Skip to main content

Trouble in the Cargo Hold




This is another little excerpt from my sci-fi novel Star Liner. Jan and Sara are doing work they did not sign up for, when they discover Simon is missing.


I worked away and we both finished at the same time. Then we went to work in the conference room where we had our meetings. We had finished the forward lounge when it was time for lunch. Sara called Simon to find out how he was doing. There was no answer. She tried again. No answer. “Can you locate his pad?” I asked.

Sara did a check. “It is in the cargo hold.”

A sudden thought filled me with foreboding. “I wonder how many unprotected vents there are in the cargo hold.”

“Let’s not get crazy,” Sara said. "There could be a good reason he is not answering.” I could think of a couple of reasons, but I did not say them out loud.

”Let’s go down and check.”

We made our way down to the forward part of Deck A where the cargo hold was. We opened the big door. We stepped in. It was dimly lit. The pallets cast odd shadows. I said, “Simon?” there was no answer. “Simon.” I looked around at the shadows.  “I don’t like this.”

“I don’t either.” She shook her head. “I never should have sent him down here alone. Stupid! Stupid!”

“Let’s go round up some numbers and come back.” Sara nodded. We left and sealed the door. I called up Rawl and asked if any of the flight crew could come down and join us. But he said that they were all busy at the moment and it would be at least a half hour before he could spare anyone. Neither Sara nor I were willing to wait. We knocked on Millie’s door. When she answered I said, “Simon may be in trouble in the cargo hold, but we want more people to go in with us. Are you up for it? It might be dangerous.”

“I’m in,” she said.

I had a gun, Sara had a stunner. “Do you have a weapon of any kind?”

She thought about it, then said, “Just a sec.” She ran to the rec room and returned with a fencing foil. She popped the safety tip off.

“Okay, I guess that is better than nothing.” Next we went to Blant’s door. He answered and we told him what was happening. He produced a work tool that had a 4 inch knife blade as one of the attachments. “Okay, we are a pretty motley crew, but let’s do this.” We returned forward to the cargo hold. Sara opened the door. “Everybody stay close together. Sara and I in front because we have the better weapons. You guys watch our sides and back. Keep your eyes open for movement.” We stepped in and Sara closed the door. The dim work lights barely held sway against the darkness.

“Yeah,” Millie whispered. “This is pretty creepy.”

We slowly moved down the center aisle. I called out softly, “Simon?”

Sara whispered, “If Simon jumps out at us to scare us, I’m going to kill him.” We laughed the laugh of the nervous.


Star Liner on Amazon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, which is tr
1 comment
Read more

Roy Batty Figures it out

  This is written with the assumption that the reader has seen the film Blade Runner . If you haven’t, you may not get much out of it. In one of the last scenes in Blade Runner , the killer android Roy Batty, who holds Deckard’s life in his hands, has a remarkable speech: “I've seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die.” I am told that the speech that was written was not working very well, and Rutger Hauer was told to just improvise something. Wow. He nailed it. At this point in the film Roy Batty has been the villain throughout. We have been rooting for Deckard (Harrison Ford) to take him out, but it is not going well, and it seems like Batty is about to kill him. At the last second, Roy Batty pulls Deckard up, to keep him from falling to his death. Then he delivers this
Post a Comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up (or
1 comment
Read more