Untitled SF

“It’s empty Lenna, there’s not a god damn thing in there.”

Once again, that bad feeling she got in her gut before docking had proven right. Twenty minutes ago they had gotten a message from the surface. USP Alethia 7 was back in orbit after its ten year journey to Mars and back; would they dock and say hello to the inmates? But when they got within sight of the enormous barge, Lenna got that bad feeling. The way it hung in the air like dead weight --- well, everything in space sort of hung there in a peculiar way, but this was different.

Lenna had dealt with crises like this before, always with a skilled hand and a level head, and today would be no different if she had anything to do with it. They hadn’t selected her for field work for nothing. It was true, though, that this would be no ordinary crises to handle. An entire prison barge and not a damn person on it and no obvious trace of anything wrong. This wasn’t going to be easy to explain to the higher-ups, and Lenna knew it wouldn’t be long before Langloss would want explanations. She could almost hear him now, sitting back in his leather chair and scrutinizing her from under a furrowed brow. “Lenna, dear,” he would start, with his gravelly voice, “don’t fail me...”

“Calm down, Swenton. Listen, I want you to get a team in here to search this place up and down, and I mean down to every last piece of dust. Go.”

Deon Swenton was a tired forty-something who was getting too old for this and sometimes needed to be given a rough push to get him going. His steely blue eyes glanced for a moment at Lenna before passing on back towards the control deck. The glare of the overhead lights reflected off his ALON shield mask. For a moment Swenton’s familiar short peppery hair was obscured, and, in his DHS uniform, he looked just like any other of the mindless clones she would see walking through headquarters at any given moment. It had been awhile since she had actually been to headquarters though. Once you were in space, you tended to stay there.

Homeland Security in space? What a joke. The US wasn’t ready to live in space yet, that much was evident in the condition of the barge. It looked like it had been hammered together from old scrap metal cars from the turn of the millennium. It was an ugly behemoth, dotted with little winking yellow eyes across its dark sides, each a solitary confinement for some of the world’s worst criminals. It had been assembled in space and it would forever exist in space. It was an eyesore, but that’s why they had it make purposefully slow runs back and forth between Earth and Mars. Not that there was much to see on Mars yet, but it got the inmates out of sight, and that was all the suits and blue-collars on the surface really cared about.

“Lenna,” came Swenton’s nervous voice, “it’s Langloss. He wants to talk to you.”

Taking her eyes away from the porthole of the shuttle, Lenna ducked and made her way past Swenton, grabbing onto the handles to maneuver about the cabin, to the control deck where Langloss’ voice was already sighing heavily through the com speaker. He sounded far away, less imposing. For Lenna, this was the best way to talk to him.

“Sir?”

“Lenna. What the hell’s going on out there?”

“We’re still assessing the situation, sir.”

“Do you realize whose ass it’s going to be if I have to tell those federal boys their prisoners are all gone?”

“I’ll let you know the details as soon as I can, sir, right now it is still too early.”

“I’m counting on you...”

Without answering, she flicked the switch to cut the call. She never liked it when he said that. It made her feel like she owed it to him. Just what did she owe him? Did he think that because he snatched her up out of her dead-end career that she was somehow indebted to him now? He might be her commanding officer, but he was just a bureaucrat who sat in an office chair all day shouting orders. What did he know about her beyond her track record? All he cared about were results, and it just so happened she was good at getting them.

It didn’t take long for the team from the surface to reach them, a small group of five. They filed in, one by one, wearing those same dark blue and black DHS uniforms. One of them confidently removed his mask, exposing an old and weathered face dotted with scars and wrinkles. His fading grey hair and stubble framed a powerful jaw, which held a perpetual sneer.

“What’s the situation? Who’s in charge here?”

“I am. Captain Lenna Ludera, special ops.”

“Oh hooo... special ops, eh? Well, Special Ops Ludera, you can call me Buck Huckabaa. Make that forensic ops Buck Huckabaa...”

She had heard of Huckabaa, but had yet to actually meet or work with him. He was supposedly legendary within DHS. Already she didn’t like him.

“What’s a pretty thing like you doing out here in space?”

