Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space
Read Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space Online
Authors: Stephen Euin Cobb
Praise for
BONES BURNT BLACK:
Serial Killer in Space
"A riveting and realistic portrayal of
space travel gone wrong, and of a crew who must fight for their survival.
Bones
Burnt Black
is exciting, and expertly told. A must-read."
J.C. Hutchins, author of the
7th Son
series
"Without a doubt one of the most
entertaining and believable science fiction books I've ever read."
Janine K. Spendlove, author of the
War
of the Seasons
series
"Stephen Euin Cobb has achieved an
excellent cross-genre work in
Bones Burnt Black
. This is much like an
Agatha Christie plot, with a stalker hunting down the victims one by one and
Cobb handles this very well.
Bones Burnt Black
is a mystery, it is
science fiction and it is a great page turner. If you enjoyed books like
Caves
of Steel
or movies like
Ten Little Indians
, you should read this
book. You will find that science and murder can be a powerful fusion."
Colleen R. Cahill, writing for the SFRevu
Bones Burnt
Black:
Serial Killer
in Space
by
Stephen Euin Cobb
Additional Novels by Stephen Euin Cobb
Skinbrain:
Secrets of the Rolling Head Tormented by the Ocean that Chases its Moon
Plague
at Redhook: Life Extension Without End
Nonfiction by Stephen Euin Cobb
Indistinguishable
from Magic: Predictions of Revolutionary Future Science
Bones Burnt Black:
Serial Killer in Space
Copyright
2004 by Stephen Euin Cobb
www.SteveCobb.com
(V17-c2-toc1)
All rights reserved,
including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This is a work of fiction.
All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any
resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
This Kindle edition
contains the complete text of the original paperback edition, which was
published by August Press in 2004.
The paperback edition's
ISBN: 0-967034671
Library of Congress
Control Number: 2004092497
Chapter One
Through her closed eyelids, a red light glared
painfully bright. Almost awake, she thought,
Turn it off!
The light vanished and took with it the pain, but then
it came back, bright and red and stabbing. She cringed and squirmed and bared
her teeth. “Turn it off!”
The light went dark.
Voice sounds strange,
she thought. It had echoed
claustrophobically, as if her head were in a bucket. Yet the echo also seemed
somehow familiar, as though she’d heard it many times before. Puzzling over
this drew her a few steps closer to wakefulness.
Sluggishly, she eased her eyes open; and just as they
opened the light came back—white now instead of red, and a hundred times
brighter without eyelids to filter it. She squeezed her eyes shut in a useless
attempt to end the pain.
“Cut it out! I’m awake!” She raised her hands and
covered her face, and was further confused when a barrier prevented her palms
from traveling the last few inches to touch the skin of her nose and forehead.
The light went out, but within seconds was back.
“I said, ‘turn it off!’” Angry now, she swung an arm to
slap the light source away. Missing it made her feel foolish, which elevated
her anger toward rage. Even so, she managed to notice the stiff texture and
heavy mass of the material covering her arm, hand, and shoulder. She also
recognized the unmistakable stench of sweaty vinyl.
I’m in a vacuum suit.
The next time the light went out she glanced around to
learn where she was. Black sky surrounded her; black sky dotted with stars. The
stars were in motion—all traveling downward toward her feet. Somewhat less than
immediately, she realized it wasn’t the stars that were moving.
Her slow endless back-flip again brought her around to
face the sun. Squinting, she shaded her eyes against its light with a pair of
green-gloved hands.
Why am I outside?
Looking about in every direction, she tried to locate
the large orbiting city which was the last place she recalled working. She did
not see it.
Where’s Huygens Colony?
Then she realized her sky was not dominated by a huge
red-orange cloud-covered moon.
Where’s Titan?
Searching for the giant ringed planet, which should have
appeared as large as a grapefruit held at arm’s length, revealed that it too
was missing.
Where the hell is Saturn?
She paused a second, then turned the question
upside-down.
Where the hell am I?
The soft, easily ignored, drum-beat of her pulse began
to race in the base of her neck—and by racing, thumped louder. The recurring
pain of sunlight inside her eyes was now joined by a new pain—sharp and deep—in
the center of her chest.
Got to calm down!
She pressed both hands against
her gadget-covered ribcage.
Mom had her first heart attack at twenty-nine:
when she was my age exactly. This is no time to have a coronary!
Monitoring the beat in her neck, she closed her eyes
and concentrated on trying to relax. As soon as she estimated her pulse was
below one hundred and twenty she proceeded to the next logical step.
