Aisha was in the midst of potting herbs at a gardening table in the solarium when she felt the entire ship lurch in a terribly wrong way. The woman in the turquoise dress and gardening apron steadied herself with a quick reset of her footing. The pot of basil was safe in her garden-gloved hands, but the table tipped began a chaotic avalanche. Aisha’s cat Sourdough leapt gracefully from the table as earth, gardening tools, and the ceramic shards of shattered pots skidded across the floor of the solarium. The sound of the table tipping over and all going awry wasn’t even the most startling noise that hit Aisha’s ears.
A screeching and raucous sound hit the room like a delayed crack of thunder. Aisha dropped the pot in her hands and covered her ears with her dirt-covered gloves. The deafening noise of steel hitting steel perpetuated in its magnitude, unstoppable for the full minute or so it went on. The ship lurched again, and without anything to grab to balance herself, Aisha stepped sideways and attempted to balance out as she changed her footing.
After it was over, Aisha looked around in shock, still processing what had just happened. She removed her gardening gloves and brushed dirt from her wiry black hair, pulled back into a thick braid.
Aisha’s first thought was, Is the solarium all right? She looked around, and saw no major damage in sight other than her turned-over worktable. This briefly reassured her that the garden was safe. When she looked up, Aisha saw the familiar green branches of the oak tree in the center of the solarium.
“What was that?” she said aloud, as if someone would answer her. Sourdough yowled, a creature inconvenienced.
“Hush.” Aisha cautioned in a low voice. The fluffy white cat looked up, his crystal blue eyes seeking his owner’s gaze. He stood on two feet and gently raised his front paws to stretch upward and find a claw-hold in Aisha’s turquoise skirts. Sourdough leaned into his stretch, eyes expectantly staring at the woman above.
There was another sound of metal thunder, the kind of sound that made Aisha’s heart constrict and her stomach tighten. She felt tiny claws gripping her dress, and looked down.
“Oh, Sourdough.” she gently removed the cat’s claws. She leaned down toward the fluffy white creature. The cat sat by her knees, and licked his paws, cleaning each toe carefully with the delicate patience of a very busy cat. Aisha stayed there, crouched in the garden, until she heard the sound again.
Metal tore at metal as the transport ship fought back against whatever had rammed into it minutes before. Then, the sound of the ship’s alarms blared.
“HULL BREACH” flashed on the few digital screens that peppered the walls of the large garden room. Soon enough, the ship’s automated voice followed the sound of the high-pitched alarms.
“Proceed to evacuation routes to exit the ship. Follow the blue arrows to safety,” said the voice, several times in a row. Then the screens all glowed with blue arrows. All the ones that Aisha could see pointed towards the door, directing her to leave the room.
A tiny voice inside her told her that nothing could be more dangerous than listening to the automated system right now. Her muscles were tight, nerves on edge in an adrenaline-addled feeling.
A final siren wail followed the repetitive message and then the comm system went quiet. The blue arrows continued their flashing directions, and it was nearly silent.
Aisha felt a resolve to hide herself and her cat wherever she could. Something held her back from leaving the garden. Aisha could feel her breathing had become shallow. Anxiety clustered in her chest around her heart, a weight of stricture. Her body said no. There was no one else in the solarium at the moment so she felt relatively safe. Whatever was happening, she could wait it out.
Aisha stood, grabbed her fluffy white cat, and placed her gardening gloves in an empty ceramic pot. She turned off the lights in the solarium and withdrew into the darkest corner of the garden behind several large stacks of bagged soil, and space-worthy storage boxes.
Distant sounds of screaming and gunfire paralyzed Aisha and her cat as they rang out from beyond the boxes they huddled behind, and beyond the doors of the solarium. Aisha could hear her own heartbeat, which only increased its hammering in her chest as she began to worry that whoever was killing out there would find her. Sourdough’s purring felt disproportionate in her arms. He kneaded her sleeve, and she could feel the tips of his claws as they tightened, through the fabric, on her skin.
How I do wish I’d brought his carrier with me today, thought Aisha, regretting the fact that she’d simply carried her pet from her room to the solarium. Still her heartbeat in her chest like a jackhammer as she heard more screams that turned her blood to ice, louder and seemingly closer than before.
Do not move, Aisha told herself. Sourdough, thankfully, didn’t do much other than purr. Aisha hoped that the mechanical noises of the air system and the automated water sprinklers that peppered the solarium everywhere would drown out any noises she and her cat made when the killers came to find them.
But the killers never came. An hour passed, long enough for Aisha to adjust her position from crouching to sitting on the floor with her back to a cold steel wall to her legs falling asleep in that position. At some point, Sourdough settled in her lap and fell asleep himself. The screams of the dying became infrequent, and finally stopped altogether.
No more steel grinding against more steel.
No more sounds of laser-gun fire.
Aisha’s heartbeat didn’t stop pounding, though it felt like it had been hours. Still, she waited. Before she ever stepped foot on a colonial ship, she’d been trained by New Worlds New Colonies. As an astrobotanist, she had to know the basic survival skills needed on every mission.
