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We weren’t sent up there to learn anything. At first, it was just a shipment to the leader of desert planet 5 in the Quay galaxy. Simply a cargo flight. But when people on other ships started dying, one on top of the other, when they entered desert planet 5’s atmosphere, it changed. We weren’t much of a cargo crew, never mind a research team. It was me, Pete, Chef, and doddering old Dr. Voci, the linguist.
Being the only woman on the crew, I didn’t feel alienated or unwelcome. I felt like a man, one of the guys. Hell, Pete had longer hair than I did. We never showered, so there weren’t any genitalia issues. As far as my crew was concerned, I could have had a dick too.
Chef got the call, that we were supposed to dump our cargo just before we entered the galaxy and focus on research.
“What about the leader of 5?” I asked. “Our alliance with them is tenuous at best. We can’t afford to start a war with such a piddling, crappo planet.”
“If they get pissed, the leader of headquarters will send out an atomic fleet to blow them all to hell.” Pete was twenty, by far the most carefree of our crew. He wasn’t brilliant or good with equipment; his sister pulled strings to get him the job. Butnd he was funny, even if he didn’t mean to be, so we kept him.
Our ship, Titanic’s Return, was small, the way a good cargo ship should be. The biggest part was the cargo hold, and no one even went in there except at the start and end of a trip, to load and unload cargo. Then there was the dispatch room, strictly Chef’s domain, because only one person could fit in there. It had a metal chair screwed to the floor, a radio, and two communicator screens. The only other areas were the deck, where the crew slept and what Pete called the main dining hall, where we did everything else. And, of course, the rabbit tunnel. There were no bathrooms ‘cause we pissed in our suits and pumped it through tubes into space.
I was used to dumping cargo, especially in war zones, if you don’t have anything of value on your ship, no ones ‘gonna mess with you. Because no one wants a rusty pile of metal with five worthless cargo pilots aboard. So, Pete and I went to the rabbit tunnel and shoved it out into space. We didn’t even stay long enough to watch it drift away.
The rabbit tunnel is the most interesting and disconcerting part of Titanic’s Return. It’s a clear plastic tube that juts out into space. It’s narrow, with barely enough room to turn around and no room to stand. If you have people on either side of you, it’s impossible to get by them; you’re trapped. Pete and I chose to back out, his ass waggling in my face.
“Y’know,” Pete said, his voice hollow because of the tube, “I used to be claustrophobic in these things.” He patted the side of the tube affectionately, as if was alive and listening.
It was hot in the tube, and we both were trying to catch our breath. “So what happened?”
"I had sex in one of them.” I could hear him grinning. “With Gloria." He drew the sound of her name out, Glllooooriaa.
I laughed and looked to my right, expecting the green meteor Eqo to be right next to us. But I didn’t see it. My breathing quickened and I stopped backing out, my hands and knees burning.
Pete stopped too, before backing into me. It’s not a psychic connection; we just know each other, feel each other’s moods. I don’t believe in all that psychic crap.
“What?” he asked, relaxed. “Why did we stop?”
I pointed, even though he was facing away from me. “We were supposed to stop right next to Eqo. But it’s back there.”
“So? We never stop right on target; we’re always about fifty meters off. Chef was never a good navigator. He starts thinking about women, wham, we’re way past target.” On the word "wham," he slammed his hand into his palm, making me flinch. “One time I caught him jacking off in the pilot’s seat, the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.”
I hit him on his back, so he would be quiet, so I could explain that we weren’t just fifty meters off target. I needed to find my center, be calm.
I could barely breathe. “We’re not just a little off target. Eqo is supposed to be here,” I smacked the side of the tubing. “Do you see where it is?”
I saw his head turn so he was gazing into space. “No. We just haven’t reached it yet. It doesn’t matter if we’re off schedule now that we’ve dumped our cargo. You’re so anal retentive, Carrie. Relax.”
“We passed it.” My voice sounded flat, dead. “It’s back there.” I pointed over his shoulder and let my arm rest there, next to his collar bone. He felt sweaty through the mesh of his space suit. “It’s just a green dot. Fifty miles away, I’d guess.”
“Shit. Which means we’re on the edge of desert 5’s atmosphere.” He was serious now, intense, grim.
“Yeah, where the first ship had “the problem.”
