Wandering Home

By Lance J. Mushung

THE SHIP’S HYPER-COMPUTER WOKE ME UP repeating, “Commander Braddock,” like a chime.

I groaned. “What is it, Wanda?”

“The Captain left you in charge.”

“What’s going on?”

“She was called off Wanderer to the station for a meeting with Commonwealth officials.”

“Ship status?”

“Nominal. Most of the crew are enjoying the station’s entertainment facilities. There are eight personnel working in aft engineering sections.”

I’d considered a visit to the station myself, but had selected some sack time instead. Wanderer would soon depart on her mission and it seemed I’d handled a million and one last minute issues. A glance at my timepiece told me I’d managed to get almost three hours sleep. “I’ll head down to Command B after I wake up.”

I yawned and sat up in my bunk. My cabin’s monitor screen was playing the view from a cam mounted on the nose of the Shangdi Space Station. The screen displayed, in the foreground, a portion of the squatty steel-gray cylinder of the station connected by a short tunnel to the thin navy-blue tapered cylinder of Wanderer. The deep black canvas of space dotted by uncounted stars made up the background, with our sun Brigid only five light-hours away shining the brightest.

I told the screen, “Display Branwen from Marici,” and had some luck with the scene transmitted by the Marici satellite approximately five hours earlier. The entire disk of Branwen was illuminated. The sight of the beautiful blue flecked with white globe of home never got old. And beyond loomed the planet that Branwen orbited, the hot and poisonous Ankou, which looked like a pearl with its total cloud cover colored an almost uniform pale white.

In my cabin’s head, the mirror showed my gray eyes looking as bleary as I’d expected and my auburn hair confirming I’d been sleeping. I was combing away my pillow hair when Wanda said, “Commander.”

“Yes.”

“Six station personnel boarded moments ago. Five acted in an odd manner. I’ll show you on your screen.”

A man in a beige spacesuit ran into Wanderer. Five men and women wearing the moss green jumpsuits of station personnel followed. The five moved with a halting staggering gait. Two, a man and a woman, had holstered sidearms and were the guards who were supposed to prevent boarding except by the crew.

“Close the hatch.”

“Already done.”

“Get the Captain on the comm.”

“Comm traffic from the station is very confused, almost panicked.”

“Concentrate on getting the Captain.”

“Something extraordinary just happened. Lt. Garcia died and came back to life.”

“What?”

Wanda showed me. Two of the intruders wearing green jumpsuits pinned Garcia to the deck and bit into his neck and left arm. Then they stood up and lurched down the passageway. Garcia’s vitals flatlined, but started up again at a low level a couple of seconds later. He got up and followed his attackers shuffling as they had. I shook my head while chewing my lip and began rubbing the back of my neck.

After a few seconds Wanda said, “Commander.”

“Christ almighty. He’s been with me since construction of the ship began.”

“I know. What are your orders?”

“Have you gotten the Captain?”

“No.”

“Let’s try—”

“Wilson and Oduya just became like Lt. Garcia.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“It appears the crew is being infected with an agent transmitted by contact. The intruder wearing the spacesuit is entering Command B.”

“Try to lock out Command B’s controls. He must have a reason for the suit. Call general quarters so our people will put theirs on.”

The alert claxon began whooping. I opened the locker holding my spacesuit.

Wanda said, “Wilson, Oduya, and one of the intruders attacked Wang and Thibodeaux, who are now infected.”

“God damn it.”

I was slipping into my spacesuit when Wanda said, “Subcommander Kovalchik is infected.”

My stomach seemed to drop through the deck and I whispered, sounding more whiny than I’d intended, “Are you sure?”

“I am and I’m very sorry. I know she was a close personal friend.”

I sniffed, swallowed, and kicked the door of the spacesuit locker shut, putting a deep dent in its dark blue surface.

Wanda said while the locker door was still vibrating, “Shakir and O’Malley are infected.”

“We can’t have lost everyone already.”

“We have. It’s fortunate you are forward and the hatch is aft.”

I muttered, “Yeah, lucky.”

“The intruder in Command B understands ship systems.”

“I’ll get to the weapons locker on deck 14 and then take care of him.”

“Be careful. Everyone is dangerous.”

I nodded. “Understood.”

“The intruder has started taking control.”

“Can you stop him?”

“No. He’s now shutting down my higher brain—”

“Wanda? Wanda? Bloody hell.”

I rocketed out of my cabin, decided against using the lift, and ran toward the ladderway. A thump echoed through the passageway and the deck shivered. The ship had undocked from the station.

