sucked out the hole. Indeed, she could hear whistling as the sticky wad was sucked through the hole. But then the whistling grew quieter and quieter. When she touched the St. Christopher medal, her finger stuck! It was cold, freezing. And then she sighed with relief. The cold vacuum wasn’t just sucking the gum out the hole, it was drawing the heat out as well, transforming the gum from warm, viscous wad into hard, frozen chunk. More important, it had sealed the St. Christopher medal to the hull.

She pushed herself back to the computer screen where print flowed across the screen. “Air loss has ceased. Air reserves reduced to 17 hours. Vessel will require immediate maintenance.” Marie Simone pulled herself back into the flight couch and began strapping herself in. She glanced at the St. Christopher medal stuck to the hull, and then at the inert communication box. Why would someone want me dead? That was what the Baron warned of, that now isn’t my time. But that doesn’t mean they won’t try again. She spent the rest of the voyage working it out.

---

When she arrived back at the Star of Haiti, Marie Simone bolted past Roosevelt and ran to the engineering section without stopping. After she locked herself in, she checked her e-mail. She sobbed as she read the announcement she knew she would find. Jean Gilbert had disappeared while she was away. The ship-wide search was still ongoing, but he had simply disappeared. Most important, his microchip had cut off, leaving his location unknown. When she pulled up the wireless systems program, she found the rogue software exactly where she expected to find it.

She felt a cold knot of fury simmer through her as she studied the rogue software. She knew how they did it now, and that told her who. Now to deal with them. She recorded a brief message addressed to the entire crew and sent it out. No one would misunderstand when they received it.

Papa arrived at the outer hatch within minutes, banging and shouting her name. She let him in and sealed the hatch behind him.

“Child, what have you done? They have all gone mad! The crew grabbed them and beat them, Roosevelt, Gilbert and Lindsay. Then they cycled them to space through an airlock. All because of the message you sent. Why?”

She clenched her fists. “How could I? How could you? I was like your own flesh and blood, and you would have killed me!” She slapped him when he opened his mouth to protest.

“Don’t speak, you’ll just lie. I found your dirty little program, the one that lets you hack into everyone’s microchip. What are you doing? Tracking everyone? Spying on their conversations? I can even make it speak to them, put voices in their head. That’s something even you didn’t think of. That’s how I sent out the message, warning everyone.”

The old man slumped into a chair and covered his face with his hands. “I never meant to harm anyone. I can prove it. The ones who are missing, even Jean Gilbert, are safe. We put them into creche sleep and changed the ID codes on their microchips. They will awaken when we arrive at Hevre.”

“But why, Papa? You are the mission leader. What more could you want?”

“You don’t understand. Yes, I am the mission leader, but there are many who would take that away from me. They disagree with my decisions, they argue every point. Several of them, the ones I made disappear, were planning on forcing me to resign. I learned that, when I listened to them conspiring together.” He set up suddenly and glared.

“It’s not fair! All of you will arrive at Hevre young and strong so you can build a new life, a new world. I will be a feeble old man by that time.” He swept his arms wide, encompassing the vessel. “This is my life! The new world is just a dream that I will never take part in. My life, my dream, is the Star of Haiti, and those thousands of sleeping people in my care. Is that so terrible? Living my dream so you all can have yours?”

He slumped back into the chair as his gaze drifted to the floor. “But now that’s gone. Soon they will come for me and make me breathe the vacuum. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Maybe that is what you deserve, Papa. After all, that’s what you would have done to me. Then she drew a deep, trembling breath. She remembered his smile, the sunshine of her days. That he had cared for her and guided her, loved her. How he could be all this, and then coldly plan her death was a mystery. But can I do the same? The answer was obvious once she considered it.

---

The log of the Star of Haiti recorded that the mission Captain, Vincente Durand, was replaced by his step-daughter, Marie Simone Dorvilie, shortly after the Seven Sisters reached midpoint in 2175. For unspecified health reasons, Captain Durand was placed in creche sleep for the remainder of the mission. Because of his advanced age, he was not revived until a decade after the colony was founded. He lived out the remainder of his years with Captain Dorvilie and her husband on Herve.

 

 

When The Baron Speaks, You Listen by James R. Statton 1 2
originally published August 11, 2010

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