Pete grunted. “Yeah, because everyone on the ship going to heaven and then dying is only a minor inconvenience."
That’s when I started moving, fast, banging against the side of the tube where it curved. The whole ship was on normal gravity so we didn’t have to worry about floating.
What Pete meant when he said going to heaven and then dying was that the victims would hallucinate, seeing good things, a long deceased pet, heavenly
light, even angels. And then they would keel over, dead.
“Chef is going to die,” I said.
“Well, yeah, we probably all are.”
I ignored Pete’s dark humor. “I’m going to kill him. I’d say this constitutes a “violation of policies” so I can finally fire him.” The company I worked for said I could only let Chef go if I had a legitimate complaint and him being an asshole wasn’t legitimate enough.
I could hear Pete’s ragged breathing; he had stopped moving, his helmet in his hand, and was leaning his forehead against the plastic tubing. He was muttering to himself, what sounded like a Grion prayer.
He stopped praying and turned his haunted face towards me. “Fuck, I’m hallucinating.”
“You’re such a hypochondriac, keep moving. You’re not hallucinating.”
We came out in the middle of one of the cargo room walls. I climbed down the ladder cut into the wall and jumped to the ground of the empty cargo room.
I expected to find chaos in the dining hall but it was quiet. Dr. Voci wasn’t there; it was just Chef, slouched in the hard metal navigating chair. The calm was surreal.
“Andrew, what are you doing?” There was no response; he didn’t even turn his head in my direction. I fought to keep the panic out of my voice. “We were supposed to stop next to Eqo. We’re now in the territory where the first ship stopped.” He still didn’t answer and, for a second, I wondered if he was still alive. “Do you know why it stopped? Because the whole crew was dead.”
I had hoped to shock him with my anger and blunt way of speaking but he remained calm, turning to face me with slow, fluid movements.
He flung his arm over the back of the navigator chair, so he could look into my face. “You’re wrong.” I turned to see what Pete made of all this, but he was gone, probably looking for Voci.
I raised my eyebrows and tried for a stance of authority.
“Wrong?”
“Not everyone on those ships died. Didn’t I tell you? The smart ones survived.”
“How do you know that? Did base tell you? And you kept it from us?” I was incredulous, panic filling my soul and weighing it down. My heart was beating too fast, keeping an uneven rhythm. The tips of my fingers were numb.
That’s when I heard the clanging from the deck. And the praying. What sounded like praying. But the ship was moving again.
Never before had I heard Dr. Voci speak in a voice that wasn’t muted and calm. But now his voice, louder than a dragon’s wail, made my skull vibrate. And I knew before he burst into the dining hall, his bare chest smeared with blood, that he wasn’t speaking one of the dozen languages he knew. It wasn’t a language at all; just gibberish, spoken smoothly and magnificently, the way only a linguist could do it.
I only realized later that the clanging was the sound of Pete’s body being thrown into the walls of the ship, so that the sharp metal gouged into his youthful flesh.
I hadn’t seen Voci’s face since we had launched, because of our helmets, but now his suit was zipped down to the waist and hanging from him like a newly shed cocoon from a butterfly. I couldn’t get over the sight of his face. It was so normal and yet so strange, beautiful and ugly, especially when contrasted with his blood smeared chest.
“He’s killed Pete,” I said, and with that statement I was over swept with grief and rage. I knelt down, because I could no longer stand, and clawed at my helmet, grabbed at my the baggy material of my suit. “Shit!” I screamed.
“Ooohhweeechiakanddaa!” Voci answered back. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been relatively sure I was going to soon be killed by one of my planet's most revered linguists.
I wasn’t worried about hallucinating, but the thought was drifting somewhere in my subconscious.
Maybe I’m hallucinating now, I thought to myself, and the idea brought comfort. But it couldn’t be a hallucination, I reasoned, because, if it was, where were the angels?
“Where are the fucking angels?” I asked aloud. And I wondered if anyone on the other ships had had hallucinations of Hell.But no one answered, I hadn’t expected them to. Chef was just sitting there, practically lounging, calm, watching. Slowly he reached out his arm, but not towards me. And then he began talking, to the empty space next to me, while Voci continued his incessant babbling.
For a second I thought "Aliens?" But that was a joke and had been since the “law of the species” theory.
"I know, I know…” Chef said in a consoling voice, as if trying to calm the empty air. He laughed. “Of course she’s going to Hell, all ship captains go to hell, along with killers and Latin professors.”