“Most of you will die,” said the unnecessarily aggressive training instructor at the time. “Some of you will survive because you listened to what you will hear today. Some of you will survive by sheer luck.” He’d eyed Aisha with skepticism as he’d examined each one of his trainees.
It was clear he was not used to teaching scientists, who were a different breed of “civilian”. The botanists, biologists, and medical doctors had all gazed at one another with the same humorous look that said, who cares about death? That’s just another experiment.
Aisha shook away the memory and decided to stand. She’d go to her room, gather some things, and assess the situation. Thankfully, as NCNW cared about efficiency, the science living quarters were on the same floor as the working labs. Aisha and Sourdough were less than a ten-minute walk from their room.
Those ten minutes, however, stretched into an indeterminable amount of time as Aisha walked cautiously, step by step, towards her quarters. It was inevitable, given the screams and gunfire earlier, that there would be bodies. Where there would be bodies, she didn’t know. She clung to Sourdough as she made it through the hallways to her quarters without seeing anyone who was dead... Yet.
Once they’d made it to the room and Aisha changed from her gardening apron and turquoise dress to some trousers and a more comfortable shirt, she’d packed Sourdough into his hard-sided acrylic cat carrier. It was also a backpack, so the satisfied cat settled in for his ride as Aisha strapped the bag on her back.
As she walked down the corridor, Aisha felt a panic begin to overtake her. She hadn’t seen or heard anyone yet, dead or alive. Attacker or defender. She resisted the urge to jog down the hall, just to get this over with. She knew people had been killed. Where were they?
But everything in Aisha was trained to be better than that. She knew that to run was to give in to the chaos that occurred around her, and the last thing she wanted to do was join the chaos. Even if it was supposedly, at least to her ears, over.
So Aisha walked at a rapid pace instead, her long legs carrying her down hallways and corridors, till she finally passed dead passengers riddled with laser-gun burns. She looked, and kept moving.
It is fruitless to dwell, she told herself, and carried Sourdough along on her back. As Aisha walked, she watched the seams along the eternally smooth walls of the circular hallway that seemed to have no end, broken up by the occasional NCNW ad.
Aisha tried not to remember what life had been like a few hours ago, tried not to think of the past despite every Quarr poster on the walls. She balled her hands into fists for a moment, squeezing her fingernails into her palms so that she could feel just enough of their sharp tips against her skin.
“I still cannot believe we’ll have to leave so much behind,” Aisha muttered into the empty white hallway. “Utterly miserable circumstances,” she finished with a shaky sigh. The carpet absorbed her complaints, made her words feel small. Aisha tried not to feel small herself. She was possibly the last living person on the Prosperity, an ugly intrusive thought that took seed in her mind.
Soon she came on a clean rectangular space that broke up the hallways. There were two elevators on the far wall, and between a flashing sign that glowed blue and white.
“HULL BREACH,” it said in all capitals. “STAFF MUST EVACUATE. PROCEED TO EVACUATION ROUTE.”
Aisha stopped walking, and looked around the service elevator area. There were metal containers, boxes, and bins scattered about, open, broken. It looked as if the area had been looted, but there were no bodies. Not like she had seen a little while ago, on the Conservatory deck. Worse, she knew she had to go back there for more supplies later.
Something urged her to look in the boxes that had already been opened, and to her delight she found a small laser pistol in one of them. Aisha looked at the fuel indicator on the side of the black firearm, and nodded. She pocketed the object and hunted through the rest of the bins, but there was nothing of consequence. Various kinds of cables, tools, measurement devices, repair parts and cleaning supplies seemed to dominate the contents of the service room, as one would expect.
Aisha approached the flashing screen by the elevator.
“Hull breach,” she said, and tapped the tiny “x” in the upper corner of the warning window on the screen. She dismissed the warning dialog the software offered and saw that the elevators were working.
“I guess that means we’re stuck going down to the planet, Sourdough.” She shook her head, and removed her backpack. With great care, she set it down on the ground. Aisha used the screen to call for the service elevator, and waited patiently. “As long as they don’t find us, I think we’ll be fine.”
Aisha heard the elevator doors open. The service elevator was huge, ten feet by twenty feet at least. The shiny steel metal walls of the box were barely used, and reminded Aisha that the ship was newer, though she felt it had been an age since they left the Orbital Relay Base over Earth.
“Well, then,” Aisha grabbed the backpack and stepped into elevator. “This just continues to be an adventure.”
The service elevator doors shut, and she tapped on the control panel. It didn’t offer much, but she saw that she could get to the mall level from here where there were food supplies.
“And that’s where we’re going,” she said to Sourdough, whose little white face peered out of the clear bubble in the side of the backpack.
Aisha chose the level she wanted on the screen, and the whole elevator lurched. The astrobotanist grabbed the wall to steady herself as the elevator’s gears began to grind to life. The elevator started moving, and Aisha wished that her trip on the Prosperity had not turned so terribly dangerous.
What happens next? Stay tuned to “Dormant Planet“ on my always free blog, “It Ain’t Easy Being Seen!” for chapter 4!
Much love,
Alexandra
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