“Alethia 7 appears to be completely empty and we need to find out why.”

“Empty? What, did they have a prison fight?”

“That’s what I want you to figure out. Be ready for anything.”

Grinning, and missing a few teeth, Huckabaa disappeared back into the docking tube that led to their shuttle. Lenna headed for the small cubicle they used to change to retrieve her gear. There was no way she’d let him waltz through there alone, no matter how experienced he was. She brushed back her matted brown hair before the small mirror on the wall. She looked like hell. She felt like hell.

“I don’t like this, Lenna.”

Swenton was adjusting his gun holster and tightening the straps, but his eyes stared vacantly forward. “They couldn’t have just gotten up and left...”

Lenna wasn’t sure of anything at the moment, but she had long since learned not to waste time speculating. Huckabaa was waiting for them as they exited the docking tube from the shuttle. Inside the barge, a constant hum from the ventilation system kept things noisy, but otherwise all was quiet. There was no prison guard to greet them, nothing. At times Lenna would question the safety of her career, but when she considered what it would be like to work on a prison barge, for instance, she didn’t feel so bad. They were ten year contracts, and the only people who took them were down, out of luck, and probably not much more stable than the prisoners they would be overseeing.

The air was stale and tasted of rust, but the lights were still fully active. Power wasn’t out, and neither was life support judging by the sound of the fans still running. The room they had entered was scarcely cluttered, mostly jumbled pieces of metal and junk floating lightly from corner to corner, but otherwise it was empty.

“So you say you tried to establish communication with them and got no response?”

Swenton nodded. “That’s right. The ship had returned, but I got no answer, and it seemed to be just sitting where the auto-pilot was programmed to stop it. Nothing further. Usually the first thing they do is contact the surface and even if their communications were down surely they’d send someone...”

Huckabaa sniffed loudly and scratched his nose, as if hardly surprised. He waved his hand and signaled for others to follow him, advancing through the only other tunnel available on the opposite wall. Lenna nodded to Swenton and they followed close behind. Well, as close as was possible in the cramped tunnels. She had never fully gotten used to weightlessness, spending weeks in the hospital the first time she had returned to the surface. Her muscles had pretty well turned to goo and she couldn’t even stand up. Since then, her trips back to Earth were rare, preferring not to bother with the headache of learning to walk over and over again. This meant she had even more time on her hands in space to do their dirty work. Whenever she began second-guessing her decision to join, she heard Merri’s excited voice over the phone.

“You got in? That’s great, Lenna! I always wanted to join, but I don’t think I’m good enough... But you get to be a space cop! What? Isn’t that what they call them? I guess I’ll just have to stay down here, just a normal cop. My mother thinks it’s so weird that I wanna be a cop, like there can’t be police women. She’s just too old-fashioned... oh, but to go into space...”

“Space is ugly, Merri.”

A detective for a mere five years was all it took apparently to be ‘good enough.’ She had worked with Merri, then a fresh recruit, on a few cases, getting her hands dirty in a job that left her with no time for any other life. Not that she had much of a life left at that point. She had abandoned any hope of being a mother with a normal desk job when they told her she had a weak cervix. After four miscarriages, Nolan had left her, saying it just wasn’t working out. When she got the offer from DHS, there wasn’t much reason not to accept.

Reaching the end of the service tunnel, they emerged into a large central node sort of room, with tunnels in every direction heading for different sections of the prison corridors. The bluish glow of computer monitors and that constant hum greeted them. Again though, it seemed as though everyone had merely gotten up and left quietly.

“Get on those machines,” Huckabaa barked, “and see if you can find out what they were doing.”

From the corner of the room, Swenton gave her a worried look. A married man, he was the most unlikely of the special ops, as he still tried, rather vainly, to maintain a life on the surface with as many visits as he could make. Though, Lenna had noticed the frequency had been steadily decreasing in the past six months, and whenever she would try to talk to him about his family, he would manage to change the subject.

“Just a bunch of inmate records, sir. There doesn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary. According to this, the locks are still in place, too.”

“Well boys and girls, care to take a tour of the zoo?”

