Sample Chapters of Bones Burnt Black

Sample Chapters of Plague at Redhook by Stephen Euin Cobb

Plague at Redhook

Stephen Euin Cobb

Chapter 1

Wreckage

A man in his late thirties with jet black hair scrambled through the spotless but unfamiliar corridors of his new ship as he watched the twisted remains of a large passenger craft tumbling in his mind's eye. “I repeat,” he thought frantically, “this is Doctor Mark Tolman of the Hospital Ship Louis Pasteur calling the Star Shuttle Andromeda. Do you read?”

The great deformed hulk tumbled silently against the starry background. Its tumbling, however, was not aligned perpendicular to its long axis. Instead, it was tilted at a forty five degree angle; so that as the ship tumbled it traced out a clumsy hourglass shape.

A huge cavernous hole just front of the ship's mid-section, and wider than the ship itself, would have cut the craft completely in two if not for a dozen irregular strips of jaggedly twisted hull-metal. These strips all arched outward—their now frozen response to what must have been an explosion of incredible violence.

“Pasteur!” thought Mark.

“Yes, Doctor?” said his ship's comsys.

“Deploy all four paramedics. Route each of them to a separate entry point on that ship. They are not to request boarding permission. On my authority, they are to enter immediately. By force, if necessary.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Mark heard distant bursts of air escaping his ship. The four robots were on their way.

He reached his bridge and climbed into his gray command chair. “This is Doctor Mark Tolman calling anyone aboard the Star Shuttle Andromeda. Anyone, please respond!”

Andromeda tumbled in silence for two full minutes before a woman's voice finally came through the link. “Doctor?” she said, as though confused at the thought.

“Yes?” Mark responded urgently.

“You are a doctor?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes, I am. Are you hurt? Do you need medical assistance?”

“No.” She spoke slowly, as though distracted or lost in daydreams. “But I like the sound of your voice. It's soothing. Makes you sound. . . handsome.”

“Thank you. Is there anyone aboard your ship who needs medical assistance?”

“Maybe. Probably. I guess so.” But she sounded disinterested in that particular question. She paused, then asked: “What are you wearing?”

“What?”

“Your clothes. What kind of clothes do you have on?”

“What does that have to do with—”

She interrupted him with high-pitched giggles, then whispered her thoughts, “I'm not wearing anything at all!”

“Why are—”

“If you come over here, I'll let you. . .” she giggled again, “I'll let you give me a physical.” But from the way she said the word physical, it was clear that a physical was not what she meant.

He hesitated. “What are you talking about?”

“Please, come over,” she pleaded. “I want you. I want you so bad!”

“What?” He stumbled for words, then finally blurted: “Madam! I'm a married man!”

“I don't care. I've got to have somebody! I've got to. I'm all alone here. And you sound so handsome. Won't you please come over? Please? I'll beg. If that's what you want. I'll crawl on my knees and beg!”

“No. I—”

“I'll let you spank me first,” she said, playfully. “Would you like that? I don't mind if you hurt me a little; just as long as you—”

“No.”

“You can tie me up! Would that help? You can tie me in any position. Any position you want. I'm desperate.”

“No!”

“Oh please.” The woman began to cry. “Please! Please! Please!”

Chapter 2

Emergency!

Twelve light years away, and unaware of events surrounding the Star Shuttle Andromeda, Captain Tom Vickery of the Supply Ship Livingstone was alone on his bridge relaxing in the quiet comfort of his deeply padded command chair. Tom was a tall thin man with white hair and green eyes. His health was still good, and his mind was still quick, but he was only three years away from the mandatory retirement age of one hundred.

As he relaxed amid this quiet comfort, he worked with patient care, the little tool held in his hands. With it he produced the only sounds in the room: the occasional click of his fingernails. He was clipping them.

Every five or ten seconds, a tiny crescent of extruded protein jumped for the ceiling before curving back down toward the thinly carpeted floor under the pull of the ship's electronically generated gravity. None of the clippings, however, actually managed to reach the floor. Instead, they were snatched out of the air by one or another of the six nimble little cleaning robots currently scampering about beneath Tom's command chair.

The eager little robots resembled chrome-plated sand crabs as they wrestled with one another for the privilege of collecting the tiny fragments of flying garbage. Tom smiled at their antics. Their aggressiveness reminded him of the lively old maids he'd seen leaping for the bride's bouquet at the wedding he attended last year.

He knew it would have been easier to let a grooming robot clip his nails for him. He also knew such a machine would have done a much better job. But, of course, that wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.

From inside his head, a simulated female voice spoke to him. “Tom, the comsys is calling you.”

