Fiction | Sci-Fi | Short Fiction | Flash Fiction
Depeche Mode
Choosing an Island Instead of a Lagrange
Ship dropped out of FTL a little inside Mars’ orbit, but it only woke us a week from Earth; by then, it had depleted most of its antimatter for the deceleration.
Of the forty-nine, only eleven of us rose from the frigidariums, groggy and nauseous. Cryosleep was never a sure thing, and Lady Mishap doubled down in our case. My heart soared when I saw Her pale face in the corridor, shaken by her husband’s icy death in the box, yet she was still able to grant me a slight nod.
As the two highest-ranking officers were now corpsicles, Ship corralled me as the acting captain into the Quiet Room as soon as I was fully mobile while it played Bach’s Air on the G String on a loop to the rest of the company in the mess hall, aiming for tranquillity.
Shivering in a thick bathrobe with my legs twitching uncontrollably, I quietly followed its summary of weeks’ worth of remote sensing of the radio-silent Earth.
When it finished, I asked whether the ice age was caused locally or by an alien assailant. Ship thought it must have been a war among the Blocs using H- and AM-warheads, which also mopped all the outposts: Mars, Luna, Ceres, and Titan. Ship roused us late to preserve life-support resources as we had nowhere to disembark. It had decided to park itself in one of the Earth-Moon regions of gravitational equilibrium.
“How long,” I mumbled, “can you keep us alive?”
It paused for probably millennia in its reality, but only a couple of heartbeats in mine.
“Three months unsuspended,” it answered.
“And five years frozen.”
After I presented the news to the assembled crew, the resulting kerfuffle led to a shit-storm, and Ship had to lace the air with benzodiazepine mist.
In the end, we voted that it would — before swinging to a Lagrange — drop off at Earth whoever wanted to take their chances in a semi-sterilised world with radioactive winds and personal time-to-zero of a fortnight.
I recline in the sealed re-entry pod with 150 kilograms of survival gear and four empty seats around me. For the third time, I tighten the harness nervously while listening to Ship’s countdown to my ejection and descent towards, hopefully, what remains of South Island, New Zealand.
Ship stops at tee-minus fourteen and apologises as the hatch opens with a whoosh of over-pressure. She enters silently and sits beside me, and I dare to place my hand on her thigh.
The last favour I ask of Ship before releasing us, is to put another oldie, Never Let Me Down Again, on replay for our cabin.
The story above was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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