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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 19.

Chapter Nine

Ridge was now more aware than ever of the claustrophobic effect as they ran toward the rotunda. They were four sooty, sweaty persons in dirty jumpsuits open at the collar where helmets should have fit, had they any helmets to wear or a vacuum to wear them in. They bristled with guns and fear. The corridor ran along the curvature of the ship, so that they seemed forever to be headed down under the ceiling. They seemed to be forever descending, and the ceiling ahead and behind robbed them of visibility.

In the rotunda, under a dome about 50 feet high, they stopped at a directory plaque. Ridge looked quickly around and noted closed doors all around, and a mezzanine of unknown function above. With Brenna, Tomson, and Lantz crowding around him in a sea of gun barrels, Ridge touched the view screen on the directory plaque. Simple interactive controls responded to the tip of his index finger. He moved his fingertip about and brought up a succession of images. They stood at the entrance to a warren of tunnels leading into the sensitive command structures of the nose. "There is the CP," he said, tapping on an image of a small area near the tip. He moved his fingertip, and the images rotated. A succession images and blueprints scrolled by. "There appears to be some kind of huge warehouse."

"It's a dormitory," Tomson ventured. "Kind of like a giant WorkPod01 without the galleys and other amenities."

"How odd," Brenna said. "You think they all went there to sleep?"

"Where else could they have gone?" Lantz said. "Push here."

Ridge did as she told him, pressing the first of a row of orange squares. He zoomed in on a stylized image that showed rows upon rows of sleeping tanks. "They must have gone under the gas," Tomson said. That was the lingo that meant they'd gone to sleep, and that immediately cued the four that there must have been a catastrophic emergency. "Why else would they have gone under?" Brenna said.

"Comet? Meteor? Something hit the ship and caused all that burn damage we saw out there," Tomson said.

Ridge bit his lip and swallowed hard. "If that's the case, then we need to think this all through from the start. Remember how old Caulfield was? All the signs point to this having happened a long time ago."

"We must have been asleep a long time," Brenna said. Her face contorted in horror. "My children! My husband!" Tears ran down her cheeks, and she dropped her weapon. Her hands flew to her face. The others stood stunned, soaking in the realization that Ridge knew they had been suppressing. He said quietly: "I was afraid of this. That's what Mahaffey was thinking when he pulled the plug."

"I'm going to kill myself!" Brenna cried. "I don't want to live without my babies!" She wailed loudly, and nobody had the fortitude to stop her. For a moment, Ridge wished he had joined Mahaffey. It would have been an easy way out. "No," he told Brenna. "No, you don't understand, do you?"

She wiped her eyes and stared at him through a grimace of glittering tears. "What?"

"Your babies aren't dead," Ridge said. "You're thinking that a long time passed and they grew big and died of old age. Or maybe they are grownups now and they think you were lost in space."

She nodded, running wet fingers over her sorrow-swollen features. Lantz and Tomson weren't faring much better.

"It isn't so," Ridge said. "Trust me. It's almost more sad than all that."

"What do you mean?" Lantz cried feebly, her voice distorted with grief. She, too, had loved ones who might have long ago died if the ship and its passengers had really gone into long-term hibernation as a way of escaping death, until someone could come to rescue them.

"I'd rather not speculate," Ridge told them. "It's just—I hate to see you so torn up over how this has all turned out." His three companions stared at him in varying degrees of realization and a newly dawning horror. "You see, there were no babies."

"No!" Brenna mouthed. She held her fingers to her mouth and appeared beyond speech. No words came out of her pale, distorted features. Her eyes glittered with bereavement, as did those of Lantz and Tomson, each in their own way. Tomson was still more stoic, while Lantz appeared to be a denier to the last. Feeling terribly sorry for himself, but more so for Tomson and Lantz, and especially for Brenna, Ridge said: "You remember the questions Mahaffey was asking? Can you name your children? Of course we couldn't. None of us has children."

"You think we're not human?" Tomson asked somberly.

Ridge sighed deeply, holding Brenna as she collapsed against him. "I want to think we are."

Lantz was still defiant, at least partially. "You'd better explain this crazy shazzle, man. I think I'm going to puke right here, right now." She looked green around the cheeks, and her tongue worked feverishly in her mouth as if saliva were gathering for a violent projectile heave. Ridge couldn't blame her. "I'm just piecing it together logically," he said.

"Go on," Tomson urged. "You're on the right track, man. We need to know the truth so we can understand what we are really up against."

Ridge said: "Maybe the ship took a hit. Maybe we are beyond help. A long time has gone by, and nobody has come to rescue us. Who knows where these mudmen have come from. Who knows what any of this is about. Fact is, I looked over the edge and there was nothing in WorkPod01. Nothing. No galley, no books, no showers, nothing. Just a bunch of hibernation beds for..." (he paused to swallow, and almost could not speak) "...for the next crew just like us."

Lantz hurled just then, a stream of yellowish breakfast or whatever that twirled in the air and spattered loudly on the gleaming floor in the rotunda. Her red hair hung around a feverish, flushed face in sweaty strands. Her face looked emaciated like her body.

Ridge continued: "We were grown somehow with our memories forced into us the way you add piggyback medications to an intravenous drip. Memory codons. Everything we know, everything we remember, is fake."

"Not everything," Tomson said quietly. "We are human. We know what that is. If we didn't, we wouldn't be human, and none of the rest would work." He looked at Brenna. "Our grief," he said. He looked at Lantz. "Our desperation." He pointed to himself. "Our disappointment."

"Is that what you feel?" Ridge said, tears springing to his eyes. He sobbed with his own grief. He had thought he was married. He had thought he had children. "Disappointment?" He wanted to hit Tomson. "Is that what it is in the end? You are disappointed?"

Tomson was stoic. "Maybe it's the wrong word, Ridge. Each of us has to take this in his or her own way. I didn't have children or a wife. I had a girlfriend I was going to go back and marry, but I knew she was cheating on me. That made me feel sad, but I felt I could go back and turn it around. Somehow I was going to get her to love me. Now I know it was just an illusion. Makes sense what you said. It was all a big fraud." He looked up and hollered. "Damn you, Corporation. Why did you do this to us?"

They waited in silence, and nobody answered.

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