“Put it through,” he thought in reply.

A deep masculine voice—also simulated—echoed within his head. “Captain, you said for me to notify you when we were about to enter the star system. We will be inside the orbit of its most distant planet within sixty seconds, and should be approaching E-33 in approximately two and one half minutes.”

“Thank you,” Tom thought; and started clipping his last fingernail. “PC?”

The female voice returned. “Yes?”

“Mmm, just a minute.” He clipped the fingernail once, then again, then once more. He stopped to examine it; examined them all; then folded his antique chrome-plated clippers and slipped them into his pocket.

His mind wandered for a split second; back to his great-grandfather, who, while still a young man, had bought these particular clippers for 59 cents at a large discount store on Earth—back when Earth was all there was of civilization. That discount store had been part of a chain of six thousand identical stores spread over three continents. Now, however, like his great-grandfather, the store and its entire chain no longer existed.

Tom sighed briefly; then stirred and said without moving his lips, “OK, give me the usual displays.”

Six rectangular images appeared, blocking the high and low portions of his field of view. They were arranged in two separate rows of three images each—a row of three near the ceiling, and a row of three near the floor.

The lower left image was a detailed map of the interior of Tom's ship. The image at lower right was a clock with a sweep second hand. The one at low center showed a status map of the ship's subsystems, which was color-coded: green for electrical, red for propulsion and blue for life-support. Significant problems would be indicated and pinpointed by their blinking within the display. At the moment nothing blinked.

Tom glanced at the status map, instinctively checking the numbers for any problems too subtle for the comsys to spot—if indeed there was such a thing—he then scanned the top row.

The upper left displayed a complicated map of the planetary orbits within this star system; it had an extra line drawn from the far left edge straight to one of the inner planets. A blue dot, representing Livingstone, moved swiftly along that line. In the upper center was a telescopic image of this particular star system's central star. Tom only glanced at these first two images. It was the one in the upper right that he was most interested in—a highly magnified telescopic view of a beautifully unspoiled earth-like planet. A planet that, so far, had not yet been dignified with a name; only the alphanumeric E-33.

The image of the planet was crisp and finely detailed, its colors were rich and vibrant, and the depiction of three dimensional depth was flawless. It was as if Tom were looking out a freshly washed window from a ship already in orbit about the planet. It can be said with all honesty that Livingstone's bridge featured an image display system sufficiently sophisticated to match anything at a virtual reality amusement park. However, in truth, the bridge display system was not actually turned on at this point. It hadn't been used in years.

All the images Tom was looking at were being routed directly into the visual portion of his cerebral cortex by his PC. His PC could do this because it had been surgically implanted inside one of the hollow spaces in the walls of his skull, and was microscopically wired into several key areas of his brain.

No clumsy and unsightly cords, cables or wires stretched from Tom’s head to the ship’s computer, however. All this free-flowing information was made properly convenient and socially acceptable by the use of invisible wires—cellular radio connections.

The two rows of images in Tom's display were still separated by a large empty rectangle which occupied the center of his field of view. It did not remain empty for long.

Tom imagined what it might look like if image number six were to suddenly grow larger and shift location to fill the void in the center. Immediately, image number six grew larger and moved to fill that very void. There was no magic involved. Tom's PC had simply observed him imagining it, and had obeyed the transient visual thought as if it had been an explicit request—which, of course, it was.

Tom examined the earth-like planet's brilliant white cloud formations and deep blue oceans with mild curiosity. He'd never seen this planet before. Few people had. It had only recently been discovered. “PC, has the comsys located the survey ship Gazelle yet?”

“No,” answered the female voice, “but Gazelle may be orbiting on the planet's far side at the moment.”

“Can you give me more magnification?”

The planet grew until it overflowed the center rectangle and covered all the smaller images.

“The comsys is calling again.”

“Put it through.”

“Captain,” said the masculine voice, “I’ve spotted the United Nations Astrophysical Survey Ship, Gazelle. I am slowing us to sublight speed in preparation for entering a parking orbit that will match with Gazelle's. I will then begin the standard docking approach. Livingstone will mate with Gazelle in approximately seven minutes.”

“Good. We need to see if we can't make up some of the time we lost on our last two stops. As soon as the docking and air pressure equalization are complete, I want you to—”

“Captain, I've detected a distress signal.”

“What?”

An unfamiliar voice of indeterminate sex entered Tom's mind. It spoke rapidly and with great concern. “. . . within radio distance, please respond! Mayday! Mayday! This is an emergency! Any ship within radio distance, please respond! Mayday! Mayday! This is an emergency! Any ship within. . .”

