The Pelican

The Pelican

     By Matthew Wasik

Authors note: This is actually a reworked version of a encounter from a cancelled video game! I was doing the writing, but then everything exploded. This is actually and odd introduction to the universe it's set in, since there's more to Voidscape than just spooky scariness. Oh well, regardless, please enjoy!

Most people aren’t a big fan of faster-than-light travel.

First, the familiar sight of the starfield melts away, replaced by a distant white fuzzy orb. That’s how you know you’re in whitespace. You can tell yourself that it’s just background radiation all you want, but the milky-white vision just looks wrong.

Next comes the cold. It doesn’t matter how high the ship’s heater is set, a thin layer of frost covers everything within a matter of minutes. The entire ship fills with a deathly chill that cuts right to the bone.

Then there’s the sense of presence. No matter how irrational it may be, passengers on a ship in whitespace feel like there’s somebody in the room with them. Sometimes you’ll see movement out of the corner of your eye, only to turn your head and see nothing there. “Spooky” doesn’t half cover it.

Most people would be disturbed by the effects of whitespace, but you’re a spacer. You’re used it to.

For you, it’s just another day.

Your readouts say you’re an estimated 30 minutes and 33 seconds away from reaching the jump point, just one leg in a longer journey. Your ship, the Beneficence, should drop out of whitespace in a safe location, with nothing hostile around you. But of course, “should” is the key word there. You installed afterburners on your ship for a reason.

You place your hand on the controls and wait as the time ticks down. If there is trouble when you hit realspace, you’ll have one of two options. Option 1 is to use the afterburners to stay ahead of the danger until your warp drive spins up. Option 2 is to overload the warp drive and jump early. If you’re lucky, you jump out and all you need to do is make sure the warp drive isn’t damaged. If you aren’t lucky, any number of things could happen to it. It could melt and damage the systems around it, or it could cause a dangerous power spike that kills power to your entire ship. Or it could simply explode and kill you.

Needless to say, option 2 is not your first choice. You settle in to wait, hoping it doesn’t come to that.

Your ship shudders and rumbles, and you arrive at the jump point. The fuzzy whiteness outside your viewport is replaced with white stars, and the ice covering the cockpit begins to melt.

Your scanners bleep as they register another ship extremely close-- only half a mile away. The ship appears as a blue dot on your holographic. You tense up, ready to push the throttle to maximum and run, but the dot stays motionless. You take a look at the ship with your optics. It’s motionless; in fact, it looks like it doesn’t have any power. The cabin is dark, and it’s running lights are off. You wait until your warp drive has spun up just in case, but it doesn’t look like the ship is going to move any time soon.

You consider jumping away, but decide instead to investigate the vessel. There might be somebody left alive who needs help, or failing that, maybe there’s something you can salvage. Your accounts are running more than a little low on cash.

You bring the Beneficence around to the mysterious vessel and hit the floodlights. As far as you can tell, the ship is unharmed. THE PELICAN is painted on the side in white curving letters. It looks like a civilian transport, although you don’t recognize the model. You shine the lights into the cockpit, checking to see if there are any survivors. You see a figure, slumped over in the pilot's chair and completely motionless.

You pull alongside the ship and connect your docking port. You don a spacesuit-- if the power’s out, the Pelican won’t have any life support either. You step into the airlock and check the atmospheric readings. No oxygen, just as you thought. You cycle the airlock, and the door behind you closes. There’s a hissing as the airlock equalizes the air pressure, muffled by your suit. The Pelican’s airlock neglects to open in a similar fashion, so you’re forced to pry the doors open manually. Air hisses out as you do so, taking sound with it.

The dim illumination from your ship only stretches a few feet into the Pelican. Unsurprisingly, with no power, the Pelican’s interior lights are dead. You pick up your industrial flashlight and turn it on. You inhale sharply at what the light reveals.

The ship is full of the passenger’s frozen corpses, floating lifelessly in zero-g.

You retreat to your cockpit, nauseated and profoundly disturbed, and try to decide what to do. You take stock of your ship-- a cracked turbine in the warp drive. A hitch in an engine coupling, dangerous if you leave it unrepaired. A grab bag of various other damaged components.. The fact is that your ship is falling apart, and you don’t have the money to repair it. And the only way you can see to make a few credits fast… is the star-bound equivalent of grave robbing.