Sliding a gloved hand up to the right side of her
helmet’s base, she verified that her suit radio was on. “This is—” She cleared
her throat. “This is—” She blinked her eyes. “This is—” She paused again.
The drum-beat picked up speed.
Who the hell am I?
_____
“Ship!” shouted the captain, his voice old and gruff.
“What’re the gees in here?”
The computer that controlled the spacecraft said, “One
point nine; inverted.”
The captain’s head and hands and feet all pointed
upward toward the center of the bridge dome. Hanging from his seat belt like a
lumpy towel draped over a clothesline, he grimaced. “I’m getting a headache.”
“Captain,” said the ship, “your blood is accumulating
in your feet and head. You may be in danger of blacking out. I recommend you
get out of your command chair and drop to the ceiling.”
“Too late for that. The dome’s over fifteen feet away.
At two gees, I’d break my leg. Maybe worse.”
“Captain, you must make the effort. I cannot stop or slow
the ship’s tumbling. It will continue to tumble faster. In a few minutes the
bridge will be experiencing three and a half gees. That, multiplied by your
body’s mass, will produce a force well above the rated strength of your seat
belt. If you wait until it breaks you will fall to the ceiling and surely die.
If you drop now… Well, at least the results will be less predictable.”
The captain rubbed his forehead with the fingertips of
both hands. A thick bulldog of a man, he must have been a powerhouse in his
prime. He was white-haired now; in his early sixties but still had the broad
shoulders, muscular arms and large hands of his youth. His face was wide, and
his square jaw even wider. But compared to his shoulders, arms and hands; his
hips, legs and feet seemed genuinely undersized. He wasn’t fat, yet he had a
round little belly that poked out between his belt and the bottom of his
ribcage. He glanced around the bridge trying to think of an alternate method of
getting to the ceiling from his chair.
The bridge of the spaceship Corvus was nearly half the
width of the ship and resembled a planetarium in that it had a round floor, a
white hemispherical ceiling and no windows. Its only visible furnishings were
three large gray command chairs: each shaped like an oversized recliner forever
leaning back to direct its occupant’s attention upward at the dome.
The dome was capable of presenting dozens of full
color, full motion, full 3-D images simultaneously. Images which could be of
any size or shape, and appear anywhere on the ceiling’s curved surface.
Not having identified another way down, the captain
rubbed his forehead even harder. “What’re the gees?”
“Two point one.”
“Great.” Pulling his hands down to his waist, he tried
opening the seat belt’s closure mechanism, but with twice the weight of his
body pressing against it, it refused to let go. He struggled, frantically. “I
can’t get it open!”
“Do you have a knife?”
“You know damn well I don’t have a— Aaaaah!”
The seat belt snapped open.
As the captain fell upward from his command chair the
tension on the seat belt whipped its metal buckle painfully across the bones in
the back of his hand. This pain, however, was quickly drowned in a raging flood
of greater pains as his body crashed to the domed ceiling.
The seat belt’s imperfect release had rolled him
sideways, causing him to land on his left side. He impacted with a bouncing
whiplash-like motion: first his leg, then his hip, arm, shoulder and head.
“Captain,” the ship said, “what is your condition?”
There was no reply.
“Captain, can you hear me?”
But again there was no reply.
_____
She was starting to panic again; starting to feel the
pain deep inside her chest; then she remembered.
Kim! My name is Kim!
“This is Kim Kah— Kim Kh, Kh— Kim Kirkland! This is Kim
Kirkland of the spacecraft—” But again she was stuck.
The only ship she could remember being a crewmember of
was the Sagittarius, but somehow it felt like a long time had passed since
she’d worked the Earth/Mars transport.
“This is Kim Kirkland calling anyone. Anyone, please
respond.” She waited for over a minute, but there was no answer. She switched
to the emergency channel. “This is Kim Kirkland calling Mayday, Mayday. I
repeat: this is Kim Kirkland calling Mayday.”
Still nothing.
She transmitted again several times but after ten
minutes without an answer decided she was out here on her own.
The cyclic headache inside her eyes had migrated to the
back of her head and expanded to torment the rear half of her skull.
My head
is killing me! Why?
Running a few glove-covered fingers over the outer
surface of her helmet, she discovered a dent three fingers wide located above
and behind her right ear. This explained both the pain in her head and the
mysterious radio silence. The vacuum suit’s radio transceiver was mounted on
the inside surface of her helmet just under that dent. Whatever put the dent in
her helmet had also slammed the transceiver into the side of her
skull—presumably damaging both her and it in the process.