Tom sat up in his command chair so fast all six cleaning robots scurried off for fear of being stepped on. “Where's it coming from?” he asked, before remembering the obvious. There was only one other ship in this star system.

“From the survey ship Gazelle,” the comsys said. “It seems to be the voice of Gazelle's comsys.”

“Gimme' a link.”

“Thought-link established. Audio channel only.”

“Attention, Astrophysical Survey Ship, Gazelle. This is Captain Thomas Vickery of the United Nations General Supply Ship, Livingstone. What is your emergency?”

Gazelle's comsys answered immediately. “One of our scientists has become violently insane. She has repeatedly attempted to kill other members of the survey team, and I am helpless to protect them. I fear for their lives.”

“Have you sent for police or medical help?”

“No. She jettisoned all my hyperlight communication torpedoes, so I can't send messages above lightspeed.”

Tom didn't ask if the machine had tried sending an ordinary radio message for help. He guessed the nearest U.N. base to be more than ten lightyears away. Radio signals—crawling along at exactly light speed—would take every bit of those ten years to cross that much space. Instead, he asked, “Where is she now?”

“Down on the surface of the planet. All survey team members are on the surface.”

“Well, there must be close to fifty of them and only one of her. Can't they subdue her?”

“There are 35, and I don't know. I have not been able to radio them.”

“Not at all?”

“No. Not for sixteen days.”

“Sixteen days? What about your medsys? It could sneak up on her; give her a sedative; maybe even while she's asleep.”

“She has already destroyed it.”

“Wow,” Tom said, momentarily losing his air of professionalism.

Before asking the next question, Tom thought privately—without transmitting his thoughts. He decided to ask, “Did it occur to you to go and get help yourself?”

“I did not dare leave the vicinity of this planet for fear that one of the landers is still functioning and some of the others might try to return to me here in orbit.”

“I see.” Again, Tom thought privately. Finally he said, “Well you must have been worrying about this for several days now. What recommendations have you prepared?”

“First, that you send a communication torpedo to the U.N. base at Big Sandy, describing the situation and requesting immediate assistance. Then, that you send your medsys, and some of your people, down to the surface to give medical assistance to anyone that's hurt. Have them bring lots of food. Even if no one's injured, they'll be very hungry by now.”

“I hope all your landers aren't on the surface,” Tom said. “Livingstone is a supply ship. We don't carry landers.”

“That will not be a problem. Only three landers are on the surface. The one named Zebra remains in my hanger deck.”

“Good. Is there anything else?”

“Yes, you'd better send a torpedo to your dispatcher. They'll need to have another ship complete your delivery route. It will take at least six days for help to get here from Big Sandy, and it is illegal for you to leave a life-threatening emergency before the situation is stabilized.”

“Right,” Tom said with a nod. “I'll get the landing party together. You generate a situation report for the authorities at Big Sandy and radio it to Livingstone.” His voice changed slightly as he addressed his own ship's comsys, “Livingstone, after you have Gazelle's situation report, torpedo a copy to both Big Sandy and our dispatcher, along with a recording of this conversation starting from when you first heard the distress signal. Any questions?”

“No,” Livingstone said, its voice deep and masculine.

“No,” Gazelle said, with a voice indicating neither gender.

“Good. This is Captain Thomas Vickery, out and clear. PC, page the crew and notify the medsys.” He blinked in mild surprise at a sudden change in his display.

His PC had added a small black rectangle to the upper right of the planetary image. At the center of the black rectangle was a featureless white speck: the spaceship Gazelle. Tom knew it would be Gazelle—it was growing so rapidly.

Chapter 3

Sabotage

“I am now leaving the aft emergency airlock and entering one of the ship's two main hallways,” said paramedic number four. “So far, I’ve seen no one at all.”

The robot's comments were unnecessary. Mark had watched anxiously as the images from all four paramedics played across his mind's eye. One image now showed a long white hallway; another the inside of a cramped airlock; still another a large empty hanger; and the fourth a hideous alien landscape. Or at least the fourth looked alien until Mark realized this image came from the paramedic inside the cavern. The cavern that had been carved out by the explosion.

“General assessment,” Mark said.

Number one—the chief paramedic—responded: “The forward section has sustained the most damage. More survivors are likely in the aft.”

Mark nodded, energetically. “Number three, head for the bridge. Four, check the aft store rooms. Two and one, search all remaining passenger rooms.”

Number three moved from inside the explosion-cavern to the forward emergency airlock. It didn't have to move far—or for that matter, far enough. The airlock was located within the tangled metal at the edge of the cavern. The airlock's door had popped open; its frame was warped; and on the side nearest the cavern's center, its walls were deeply caved-in: like the walls of a softdrink can crushed by a human hand.

