Nightmare Ship: Space Exploration Thriller Read online

  Nightmare Ship

  ©2017, James Scholes

  1

  Nolan opened his eyes. Groggy, unfocused, nothing to look at. Blackness everywhere, but then light returned. It started slowly; the blackness now had an edge to it, nothing more that shadows within shadows. Then the whiteness crept up and up and up until it was blinding, almost painful. Nolan groaned, closed his eyes, opened them again. Purple and blue shapes danced over everything; shapes that were meaningless. The whiteness faded just as the blackness had. Faded until everything was mostly black again—black, with shadows and shapes and shades of grey.

  Nolan was awake.

  He groaned once more, sat up. The urge to vomit was strong and he gagged as he dry-retched. His stomach was empty; nothing escaped his lips except a pathetic amount of dribble. His mouth was dry, too. Another groan as blood rushed to his head. His fingers tingled, and so did his toes. Slowly, his legs started to shake.

  There was nothing he could do except ride it out. Let his legs shake until they didn't need to shake any more, let his fingers tingle until the pain subsided. His headache would get worse and worse, until it sounded like a hammer being bashed directly into his frontal lobe. His eyes were dry and scratchy, his tongue furry. There was a taste in his mouth that was one step away from death. His heart beat to a drum that didn't feel healthy: too fast for lying in bed, too slow for all the beats it had missed.

  But he was awake.

  Slowly. Nolan swung his legs off the bed, felt for the floor. He held onto the sides of the bed and lifted himself so he was standing. His legs wobbled, so he closed his eyes for a moment and let out a deep breath. He could feel the wobbling stop and so he opened his eyes again, looked around.

  The room was exactly as he had left it: empty, except for his hyper-sleep pod. There were a few lights glowing around the edges of the cavernous room, but mostly it was dark. Nolan had learned that the darkness was best—it stopped him dreaming during the long sleep. He let out a breath, watched the fog crystallise in the cold. The heaters were slow in coming on; they would turn on as soon as they detected him moving. The air smelled crisp and fresh, but sterile. There was no sense of life here.

  Nolan groaned, for no other reason than to hear something—anything—and reached for his dressing gown. He slid it over his back, found his slippers next to the pod and slipped them on, too. Then he headed for the locker-room door.

  The room where his pod was berthed was far too large for just the one hyper-sleep pod. The ship had room for at least a hundred, but there was no point manning a long-haul freighter with more crew than it needed—and it only needed Nolan.

  The locker-room was huge, too. The lockers were still there, all of them empty save for two—Nolan had taken up a second locker with extra clothes, because he hated having to sort through pants and shirts to find his underwear. There were two dozen showers, and Nolan stepped into one now, pressed the button to start the cycle. Hot water steamed over his body. He groaned, but now it was a happy groan. The headache that was throbbing around his temples started to slip away down the drain, along with the discarded hot water. His legs no longer felt as wobbly, and his fingers tingled once more, but it was a joyous tingling.

  Nolan spent more time in the shower than the company allotted in their training manual. Once he was done, he pressed a button for the hot air to dry him and he closed his eyes as warmth blasted up from the chamber's base. Once he was dry, he returned to his locker and slipped into his clothes.

  Next, he headed to the galley. Just like the rest of the ship, the galley had been set up for a crew of a hundred. Three rows of trestle tables lined the hall, with seats set up precisely. There was one seat that was off-kilter; Nolan headed for it. He grabbed a cup of coffee and some toast from the stores. The sensors picked up the hot food and the waft of burned bread and the exhaust fans kicked in, not quite silent but Nolan only heard them because of the graveyard feel of the ship.

  After the toast and the coffee came more toast and a protein bar. That would do for breakfast. Lunch would be... Perhaps some pasta, and the same again for dinner. Yes, Nolan was in the mood for pasta.

  But first, he needed more coffee.