Then again, what choice do you have?

You enter the Pelican apprehensively, and your suit’s magnetic boots anchor you to the floor. The main passenger room reminds you of a commercial plane-- you took a few flights on one when you were on your homeworld. The Pelican must have been packed to capacity; there must be at least a hundred corpses in the cabin.

Many of the deceased passengers weren’t strapped in, and are now listlessly floating around the cabin. A layer of frost covers all of them, glittering in the beam of your flashlight. The resulting tableau is repulsive yet oddly beautiful.

 A corpse drifts close to you-- a woman, dressed in expensive clothing, limbs askew. As she approaches, you’re struck by her expression: she’s smiling. Not only is she smiling, but her entire face is covered with a blissful, content expression. You realize that all the other dead passengers wear similar expressions, happy in death. You avert your eyes.

You head to the cargo bay, the passengers probably had some valuables locked away. It’s not like they need them now, you tell yourself. As you proceed, you try to ignore the dead passengers; not all of them were adults. The only sound you can hear is your own nervous breathing.

The cargo bay is full of various crates of different sizes, and mercifully free of corpses. One catches your eye: a small, heavily secured crate near the back, probably full of something valuable. Closer inspection reveals a security keypad, to which you most definitely don’t know the code to open. You think there’s a tool stored aboard the Beneficence that would do the trick.

As you head back to your ship, you think you see one of the bodies twitch. You whip your head around to the corpse in question-- a man in maybe his early thirties, wearing a business suit and smiling beatifically -- but it’s motionless.

You begin to hear music through your suit’s radio, scratchy and faint, but there. You dismiss it as unimportant, although a small, suddenly inaccessible part of your brain begins to scream in horror.

You return with a buzzsaw, and begin to slice open the secured crate. The lack of air muffles the usual screech of the saw. The music is slowly becoming louder-- you can make out a melody, although you can’t identify what instrument is producing it. The top of the crate is sheared off, revealing an assortment of random items. One that catches your eye in particular is a set of jewels, stored in a sparkling glass case. As you clumsily grasp the case in your suit’s thick gloves, the music picks up in volume.

The music fills your ears, sweet yet sad. The music fills your entire body now, you thrum in tune to it. You can hear voices now. You somehow know that the voices are the dead passengers, throats raised in wonderful chorus. You feel warm and safe. You close your eyes.

You suddenly realize that you had started reaching to take your helmet off. The music is very loud now, the sweet melody replaced with a jarring minor chord. You hurriedly grab the jewels and enter the passenger area, the music becoming painfully loud. As you enter the voices begin to scream in fury; the noise reverberates throughout your entire body. They don’t want you to leave.

You rush towards the docking port as fast as the bulky suit allows. To your horror, the frozen corpses begin to twitch and spasm. The serenity is gone from their faces, replaced with rage. You wish you believed in a higher power, so you would have someone to pray to. The dead passengers reach towards you with cold, stiff arms, trying to stop you from leaving.

You’re almost at the docking port when the dead woman from before drifts in front of you. Her face is set in wrathful fury, and her eyes are open, staring in hatred. She claws at your suit, trying to stop you. She misses and floats away, but the other passengers are convulsing and trying to grab you. You feel dead hands on your suit, trying to find purchase. Just as you make it to the docking port, the dead woman comes floating towards you with ponderous inevitability. She’s screaming, and you can hear her, even though there’s no air to carry the horrific sound. She reaches out for you.

Just before she can grab hold, you rush inside the airlock and hit the “cycle” button. The woman’s grasping hand is sheared off at the wrist as the doors close. The hand falls to the floor as the artificial gravity of the Beneficence takes over. You hear faint thumping noises from the airlock as the deceased passengers try to pry their way into your ship.

You take off your spacesuit and slump to the ground, shaking with fear.

You disconnect the Beneficence from the Pelican and warp away… but not before ejecting the severed hand into space. You resolve to pawn the jewels as soon as you can, and try to forget the terrible things you saw aboard the Pelican.

Most people would be disturbed by what just happened. Most would have trouble sleeping, and wake from slumber in a cold sweat. Most would think back to what they had seen again and again, questioning whether they were sane.

But you’re a spacer. You’re used it to it.

For you, it’s just another day.