I was still on the cold metal floor, breathing raggedly.
“But I’m a Latin professor.” It was the first coherent sentence from Voci since we entered planet 5’s atmosphere. “Does that mean I’m going to Hell?”
Chef grinned. “Of course it does, you silly little man.”
And that’s when I realized; I wasn’t dead yet. I wasn’t even injured. “So why am I still sitting on the floor?”
I stood up and violently detached the helmet from my suit because there was something wrong with it. With the air pump. The piss tubes weren’t working either, making the legs of my suit stick to me.
Voci looked at me and giggled. I knew that I had to get to the only safe place on the ship, so I headed for the rabbit tunnel.
Voci was suddenly lucid again. “What are you doing?!”
Chef stood up from his chair, alert, watching me.
I spoke slowly, calmly. “It’s okay; I’m just going to get some tools, to fix my helmet.” I don’t know why I felt the need to lie, but I knew I had to. I never trusted Chef, but Voci was sort of a father figure, to all of us, but me especially.
Chef moved quickly to my side; smiled ingratiatingly and swung an arm lovingly around my neck.
“I have written a lovely poem for you,” Chef told me. Voci grinned.
“You have?” He was so close I could only see parts of him, his hand, his fat arm. He smelled musty, like moth balls and cologne. But not urine. I wanted to bury my head in his shoulder, just to get away from my own stench, but I didn’t.
“I shall recite it for you. I shall recite my poem.” He took a large breath and began in a sing song voice:
“I’m sorry that you have to die, but there will be no pain
You weren’t very important, you know, ‘till you were brutally slain
And as far as I have heard, in heaven there’s no rain
But if you’re still not reassured, just know…
you’ll make a pretty stain.”
He used his free arm to conduct the invisible orchestra that I assumed was backing him up. As he said the last line, his arm began to tighten around my neck. Voci started to giggle hysterically.
I didn’t bother to struggle, I knew it would waste too much of my waning energy. Unlike me, Chef still had his helmet on and a helmet without an oxygen tube is nothing but a heavy hunk of plastic balanced on your shoulders. So I grabbed the oxygen tube and yanked. Then I ran, ramming the shocked professor Voci out of the way while Chef tore at his helmet, trying to get it off.
I ran into the deck but stopped by the beds to stare at the bloodied corpse of my greatest friend. He stank of blood and piss but I leaned over to wipe the blood off his forehead with the sleeve of my suit. And he opened his eyes. I screamed. Then I laughed and tried to haul him up, off the bed. It was Pete who had started the ship again and he told me the radio and communication screens in the dispatch room were smashed. I wrestled the emergency light out from underneath the bed since it would be dark in the rabbit tunnel. And that’s where we were going.
I prayed we could signal a ship before Titanic’s Return ran out of oxygen. I estimated we had about an hour left. Our ship would eventually dock on planet 5, but that wouldn’t matter if the whole crew was dead. We didn’t even have our cargo anymore.
We traveled slowly, because of Pete, who was bent and hobbling. I could hear them behind us, though Voci had stopped his babbling and was oddly quiet. We stumbled into the empty cargo room and closed the door. I shoved Pete up the ladder to the rabbit tunnel from behind and climbed in after him. We weren’t ever supposed to do it, detach the rabbit tunnel, which made it a brilliant idea.
I waited for the loud sucking sound that meant the sealing process was complete. When I heard it, I removed the pressure locks from the end of the tunnel where it attached to the ship.
“Okay, this is it,” I told Pete.
He smiled, which opened the cut on his lip, making blood run down his chin. “Go for it.”
I pressed the release button and the tube wafted slowly into space as the warning alarm shrieked, making the tube vibrate. The rabbit tunnel was still attached to the other side of the ship and opened into a corner of the dining hall. This would have been a problem if it hadn’t been blocked off by a gigantic broken oxygen machine. Even so, I wanted to check, make sure I didn’t have to detach the tube completely, to drift aimlessly in space. Pete was lying right next to the sealed end of the tube, barely breathing, watching me through glazed eyes.
