Chilo stared out at the stars and, focusing on one at a time, uttered a curse for every one he picked out.
Cramped in the helm pit of the Qeexer, he still couldn't believe that he'd gotten himself into this fix. He scratched at his grizzled chin and dwelt for the umpteenth time on the old Earth saying that good deed ever went unpunished.
He glanced at his instrumentation once again, his lungs feeling heavier and heavier. He knew that the last thing you were supposed to do upon receiving a head injury was to let yourself fall asleep. And so he had kept himself awake through walking around in the cramped quarters, through stimulants, recitation, biting himself----anything and everything he could think of. None of which was going to do him a damned bit of good because, just to make things absolutely perfect, he wasn't going to be able to breathe for all that much longer. The life-support systems were tied into his engines. When they went down, the support systems switched to backup power supply, but that was in the process of running out. Chilo was positive it was getting tougher to breathe, although he wasn't altogether sure how much of that was genuine and how much was just his imagination running away with him. But if wasn't happening now, it was going to be happening soon enough as the systems became incapable of cleansing the atmosphere within the craft and everybody within suffocated.
Everybody....
Every----body----
----lots of bodies.
Not for the first time, he dwelt on the fact that this was a case where the more was definitely not the merrier. Every single body on the ship was another person who was taking up space, another person breathing oxygen and taking up air that would be better served to keep him, Chilo, alive.
What had gotten into him? What in God's name had possessed him to take on this useless, unprofitable detail? If he'd been a Shygg'tt'nn he would've been drummed out of----well, whatever the Shygg'tt'nn were drummed out of when they made unbelievably bad business decisions. The problem was that this was no longer simply a case of costing him money. Now it was going to cost him his life.
.....lots of bodies.
"Dump 'em," he said, giving voice finally to the thought that had bounced around in his head for the last several hours. It was a perfectly reasonable idea. All he had to do was get rid of the passengers and he could probably survive days, maybe even weeks, instead of the mere hours that his instruments seemed to indicate remained to him.
It wouldn't be easy. There were, after all, forty-seven of them and only one of him. It wasn't likely that they would simply and cheerfully hurl themselves into the void so that he, Chilo, had a better chance at survival. No, the only way to get rid of them would be by force. Again, though, he was slightly outnumbered.....by about forty-seven to one.
He had a couple of disruptors in a hidden compartment under his feet. He could remove those, go into the aft section where all the passengers were situation, and start blasting away. Blow them all to hell and gone and then eject the bodies. But then he pictured himself standing there, shooting, body after body going down, seeing the fear of death in their eyes, hearing the death rattles not once, not twice, but forty-seven times. Because it was going to have to be all of them. All or nothing, he knew that with absolute certainty. He couldn't pick and choose. All or nothing. But he was no killer. He'd never killed anyone in his life; the disruptors were just for protection, a last resort, and he'd never fired them. Never had to. Kill them and then blast into space....how could he....?
Then he realized. He didn't have to kill them. Just blast them into space, into the void. Sure, they'd die agonizingly, suffering in space, but it wasn't as if death by disruptor was all that much better.
The Qeexer was divided into three sections: The helm pit, which was where he was. The midsection, used for equipment storage mostly, and his private quarters as well. And the aft section---the largest section, used for cargo....
....which was where all his passengers were. They were cramped, they were uncomfortable, but they were alive.
Chilo's eyes scanned his equipment board. And there, just as he knew it would be, was the control for the aft loading doors. There were controls in back as well, but they were redundant and---if necessary----could be overridden from the helm pit. The helm pit, which was, for that matter, self-contained and secured, a heavy door sealing it off from the rest of the vessel.
All he had to do was blow the loading-bay doors. The passengers back there probably wouldn't even have time to realize that their lives were ended before they were sucked out into the vacuum of space. Granted he'd lose some air as well. With power so low, the onboard systems would never be able to replenish what he lost to the vacuum. On the other hand, he'd have the remaining air in the helm pit and in the midsection. Not a lot, but at least it would be all his. All his.
.....lots of bodies....
The bay-door switch beckoned to him and he reached over and tapped it, determined to do what had to be done for survival before he thought better of it. Immediately a yellow caution light came on, and the operations computer came on in its flat, monotone masculine voice. "Warning. This vessel is not within a planetary atmosphere. Opening of loading-bay doors will cause loss of air in aft section and loss of any objects not properly secured. Do you wish to continue with procedure? Signify by saying, 'Continue with procedure.'"