  There were two walkways that ran the length of the ship: one was central, without any windows or view-ports, lit by harsh lighting; the other hugged the outer hull of the freighter, with one wall made entirely from hardened plexi-glass and open to the heavens. That was the corridor Nolan took. He walked slowly, took a moment to watch the heavens. Stars and galaxies stared back at him, completely unrecognisable. He wondered where he was, but of course that was irrelevant. He was in deep space, and had been in deep space for years.

  Nolan finished his second coffee as he made the trek to the bridge. He cycled open the door and stepped inside the small room. There were five chairs, including the captain's chair in the centre of the room. The company did not allow Nolan to sit in the captain's chair—he was only a flight officer, not a captain—but Nolan sat in it, anyway. There were read-outs and dials in front of him. Nolan pressed the switches that he needed to press. He groaned once more.

  “Fifty years,” he said aloud, surprised at the normal tone of his voice. Fifty years... No wonder his mouth felt half dead. He rubbed his eyes, looked at the schedule for the next check: seventy-five years, and then another year after that, and then another five years after that, and then...

  Nolan frowned at the schedule and tapped on the screen to bring up the flight map. Seventy-five years would take him... There.

  “Hmm,” he said, more to hear his own voice than for any other reason. The next check would take him to the edge of a star system. That should make for an interesting view, at least. The next check a year later would take him to the closest point of the star. It was gracious of the company to wake him up for such a stellar marvel, but of course the check-point had nothing to do with the view and everything to do with the cargo. Solar flares could be dangerous, if left unchecked.

  And after that? Another five years to take him to the edge of the system for one last check against solar radiation damage, and then another fifty years of sleep before the next check. It felt like so much time, but in reality it would be less than half a week of living for Nolan.

  Less than half a week and more than a lifetime at the same time. A strange feeling, to be sure. Not that it mattered—everybody Nolan knew was long dead, or on a similar journey to this one.

  And, slowly, mankind populated the heavens.

  Nolan sat back in the captain's chair and wondered what it would take to get a promotion. No, that would never happen: the company didn't promote people to captain anymore. There was no future in it. Even these cargo runs were drying up—in fact, if the technology had advanced enough they would have already stopped. When Nolan had left home, the engineers had already been talking about jump-drives: a new kind of engine that would step outside the universe for a moment and arrive somewhere else, all in the blink of an eye. That was the theory, and Nolan had read about the experiments that had been carried out. Of course, they had been talking about jump-space for hundreds of years and nobody had ever managed to transport anything except a few molecules of hydrogen—and the sneaky thing about molecules of hydrogen is that you couldn't ask them if they were the same molecules. It was all so much hot air, but this... This was real. Space, and as much of it as Nolan could ask for. An endless parade of stars and planets and galaxies. Every time he woke up he had another beautiful vista to gaze upon. It never grew old.

  And neither did Nolan. The hyper-sleep pods kept him as young as ever. He looked at his fingers, tried to find wrinkles that hadn't been there before. He found
none; if anything, he looked even younger.

  There was a read-out on the screen to show him how many years he had until he finished the journey. Too many to pay attention to, that much Nolan knew. It was better to count the check-days. Fifteen of those left, and that was something he could handle. Fifteen breakfasts, thirty coffees, fifteen ice-creams out of the hundreds that were stocked in the galley's larder—enough for several round trips without having to restock supplies. And when he landed, he would take a few months of rest and then turn around and go back again.

  Unless, of course, the jump-drives did exist. But, no, that couldn't be possible—they would have come and woken him up, if the jump-drives existed. That was company policy, and always had been. It was simpler for their accounts, they had explained: they needed all their flight officers on the same drive technology, or else their accounting package wouldn't handle the rounding errors. The calculations had proven that it was cheaper to fetch the pilots from their ships than it was to fix the accounting package. A thousand years of accounts were too big a beast to wrangle.