The lights and Gigi field switched off, leaving me floating in zero gravity in the dim emergency lighting. The bastard in Command B probably thought he’d made my life more difficult. My suit’s night vision kicked in and I adjusted my thinking for zero-g.

I flew into the ladderway and pulled myself aft toward deck 14. At least I didn’t need to worry about falling to the bottom and breaking my neck if the Gigi field came back on. The automatic safeties built into the ladderway wouldn’t allow it.

Crewman O’Malley grabbed my left leg as I passed deck 12. I thanked my lucky stars I was wearing a suit because he tried to bite me, but his teeth couldn’t penetrate. I grabbed a handhold with both hands and kicked him with my other leg. His hands slipped off me and he tumbled away with his arms and legs flopping like a rag doll thrown by a child. I picked up my pace.

O’Malley came out of the ladderway after I opened the weapons locker. I grabbed one of the small blue-black plasma pulse pistols and said through my suit’s speaker, “O’Malley, stop.”

He didn’t.

“O’Malley, I order you to stop right now.” He took no notice of my order. His expression didn’t indicate he’d heard me, or even knew me. I couldn’t have him on me and clawing at the controls of my suit. “I’m sorry.” I aimed at his chest and squeezed the trigger of the PPP. It hummed and burned a hole into him through the left side of his steel blue jumpsuit. The wound was enough to stop anyone, and most likely finish many. However, he didn’t appear to notice it and kept coming. I muttered, “Son of a bitch,” pushed off the bulkhead, and sailed away from him to keep my distance.

A memory from the horror fiction I’d enjoyed when young popped to mind as I retreated down the passageway. The infected reminded me of zombies. It was worth a shot to try stopping O’Malley the way they were stopped.

I spun around and put a hole in his head right between his green eyes. His arms and legs stopped moving and he began spinning as he soared past me in what seemed to be slow motion. Back at the locker, I shoved a second PPP into my suit’s tool belt and picked up a satchel of breaching explosives in case I couldn’t get into Command B any other way.

Long red hair drifting above like a wild fright wig startled me when I exited the ladderway on Command B’s deck. The hair belonged to the female zombie guard from the station. She made no attempt to draw her weapon and launched toward me. I burned a red hole into her head just below the red hair and she floated away bouncing off the bulkheads and deck.

The ship’s depressurization alarm began wailing, and a few seconds afterward the Gigi field and normal lights came back on. I hit the deck with a resounding thud, snarled, and got to my feet. In front of Command B’s hatch, I found Thibodeaux and Wang crumpled on the deck. They were desiccated the same as anyone exposed to a vacuum. I pursed my lips and tried the hatch. It wouldn’t open.

A man spoke over the radio. “Larry, it’s just you and me now.”

“Who the hell are you and how do you know me?”

“My name is Ali Fawzi. I watched your vid about Wanderer’s mission to find Earth. You have my compliments. You did a good job describing the mechanics of hopping anywhere from three to five light years, charting space around the ship, and repeating the process over and over. I loved your analogy of the ship needing to feel its way outward, making short hops because unidentified gravity sources such as black holes, dark stars, and rouge planets make predicting the actual location of a Einstein-Rosen bridge’s tail problematic.”

“Thanks for the favorable review.”

“Now, now. Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m a Cutter.”

A Cutter. I should have guessed. Cutters idolized Rashid Shihab. He’d been one of the crew of Sharon Constant, the sleeper ark that brought the ancestors to Branwen 228 b’years earlier. When the ark entered Brigid’s system, Rashid had performed his infamous deed known forever as “cutting the string.” He destroyed all the navigational data to make certain the ark couldn’t return to Earth and stated all ties to home must be severed to start over in a new place free from overpopulation, pollution, ecological collapse, and war. The Cutters formed after the development of the Hop Drive and took inspiration from his act because they believed we’d be contaminated by any contact with our ancestral home world.

I said, “You turned my crew into zombies and then finished them.”

“Zombies, I like that. We’ve been calling them deadites. And yes, a vacuum was an easy way to get them all at once. They’d served their purpose of getting me here to Command B and neutralizing everyone they came across, except for you. It wasn’t likely they’d be able to take care of you at this point, so I finished them. I’m repressurizing now.”

“I think I’ll keep my suit on.” I dropped the satchel of explosives by the hatch and kept Ali talking as I walked along the curved passageway shooting out the five cams in the area. “How do you make a zombie?”

“There’s no reason not to satisfy your curiosity. They’re created by special nano-meds. The split second a special one takes over one of the billions of normal nano-meds in a person’s body, new programming is transmitted to all of them. I needed something that would disable the crew in a hurry, but was undetectable by current security systems. There was no way I could get things like bombs or poison gas on the Shangdi station. But nano-meds fit the bill. The zombies want nothing beyond spreading their nano-meds.”

