Christian Oesterling: Blank Space: Into the Depths of the Universe

‘Prissy and I will head down to the main database and try to locate the footage of us in the cockpit. Everyone keep in radio contact, meet back on the bridge in two hours. Remember where we are. We’re in the blank space, and we are on our own.’

Leon clambered down the ladder; cool against his palms, Prissy following after. The whole place seemed to vibrate with a faint hum, a constant reminder that nothing was at rest. A faint drip, drip, drip somewhere out of sight. ‘Condensation near the engines’ Leon told himself. Prissy jumped the last two rungs, thudding onto the mesh grating that was the floor. A drip of sweat made its way down the side of her face from her brow, which she wiped away with the back of her hand.

‘Never been down here,’ she said.

‘I have once, the main database is this way,’ he replied, gesturing to a corridor with a faint orange glow to it. They began to move down it, a jet of steam from a pressure valve startling Prissy. All of the walls were covered in pipework, valves, and cogs, wheels and channels, it somehow felt alive, biomechanical. ‘Biomechs would love it down here, the damn heathens’ Prissy thought to herself.

‘They didn’t exactly make this the greatest looking place in the ship did they?’ she mused.

‘We’re technically in the inner workings of the ship, I bet you’re internal organs aren’t as pretty as your outside,’ Leon answered.

‘Did you just call me pretty?’

‘I’ll leave that up to your imagination. It’s left here if I remember correctly.’

The dripping began to get louder, and Prissy saw it was dripping from one pipe to another, where it was instantly vaporizing from the heat of the pipe below. Prissy reminded herself that they had to maintain all of this in a few hours, and only now began to see what a nightmare task it would be, the place was a labyrinth.

The pair took a set of stairs down, holding onto the handrail on the way down. It was a way back up to the main decks for support, and they didn’t want to suffer an accident down here. Not to mention that someone would have to clean up the mess. Another jet of steam, and to Prissy’s nostrils, it smelled faintly of oil. She made a mental note to suggest that some sealant might be needed on that; she was no mechanic but was pretty sure that gas smelling of oil should not be venting into the walkways.

The two of them walked out into a large room, where two covered pods hummed loudly.

‘Those are Nightingale’s engines,’ Leon said, raising his voice slightly to be heard. Inside were two balls of raw energy, the very essence of all things, permanently kept spinning, releasing their power to propel the vessel throughout the stars, or even, as it was at the moment, the absence of stars. Prissy looked through a gap between the pods and saw a flight of stairs leading to a balcony, meshed together, a crude but effective latticework. Upon the balcony, against the walls of the room, were several screens.

‘Are they the main databases?’ she enquired. Leon nodded.

‘That’s them, you go on up and start having a rummage for the footage. I’m going to have a quick check of the engines and make sure they’re ok.’ Prissy turned sideways to move between the engine pods, a faint heart warming her, and made her way up the stairs. She went to the engine at the far end of the walkway, starting to sort through the menus and look for what she wanted. Leon, down below, scanned through detail after detail on the Halo-Cores for each engine, making sure his ship was in pristine condition.

Jenny was down in the testing area, cleaning up a few XF-50 Alphas. Her polish was running low, her hands getting a good workout from polishing the weapons. They needed to be as clean as could be to ensure nothing went wrong. The plasma-guns, firing green plugs of energy, were known for their efficiency, but anything could go wrong. Even a state of the art ship like the Nightingale could possibly have its little glitches. She took one of the guns and put it out in front of her, eye in the scope. The crosshairs moved, juddered, and then focused in on the target at the end of the hall. She exhaled slowly, calmed her nerves. All this crap with the hologram wasn’t going to put off the best shooter in the Celestrian Exploration Unit, no sir, that was not going to happen.

‘You’ve certainly got what it takes, Jenny,’ her instructor told her. A girl ten years younger than the Jenny onboard Nightingale beamed at the praise. She had scored an 8, 9, 9, 8, 8. 32 out of 40. The class had applauded her, save for one. Heilie. She had had it out for Jenny ever since they started, the two best markswomen in the entire class of students that year. Jenny could cope with rivalry, but Heilie downright hated her. Jenny couldn’t fathom just where this loathing had sprung from, and she reasoned it must just be because she was an average girl from Region 30 and Heilie was a spoilt brat from Region 12 who got everything she asked for because she was daddy’s pride and joy and she was damned if anyone was going to beat her.

‘I’ll grind you to a pulp, bitch,’ Heilie had jeered from the crowd. Jenny placed her gun back on the stand, and retaken her place on the sidelines, waiting for the next girl to step up to the mark. Silence ensued, 7, 8, 7, 9, 9. 30 out of 40. Not as good but still pretty impressive. The following girls took their punts, but never as near as Jenny.

It was then Heilie’s turn at the firing range. It had all come down to this, and the whole class knew it. Heilie held it in two hands, then got cocky and dropped her left to her side, holding the weapon out with one hand. Blam, Blam, Blam, Blam! 8, 9, 9, 8. It would all come down to this final shot. The audience held their breath, and Jenny almost felt the atmospheric pressure of the room change as the air was taken in by the class watching. Heart rates increased, beads of sweat emerged from their hiding places deep in the pores of their skin and rolled down to the floor. A prolonged tension.

Blam.

7.

Jenny smiled, grinning like a fool, and Heilie cursed. ‘That’s what happens when you get cocky, bitch,’ she thought to herself. The girl in front spun to face her rival; coming second wasn’t in the rulebooks of her life.

‘Don’t think you’ve won,’ she spat. Jenny got up to accept her prize of 50Zale, walking past her nemesis.

‘Except I have won, and I’m still the best.’

‘I’m still the best.’ A perfect 10 at the far end of Nightingale’s shooting range. Jenny grinned, that memory was always a pleasant one to relive. In the end, she never knew what had happened to Heilie. Rumour had it that she went mental in the end, lost her marbles completely, started blasting in the middle of Region 17 during market day, and found herself on a one-way ticket to Kalvulseah, the prison planet of The Empire Of Humanity. It made Jenny happy to think that, even if it didn’t happen. It relieved her stress and gave her comfort as she prepared the other weapons.

‘So do you think I’m mental Holden?’ Yuki asked. Holden was looking at the data on his Halo-Core, flicking through the various theories of psychoanalysis that he had come across, ticking them all off to try and discredit the delusion theory. So far he couldn’t come up with a single thing to imply that she had had something happen to her head since their last meeting, which wasn’t many hours before.

‘I can’t come up with anything, which makes the whole hallucination theory look pretty bad,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. He tossed the Halo-Core onto the table and closed his eyes.

‘So if I’m not delusional…’

‘And you saw the same thing as we all did…’

‘Then it’s more than likely that the rest of you aren’t delusional either,’ Yuki reasoned. They sat in silence, the hum of the ship keeping them company. Nightingale never seemed to be silent, even in the absence of all things that they were in. Holden thought the evidence was pretty conclusive but went about setting up the test for the others, just as Leon had told him to do. That man had been in the middle of the Androssos VI crisis, one of the squad leaders in charge of taking down Kzarre, The Last Demon King of the planet, and he knew what he was doing.