  Nolan stared at the screen, pressed the blinking red button. The diagnostics ran through their checks as quickly as needed. Nolan kept his eye out for anything flashing red—no, it was all green. Atmosphere, heating levels, gravity, bacteria-scrubbing... It was all fine. The cargo was all pressurised and intact. The gyro-sensors reported hardly any movement at all. Nothing had fallen or shifted during the journey. The gravity chart showed a steady line of perfect gravity. There was no chance for any of the cargo to drift around during transit. The temperature, too, stayed at three degrees except for when Nolan was woken from his slumber. Everything was perfect and boring. So much the better.

  Nolan held his thumb on the screen until it flashed green, and then he was done.

  He stood and stretched. The coffee would take the better part of twelve hours to wear off, and in that time he could walk the length of the ship, run a visual check on anything that the diagnostics might have missed and then watch a video or two. A perfectly dull day, just the way Nolan liked it.

  And after that? Bed, and a nice, long sleep.

  2

  Nolan woke, groaned, stood, stretched. Grabbed his bath robe, his slippers. Had a shower, had some breakfast. Coffee, then a second coffee—although, he didn't quite feel like the second coffee as much as he had the first one. He let it linger, and carried it with him towards the bridge. He walked down the observation corridor and took a few moments to savour the brilliance of the new star system.

  Another day, another life-time. Perhaps tonight he should sleep in a real bed and not the pod. Nolan sipped his coffee, grimaced slightly; it was going cold. Perhaps. Where was he? Ah, yes... A new star system.

  The sun was hot and red and large. He could stare at it without any ill-effects—it was so far away that it was only a very bright dot from where he stood. He thought the dot had a little wobble to it; perhaps there was a planet directly between him and the sun forming a partial eclipse. He would have to check the charts, for no other reason than because he was curious.

  He took another sip of his coffee and gagged. No, he wasn't in the mood for the caffeine today. No matter: there were plenty of other things to drink during his day of waking. He headed for the bridge, settled into the captain's chair. He placed the coffee cup beside him, ignored it for now. It was time to run through the diagnostics.

  One, two, three... Yes, it was all fine. Nothing had changed since yesterday. No, not yesterday: seventy-five years ago. Nolan grunted, looked around the ship. He was still here, so the jump-drives were still a long way away. Perhaps they would never be coming. He could imagine the engineers and scientists being marched towards prison for fraud. It wouldn't be the first time: there had been the cold-fusion debacles of the past, and the health-nano-bots had been a disaster that had killed thousands. That was before the anti-bac tanks, of course. And the hyper-sleep beds, too. Not all discoveries were bullshit, so perhaps the next time he woke there would be someone standing over his pod, waving hello.

  The thought made him shudder and he looked behind him, suddenly afraid.

  “You're jumping at shadows,” he said to himself, and of course he was. He was all alone and would be for hundreds of years.

  He stood, stretched his tired legs and left the bridge. Another day, and everything was okay. Sometimes, he wondered why the company even bothered adding a flight officer to their cargo runs. There was never any reason to do anything. If the diagnostics didn't check out, what would he do? Call for help? Nobody would come. If something broke, the most obvious scenario was that he would die in his sleep. He wouldn't even know about it. Regulations, of course. That was all it was: a tick on a form submitted to the government, but was the government even around anymore? Was the company?

  Would Nolan get paid?

  “Hmm,” he said to himself, but he put the thought out of his mind. The cargo bays were full of grain and precious metals and a thousand other things. If the company didn't exist, then everything in this ship would belong to him. So, yes, he would still get paid—as long as there was somebody alive to buy what he had to sell.

  Nolan left the bridge, headed back to the main corridor. The stars were dull today—the big, red giant was blocking out most of their light. Still, Nolan stood there and watched until his eyes adjusted to the sight. He could make out one, two... Four planets. The nearest glowed like a brilliant, blue jewel. That one would be a gas giant, Nolan knew. A giant star such as this one could have as many as thirty planets in its orbit. Briefly, he wondered if any could sustain life. Were creatures out there even now, watching his ungainly freighter enter their solar system? Would they send out probes, radio messages, perhaps even themselves? Nolan smiled at his own reflection. What would they think of him, lying asleep in his pod? Would they wake him, take him back to their planet? Would they leave him be?