"Con..." The words caught in his throat.
......lots of bodies....
"Con---contin....."
There was a rapping at the door behind him. It reverberated through the helm pit, like a summons from hell. "What is it?" he shouted at the unseen intruder.
"Mr. Chilo?" came a thin, reedy voice. A child's voice, a small girl. One of the soon-to-be corpses.
"Yeah? What?"
"I was....I was wondering if anyone heard our call for help."
"I don't know. I wish I did, but I don't. Go back and sit with your parents now, okay?"
"They're dead."
That caught him off-guard for a moment, but then he remembered; one of the kids had lost her parents to some rather aggressive scavengers. She was traveling with an uncle who looked to be around ninety-something. "Oh, right, well....go back with your uncle, then."
There was a pause and he thought for a moment that she'd done as he asked. He began to address the computer again when he heard, "Mr. Chilo?"
"What is it, damn you!"
"I just---I wanted to say thank you." When he said nothing in response, she continued, "I know you tried your best, and that I know you'll keep trying, and I----I believe in you. Thank you for everything."
He stared at the blinking yellow light. "Why are you saying this? Who told you to say this?" he asked tonelessly.
"The gods. I prayed to them for help, and I was starting to fall asleep while I was praying....and I heard them in my head telling me to say thank you. So I----I did."
Chilo's mouth moved, but nothing came out. "That's....that's fine. You're, uh----you're welcome. Okay? You're welcome."
He listened closely and heard the sound of her feet pattering away. He was all alone once more. Alone to do what had to be done.
"Computer."
"Waiting for instructions," the computer told him. The computer wouldn't care, of course. It simply waited to be told. It was a machine, incapable of making value judgments. Nor was it capable of taking any actions that would insure its own survival. Chilo, on the other hand, most definitely was.
"Computer...."
He thought of the child. He thought of the bodies floating in space. So many bodies. And he would survive, or at least have a better chance, and that was the important thing. "Computer, continue with...."
"What was one child, more or less? One life, or forty-seven lives? What did any of it matter? The only important thing was that he lived. Wasn't that true? Wasn't it?
He envisioned them floating past his viewer, their bodies destroyed by the vacuum, their faces etched in the horror of final realization. And he would still be alive....
.....and he might as well be dead.
With the trembling sigh of one who knows he had just completely screwed himself, Chilo said, "Computer, cancel program."
"Canceling," replied the computer. Naturally, whether he continued the program or not was of no consequence to the computer. As noted, it was just a machine. But Chilo liked to think he was something more, and reluctantly had to admit that----if that was the case----it bore with it certain responsibilities.
He leaned back in his pilot's seat, looked at the stars, and said, "Okay, gods. Whisper something to me know. Tell me what an idiot I am. Tell me I'm a jerk. Go ahead. Let me have it, square between the eyes."
And the gods answered.
At least, that's what it appeared they were doing, because the darkness of space was shimmering dead ahead, fluctuating ribbons of color undulating in circular formation.
Slowly he sat forward, his mind not entirely taking in what he was witnessing, and then the gods exploded from the shadows.
These gods, however, had chosen a very distinctive and blessed conveyance. They were in a vessel that Chilo instantly recognized as a Space Federation starship. It had dropped out of warp space, still moving so quickly that it had been a hundred thousand kilometers away and then, an eyeblink later, it was virtually right on top of him. He'd never seen such a vessel in person before, and he couldn't believe the size of the thing. The ship had course-corrected on a dime, angling upward and slowing so that it passed slowly over him rather than smashing him to pieces. He saw the name of the ship painted on the underside: U.S.S. Universe. The ship was so vast that it blotted out the light provided by a nearby sun, casting the Qeexer into shadow, but Chilo couldn't have cared less.
Chilo had never been a religious man. The concept of unseen, unknowable deities had been of no interest to him at all in his rather pragmatic life. And as he began to deliriously cheer, and wave his hands as if they could see him, he decided that he did indeed believe in gods after all. Not the unknowable ones, though. His gods were whoever those wonderful individuals were who loomed above him. They had come from wherever it was gods came from, and had arrived in this desperate environment currently inhabited by one Captain Chilo and his cargo of forty-seven frightened souls.
Thereby answering, finally, a very old question, namely:
What does God need with a starship?
And the answer, of course, was one of the oldest answers in known space:
To get to the other side.572Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡr6XThKp8J2
