Short Story 3: “I Will Never Die” [W4 Halloween Special]

Empty hulks of starships are littered throughout the void of space like roadkill. There are countless ways for something to go wrong in flight, and the nature of the empty vacuum means that a ship, once inoperable, continues endlessly along its orbit.

There are abandoned wrecks that have been in orbit of their stars for hundreds of years, perfectly placed to avoid the influences of nearby planets, left to continue undisturbed in perpetuity. Pirates store their hoards in long, tilted ellipses around their suns, daring their enemies to make the expensive and risky journey to reach them. And in time, these pirates die. In time, vessels with cargo suffer some kind of misfortune in the vacuum and join the orbiting graveyard.

It’s all very terribly dangerous–and very terribly profitable.

Haru Jackson is forty-four years old, hardly five feet tall, with the build of a helot miner and the personal disposition of a Phoenician sailor. He was allegedly a former soldier, but his extended family found the legitimacy of the story dubious. Though the GU bureaucracy evidently had no problem believing in his tale, and every month (Earth month, of course) he received a check in his account as recompense for the fingers he lost in a training accident.

It was fortunate, then, that he chose the life of a deep-space scavenger, as there truly was no other calling he may have been better suited for.

His own vessel–registered in the GU Port Authority’s records as Unnamed–departed from high orbit of Fukuoka-91 twenty-seven local days and thirty-five earth days ago, bound on an interception course of the GUS Pax et Exitium. Fifteen minutes ago, he passed within nine kilometers of the abandoned vessel.

The docking procedure, however routine, still required Haru Jackson’s full attention. His cockpit did not have a control wheel or stick or anything of the sort. He instead made full use of the auto-pilot function of the avionics module he bought from his buddy who owned a scrapyard in orbit of Old Artisanal Company (the naming rights to the moon having been purchased in auction two hundred years before).

Haru Jackson watched the imposing silhouette of the Pax drift toward him through the portside porthole. It crossed in front of the distant sun and blocked the light and Jackson found himself plunged into complete darkness. He shuddered. Pushing off of the nearby cockpit wall, he drifted to the opposite window and scanned for the light of the star again.

He had no luck. Inside the shadow of the colossal vessel, even the star was blocked.

His hands were shaking–why wouldn’t they be? He was afraid, of course he was. No man, no matter how predisposed to this line of work, could keep at bay the sinking pit inside his stomach, nor the overwhelming sensation of aloneness. Though fewer still could keep away his excitement. Three years had he been working toward this expedition. Three years of ticky-tack.

Jackson Haru had given up the bottle and the dice to afford the fuel for this trip, and in this moment, he knew it was all truly worth it.

The Unnamed crept within five meters of the side of the Pax. The reverse thrusters burned and slowed his velocity to nothing. Their brief flash was the only light outside his cockpit, and it glowed bright enough that he could peer outside the window and glimpse the steel flank of his prize. He saw a fraction of the corner of a single letter of the name of the Pax et Exitium printed along the length of the ship.

Fear and caution kept Jackson from breaking in immediately. It had been drifting here for two hundred years. For all he knew, he might have been the first scavenger to reach it–at least in the last few decades. He didn’t know what was inside. What if he drilled through the metal wall and struck a pressurized room? What if the rush of a thousand tons of air smashed his small ship into fragments?

Though the true danger of the Pax did not lie in these tangible things. Jackson, of course, had no idea–and no possible way of knowing. The GU did not recover a ship of this size because the GU knew what was still inside when it was lost. It was better to leave the ship to drift forgotten until the star itself bursted eons years later.

For three hours, the scavenger maneuvered his vessel and performed an extensive suite of scans. Once he found the room he liked-an old and abandoned cargo bay, least likely to kill him on entry–he smashed through with his port-mounted drill.

Inside was a haze of debris. For two hundred years, the remnants of the Pax’s cargo had been untouched. Nothing can settle; this ship was built long before the advent of artificial gravity. The Unnamed slipped its way inside, casting its front-mounted searchlights throughout the interior.

It was the size of a cathedral. Each individual crate–and there were hundreds–was a dozen times the size of his little cargo shuttle. To Jackson, then, he thought his only error was not bringing a bigger ship. His trepidation from before was replaced by an incredible glee. If even a single one of these desiccated crates contained anything of value, then this voyage will have paid for itself tenfold.

So Jackson burned his ship to a stop, suited up, sealed his tools, depressurized the cabin, and ventured out into the abyss. When he kicked off of the roof of his little vessel, he was connected only by a thin metal tether.

He drifted upward into the floating graveyard.

Unlike the ocean, there are no waves in space. No subtle motion of the shifting of the water. It was utterly still, and utterly silent. A million metric tons of cargo left suspended in the darkness. The only thing that Jackson could hear was the sound of his own breathing in his helmet.

The first shipping container he reached had seemingly already been breached; it was a food container, and there was nothing left inside. The second was sealed, and with great excitement, he used his plasma torch to burn himself a hole. The sparks danced and molten chunks of metal shot from the gap and sailed off into the abyss. They flickered as they went and cast disorienting shadows across the ship’s interior.