Though its entry-way was barred, the paramedic did not request new instructions. Instead, from a small compartment on its back, it withdrew a large clear plastic bag. It climbed inside the bag, glued the edge of the bag's open mouth to Andromeda's hull near the bridge, and began cutting its way inside with a laser.

When the laser broke through the hull and released air from inside Andromeda, the bag inflated with explosive speed. This caused every wrinkle on the bag's surface to disappear with a loud and resounding snap.

Mark jumped. The sound—like the sharp snap of a wet towel—startled him through the link.

By this point, the images Mark saw coming in from paramedics numbers one and two were moving at a frightening pace. The two robots were flying through the ship's hallways in the passenger section like a pair of professional race car drivers in the midst of competition.

A layman might have worried that even if the paramedics managed to find someone, they might very well kill their intended patient by smashing into him or her before they could slow to a full stop. But this was nonsense. The electric propulsion system inside a paramedic robot could accelerate or decelerate the unit at up to thirty gees.

Mark was having trouble understanding everything he saw; small details were stretched into long blurs as objects flashed by. He noticed, several times, walls that bulged out into the hallway, and twice he saw doors that had been sprung open so badly they couldn't possibly be pushed back into their twisted frames.

The two paramedics began to dodge sharply left and right, as they moved through the hallway. Mark decided they were sidestepping haphazardly floating objects. The ship's electric gravity must have failed.

He caught a momentary glimpse of several fist-sized objects. Cleaning robots. And not trying to clean anything. They must have been damaged in the explosion.

The two paramedics slowed to a mere frantic pace and began searching passenger quarters. Some doors were open. Some were shut and had to be broken into. Those whose walls bulged were ignored. Anyone in those rooms would not have survived; and opening their doors might expose the hallway to vacuum—not harmful for a paramedic, but lethal to any human survivors.

Mark thought it curious that the search was not yielding any people, just more damaged cleaning robots. He thought it equally curious that so many of the little machines had succumbed to the explosion.

Number three interrupted his thoughts, “Doctor, the front half of Andromeda, including the bridge, is completely deserted.”

“OK, help the others search the ship's rear. It's volume is much greater.”

“Doctor,” said number two, “I've found one of the ship's medsys.”

The machine Mark saw in the image from number two didn’t look like it had ever been a standard robotic doctor. It was almost unrecognizable; nothing more than an inanimate mess. Mark got the impression someone had tried to turn its eighteen inch spherical body inside out with nothing better to work with than a sledgehammer. The machine floated upside down in the zero-g; its electronic entrails hanging out for all the world to examine.

“Records indicate Andromeda had two medsys,” said number one.

A blue chrome cleaning robot floated into view. It tumbled slowly as it passed, almost bumping into the dead medsys. The cleaning robot was similarly damaged.

“Those cleaning robots,” Mark said. “Do they look purposely broken to you?”

“I'd been ignoring them in my search for human survivors,” said number two, “but now that I look at them. Yes, Doctor, they appear as though struck by a heavy blunt object; perhaps a hammer or wrench.”

“Doctor,” said one, “most of Andromeda's electrical systems have been disabled—but not all. Life-support, for example, is still working, but the communication torpedoes and electric gravity are not.”

“Have you been able to contact Andromeda's comsys?”

“No. It does not respond on any com channel. It probably has no power and is temporarily unconscious. After we treat all human injuries, we may be able to restore its power and ask it what happened.”

Mark said, “We don't have the tools or equipment to repair Andromeda's explosion damage.”

“I do not believe the power outages are a result of the explosion,” said one. “Some perhaps, but not all. Consider, if you will, Doctor, which systems have no electricity, and which do. With no message torpedoes, the ship is out of contact with the rest of civilization; and without electric gravity, every room and cabin inside it is in zero-g, thus restricting human movement in the tumbling ship. I find this suspicious. The outages and the explosion may have been deliberately planned.”

“Planned? You mean Sabotage?”

“Perhaps.”

Four said, “Doctor, I've found someone in an aft store room.”

Mark was surprised to see a woman; mostly because she was naked. When he realized who she was, however, he remained surprised only in that she was standing on a wall.

“She must have been trapped in here ever since the explosion,” the machine said, as it moved closer to her. “The ship's tumbling is producing a gravity-like centrifugal effect, which—in this room, located in the ship's extreme aft—is set perpendicular to the direction of the ship's normal gravity. Consequently the only door she could have used as an escape is out of reach, thirty feet above her head.”

