Chapter 1: Prisoner
Two months. Two smegging months I've been trapped here like a rat. Most of the crew are dead, tortured to death or just killed. I'm alone in here now. I used to be able to hear the people in the cells next to me but they're quiet now. I shared a cell with Navigation Officer Rhiannon Enwright. That's how she introduced herself. Not Rhiannon, not Rhiannon Enwright. Always Navigation Officer Rhiannon Enwright. She was married to another navigation officer and she was three months pregnant. She told me she wanted to name the baby Henry if it was a boy.
It doesn't matter now. They shot her point-blank with a bazookoid, right in the back of the head. They made the two of us kneel on the floor with our backs to them. One of them flipped a coin: I was heads, she was tails. The coin hit the floor and rattled a few times, and then she was dead.
I never told Rhiannon anything about myself. She knew my name and rank and that's it. Why bother? She's gone now. It's just a matter of time until they get to me.
By all accounts, the SS Lynx was doing fine. Just a routine trip: going back to the solar system to mine the Kuiper Belt, then quick stops on Pluto and Triton before debarking on Tethys. That's all passing ships got when they attempted to handshake with the vessel, a brusque, flat message from Captain Russell Finch describing the mission.
Of course, the captains of the other ships neglected to zoom out to see the full picture: Captain Finch delivering his message in a terrified monotone with a simulant standing behind him, cocked bazookoid inches from his head. After a while the simulants realized that Finch was giving the same response to every ship that tried to handshake. They had him record a message and, when he was finished, ejected him into space while the crew was forced to watch. Finch had some fairly nasty things done to him with a laser knife before he'd been shot out of the waste disposal unit; he was missing a leg and several fingers when he was carried to his death. There were murmurings among the crew that he'd still been alive when he was set adrift without a spacesuit, left to asphyxiate in the empty black hell of space.
The Lynx had been a few million miles from the edge of the solar system when it was boarded. There was no call to war, no threat. The simulants simply rammed the side of the ship and came aboard, swapping the Lynx for their burnt-out vessel. They repaired the damage from the crash, turned the ship around, and started steering it into deep space. For the past two months, the remainder of the crew was left in the brig, only removed from their cells for periodic torture sessions or, if they had died, to be jettisoned into space. From a crew of just over a thousand, there were maybe three hundred left after sixty days.
I don't know how much longer I can hang on. They're taking me out of my cell almost every day now. I think they do that if you're on your way out. At least it will be over. I'm just so tired. For some reason they let me keep my watch, this smegging cheap vid-watch from a souvenir stand on Mimas. I'm recording my last will and testament on this piece of smeg. Go figure. And then when I die these simulant smegheads can laugh at it.
Oh, God. I think they're coming for me again. Just... if anyone sees this, know this: my name is Nic Hawkins. I was born on Iapetus and I'm going to die in deep space.
The cell door slid open with a low whoosh. "Come on," a gravelly voice said. Nic raised herself unsteadily to her feet and shuffled out the door. The simulant led her down an unfamiliar path. She had been taken to the brig's medical room for torture so many times that she could count each of the 379 steps that took her there. But now she was going somewhere else. Perhaps it was her time.
As they walked, Nic realized she was heading down a corridor toward the drive room. Some long-buried memory resurfaced; there was a loose ventilation grate here that kept falling down. She'd told herself months ago to put in a work order to have it fixed but never got around to it, owing to her capture and imprisonment by deranged killing machines. The grate's pretty heavy, she thought. If it fell on someone, it could do a lot of damage. As she passed it, she slowed her walk, pretending to be too weak to keep up with the simulant's rapid pace. Instead, she slipped the grate from its resting spot on the wall and hefted its weight in her hands. She was tired, but a surge of adrenaline helped her keep going. I'm probably going to die if I don't do something right now. It's this or nothing. And even if I've failed, I still tried, she thought. The simulant still moved ahead of Nic, not noticing that she had fallen behind.
Quietly, she crept up behind the simulant and raised the grate above her head, then brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his neck. She tried to remember her Space Corps training when combating simulants: go for the head, go for the eyes, go for the joint at their neck. Try to decapitate it. The blow had stunned it for a few moments; Nic took the opportunity to ram the point of the grate into the simulant's neck. It sunk in an inch or so, releasing a shower of sparks, so she did it again. And again. And again, until the simulant fell. Nic tried to cut through the thick metal cords at the center of his neck but could not, only managing to make a few gouges in the central column that supported his head. Still, it was enough. Nic would have enough time to gain a considerable lead on him by the time his auto-repair unit could bring him back online. She ran back to the ventilation shaft, crawling in and replacing the grate behind her, ready to make her great escape.
