Satellite Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
The signals stopped. Satellite Station 7rB hadn’t reported in for
the past three days. But that wasn’t so uncommon. Signals stopped all the time.
They were highly unreliable. Communication on the frontier was spotty at best. Electronics
were old and cheap and spliced together with a hope and a prayer. Things
stopped working all the time and just couldn’t be replaced. That was part of
the deal with life on the frontier.
Travel between stations was nearly impossible. Time and distance
being what they were, when a satellite station stopped broadcasting, that was
usually that. After a while someone on one of the planets noticed and some
paperwork was filled out. There was a file and a procedure and a record to make
sure no one would be blamed later, but there wasn’t really much someone could
do from behind a desk. Sometimes a new satellite was sent out to the same general
vicinity. If the area was deemed valuable enough, a new satellite station was
launched, but even then, there wasn’t any attempt to investigate or reach the
old station. Travel was too hard. There were too few resources. Search and
rescue took more than it was worth. It was a value equation. Easier to replace
space junk than find out what happened to the old space junk. Sometimes, if the
satellite station had some wildly valuable piece of equipment on it then a
recycler ship was sent out, but not often. Not much was worth salvaging on a
satellite station, including the lives of the crew. But the crew knew that
going into the job and had to plan accordingly.
Satellite stations were not what people normally imagined.
Usually people imagined it was going to look like something they had seen in a sci-fi
movie. But they were really much much worse. They were the size of a trailer or
two and looked like hollowed out old ICBMs that were connected side-by-side. No
one would want to be stationed in one of them for very long. A tour lasted a
long time. Usually from three to five, depending on the job or what the crew
had been paid to do.
The signal stopped.
Then another.
And another.
That was enough. The people that filed reports began
to notice that. They didn’t know what to do except follow protocol and send out
the required replacements.
But out on the satellite stations the word had spread.
No one was ever too keen on their jobs, but there was a new tension and unease.
Nobody liked to work in a situation where they felt their lives were
particularly threatened. Their lives were of course always severely in danger,
but routine helped give the illusion of safety. The fact that something was
clearly going wrong was enough to ruin the illusion.
The crew craft approached the satellite station. Most
of the crew were very excited. It meant that they were being replaced and going
home. The sudden disappearance of satellite signals was the new crew’s problem.
The crew craft was docking when one of the satellite
crewmen looked out an observation window. That was when he saw what looked like
a comet. But it was acting strangely. It wasn’t streaking through space like it
should. It was moving fast and it was getting close. It seemed more like a
missile— on a collision course.
The number crunchers on both crafts quickly made some
determinations. It was not good. Things were not good at all. The crew craft
attempted to reverse dock, but it was way too little, way too late.
Out in space, a figure was attached to the comet,
almost like it was riding a surfboard. How that was possible, perhaps only this
alien knew.
It crashed right into the crew craft, and somehow it
survived.
The alien half-slithered, half-crawled along the crew
craft corridor, away from the hole it had made. It had no legs. It had a
bulbous head with a brain-like structure pushing through the skin. There was a
tail and tentacles to help it travel, but nothing resembling a leg.
Humans and various electronics were getting sucked out
into space until the automatic systems kicked in and there were suddenly doors
sealing themselves and robotics instantly trying to repair the hole in the
ship.
Meanwhile, the alien leapt onto a passing human and
after smashing the head in, implanted itself into the remnants of the body.
The thing connected itself biologically to the body and took control of
the legs so that it could walk.
The repair robots closed the hole in the ship, and
gravity and pressure returned. But that really didn’t fix the ship’s problems.
Now there was no danger of the alien getting sucked back out into space. Now
the remaining crew was stuck with the alien.
The alien made its way through the ship. The crew
waited for death, unequipped to face such a problem.
The men and women on the satellite station turned and
looked at each other. Aliens, for their part, were entirely new. No satellite
ship had ever made any contact of any sort. This was entirely a surprise for
everyone. They could only watch and wonder if they were next. They had solved
the mystery of the silent signals, but that was of small consolation.
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