“What if your nano-meds get loose on Branwen?”

“There’s a way to shut them down.”

“Can a zombie be restored to normal?”

“No. Grand causes require sacrifices.”

Wanderer formed a bridge and hopped. I’d done several short test hops and experienced the brief sensation of having my eyes and guts yanked forward and then slammed backward in an instant. The shift from forward to backward didn’t seem as instantaneous as in the tests.

I returned to the hatch and scratched on it in the hope of making Ali think I was setting charges. “Where are we going?”

“When I began making this plan, I considered flying the ship into Brigid or a planet. However, there was a small chance we could be intercepted. I next thought of hopping to another system and flying into its sun or planets. But then I realized I could indulge my interest in seeing a bit of the galaxy and still accomplish my goal by hopping the ship to the middle of nowhere.”

I moved to a spot down the passageway between two lockers. The sticky det tape clung to the bulkhead as I outlined the rough silhouette of a doorway. “When I get home, I’m going to make it my life’s work to destroy your piece-of- crap cult.”

Ali laughed. “I admire your optimism, but you’re stiffed even if you manage to regain control of the ship. We’re hopping a lot farther than the short steps you were going to use on your charting mission because I don’t care where a bridge’s tail puts us. I’ve just wiped out the short term memory of the computer. We’re lost, and I don’t like your odds of finding home using pulsars or some other star ID technique, especially since there are more hops coming. You can try to disable the drive, but it will take some time to get through the pressure hatches I’ve left closed between you and it.”

“You must know you’re doing little more than delaying the effort to find Earth. Even if Wanderer is lost, the Commonwealth will simply build another ship and continue.”

“Perhaps. However, it will take some time to assemble the massive resources needed to build another ship like this. If nothing else, there will be more time to convince people of the correctness of Cutter views.”

I triggered the det tape in response. It generated a yellow flash, a bang, gray smoke, and clanging as a piece of the bulkhead fell onto the deck. I rushed through the breach. Ali had just started turning toward me with a PPP in his hand. He’d been hiding behind one of the flat-gray consoles with his side to the breach and probably aiming at the hatch. I shot him two times in the chest and once in the head.

A quick check confirmed Ali hadn’t been lying. He had wiped the computer’s short-term memory. I flipped a couple of switches and typed the commands to begin reactivating Wanda’s higher brain functions. It would take about nine minutes for her to restore full functionality.

I rode the lift forward to Command A’s deck. It didn’t make sense, but I wanted some distance between myself and all the dead. Once in Command A, I studied the starfield in every direction on the screen. I didn’t recognize any constellations or any other galactic phenomenon that could help me find home.

Wanda said, “I’m fully operational again.”

“I’m glad you’re back. We’re lost.”

“I know.”

“The intruder in Command B, a Cutter named Ali Fawzi, said we’ve hopped a long way. I’m betting to the maximum range, which means we can do better than meander aimlessly in search of home. How about hopping along the surface of a sphere with a radius of 473 light years with our current position as its center?”

“Yes. We can put a grid on the sphere’s surface with each square being four by four light years. The ship can make a four-light-year hop every thirty minutes on average, meaning she can cover the entire surface of the sphere in 10.025 years. At some point, we’ll recognize deformed constellations, stars matching known spectral data, or human radio waves.”

“I figure I have about ten and a half years of consumables.”

“Correct. If fortune favors us, we’ll find home in less time.”

“Can we hop every thirty minutes and still have enough time to plot gravity wells around us?”

“Yes. And we can refuel from hydrogen clouds in that time, too. Of course, there can be no major failures in ship systems.”

“How long until we start getting failures?”

“There’s no way to know.”

“I guess it doesn’t really matter. It’s try for home or stop at the first habitable planet we can find and maroon ourselves, which isn’t much of a plan. When can we get started?”

“The drive has been recharging ever since the last hop. It will have adequate power in 39.2 minutes for the long hop to the surface of the sphere. Where we start on the sphere is of no importance.”

I began making a mental list of all the things to be done, starting with funerals. My eyes drifted to one of the few things not gray or blue, the copper commissioning plaque giving the ship’s name and commissioning date of B’March 34, 227 OB. A single snort-like laugh broke the silence. The irony of the ship’s name had hit me. 

Lance J. Mushung has worked for over 30 years with NASA contractors in Houston. His fiction has appeared in “Tales of the Talisman,” “Stupefying Stories,” “Ray Gun Revival,” “Larks Fiction Magazine,” and other publications.