Then I turned around in my chair, folded my hands in my lap, and waited.
McKinnon sucked in his breath. He stared through the windows at the Fool’s Gold, looked over his shoulder once more at the holo tank, weighing the few options available against the mass of his ego. After too many wasted seconds, he finally reached a decision.
“Very well,” he said. He let go of our chairs and shoved himself back to his accustomed seat. “Ms. Bose, prepare to dock with the Fool’s Gold. Mr. Furland, ready the main airlock hatch and prepare to go EVA.”
“Aye, sir,” Jeri said.
“Um, yeah… aye, sir.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll send a message to Ceres Station and inform them of the situation before we lose contact.” Satisfied that he had reached a proper decision, he laid his hands on the armrest. “Good work, Futuremen,” he added. “You’ve done well.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Jeri said.
“Aye, sir. Thank you.” I unbuckled my seat harness and pushed off toward the bridge hatch, trying hard not to smile.
A little victory. Insignificant as it then seemed, I didn’t have any idea how much my life depended upon it.
He took the pilot chair and headed the Comet across the zone toward the computed position of the invisible asteroid.
“They’ll surely see us approaching!” Ezra warned. “The Magician of Mars will be taking no chances, Cap’n Future!”
“We’re going to use a stratagem to get onto that asteroid without him suspecting,” Curt informed. “Watch.”
I’m a creature of habit, at least when it comes to established safety procedures, and so it was out of habit that I donned an EVA suit before I cycled through the Comet’s airlock and entered the Fool’s Gold.
On one hand, wearing the bulky spacesuit within a pressurized spacecraft is stupidly redundant, and the panel within the airlock told me that there was positive pressure on the other side of the hatch. Yet it could be argued the airlock sensors might be out of whack and there was nothing but hard vacuum within the spar; this has been known to happen before, albeit rarely, and people have died as a result. In any case, the Astronaut’s General Handbook says that an EVA suit should be worn when boarding another craft under uncertain conditions, and so I followed the book.
Doing so saved my life.
I went alone, leaving Jeri and McKinnon behind inside the freighter. The hatch led past the Gold’s airlock into the spar’s access tunnel, all of which was vacant. Switching on the helmet’s external mike, I heard nothing but the customary background hum of the ventilation system, further evidence that the vessel crew compartments were still pressurized.
At that point, I could well have removed my helmet and hung it from a strap on my utility belt. In fact, the only reason I didn’t was that I didn’t want it banging around as I went through the carrousel, which lay at the end of the tunnel to my right. Besides, the stillness of the tunnel gave me the chills. Surely someone would have noticed the unscheduled docking of an Ares-class freighter, let alone one so far from Ceres. Why wasn’t there an officer waiting at the airlock to chew me out for risking collision with his precious ship?
The answer came after I rotated through the carrousel and entered the rotating command sphere. That’s when I found the first corpse.
A naked man hung upside down through an open manhole, his limp arms dangling above the wide pool of blood on the deck. It was difficult to see his face, because the blood that had dyed it crimson came from a scimitar-shaped gash in his neck. Looking up through the manhole, I saw that his feet had been neatly lashed together with a bungee cord, which in turn was tied to a conduit in the ceiling of the corridor directly above.
Since there were no bloodstains below his shoulders, it was obvious that his throat had been slit after he had been hung from the conduit. The blood was dry—most of it, anyway—and the body was stiff. He had been here for quite some time.
I reported what I found to Jeri and McKinnon, and then I gingerly pushed the body out of the way and continued down the corridor.
Please understand if everything I tell you sounds coldly methodical, even callous. First, if you’ve worked in space as long as I have—that is, all my life—then death, no matter how horrible it may be, is no stranger. The first time I saw a man die was when I was nine years old, when a one-in-a-million micrometeorite punched through the helmet faceplate of one of my school teachers while he was leading us on a field trip to the Apollo 17 landing site at Taurus Lithrow. Since then, I’ve seen the grisly results of explosive decompression, fatal radiation overexposure, freak mining accidents, careless suit-up procedures, hull fires and electrocutions, even someone who choked on his own vomit after consuming too much bathtub vodka during a birthday party. Death comes to us all, eventually; if you’re careful and wise, all you can do is make sure that it isn’t too painful and no one is stuck with a mess to clean up.
Second: if I attempted now to describe each and every body I discovered as I made my way through the Fool’s Gold, not only would the result be gratuitous pandering to those who wallow in such details, but I would never be able to complete this testimony.
To put it succinctly, the command sphere of the Fool’s Gold was a slaughterhouse.
I found ten more bodies, each more gruesome than the last. They were in crew cabins and passageways, in the galley and in the head, in the rec room and the quartermaster’s office.
Most were alone, but two of them were together, each apparently dead from wounds they had inflicted upon one another: a man and a woman, who had tried to carve each other up with knives they had taken from the nearby galley.
A couple of the bodies were nude, like the first, but most were fully or partially clothed. For the most part, they had died of stabbing or bludgeon wounds, by means of anything that could be used as a weapon, whether it be a ballpoint pen, a screwdriver, or a pipefitter’s wrench.
One woman was lucky. She had committed suicide by hanging herself by a coiled bedsheet she had cast over the top of a door. I hope that she had successfully strangled herself before whoever found her body seared off her right arm with the cutting torch cast nearby.
As I climbed up ladders, poked my helmet through hatches, and stepped over stiffening corpses, I kept up a running monologue, informing the Comet of where I exactly was within the vessel and what I had just found. I made no speculation as to why this massacre had taken place, only to note that the bodies seemed reasonably fresh and that most of the bloodstains were dry.
And blood lay everywhere. It was splattered across walls and soaked into carpets and dripping from wall fixtures, until it no longer resembled blood and just looked like spilled red paint. I was glad I had my helmet on, because the visor helped distance me from the carnage, and the rank odor would have made me even more sickened than I was now.
Although I heard an occasional gasp or exclamation from Jeri through my headset, after a while I couldn’t detect McKinnon’s voice any longer. I assumed that he had gone someplace private to vomit. This was understandable; the violence around me was mind shattering.
There were four decks in the command sphere, one above the other. By the time I reached the top deck, I had counted eleven corpses. Remembering that McKinnon had told me earlier that the crew complement of the Fool’s Gold was twelve, I had begun to wonder where the last body lay.