Outside Entity

“Shipmate Chloe Verdant vitals have flatlined, thirty second resuscitation timer initiated.”

Damn I thought, Chloe would have made this a lot easier.

I finished soldering the last connector for the control board that managed the starboard side thruster, and was about to head down to the engine bay to check on the Radinsky drive. Chloe wasn’t an engineer, hell she wasn’t even a tech, but she was a researcher and great at digging up information when necessary. I didn’t know shit about Rad drives.

I checked my watch. 21:28 Zulu Sol Time. Exactly 13 minutes had passed since I had finished running diagnostics on the state of the Deep Nebula 3, the hauling and passenger ship that I had traveled on for the last few months. It was a fairly standard frigate. The loading bay was modular, and could be configured to hold a cargo crate three times the height of the ship itself. So long as the nav system could keep you clear of any tight spaces while traveling at FTL speeds, aerodynamics and aesthetics weren’t necessary in space flight. The upper levels were reserved for crew and bridge, the middle tier divvied up amongst passengers, with three bunks to a room. The Nebula was nice, captain Antwon Damascus had opted for stalled private showers instead of the group shower blocks standard in prisons.

It was inside one of those showers that the first death had occurred. One of the civilians, a young man whose name I didn’t know. He had tried to space himself earlier, I had heard the panicked chatter on my comm while half asleep in my own bunk, listening to an audio program. Not being of small stature, I generally volunteered to help with crowd control. People generally stop squabbling when someone twice their size asks them, politely, to stop. But I hadn’t gotten to him in time. From the screaming, it sounded like he thought we were all going to try and eat him. He locked himself in the stall. Unfortunately, someone had been about to take their own shower and shave, he took the blade from the razor and slit his own wrists. The ship AI pinged the crew about his vitals failing, but it took a while to convince it to override the lock and let me and Bugs, the first mate, in.

He laid there in a puddle of his own blood that slowly trickled down the drain. We had put rebreathers on, and wore shoulder length gloves, not having enough time to get into our protocoled hazmat suits. It didn’t matter though. It wasn’t a pathogen that made him go crazy. I was looking right at the culprit.

Outside the porthole on the starboard side was it, the thing. The Outside Entity. It was hard to judge size through the triple thick impact glass, but I saw it there, its oddly shaped body reflecting the flashing red of our emergency lights. It looked like a starfish, rounded center with gangly tendrils that spread out like bat wings when it moved. The center of the face I could make out three eyes, their pupils were a squiggle, and none of them faced the same direction. From here I couldn’t discern a mouth, but that was something I didn’t care to become more acquainted with anyways.

Ship’s diagnostic rundown detailed three critical zones, eleven non critical but failing zones, and three non critical warning zones. I mapped out the three criticals, the first of which I had just finished. I had estimated fifteen minutes for repairing it. The control board was a standard mass produced one, with plenty of replacements in engineering, the portable solder kit being a bonus find in the same cabinet. Assuming I didn’t lose myself somewhere along the way, this would hopefully be a straightforward repair procedure, and I could limp the Nebula back home. Fuck space, I’m going back to water purifying after this. With no pilot to get us out of here, I was going to be relying entirely on ship’s nav and bot pilot systems.

Ping, our usual pilot, was the second one to go. She was also, in a very short sighted way, the reason this had all happened in the first place. After we had picked up the cargo and passengers, we left orbit of Cumulous 412, the gaseous planet in the Magellan 5 sector. Somewhere between Magellan and the next Galaxy over, Ping had brought us to a screeching halt out of FTL, damaging the Radesnky Dmitriov drive as well as a number of secondary ship systems. Things like life support, ship power, and medical are well insulated from the body of ship, so the external stressors of dropping out of intergalactic travel speed didn’t fuck them up. Still, I, as well as everyone else aboard, was jostled quite hard.

I had just gotten to my room, and was readying myself for a solid bit of shuteye when it happened.

Immediately, I hopped on comms, “What the hell was that? I can see stars, and none of them close by. Any injuries?” I was the ships medic, and annoyed as I was, there was a duty to uphold.

Ping answered my comm, replying on the general channel for all crew to hear.

“I was getting some kind of error reading, there was an alert, so I pulled us out of FTL as fast as I could. We’ve got some system damage but nothing that will interest you Doc.”

Well, at least I can still get my sleep rotation in I thought, easing myself back into my bunk.

“Bullshit Ping!”, said Jewel, our resident engineer, “I was running a diagnostic sweep, there were no alerts. Now we’re adrift in a dark zone!”

Another shipmate chimed in, Bugs this time, “No, I thought I heard an alert go out too.”

“Me three,” chimed in Rodriguez, our maintenance chief, “at least, I thought I did.”

“You’re all going void crazy,” came the voice of Jewel again. She was sounding quite incensed, “Stop taking extra rotations on long hauls!”

“Simmer down,” the voice of captain Antwon came through on priority channel, drowning out the complaints of others before an intercom yelling match broke out.

“Jewel, I’m going to need diagnostics again. Bugs, go with Rodriguez and check for any physical damage that might cause a breach when we go FTL.” The three pinged an acknowledgement, and then I got a private comms message from Antwon.

“Doc, you awake?”

“Of course Cap, what’s up?”

“I thought I heard that alert too.”

I paused while I considered what I thought he was telling me.

“Void sickness sir? You and I have only done three rotations. That’s four months total space side. Ping’s only done two. Both circumstances are well within healthy bounds, at least to veterans like us. If we were on our sixth or seventh, I might be worried.”

There was another pause.

“Thanks Malcolm, that’s all I wanted to hear.”

I pinged back an acknowledgement. Of course, at this point I wish it was void sickness.