The forensic team disappeared into one of the many tunnels, and Lenna was left with Swenton to utilize what they could. A couple buttons later she managed to figure out how to view all of the security cameras throughout the entire prison barge. In every single one of them was the same thing: groaning metal corridors with blinking lights over endless circular cell doors. She felt a slight shiver, but it might have just been Swenton’s sudden hand on her shoulder.

“Hey, are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Look at this. It never changes. It’s like we’re on a ghost ship.”

She found the series of cameras overlooking the corridor that Huckabaa’s team was searching. They were floating through slowly, checking each cell door but finding that, sure enough, the locks were all in place. It was pretty evident by their frustrated faces that they weren’t finding any actual prisoners though.

“Maybe those were just unoccupied cells.”

Lenna shook her head. “No, briefing said this thing was full, not a free cell anywhere. Besides, where are all the personnel?”

Too many questions without answers. Lenna hated that more than anything. She had often questioned Nolan, sometimes multiple times a day, whether he was sure or not. His reply would always be the same

“Of course I do, Lenna. I love you.”

And it worked, at least until the next time she felt unsure. There was a certain distance he always kept no matter how hard she tried to get closer. She had even allowed him to have sex with her, pretending that the pain was actually pleasure. He spoke frequently of what sort of children they would have, what they would name them, so she would purposefully forget to take her birth control. It was innocent enough; she just wanted to see the look on his face when she told him she was pregnant. Wouldn’t he be so happy? Wouldn’t he propose to her right then? Now all she could remember was the horrible contractions and the red stain of the water in the toilet as it mixed with her tears and her lost happiness.

Lenna strapped herself into the pilot’s chair of their two-man shuttle. She pressed the pulsing green light that said ‘ANSWER.’

“Sir.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Huckabaa’s team is still analyzing everything, but as far as we can tell it’s like everyone on board just vanished into thin air.”

“People don’t just vanish from existence, Lenna.”

Countless nights in the bathroom huddling over a small plastic strip waiting for it to change, friends from highschool, coworkers on the force, distressed clients from cases, her mother, her father...

“As far as the Alethia 7 is concerned, they’re still there.”

“I need something conclusive to tell them.”

“It’s still too early to te---”

“Damnit, then give me something inconclusive!”

Through the cockpit’s window, Lenna could see endless constellations against black in all directions. One of Swenton’s marriage advice books floated by, seeming almost majestic against the backdrop. Her mind swirled with conflicting emotions, overwhelmed with the pressures to perform in an environment that constantly reminded her how small and vulnerable she was. Langloss’s voice echoed again throughout the cabin, his low voice almost pleading.

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t fucking have an answer!”

There was a long silence, as bits of digitally encoded sound data propagated through electromagnetic waves across the void of space to that mahogany office in D.C..

“Alright. But contact me as soon as you do.”

Lenna leaned back and closed her eyes, pressing her fingers against the bridge of her nose.

“I’ll keep in touch,” Nolan had told her. Of course, he had never called, and she had been too scared to herself. She was tired; tired of always having to take the initiative in her relationships, chasing down unwilling men who somewhere along the way always stopped caring. It was always ultimately left up to her.

Lenna took a bite of a granola bar, one of the few food choices aboard the shuttle that didn’t require rehydrating. She liked that she couldn’t hear herself think over the crunching.

The room was completely ransacked. They all wore their ALON masks to protect against the floating debris. Shards of glass, metal, and plastic floated elegantly, and Lenna almost found beauty in the chaos. This was apparently the recreational room of the ship, or what was left of it. The only things that remained intact were the computers, which dumbly declared, like all the previous they had encountered, that everything was fine.

“What a mess... somebody had some fun apparently.”

Huckabaa’s voice was muffled by the mask, and he pushed half of a checkerboard table out of the way, searching for any clues.

-- Written in late 2005 in a fit of creativity, all in one sitting. I don’t know where it came from, but I really liked it for some reason and where it was going. But now, two years later, I can’t remember where I was going with it and I feel as though it will never be finished. Reading it again, it felt like someone else’s work since I could hardly remember it at all. Such a strange feeling... --