Dearly departed
22 Dec 2020Teafox
Looking back on it, I guess I should recognise that the miners that held out longest in searching were those that had lost family in the belts themselves. As the hours passed, the younger pilots started peeling off; citing exhaustion or needing to refuel, some of the others who had families to attend to or valuable cargo that would be a danger to haul around the belt left too. Others made no excuses, they had done their part in their view... and they had, they could have let me search alone.Dutifully they called out anything that could possibly have been out of the ordinary, lighting a beacon for me to come and take a look.
Signs of a pirate attack, a federal shakedown, a few bits of twisted metal from someone misjuding their speed and losing their shields and part of their hull on a rock. Nothing definitive.
And then something interesting.
"Hey, has anyone been mining outside of the hot spot? There's a core rock that's been blown about two clicks from the edge. Looks like the minerals were abandoned too."
That was it. How do you leave a sign that a miner will spot, but a soldier won't? You mine badly. I arrived on the scene as hot as I dared, firing off the mineral scanner. If by some chance he was nearby and still had power... and his own scanner running, he'd see it go off.
The other mining ship had ventured closer. I could hear in his voice before I understood the words. "There's something there in the ice. Looks bad, like it's been out of power for a while. I'm sorry."
The signal was so cold, I couldn't get a target to launch a limpet. There wasn't any other alternative I could think of. None of our ships here were big enough to move that amount of rock quickly and safely, but my cobra was easily small enough to slide right up to the stricken Asp.
Remlok suits don't get you an awful lot of protection in ideal conditions when on a space walk. The broken interior of the asteroid would probably fizz and pop for a few days as chemicals previously interior to the rock were exposed to hard vacuum and evaporated, bringing the visibility down, and forcing the heating unit of the vacuum suit to work harder to keep me alive. Fortunately, if a ship is unpowered and you have the tools, it's easy to pop the cargo hatch quickly. Not that I needed to. It had been left open. A smart move if you really were trying to stretch your life support power; the ship wouldn't try to heat a cabin under vacuum, less to heat, lower power consumption.
If you ever get the opportunity to view the body of one of your previous imprints in the future, take my advice and avoid it. I imagine that even under the best of circumstances it is a harrowing experience. It's the kind of haunting sight that is devilishly hard to look away from though. The only solace it brings me when I say that I wasn't able to resist is that at least I didn't seem to have suffered. The inside of the hatch to the cockpit was frosted over with an unpleasant brown colour. Blood, but clearly there was still atmo in there, even if it was likely just carbon dioxide now. I popped the pressure release seal on the door so I could get it open. The change in air pressure made all of the loose objects in the room beyond shift slightly, so when I finally got the door open, there were soft movements all around the room.
It was something out of a horror movie. Screens smashed, one of the bunks had been all but torn off, and the pilot's seat itself was enough to make me glad I didn't have any food in my system to throw up. The back of the chair had been ripped entirely open, and now that the room had no air pressure, the body in the chair was trying to equalize by ejecting what was left of it's vital fluids over the inside of the canopy and the mining tool that been used to rip through the chair and the pilot alike. Compared to that guy, my death was positively pleasant. No wonder they had to sedate him. I silently wished him a lifetime of unsuccessful therapy.
I tried to pull my attention away from the grizzly scene. There was no sign of the kid... The co-pilots seat was below. I scrambled for the access ladder.
The lower cockpit was much more orderly, but still a hellish scene. There were bloody hand and foot prints everywhere, all but one of the screens was smashed and there, curled up tightly almost as though he was hiding, was a bloodied remlok suit. Motionless aside from the gentle drift. Both his ankles were cuffed together, with what looked like a broken part of the grab rail on the bunk still hanging on the chain. From that bunk he'd have been able to reach the storage rack for the mining drills. It'd have cut through the bunk like a felling axe through warm butter. The back of the pilots seat would probably put up even less resistance, and then...
And then Amber lights began to flash inside his helmet. The small figure flailed a little as if woken by the alarm. I could see now that he had zip tied one wrist to the surviving screen, which he swatted at. It sprang to dim life. He had to use both arms to steady himself and then tapped at the control to power on the life support. On and then off just as soon as it had refilled his O2 and heater energy. Probably less than five seconds in all.
Under emergency conditions, your remlok suit will give you seven and a half minutes of life support before shutting your body down and initiating the distress beacon. A decent life support system can refill that in... Well, apparently about five seconds. He had conserved as much fuel as possible by smashing up all of the screens and turning on the life support for a few seconds every seven minutes or so... For how many hours?
I wasn't exactly coherent when I realized what was going on. I was exhausted, I was in awe, and I'll admit, I was crying with relief. I remember we did say... something to each other, but even now, I can't remember what exactly.
The zip-tie snapped apart easily enough and even through blurry eyes, it wasn't hard to get us back aboard the Vagrant.
The kid's a mess emotionally. Exhausted, traumatized, I wouldn't normally take someone out of their vacsuit outside of a space station, but just accept that it needed cleaning. Besides, if something happens now, an extra seven and a half minutes isn't going to be much help without the insurance of an imprint. Besides which, heated blankets feel much nicer without an insulating space suit.
One of the two miners came aboard, concerned that I had removed a body from it's resting place. The other had gone to get a larger ship to help extract Vesper from the rocks.
He looked at me pityingly when I told him not to disturb the kid, he was just sleeping. He did his best to comfort me in my time of loss and.
"No really, he's exhausted, but he cycled the power to the life support on and off to save fuel."
His eyes positively bugged out at me. "For fourteen hours? You're delusional." he broke into laughter. "That's amazing I gotta tell H..." I caught his hand as he reached for his suit comms.
"You can't tell anyone. If the feds find out, they'll come for us again."
His eyes met mine, seconds passed. He took his arm from my wrist and spoke gravely.
"Henry, hurry up with that Anaconda, will you? This guy's just lost his kid. It'll do him no good to hang around here, we've got to get a funeral done."
Belter funerals are simple affairs. By the time Henry had returned with a bigger ship and some help, we had recovered all of our personal effects from Vesper.
Solemn words were spoken, by Arthur on my behalf, for the souls of the three bodies that had died on the ship. Vespertillio, my asp explorer was then de-orbited so that it's remains would fall into the atmosphere of the gas giant we were circling, and the self destruct timer was armed to ensure no one could indulge in grave robbing... and so that it'd be much harder to notice that there were only two bodies on board before the charges atomized the evidence.
Arthur insisted that we stay at least a short time, if only to keep up the appearance of a father grieving for his child, but also, if the kid needed more help than I could provide, then he would arrange for another family to smuggle him out. Lastly, he made sure I had something to eat that this new body wouldn't reject, and said he would stand watch whilst I got some rest.
I've never liked taking sleeping pills, but I was glad to make an exception.