The crew and passengers, as they all went insane, killed themselves in increasingly dramatic fashion, though not causing any further damage to the ship. The crescendo occurred when all civilian passengers vented the helium mined from the Cumulous class planet, plopped themselves into the storage container one by one via the emergency maintenance hatch, and then forced an emergency module eject.

I had already turned my comms device off by then, so I missed what was probably the horrific sound of two dozen people being sucked out of whatever hull breach they managed to cause. As I walked towards engine, another chime went across the ships speakers.

“Resuscitation window exceeded, shipmate Chloe Verdant demise confirmed.”

I gritted my teeth.

That fucking thing. I glanced out another porthole as I passed through the long corridor towards where the Rad drive was. It was following me as I charted my way through the bowels of the ship, spreading the skin on its tendrils to make the starfish shape. It must have some sort of natural solar sail. Probably took that bastard millennia to cross these dark zones. Or maybe it just lived here, waiting. We didn’t have any astrobiologists on board, and I’d never met anyone who’d managed to make contact with extraterrestrial life before. If I lived through this, I guess I could make a killing off of a book deal or something.

I checked my watch again. 21:30 ZST. It was approximately a two minute shuffle from my first stop to my second, and so far I was right on time. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I could feel its gaze on me, I could almost feel the intensity as it was focusing, trying to figure out why I hadn’t cracked yet.

Fuck you I thought, and continued my march.

Jewel’s body was here in the engine room, and I paused for a moment to stare at her. She was a new addition to Antwon’s crew. He found her scrounging around a junk yard, and it turned out she had a knack for engines. She wore denim overalls, and a striped shirt. She had the most wonderful freckles, and a sweet tinkling sort of laugh. I had been meandering towards asking her on a date, such as they were space side. I was going to miss that laugh.

In her final moments, she had attempted to shove herself into some kind of material ejection tube used for dumping hazardous waste in an emergency. I can only assume it crushed her spine. Her sweet face was twisted in agony, frozen in pain forever. Tears were stinging at the corners of my eyes. I loved my crew. Antwon and I had gone to graduate school together. He was in astrophysical navigation and I went into medical practice. Every now and then I’d tag along to his adventures, patching up the miners and refugees who boarded his ship. Maybe a miscreant shipmate who got roughed up by some locals. They were all gone now.

The repair on the Rad drive wasn’t even a repair. I had to flush the burnt out coolant and replace it with a canister that was resting in a storage compartment full of spare parts. Once I had attached the nozzle and released the containment valve, I had ship check if systems were nominal, and it restarted the drive.

I checked my watch again. 21:40 ZST. Ten minutes. I had saved a couple thanks to the diagrams Jewel must have laid out neatly when we first stopped. She was probably about to solve the problem herself when the madness took her. That storage compartment was usually locked after all.

The last repair was the most grueling. Our dampeners had been stressed to breaking when we lurched out of FTL, and the fuses that kept them running were buried in electrical, and their replacement parts weren’t conveniently located. I had given myself thirty five minutes just to locate the new fuses, and I nearly filled that entire time with my search, checking my watch roughly every five minutes. Still the outside entity followed me, stalking me from window to window. Some of the corpses of my crew and company began to drive lazily by the windows.

Another thirty minutes to replace the fuses. The blown ones were behind several thick cables that ran some of the auxiliary systems. It was a mess. Electrical was the major thing Antwon had scrimped on, opting to do most of the work himself. After I slotted the last fuse into place, I pinged ship to confirm, checking my watch. 23:07 ZST. Through the speakers ship told me that there was still an issue with the dampener on the port side, a connection failure.

I had been carrying a small handheld terminal with me, and I ran diagnostics to see where the connection might be broken. If the reading was weak, it might have something to do with the repair I’d just done. If there was no reading, it meant the damn thing was broken on the outside of the hull. That meant I’d have to duke it out with the entity while wearing a space suit.

The terminal came back as clear.

I stared at it, then I tapped the screen with the tip of my finger. I pinged ship again. Ship reported that there was no reading on the port side dampener. I stood there, crouched in the cramped electrical room. I was sweating from the work and the stress.

If ships AI had been damaged or compromised in some way, I wasn’t going to get out of here alive. I decided to run the diagnostics on the terminal again, this time running a stabilizer test. This would trigger the Rad drive to spin up and begin to produce the field that helped us slip into FTL speed. If the dampener really was broken, it wouldn’t even get past warm up. I left electrical and began to head towards the air lock.

I checked my watch. 23:15 ZST.

Odd I thought, as I made my way to the airlock.

I didn’t realize it took me that long to run the first diagnostics.

My terminal chimed as it finished its test. I could feel the rumble in the hull as the rad drive spun up. Lifting the screen I saw that it said the dampeners were functioning as intended. Then ship pinged me again.

“Critical Warning, dampener on port side total failure. Please replace unit.”

I was passing by the bridge now. Somewhere in there was Antwon, and Bugs. None of that mattered right now though.

I reached the airlock, and checked my watch again. 23:29 ZST.

Gosh was it such a long walk to the airlock from electrical?

Another ping from ship.

“Malcolm, you are the only one who can finish the repairs of this vessel. You must exit into space. You must save your crew.”

Yeah - yeah they were all counting on me.

I stepped into the airlock and sealed the hatch. Through the preview window made of the triple thick impact glass, I could see the thing. All three of its eyes seemed to be fixed on me.

I don’t need a space suit. I can hold my breath for three minutes. I used to do it all the time at the rec center pool. I’ll pop out, punch this sonofabitch in its dumb eyes, and swap the dampener. I’ll be a hero. Then I can take Jewel out on that date.

I slammed my fist on the eject button.

“Shipmate Malcolm Alderson vitals have flatlined. Thirty second resuscitation timer initiated.”