Spacer Tales: The Lonely Engineer

to head off in different directions often hopped ship there, too, with a busy turnover. Rumour amongst the wannabe-spacer community was that it was easier to get a berth on Karadon, and that making your own way out there was considered to be showing an enterprising spirit.

  ‘Fonse, his name was,’ Jok said. ‘Just a rookie kid, hired to cook, clean and help out with whatever work he could. He didn’t know no better than to take the berth on the Surehaul 7.’ The veteran spacer paused, taking a sup of his cornbeer and settling himself to continue with the story.

  ‘Anyhow, they set off for Canelon, a doomed ship heading out into the wilds of space. The last contact anyone had with them was three weeks later – the liner Glory of Canelon passed them. At that time they were all alive, and not reporting any problems. But five weeks after that, they arrived at Karadon.’ He paused impressively, fixing the groundhog kid in a steady look as the darkened bar went very quiet.

  ‘The ship came in on an emergency course, as all starships are programmed to do if they’re approaching a system still under autopilot. It went into long orbit outside the system, broadcasting an automated distress call. There was no response to hails, so the Port Authority sent the SDF to find out what was going on.’ The System Defence Force of any League world had a wide range of vehicles at their disposal, from fighters to tugs.

  ‘They sent out a salvage tug with a search and rescue team,’ Jok said. ‘The Surehaul 7 looked intact, no obvious damage to it, but they still couldn’t get any response to hails so they sent in a shuttle. There were six of them in the boarding party – SDF Lieutenant Harb Bennet was leading, with a medic, an engineer and three paramedic/techs. They were all fully suited up, of course, using a quarantine airlock in case of hazmat or infection.

  ‘They boarded the ship through the main airlock, directly abaft the flight deck, with live comms being maintained between them and the salvage tug. That was being listened to in turn by a whole load of involved organisations – traffic control, System Defence HQ, the Port Admiralty office, all sorts. In all, it was being listened to and recorded in seven different places. And this is fact, a matter of official record, as sure and true as I am sitting here, that when they went aboard that ship the boarding party reported and spoke to a member of the crew they saw on the flight deck.

  ‘Four of them did that; the first four aboard. Lt Bennet is on record as speaking to someone, saying, ‘SDF Rescue. Identify yourself.’ The hazmat officer was talking to her team on the salvage tug and reported, ‘Zero atmosphere. Temperature minus two. One suited survivor so far.’ The engineer, talking to her team, was recorded saying, ‘We’ve got one alive on the flight deck, ship appears intact and functional.’ The medic, talking to Infection Control, reported, ‘At least one survivor, male, appears to be…’ before she broke off and exclaimed as they all did at the same time, before carrying on, ‘Scrap that, it must have been a holoprojection.’

  ‘They all made statements, afterwards, confirming what they saw – a man in a bubble helmet spacesuit, mid forties, dark haired, exhausted looking and hadn’t shaved for a few days. He was standing by the flight console as if he’d just got up from it to greet them as they came aboard. All of them said how relieved he looked, so grateful and relieved to see them, but then in the next moment he just vanished.

  ‘The engineer was the first one to realise that what they had seen could not have been a holoprojection. You’d need very sophisticated, expensive gear to project a life-sized image that solid and realistic, and it was obvious that there was nothing like that on the freighter. She was the first one to flip back through her helmet-cam recording of what they’d seen, too, and discover that the man she’d seen clear as day with her own eyes had not appeared on camera at all. Others watching remotely were already asking, ‘What survivor?’, ‘What man?’, ‘We’re not picking up your survivor, here.’’ Jok took a drink of his cornbeer to let the implications of that sink in. The groundhog kid was wide eyed, now, enthralled.

  ‘They were all talking at once,’ Jok said. ‘But Lt Bennet called them back to order, said that they’d figure out what they’d seen, after, but for right then they had to secure the ship and check for survivors. So, that’s what they did.