Mark noticed that everything loose in the room had fallen into piles upon the same wall the woman was standing.

“Madam, are you all right?” paramedic number four asked, politely ignoring her nudity. “Do you have any injuries, pain, discomfort?”

“Where is the man?” she asked. “I want to talk to the man.”

“Doctor, I think she wants to talk to you.”

“I already know what she wants,” Mark said. “I don't have time to argue with her again. Examine her, and treat her if she needs it. Then move on. There are more people in that ship somewhere. The passenger list names nine people in addition to its standard crew of four. That's thirteen people. Which means twelve are still missing. Before we—”

“Doctor. I think I've found most of them,” said number two, but the machine did not sound at all pleased with this fact. And from the images it was sending him, Mark could see why.

The bodies were strewn about the ship's engine room like unwanted rag dolls. The centrifugal gravity in this part of the ship was apparently sufficient to cause the bodies to lay in place, rather than float about freely like the cleaning robots and the medsys. There was little blood, and few obvious injuries—three broken arms and one broken leg—but the prognosis remained the same. Medical attention for these people had come too late. They were all dead.

Mark was familiar with the type of internal injuries produced by an explosion's shock wave. Though a body might remain whole, and there might be little or no visible damage, massive hemorrhaging would still be scattered throughout the major organs.

Number two moved to examine more closely one of the dead. Number one entered the room and also approached a corpse. After a few seconds they each moved on to another body; and then another.

Mark shook his head somberly at the terrible loss of life.

Number two broke the silence: “These people should be dead.”

Mark squinted in confusion.

“They are dead,” said one. “No pulse. No brain waves.”

“I disagree,” said two, gently. “Look more closely. Their skin tissues are moist and resilient. Scan them. Their blood is stagnant in their veins, yet it remains oxygenated. The cells and tissues we see here are perfectly healthy.”

“You are correct,” said one, with a casualness that Mark found shocking. “There is also no sign of rigor mortis or any other stage of tissue degeneration. But this is impossible. Their bodies are functionally dead. There is no logical means by which the cells composing their tissues can continue to live.”

“Well,” said two, “since the cells of a large organism die only after the body ceases to provide them with nourishment and carry away each cell's waste materials, the cells always live on a few minutes after the organism's body is dead. And since the cells of these tissues are not yet aware that their bodies are dead, it follows that these people have been dead no more than a minute or two.”

“An obvious impossibility,” said one, “since the explosion occurred days ago.”

“Perhaps they didn't die as a result of the explosion,” Mark suggested.

“Scanning shows massive hemorrhaging in every organ,” one said. “Death by shock wave.”

“Could there have been a second explosion?” Mark asked.

“It would have had to occur while we were already inside Andromeda, searching for survivors. We would have noticed.”

“This makes no sense,” two said. “It's as though—”

“Look!” shouted number one with more emotion than Mark had ever heard coming out of a machine. This single word sent a long cold chill up his spine—mostly because the emotion the digitally generated voice carried was one of pure, unbridled fear.

Then Mark saw it too. A hand. A severed human hand. It crept across the floor, moving in a jerky, sloppy, uncoordinated fashion—not at all like the severed hands in old Hollywood monster movies. This one's fingers twitched in random spasms, as though each were guided by a separate mind, and unaware of what its fellow fingers were trying to do; or perhaps even fighting them for control.

The hand left no trail of blood as it crawled past the leg of one body and bumped into the arm of another. It recoiled at this contact and fumbled off in a new direction. It struck the base of a wall at an angle and began following along the flat surface. Its new path would soon take it behind some of the complicated machinery of the ship's engine.

Mark heard himself shout, “Don't let it get away!”

The paramedics convulsed into action. They chased the thing back and forth around the room. Its coordination improved with amazing speed, and soon it was dodging in and out among the undead bodies, sprinting like a frightened mouse. After a minute or two of excitement, number one captured it. But even when captured, it squirmed like a miniature wild animal.

“OK,” Mark said. “I want that hand brought over here, as well as the naked woman and all the undead. Place the undead in hospital beds for continuous observation. I'll examine the hand myself.” He sighed deeply; a conscious effort to regain his composure. “How is the woman?”

There was no immediate response. So he asked again. “Four, have you examined the woman? How is she?”

“I was just about to request permission to sedate her,” it responded.

“Why? Is she in pain?”

“No.”

“Is she resisting treatment? Is she fighting you?”

“Well, sort of.”

“What do you mean?”

“She keeps trying to mount me.”

“Mount you?”

“Sexually.”

End of Sample Chapters

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