Putting her hand down, she sighed deeply. Her exhaled
breath struck the helmet’s faceplate and curled back toward her eyes and ears.
It tickled her eyelashes and ruffled the loose blonde hairs that framed her
face. Ignoring these sensations, she returned to an earlier question:
Where
am I?
The sun is much too bright for the outer solar
system.
She tried to estimate its angular diameter and hence its distance.
Looks
like I’m somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Venus. Maybe near Earth.
Looking around for a star that on closer examination
would appear as a small disk—indicating it was really a planet—yielded nothing.
This didn’t worry her. She couldn’t land safely on a planet with nothing more
than a vacuum suit. What she needed was a ship.
She looked around again, more carefully this time,
examining every bright star, hoping one wasn’t just a point of light but an
irregular shape, lumpy or elongated, which would indicate it was a nearby
spacecraft and presumably the spacecraft from which she was currently on EVA.
But none of the bright stars showed any visible detail.
It occurred to her that her ship might be silhouetted
against the face of the sun, or—if she’d been unconscious long enough—that it
might be far enough away to appear as one of the dimmer stars: a mere shapeless
speck. The first of these two possibilities might be impossible to overcome,
but the second she could handle by making a simple change in her search
strategy.
She looked at the sky’s constellations for a star that
should not be there: a star that wasn’t part of the normal sky. If she found
one, bright or dim, it would just about have to be the spacecraft she had been
aboard. That or—
There!
She looked more closely.
That’s it!
Orion, the hunter, had mysteriously gained weight. His
belt was a line of four stars instead of its usual three. The extra star showed
no detail and was slightly dimmer than the traditional stars of the belt.
It’s
a ship, an asteroid, or a planet too far off to show a disk. There’s just no
way to be sure.
She searched the constellations for any additional
extra
stars
but found none.
Guess I don’t have much choice but to assume it’s my
ship. Just have to head for it and hope I’m not wasting nitrogen.
Reaching down to the large pocket on the front of her
left thigh, she tore open its Velcro closure and pulled out something which
resembled an eight inch long aluminum hotdog with no bun. She strapped it to
the back of her right forearm and adjusted its straps for tightness.
Containing only compressed nitrogen gas, the little jet
pack’s thrust would be tiny. But by foregoing combustion it required no
ignition system and could be safely used in any emergency—even near open fuel
leaks. After two decades of successful use, its design was now considered very
nearly fool-proof.
First things first.
Before attempting to aim herself at the extra star, she
needed to stop her tumbling. Not only was it annoying but it would severely
limit the accuracy of her aim during the thrust maneuver. So she directed the
jet pack’s exhaust nozzle—which was near her wrist—upward above her head by
bending her arm as though showing off a powerful biceps muscle and pressed the
jet pack’s release valve.
No burst of gas exited its nozzle.
She pressed the release again.
Still nothing.
Twisting her arm as far as she could within the
limitations of the vacuum suit, she examined the pack’s canister and spotted a
small cone-shaped dent in its curved aluminum wall. At the bottom of the dent
was a tiny puncture.
Thing’s empty! All the nitrogen’s escaped!
The extra star, accompanied by a host of normal stars,
once again moved downward through her field of vision.
If it really is a
ship it must be twenty or more miles away. Without any propellant it might just
as well be a billion.
_____
Slowly, and without any other movement, the
white-haired old captain opened his eyes. As the mists cleared from his mind
and he began to recall the how and why of his location he, very carefully, and
still moving only his eyes, looked around at his upside-down bridge. He was
tempted to turn his head and glance up at his empty command chair but the
various pains pulsing and meandering within his body made him fear that this
might not be a good thing to do. Instead, he tried to shift his weight just
enough to pull his left arm out from under his chest. He succeeded only in creating
a wave of pain that expanded to fill his entire universe.
That was a mistake he did not intend to repeat.
When he once again possessed control of his mouth he
whispered, “Get me Mike. And make it voice-only. I don’t want him to see me.”
Seconds later a new voice echoed on the bridge. “Larry,
what’s with all these upside-down g-forces?”
To instill confidence, the captain spoke as loud as he
dared. Even so, this was just above a whisper. “Mike, we’ve got some serious
problems. I want you to go get that passenger in cabin 5-B. She’s an
exobiologist—an ivory-tower type—doesn’t know a thing about spacecraft. Take
her to the ship’s center: deck ten. The gee forces will be weakest there.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Just do it. I’ll explain when you get there. And Mike,
hurry.”