The derelict’s shadow fell on us, and our voices sank into an unwitting silence. We’d been arguing, politics, a friendly sort of game, like tennis. In the game of politics, it doesn’t really matter what you’re arguing for as long as you can send the ball back into your opponent’s court. I had already committed ten logical fallacies by that time, but Neller had been playing the game straight. You’d almost think he really believed the things he said. He kept bringing things back to the same point again and again, and really, that lack of variety just makes it easier for me to come up with…with…well with anything. Heck, I was making up about three conspiracy theories just in that one lunch break.
Anyway, the derelict, that’s when we realized it was there. We were on the side facing the sun. We both rather prefer the natural light when we can get it, and everything suddenly went dark on our perpetual day. My first instinct was to go to the window and get a better look. Neller did the right thing, calling up a general alarm, though I could have warned him that somebody else would already have done it.
So yeah, I probably got a better look at it than he did. Um, the markings were something like, B# and this weird symbol that was almost a letter C. And yeah, the hull was gutted, so whatever else was written had been sheared away. That’s when I saw the bodies. They looked like mummies, you know, from those old horror movies. I don’t know what I saw, exactly. Just pale, dried up faces of people who had only halfway gotten into their space suits. I would have thought a sudden decompression would have made them explode. So, I don’t know.
Oh yeah, before the jump. Maybe it was the glimmer of the field—I’m telling you this all happened so quickly, it’s almost more of an impression than something I know I saw—well, the pod bay doors were shut. I don’t know about that ship, but most will automatically shut to try to keep pressure. Anyway, this one had a porthole, and there was a flash of light from the other side, the side not in outer space, like, well, like someone lighting a match.
There was a face, a fat face, and a cigar in that quick flicker. I don’t know whose. I don’t know, I’m told man sees faces where there are no faces. I’m just telling you what I thought I saw. Maybe there were survivors there, or it was a scavenger. Scavengers trying to restart the life-support system; they get the power back and the computer comes online and finishes the jump it had tried to make before whatever hit it hit it. Maybe the machine’s busted and it is jumping them all over the place.
Maybe the crew’s trapped? It might explain the mummies. The hull was breached right as they jumped. So, they weren’t exposed to the vacuum of space; they were exposed to, well, that’s a religious question. I mean, I’ll brave politics; nobody takes politics seriously except people like Neller. Good people, if a little stiff. I know better than to hypothesize what happens in a jump. That is your business.
A safer speculation, one I’m a little fond of, is it was all a show, you know? The corpses were fake, put there to sell what had happened. The ship’s some sort of spy of a foreign government. They put together a ship, see, making it look like a derelict. They jump it through a military base like ours. We say, “Huh, that’s weird,” and note it down while they have taken hundreds of pictures of our new stellar satellites. Anyway, I’m just playing politics again, and you don’t look like the kind that plays games.
Psst! Hey kid, wanna buy a book?
Tale Told 