  ‘It didn’t take them long to find out what had happened. Even before they accessed the log it was clear from diagnostics that there’d been a disastrous breakdown of the life support system – a fire in the air processing unit itself which had not only taken out the air processing systems but released lethal levels of cyanogenic gases from the plastic of cheap components as it burned. The backup systems should have kicked in, of course, and filtered the air within seconds, but the backup was offline. It had been offline for months, with the skipper waiting for authorisation from the company to have it replaced.

  ‘They found out more from the log. And the moment they accessed the most recent log entries they recognised Jernak Tamarez as the man they’d seen on the flight. There were six days of log entries from the time of the accident, from his first frantic reports that the others were all dead to the most recent entry. Six of the crew had died within minutes. They would have been convulsing in seconds, in no condition to get themselves into spacesuits, and would have been dead of heart failure within three or four minutes. Jernak Tamarez was the only survivor. He’d been in the engine compartment with the hatch closed when the fire broke out and had the sense and the experience to scramble into a suit before he opened the hatch. By the time he got there the others were already dying. He did manage to get the kid, Fonse, into a suit, but it was already too late. The ship just didn’t have anything like the medical equipment needed to save them, and though the engineer did everything he could, there was just no hope for them.’

  Jok looked into the eyes of the groundhog kid. ‘But for a few hours of exhausted sleep, Jernak Tamarez spent the first four days trying to fix some kind of life support. He managed to vent the poisoned air but couldn’t fix the air processor to generate a breathable atmosphere. There was some air in a separate tank which was used for charging spacesuits for hullwalking and emergencies, but not enough to get him to Canelon. His only chance of rescue was if another ship passed by close enough to pick up his distress signal before he ran out of air, but out in space, the chances of that…’ the old spacer spread his hands, eloquently. ‘It would need a miracle. After he realised that he just wasn’t going to be able to fix the life support, he spent the next two days doing everything he possibly could to ensure that the ship would make it to port. He recorded in the log that all he could hope for, all he could pray for now was that the ship would make it to port so that their families at least would know what had happened to them, the company would be held accountable for the state of the ship they’d sent seven people out there to die on, and they might find peace.

  ‘When they searched the ship,’ he said, his voice soft now in the shadowy bar, ‘they found the other six members of the crew had been put in their bunks, laid out neatly and covered over. Jernak Tamarez did that, turning that airless, freezing ship into a morgue. Then he spent six days on that ship, alone with their bodies in the desolation of space. When they found him, he was at the bottom of a ladder, as if he’d collapsed trying to get from engineering to the flight deck. He was still in the spacesuit they’d seen him in when they went aboard.’ Jok was silent for three taut seconds before he added, ‘He’d been dead for three weeks.’

  The groundhog kid shivered a little, glancing around at the looks of confirmation on many of the faces around him.

  ‘Is that for real?’ he asked. ‘Did that really happen?’

  ‘Fact,’ Jok confirmed. ‘Of course the official enquiry decided that what the boarding party had seen was some kind of optical illusion, a disturbance of ice particles caused by the opening of the airlock, which the four of them saw out of the corner of their eyes and imagined to be a survivor. You can believe, if you like, that the reason they
all reported seeing the same thing and immediately recognised Jernak Tamarez as the man on the flight deck when they saw the log was that it was some kind of shared hallucination. All four of them were experienced search and rescue professionals, of course, and not the slightest bit inclined to freak out even in the most horrifying situations, but do by all means believe that it was some kind of illusion or hallucination if it makes you sleep easier. If you ask spacers, though, people who have been out there and know how vast and strange and beyond our comprehension the universe truly is, they will tell you, Jernak Tamarez, the lonely engineer, stayed at his post and brought that cold, dead ship back to port.’

  The groundhog kid swallowed. Tam Kluskey saw the amusement on the faces of the spacers gathered round and heard the rapidly rising clamour as several of them competed to be the next one up on the bar telling their own ghost stories. Tam grinned to himself as he went to pour another cornbeer for the next storyteller.

  Now it was going to be a good evening.

  ______________________

  Skipper Alex von Strada and his corvette