Space Drift

Air was down. The sublight drive was down. The supralight drive was at 10% functionality. We were drifting along at warp speed without the ability to safely return to gravitational speeds, and on top of that we were burning through our reserves of oxygen. There must have been a malfunction in the control unit. How else could so many systems bust themselves up at once? I had read stories of submariners trapped on the ocean floor when their ballast tanks stopped working. Our tin can was billions of dollars more expensive and yet the feeling of helplessness felt exactly the same.

I sent some of the crew to check the controller, and the rest fanned out and did a general spec. Within twenty minutes all the radios had gone silent. No calls for help, no screams, just more and more silence. The hair on my arms was standing on end. Then the lights went out. The dim red safety lights flicked on, turning the shiny chrome of the cabin into a bloody reflection of itself. I armed my taser and cursed the official regulations that forbade freighters from carrying real weapons.

I found the first dead crew member only 500 feet from the cabin. It was Trallexi, but her limbs were all missing. No blood or sign of violence, just a torso belonging to someone who I had seen alive just minutes ago. Then I realized why there wasn’t any blood: she was frozen stiff. Suction kicked in. There was a hole somewhere in the hull! Whatever had been freeze drying my crew had drilled into the ship somewhere and was leaving. I banged and careened off of the corridors, accumulating frozen bodies as the mess of the dead coalesced towards the vacuum point.

We crashed through the gaping hole torn in the hull, and my suit caught on a jagged edge of the metal. I tried to grab a pipeline or a frame strut, but the jostle of icy flesh around me was too chaotic to even orient myself correctly. We floated out into space, my suit losing air rapidly. As the cold began to set in I saw a bright red ship detach itself several thousand feet down the hull. Another vacuum puncture. More frozen bodied floated out, and we drifted into space, the frozen and the freezing, the dead and the dying. At least dead submariners washed up on shore somewhere. We could be drifting here for thousands of years.