Day 02. The Boarding
Well it seems my days spent on board that disgusting junk freighter seem to have come to a premature end. Now although I find myself in much nicer surroundings – no more large cockroaches running around everywhere – it seems that I am being held here against my will and am being taken to who knows where, to see who knows who. But I am glad to be off that ship now, especially all that business with the green phage and everything. Now as for all this stuff about being a traitor and a spy, I know I’ve done a few things in my lifetime, but I don’t ever remember doing anything like that. And I’m still not quite certain who these people are who’ve taken me from my ship, but with galactic politics the way they are at the moment, they could be anyone. A traitor to one group is almost certainly a hero to another. Now I’m not claiming to be anyone’s hero either, but that’s just the way it seems to happen in all those narratives you see on the reality screens.
At least it’s something exciting to break the almost unbearable monotony, but I knew I should have been careful for what I wished for. Anyway, so what happened was that they explained that they had been sent by an undisclosed party to search me out and bring me to justice or something like that. Then the two men reached over and grabbed me, gave me a few good punches, two in the stomach and one on the jaw, and asked me if I wanted to do this the easy way. I didn’t want to find out what the hard way was.
They let me collect a few of my things, which I thought was nice of them, and so I gathered together a few clothes and things that were just lying in the corner amongst the junk. There were lots of things that I left there, but I didn’t really mind leaving it all that much, but as I stuffed one last container of my medication into my pockets, I saw there, in the dark corner a dim glow. I turned around to check on the others, who seemed busy talking to the captain, then turned back for a closer look. I was quite certain it was one of the green phage, slowly munching away on the corpse of a large cockroach. I looked around some more and saw a few more there in the shadows. I hurriedly emptied the container of pills into my pocket, casually raised my foot, and brought it down hard on one of little critters, and collected all the little pieces up into the container. For the interests of science.
We’ve been boarded! It’s not too uncommon for the authorities to board deep space freighters every now and then, but I’m not sure exactly what they’re doing this far out from any star system. Unless they’ve been tracking and following us from the last we passed through. Long distance freighters usually don’t have very sophisticated scanning capabilities like the combat frigates or ships like that. They’re usually looking for smuggled weapons or any stashes of controlled substances, things like that. The captain seemed a little surprised and tense as he announced the boarding to the crew. I really haven’t seen anything too dodgy going on around the place in the few months I’ve been on board, but then again you never know.
Usually it’s a good idea just to stay out of the way, out of sight and just let the authorities go about their business and leave, but today they specifically asked to speak to me. There was a loud knock on the door, three hard metallic clunks, then someone shouting “open up in there!” I turned off the bad daytime realityvision show that I was half watching in the background and unlocked the door. It slid open with its usual grinding sound and there stood the captain who informed me that there were a few people here to see me and they had a few things to talk about.
I nodded for them to enter, wondering what exactly they could possibly want to speak to me about, and following the captain in, walked two rather tall gentlemen in seemingly expensive, tight fitting suits followed by a very professional looking young lady with thick glasses, who although she was quite a bit smaller than her counterparts, seemed to carry with her a presence that overshadowed the others. I closed the door behind them. They certainly didn’t look like any authorities I had ever seen in any part of the galaxy. The girl, who couldn’t have been very much older than twenty-three, introduced herself as Vanessa Schneider and said in a very matter-of-factly tone of voice, “We have reason to believe that you, Mr. Stargazer, are a traitor and a spy.”
I did a little research on the ship’s computer. Unfortunately it took virtually all morning. It’s incredible how slow the internet is out here. So anyway, I found out eventually of a few cases of this actually happening, although I’m not quite convinced of the reliability of the cases. One website suggested that it was a new top secret government control device; another said it was a sign of preliminary invasion from the next galaxy over, but then I came across a very detailed page about a newly discovered synthetic life form, a macrovirus which they referred to as the Green Phage, which seemed to hit the nail right on the head – whatever that’s supposed to mean.
So apparently these little blighters are especially nasty. They are silicon based life forms around the size of a large cockroach, that for some yet unknown reason, emit a dull green glow as they float through space aimlessly, sometimes for many years, until they happen to cross the path of some kind of starship or space station, to which they attach themselves to and begin digging into, interfacing with any kind of computer systems and plugging in to any power supply they can use and also devouring any materials it can convert into energy – it is even suggested that they may indeed be able do this with organic material. Now after it has fully infiltrated the host, it will begin to use the ships available resources to create multiple copies of itself, which in turn create copies of themselves. Whether it builds them from existing materials, or uses some kind of replication technology, is still not known.
Then after a few days, when the green phage has reproduced as much as it can, it proceeds to destroy the entire host vessel, which is most likely done either by infiltrating the emergency self-destruct mechanism or by damaging and/or overloading the main power reactor core or hyperdrive unit on the ship. The tiny resilient macroviruses use the power of the explosion, to propel themselves through space, onward to their next host victim. Now I haven’t told anyone about this yet. I’m not sure anyone would really believe me anyway, except maybe Merv and I actually haven’t seen him in a few days. This time I really do hope I am just being paranoid again.
There’s something on board with us; I just know it. I thought I heard some kind of strange scuttling and crawling sound a little while earlier over in the corner, which woke me up, although it’s possible that I could have just dreamt it, I’m not quite sure, or it could have just been a bug or something. I got up anyway and looked around for a bit, but couldn’t see anything in the dim fluorescent light that’s always flickering on and off in my quarters, so I decided I might head on down to the lounge and clear my head. The lounge is just about the only place you can go on the whole freighter that’s not absolutely filthy and full of junk lying around all over the place. The lounge is just about the easiest place on the ship to get to as well, seems like every corridor leads there in the end and I was soon sitting there alone at one of the many illuminated tables sipping a tall glass of ale from the autotender. “Would you like another?” it asked in a polite, but forceful tone of voice, the second I had finished off the last of what was left in my glass.
So I was still just sitting around, thinking about different things, about the bump in the night, about the sparks on the hull. I must have been onto around my third drink, when I remembered an old story I’d heard a long time ago in a bar on the other side of the galaxy when things were still good. There was this really old man, drunk as anything, with the most disgusting, half-rotten and falling out teeth you’ve ever seen, who had stood up, perhaps to relieve himself in the facilities, but had become caught up along the way telling a story about a strange experience he’d had one time on an extended deep space flight.
And so the story went: he had been on a passenger flight with Transgalactic Starliners, headed for a remote system somewhere on the outer rim, when they had experienced what was considered mealy a rather large particle collision that had impacted right outside the room he was staying in. He didn’t really pay it too much notice, but a few days later, while he had fortunately been the only person on board inside an escape capsule, just about the entire starbus exploded around him and as he flew off in the badly damaged escape capsule, all he saw thousands and of little glowing green pods being shot off into space in every direction. We all thought he was crazy of course after he proceeded to relieve himself then and there and pass out on the cold tiles of the bar floor.