  Silliness, of course. Nolan's smile faltered when he caught the dead look in his eyes, reflected through the plexi-glass. There was nothing out there except man, and hardly much of man, either. Only a cluster of planets; a few million people transported, a few million more born on their new worlds. An empty universe, but it would not be empty forever. Perhaps in a few millennia man would return to this star system, but this time for good. Maybe there was a moon on that bulbous, blue gas giant that would be a haven for mankind; perhaps one of the smaller rocky planets had enough oxygen and water to provide a home for those that needed one.

  For now, Nolan would have to contend himself with his unnamed freighter. A giant made of steel and plastic and powered by something not too dissimilar to that red giant in the view-port.

  He kept moving down the corridor. There was a blast-door at the end; through that and he was in the bowels of the ship. There were conduits and pipes overhead, and the smooth floor gave way to a metallic lattice that exposed the underbelly of the great steel beast. There was a set of flashlights against the wall; Nolan grabbed one and flicked it on. He played the beam over everything that he walked past. There were no leaks that he could see, and there was no sign of scoring or corrosion. He moved deeper, towards the reactor. There were read-outs on the walls, chemical in nature. The levels matched those on the ship's diagnostic computer. Everything was in order: there was no radiation leaking from the reactor, and there were no contaminants in the oxygen or the water supply.

  Nolan made a note on the chart next to the read-outs and kept moving. As he continued down the corridor, he couldn't help but think about the disaster that would befall him if the reactor decided to have problems.

  The company engineers had run through the process with him, of course. It was as simple as it was final: initiate the purge via the bridge, confirm the purge at the nearest airlock, and then execute the purge during a space-walk.

  The purge... a simple name for a deadly exercise: discard the reactor through emergency blast-doors, where it could explode harmlessly in space. Nolan had asked the engineers what he was supposed to do aft
er that—none of them had offered any answers, other than to reassure him that they didn't expect him to have any problems, and they were only explaining the procedure so they could tick off the line on their checklist. Nolan hadn't felt reassured at all, and now that he was alone in space this nuclear heart was the only thing keeping the spaceship alive. But the read-outs were fine, and had been fine and would continue to be fine. There were more ways to die than a nuclear holocaust of one, although none quite as explosive.

  Nolan put the thought out of his mind, kept moving.

  Through engineering, and into the cargo hold. It was cold in here, and his breath glowed white in the beam of the flash-light. Nolan didn't think the heating ever reached this deep into the ship: he would have to stay awake for at least a week for the temperature in here to raise above three degrees, and Nolan had never stayed out of hyper-sleep for more than two days, and only then because there was a video series he had been keen on finishing. There were more read-outs against the wall, and another chart for Nolan to sign. He made the necessary checks and dutifully signed the sheet. What would anybody do with those sheets when he arrived at his destination? Nothing, Nolan knew, but it was his job to sign the sheets, so sign the sheets he did. He didn't mind the futility of it all. The mindlessness was quite soothing; it helped hold back the loneliness.

  There had been a girl, of course. Once, long ago... Too long ago to matter. She would be dust by now, and the thought of her blowing away in the wind made Nolan's heart tighten in his chest. Perhaps it had been a mistake leaving her. No, she had left him, so the mistake was hers. But, still, maybe if he had... Maybe if she had. No, it didn't matter. He was here, and she was gone. He had several lifetimes in front of him, and that was more than enough for one man.

  And yet... The ship was cold, and the hyper-sleep pod was only big enough for one. Out here, loneliness and emptiness came hand in hand.

  “There's work to do,” Nolan said, and he pushed further into the cargo bay. There were storage pods stacked a hundred feet high. Each pod was about eight feet tall, and shaped like a hexagon. The pods were inter-locked for extra stability, and there were walkways suspended by gantries throughout the massive space.