While I was thinking about the prompt, one line (the opening line) crawled into my brain and stuck, so I built the story from there. I was originally wanted to try to make it impossible to tell if this was a 19th-Century sailing ship or a space ship, but in the end, I had to go with outer space. Chuck gave us 2000 words, and for once I used most of them. So here, in 1852 words, is:
Lost Hope
More like fleas
deserting a dead rat, I thought, but had more sense than to say. Aloud, I
asked, “Can you blame them? I only give us about a 25% chance of making it
through. Most of them figure it’s a lot less than that. They just don’t want to
die.”
Captain Cassandra d’Clerc turned and fixed me with a hard
look. “Will you be leaving us, then, Lieutenant?”
I swallowed hard. Was she giving me an order, a way out, or
a test? Knowing the captain, I guessed it was a test, and that I’d better pass
it. “I’ll be right here, Captain. We’ll make it through. My mum always said I
only lived to grow up because I was too stupid to know when I was killed.”
That startled a bark of laughter from her, and I relaxed.
“I don’t suppose you could share that attitude with the rest
of the crew?”
“You ask that? You gave them the choice to go or stay,” I
pointed out.
“I know. But I didn’t expect so many—we do need enough crew
to run the ship. I'm worried that at this rate we won’t have it.”
“Hope—or stupidity—can only carry you through if you really
have it.” I let her digest that.
Ours had been an extraordinarily long voyage, and when we
returned to the fringes of known lands, we found that much had changed in our
absence. Being in known territory was somewhat less frightening than the
unknown through which we had voyaged for over a year, but most of the lands
between this farthest outpost and home were now in the hands of the enemy.
Our current stop—the first in over a year, and the last
before the blockade--was controlled by the Company, which always stays neutral,
lest politics interfere with making money. They wouldn’t blast our ship to
atoms, but they wouldn’t help us break the blockade, either. And they’d made an
offer that too many of our people, looking at our chances of getting through to
our home planet, couldn’t resist.
I watched as the majority of our crew, and all the
passengers, filed down the ramp into the customs shed, carrying everything they
owned. They’d been told that they could stay. They would work for the Company
for three years in exchange for food and a bed in the bunkhouse. After that
they could become legal residents. I wondered how many realized what they had
committed to. They wouldn’t be returning to their home planets and resuming
interrupted lives. I doubted if most of them would survive the probationary
period.
“They’ve chosen slavery,” Captain d’Clerc said. She stepped
up next to me at the viewport, and we watched the pathetic line of men and
women disappear into the customs shed. She was right about their choice. They’d
given up all hope in our plan, and were willing to settle for spiritual
obliteration in order to avoid physical obliteration.
It was a natural impulse, and more common than not, to judge
by the exodus from the ship. The captain and I both knew it was likely to end
in both spiritual and physical death for them. I assumed that the other crew
members who remained aboard had reached the same conclusion and chose to die
our way.
The captain turned away from the view. “That’s the last of
them. Sound the final call for going ashore—or coming back aboard. We launch in
15 minutes.”
We were left with a crew of 12, instead of our usual 50.
Since the passengers—mostly minor government functionaries who’d been sent
along to claim any new lands we might have found on our voyage beyond known
space—were gone, a dozen of us could handle the running of the ship. We had the
right people, too. We could cover all the essential functions, though we’d lost
our chief communications officer and the navigator. I’d been Navs until my last
voyage but one, so I’d handle that.
One passenger remained.
I didn’t discover her until I was making a final sweep of
the ship. The ramps were up and the hatches closed when I found the
astrophysicist sitting quietly in her stateroom reading a book.
“Dr. Kareem? The ship launches in five minutes. Did you miss
the announcements?”
She her head, which was a great deal greyer even than the
captains—and Captain d’Clerc had aged a great deal on this voyage—and looked at
me.
“I heard. I have no intention of becoming a slave to the
Company.”
“There is a good chance that we will die,” I commented.
“Young man, I’m plenty old enough not to fear that. And if
we do not die, then I will carry our discoveries back to the scientific
community. The Company has no use for my kind of science.”
I nodded. She didn’t need to say that, with no use for
astrophysics, the Company would simply put her to manual labor until she died. At
her age, it wouldn’t take long. Her choice made sense.
“I shan’t be a burden,” Dr. Kareem added with a gleam of a
smile. “I may have my head in the stars, and a bad leg, but I can cook.”
“If we live long enough to need a meal,” I said, “we would
be most grateful if you would take command in the galley. We’ve lost our chefs.”
