Space Vacation
Christina Engela
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We got to see a Corsair ship up close – all matt black, no markings, no lights – and practically invisible out here in the dark! What a sight to behold! Most people don’t get to see those bastards up close. That is, for very long! Anyways, the ship was just floating there, no sign of life. Our hails weren’t being answered, and so we assumed the ship was dead in space. Captain Mulligan, gods-rest-his-soul, told me to form a boarding party of security and medics from the sickbay and that we were going over there. We weren’t a military ship, and we’re not Star Marines, so we were lightly armed and quite nervous. I mean, this wasn’t just some of my security section being called out to break up a fight at one of the bars on the promenade, this was serious life-and-death shit! So I said ‘okay’, and told my assistant supervisor, Lisa Garfner, to get them all together. Seven of us shifted over to the other ship with the transmatter (you still use those things, I take it?) not knowing what to expect. It could’ve been anything… and it was. It was crazy.”
“It’s a general rule – a law of space, as it was a law of the sea in the old days, that ships had to respond to distress calls. Unless of course it places their own lives in danger. Bearing this thought in mind, as you can probably tell by my writing, my fingers are beginning to tremble slightly.”
“I was the chief of security on this civilian behemoth. Yes, that’s right – I used a big word – try not to faint. I was one of the mostly invisible shepherds protecting the gilded flock of holidaymakers on their pleasure cruise through space. Most of the time it was boring, tedious work with nothing more exciting than the occasional case of misplaced luggage, passengers getting lost in the miles of corridor asking for directions, and just being visible to the passengers to put their minds at ease and make them think they were safe. Safe? Ha ha! This is space, man – anything can happen. Finding my shuttle out here proves that.”
“The Exo went pale when he realized what we were dealing with. Well, what he thought we were dealing with. I never really thought he was a paragon of courage, mister ‘I’ll-be-Captain-one-of-these-days’ Beckett. He wanted to turn a blind eye as it were, and keep going. Of course we didn’t want to break the law – or tempt karma… so the Captain over-ruled him and decided to stop. It was. A trap, I mean. But nothing like we thought – not something as mundane as Corsairs. Oh, no. And it didn’t spring on us till days later, when we were light-years away.”
“We didn’t think anything of it at the time, but we saw several of the bodies of the crew, space pirates all, with what looked like necklaces of garlic around their necks. There was salt strewn on the floor in places, and it made a crunchy sound as we walked over it. Some had died clinging to crude wooden and metal crosses. Religious fanatics, I thought then – after all, isn’t it usually the worst sort of people who turn to religion when they suddenly see their end approaching and they fear some kind of reckoning coming their way?”
“The survivor spoke to us though, or tried to. Mumbling through that matted brown beard of his, pale as death itself. I can’t say now if it was weakness from his wounds or what it was – but we struggled to understand him. In fact we got nothing intelligible from him at all then. He seemed afraid, like any dying man probably would be, but he did seem more terrified than any dying man I’ve seen before – and I’ve seen a few in my time. Let me tell you, Corsair or not, he grabbed whatever hand would hold his, and clenched it so tight his knuckles turned white! He kept fading out as we carried him on the stretcher board the medics brought with them. Looking back, I think he tried to warn us, poor bastard. He tried to tell us to leave him behind and go, but we wouldn’t listen. We thought we were better than the Corsairs, remember? We thought we would be all moral and upright and try to help him. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ were the last words he said before losing consciousness. At least, those that we could make out. At the end of it all, he was right – as it turned out, we couldn’t even help ourselves.”
“RSL has more star-liners than any other company, and covers every commercial route in known space. Demeter is one of the biggest, carrying up to 4500 passengers and crew at any single point on its never-ending, circular cruise around the Terran Empire. And me? Where do I fit in? My name is Sean Lange, and you will probably have never heard of me. It’s sad somehow, I always wanted to leave some kind of a legacy in this life, and perhaps to be remembered. Instead, circumstances have arranged it so that this is probably the last time I will ever use that name.”
“My ship – the Demeter, was a star-liner operated by the Red Star Line. I say ‘was’ because of the events you will read about in this account. This is a long letter, I know, but I had quite a long time to write it. You probably already know this, having seen the commercials running on all the major channels for the last twenty years or so, but the Red Star Line is the largest cruise operator in the known universe. Unless something has changed between now and by the time you read this, this is probably still true. In fact, customers of the Red Star Line get more quality, value for money – and smiles by Demeter than they do anywhere else. Okay, okay. It’s an old joke – corny for sure, but what the hell.”
“Looks like they went crazy and started cacking each other.’ Lisa said to me as we walked through the ship, searching for a single survivor. There were what looked to be barricades in the corridors. The elevator doors were shot through from the inside. So were the sides and the roof!”
“I’m sure when you run it through the interweb just now, or if you are from a military ship, through your own database – you will see that you have stumbled across a relic of one of those great mysteries of deep space, and probably one of those missing ships people like to write spooky stories about. Well, whatever they wrote, buddy, they got it wrong. You can take it from me.”
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