I turned the emergency signal on, left it on high blink mode and wedged it between Pete’s foot and the plastic casing of the tube’s wall. I didn’t tell Pete where I was going, I couldn’t have even if I had wanted to, because of the blaring wail of the alarm. I had to climb over him to get anywhere so my back was pressed against the top of the tube. I didn’t want to hurt him anymore than he already was but I’m sure I kneed him a few times. When I was on the other side, my suit was covered with blood.
I took my time, my hands sticking to the plastic floor because they were coated in my own half dried urine. When I was halfway to the other side, the emergency alarm finally shut off. As did the lights. "This is normal," I told myself, but that didn’t stop my heart from trying to rip itself from my chest.
“I am a worm,” I told myself, “a worm in its cozy dirt tunnel, going to meet its friends. I am a worm. I am a worm. I am a worm,” I repeated to myself silently, so I would stop worrying about Pete, and a ship happening by in a place everyone was afraid to pass through. And to shut off the questions, the hundreds of unanswerable questions that were floating in my head like meteors.
With every step, another one entered into my head. If everyone was hallucinating, why weren’t Pete and I? And if the hallucinations were heavenly, why had Chef tried to kill me? Why didn’t he smell like urine? How long does it take for the person to keel over dead after they start to hallucinate?
And then I was there, at the other end looking through at Chef and Voci. I blinked and waited for my eyes to adjust to the bright light. They were trying unsuccessfully to move the eight hundred pound machine. They were cursing at each other, trying to figure out how to move something that was screwed into the floor and the wall.
“Idiots,” I whispered. They seemed normal again and I was about to call out to them when Chef began talking about Pete.
“So, is he dead?” Chef asked.
“I don’t know, who cares. What was he thinking, turning the ship back on when he had agreed to the plan?”
“He was coerced. Never trust a coerced man,” Chef told Voci. “You went too far, smearing yourself with blood to convince one person you’re hallucinating.”
“Shut up. Don’t lecture me. I knew she would escape and she did. So now planet 5 will have yet another witness to the phenomenon of their atmosphere. Now we’re a part of history, part of the elaborate plan to make people stay out of their territory without being openly aggressive.”
“It’s not just that,” Chef argued, obviously annoyed now. “Anyone, including us, who is commissioned by the government is getting away with murder, and the witnesses defend these people ‘cause they were ‘hallucinating.' It’s brilliant.”
That’s when I started screaming. I don’t know what I was saying, obscenities, some kind of rant about the corruptness of universal conspiracies. And then I was crawling back to Pete, fast, determined. Now that the tube was partly disconnected it no longer curved. It hung in a ninety degree angle from the ship, like a boneless arm, waving at the stars.
When I got back to the other end, I told Pete everything, but I didn’t know if he heard me. His eyes were open, but unfocused. He gave no indication that he knew I was there. I just waited, for a ship I knew was never coming. The only real light was from the emergency signal, still wedged by Pete’s legs.
There were twenty seconds of blinding light. And then darkness for thirty. Twenty seconds of brilliance. And then darkness. It went on like this for a while; I don’t know how long.
And then it changed; not the pattern of light and darkness but the fact that when the light came on, there was a third person with us. He was with us in both the light and the dark but he would only talk during the twenty seconds of light. I couldn’t figure out why.
“You’re okay, Carrie,” he told me, his face serious. “You’ll be okay. A ship will be here soon.” Darkness.
“How do you know?” There was no response until the light flashed. “I can see it. The captain is a woman, like you.”
“How did you get here?”
“I flew.”
I smiled sarcastically, “’Cause you’re an angel?” He didn’t seem to be offended by my tone.
“In a way.” He paused for the darkness. “I guess you could consider me an angel.”
“But I don’t believe in angels,” I argued.
He laughed, “I’m sorry, but I am.”
I don’t know why, but I believed him. He told me stories, but only in the times of light. And then he was gone. I missed him.
Five minutes later a ship picked us up. The captain was a woman.
Later, I was renowned as a hero and so was Pete. We took this turn of events humbly, saying we were just cargo pilots, lowly cargo pilots, and the media eventually forgot us. We exposed the conspiracy and revealed the hallucination zone as a hoax.
The odd thing was, I didn’t think it was a hoax. I don’t know what it was. I thought there might be some truth behind it. My planet is now at war with desert planet 5, thousands are dying compared to the dozen or so who died from the conspiracy.
But all I can think about was my own scrape with death. I don’t know who he was, the person who claimed he was an angel. All I know is that I believed. I’ll always believe.
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