My comments were unnecessarily pessimistic. We wouldn’t die
that day, and we both knew it. It would take at least one day’s travel to reach
enemy territory, and we’d be hungry well before then. I thought she might be
able to do more than cook for us, too.
“You might as well come on up to the bridge with me. There’s
plenty of room, and you might enjoy the view. We’ll welcome any suggestions you
might have.”
“Indeed, I shall enjoy it. As for suggestions,” she put
aside the book and tightened the leg brace that she’d loosened for comfort
while on her bunk. “I am not a practical navigator, but I may have some ideas.”
She followed me up the corridor, limping only a little, while I thought about
how we might make use of the best astrophysicist in the galaxy.
“Strap in for launch,” was all the captain said when we
entered the bridge, where all the remaining officers were beginning the
countdown. Dr. Kareem took the empty seat next to me at the Nav station.
Over the course of the next two days, Dr. Kareen fulfilled
her promise. She provided us with a steady supply of coffee as well as decent
meals. It wasn’t luxurious, but we had been on tight rations as we neared the
end of our voyage. With the population of the vessel reduced by three-quarters,
even though the Company had parted with few supplies at our brief stop, we had
more than enough to last us—for however long we’d need to eat.
All of us were surprisingly cheerful. Well, not the Chief
Engineer. He’d never in his life been cheerful, and the imminent approach of near-certain
death didn’t change that. But the rest of us chose to believe in my 25% chance,
rather than the 2% chance that the Company had given. We’d not seen any enemy
ships in that first day, and while we were poorly armed—our mission was
exploration, not subjugation—we were plenty agile. We might yet dodge the
blockade, we told each other.
We were deceiving ourselves about that. The appearance of a
fleet on our third day proved that. Six well-armed warships moved on us in
formation, and at least two of them looked fast as well as capable of
vaporizing us.
We could have given up then. It might even have been a way
to keep ourselves alive. But, having left behind those unwilling to hope, and
fight, to the end was that the bunch of us who were left were unable to give
up.
I’m not sure at what point in our dodging and evasive
maneuvers Dr. Kareem joined me, but we’d taken one hit when she touched my arm.
“There might be a way.”
“What?” I’d been too focused on my work to notice her, and
too long without sleep to respond quickly.
“We could try that.”
I looked where she was pointing on the chart-screen that
represented nearby space, and time stopped.
Okay, time kept going, and we were rocked by another
near-miss while I considered what the astrophysicist was saying.
“Captain?” I wasn’t going to call this one on my own.
“Continue evasive maneuvers,” Captain d’Clerc commanded
Lieutenant Carmichael, who had the helm. She crossed to where Dr. Kareem and I
were studying the chart-screen. “What?”
Dr. Kareem was as calm as if she were giving an unimportant
lecture to a group of semi-interested students. “There is an anomaly there.”
She pointed. “If we were to enter it, I think that we could stop worrying about
the enemy ships.”
The captain laughed. “Or anything else. No one knows what
will happen to a ship that enters one of those. No one even knows exactly what
it is. Some kind of black hole, isn’t it?”
“No, not a black hole. Not even I would care to dive into
one of those. I think it is more like what the early astrophysicists called a
‘wormhole.’ Of course, they didn’t know what they were talking about, but I
have studied the phenomenon.”
I’ll bet you have,
I thought. For some reason, my hopes were soaring, even while she proposed
diving into something I’d been taught all my spacing life to avoid on pain of
death.
Death. We’d all planned on that anyway. What better way to
go than exploring a wormhole? I could see that was how Dr. Kareem’s mind was
running. She had less to lose than most of us, unless you figured that we were
all living on borrowed time anyway.
“We have about a 1 in 100 chance of it being a survivable
experience, and dumping us out a long way from any enemy ships.”
“We have about a none in 100 chance of surviving this
attack,” Lieutenant Carmichael called from the helm, as we shook from another
hit. “Damage assessment?”
“No hull breech!” someone shouted from where he monitored an
array of screens. “Key systems intact.”
“Any idea where we’ll end up?” the captain asked.
Dr. Kareem shook her head, her smile more than a hint now. “Not
a clue. But wouldn’t it be grand to find out?”
When there’s no hope left at all, any hope will do. We
weren’t ready to give up, and if we were going to die, every one of us aboard
preferred to do it in our own way. I laid the course, Captain d’Clerc gave the
orders, and Lieutenant Carmichael aimed us right at the wormhole.
We were coming out the other side, or going to the most
glorious death we could imagine. It didn’t really matter which.
###
©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!
