Sargasso of Souls – Session 2

For the next four days we sat in the designated quarantine area under the watchful eye of the UNSC Battlecruiser Nigeria and waited.

Our team did the best it could to see to the needs of the rag-tag band of CIC employees that we had collected: men, women and children. It wasn’t exactly comfortable but everyone was pretty grateful just to have escaped from the surface.

Below us the situation on Earth continued to deteriorate. Panic gripped the planet as satellites revealed that the plague had spread throughout Antarctica, across large portions of South America and into some areas of Africa and the United States.

In addition to acting as liaison to the passengers, which kept him pretty occupied, Razor spent his time trying to contact George Cochrane, the head of CIC, and seeing if he could find out any information on what had happened to one of his ex-wives, the last one I think, or maybe she was the second, whichever. Anyway by then the administration was in chaos and no one seemed to know anything.

Our only real contact was with an Inspector from the French police, who seemed oblivious to the impending demise of civilization and made it clear that he wanted us to return to Earth so that he could interview us about an assault with deadly weapons at the shuttle facility, and the seemingly related murder of the head of construction, Mr Lau. I didn’t ask but it seemed pretty likely that the Morris brothers had perpetrated the latter. Though, to be honest, I felt Lau had it coming.

Fortunately for us, despite the inspector’s protests, we were forbidden to leave the quarantine for any reason so we were unable to oblige. C’est la vie.

At the end of the four days, even the dogged Inspector had recognised that there were more important things to worry about and we were free to go where we pleased.

Ramsay fired up the engines and the Salvation, as Razor had named our shuttle, headed out into space following the only lead Razor had on the whereabouts of his ex-wife, Denise. It had been suggested that she might be one of thousands of evacuees that had been placed in cryogenic-suspension and shipped off to Mars over the previous few days.

However, when we reached the Mars Linetop facility we found the huge influx of refugees had totally exceeded the station’s capacity. Getting aboard would have proved difficult to arrange and, according to the administrators Razor contacted, there was no record of Denise. Finding an individual in the chaos would be next to impossible, so he resigned himself to the fact that, for the moment, he could do nothing. We left Mars without docking and set course for the Sol-Autaris jump-gate.

As we travelled I spent much of the time in my quarters. I was still recovering from the arm wound I had received, and had no particular inclination to mingle with the passengers, though I did talk with Marie Duprés on a couple of occasions. I kind of liked her. At the shuttle facility she had held it together when she needed to. I respected that.

On completing the jump to Autaris, Mark revealed that there were some handling problems with the ship, which were starting to concern him. Diagnostics had suggested an imbalance of about 32 tonnes between the port and starboard sides. Despite the scale of the discrepancy, pinpointing it proved to be more difficult.

With Ramsay and Phipps occupied and Razor suffering from an extreme bout of jump-sickness that confined him pretty much to his cabin, it was Morris and I that spent the next few hours crawling around the ship’s ducting and access tunnels looking for anything out of the ordinary. Not that anything down there was particularly familiar to me.

It was only after we’d combed the entire ship that Ramsay figured out we were 32 tonnes light, and then we realised the port side water tank was empty. The sensor on the tank suspiciously read ‘full’. Maybe it was just a malfunction but Morris and I suspected that it had been done intentionally.

On closer inspection we found a hidden compartment containing an armed stowaway that Morris shot; though not fatally.

After we had dragged him out of the cramped compartment and Veldin had patched him up, we discovered that the stowaway was a French security guard from the shuttle facility. Interrogating him proved awkward however, as he spoke no English.

Co-opting Marie Duprés to assist with translation, we discerned that he had hidden there on Lau’s orders ready to kill us when the shuttle was hijacked but he maintained that since then he had been working on his own initiative.

There was another similar compartment on the starboard side of the ship but it was empty.

It appeared that the stowaway had come clean but nonetheless Morris proposed putting him off at the next reasonable opportunity. I was happy with that. I wasn’t sure of the Frenchman’s loyalties and didn’t want to be watching my back for the rest of the trip.

We continued on our way, passing through the Niaven system, where four local Frigates made it clear that we were not welcome.

Then we entered the Hetari system, where the stations again refused us docking permission due to the fear of contamination. However, as a consequence of the empty tank, there was a growing water shortage aboard the Salvation. It needed to be resolved. After much cajoling we eventually persuaded a mining station to provide a chunk of ice to replenish our H2O in exchange for transporting two government personnel to Esperi V.

Docking remained out of the question however so Morris and I had to suit up and do a precarious space-walk to receive both the ice and the passengers.

Something told me the men that came aboard were military. They had that look about them. We didn’t ask any questions, about either them or the case they were carrying, but we watched them extremely closely.

The last leg of the journey was through the Rani system and it was there that we finally came across a more hospitable station. We still had to submit to a full inspection and bio-scan before eventually being allowed to dock, but the representative of the Rani IV Medical Research Centre who came aboard to conduct the check, Ms Adelina Rossi, was far more agreeable than those we had encountered previously. While she conducted the mandatory inspection she seemed standoffish and a little nervous, but once it was confirmed we were clear of contaminants she started to warm up. She got on so well with Morris in fact that I believe they went out for a meal later on, though I don’t think anything major came of it.

We also gave our stowaway his parole and hoped we wouldn’t live to regret it. He seemed like a man of his word, but you can never tell for certain.

In the afternoon I went for a look around the station with our fly-boy, Ramsay. I thought someone should go with him because he didn’t look like someone who could handle himself if he got into trouble. Sadly there wasn’t any.

The next day we departed, and a few hours later we arrived at our destination, the Bharat Hydroponics station orbiting Esperi V.

As Samantha Wiles, Nessence Transit’s chief administrator, met us on the landing platform I observed the two men we had transported from the Hetari system being met by a station security team. I wondered who they were and did my best to commit their faces to memory, in case we ever crossed paths again.