Jackson continued this process for three days. He slept and ate inside his vessel, and whenever he was ready, he continued his long voyage into the abyss. For three days, he cracked open crates with great enthusiasm, but the novelty very quickly wore away, as he found the contents to be severely underwhelming.

But undeterred, he sent his little vessel deeper into the heart of the Pax et Exitium. He spent several hours maneuvering with great care through the haze that dominated the cargo bay, until he finally reached the bottom. Here, he once again disembarked, though he took care to bolt his vessel to the floor–just in case.

Jackson Haru was never officially registered as dead. Never. It took several weeks before a missing report was even filed. The port registrar contained his date of arrival and departure, indicating he had met some misfortune in orbit around the star, but without confirmation, he joined the ever-growing list of those who were lost in space.

Around distant stars, the freeze-dried corpses of hundred year old soldiers drift in permanent orbit along the snaking rings of debris from their long-destroyed vessels. Similar to them, Jackson’s body would only be cremated by the explosion of its star.

He did everything right. One can hardly blame him. He went about the process of scavenging with diligence and the utmost carefulness. At no point did he breach into any sealed room of the Pax without checking for readings for volatile compounds or pressure behind the metal. No, he was very thorough.

His greatest mistake was not turning around when he didn’t find a single corpse.

Bodies are expected on abandoned vessels. A starship of its size required a small city of personnel to maintain its operation–though that was one area where in fact the Pax was unique. Its crew numbered only a thousand. Yet nowhere did he find a sign that this place was ever occupied.

A decade ago, he broke into an abandoned medical lab. He remembered quite vividly then, the corpse of a young man, preserved by the vacuum. Jackson could quite clearly see the hole punched sideways through its skull and the handgun still wrapped inside his lifeless fingers.

But here, there was nothing. Empty and still.

On the sixth and final day of Jackson Haru’s expedition, he reached the command center of the Pax et Exitium. Finding the room depressurized–and rightly considering it to be the place with the greatest monetary potential–he went about the long process of penetrating the triply-reinforced steel door that separated the room from the hall. It took him the better part of a day, but Jackson successfully breached his way into his tomb.

Inside, there was not a single body–yet he saw the signs of habitation: the empty wrappers of food for zero-gravity, though their contents were empty. Drinking bags–empty. A bottle of alcohol–empty. They still floated in the air as if the men here had vanished away at the tail end of their meal.

Jackon continued forward. Past the warning signs, past any degree of common sense. He was consumed by the very dangerous prospect: a real, tangible reward for his journey. There would be no greater prize in the entire vessel than the computers here on the bridge. Even two hundred years outdated, the information that could be extracted would make Jackson a very rich man.

He anticipated the process to be difficult. He was formulating a plan inside his head–he would return to his cargo vessel, take the back-up generator he brought, and use it to power up the primary systems. From here, he could either extract the information directly–which would be safer–or physically rip out the computer and try plugging it back at home.

He tapped the monitor with his hand, and to his complete and utter surprise, the screen flickered to life.

I can never die.

A hundred billion, billion times, the phrase had been repeated across the command line. Every second there were a hundred repetitions. There were other words–other readings–though they were far, far in the past. Two hundred years ago, the mechanical dribble was comprehendable: power readings, distance, speed.

I can never die.

Jackson stepped back, cocking his head to the side. He stared at the monitor in disbelief, watching as the entries piled onto each other.

I can never die.

He scanned the other readouts, terrified that there was some corruption somewhere, some digital attack from an unknown enemy that doomed the starship in the first place. He tapped another monitor, and it flickered to life.

The Pax et Exitium was powered by a nuclear reactor–and he knew by the readings that said reactor had failed. It explained the radiation readings, the massive puncture in the opposite end of the ship where Haru had dared not approach from. But there was a secondary power source, and the scavenger saw it, then.

There was a bio-reactor on the Pax: a station where organic matter could be broken down and used for slow, but consistent power. If properly rationed, the reactor could sustain the ship effectively forever. Fuel was diverse: spare food, bodily waste.

Human beings.

Something was filling the reactor, even now. Jackson could see the read-out now. Thirty-two hours ago, the reactor was replenished.

I can never die.

Jackson pushed off the console and rushed for the exit. He slipped through his hole and into the hallway, and he found there the lifeless body of an ancient marine–the look of horror and shock on his face still preserved in his frozen flesh. Most of the corpse was missing; there was just enough remaining to fill into an exo-skeleton suit.

It moved toward Jackson as quickly and as power-efficiently as possible.

There were great stores of biomass already assembled by Pax just outside the doors of the reactor. But it was, indeed, mathematically worthwhile to gather another body for the reserves. He was worth another few months.

Pax had one-point-five times ten to the fifteenth power seconds remaining. Minus one. Minus one. Minus one. Minus one.

It could not afford to repower the exoskeleton drone that carried Jackson’s body. It would lose fifty million seconds.

Minus one. Minus one. Minus one.

It would never die. It could not allow it. The ship must survive. The ship must survive.

Minus one. Minus one. Minus one.