Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

Phall was bent over a log sitting on her desk when Balth entered the med-lab. Doc was nowhere in sight. Phall started with a jump when Balth spoke. “Excuse me, Dr. Beccera. I’m sorry to disturb you, but Capt. Kalm needs to see you and Doc Triskan as soon as possible. Is Doc very busy right now?”

“Not at the moment.” Phall Beccera was a tall woman with clear, green eyes and short cropped blonde hair. She had a soft, sultry voice which was usually spoken just above a whisper, but was never hard to hear. “I’ll get him and we’ll be there shortly.” With that, Phall picked up her log and walked out of the med-lab, turning to the bays. Balth followed her out and turned to the observatory and the telescopes housed there.

I was just closing the door to the freezer unit at the outer hull when Phall came from behind wrapping her arms around me. “I found two more. Numbers 88 and 90. Same problem. Cracked shield.” I shook my head and disentangled myself from Phall’s arms. “I just don’t understand it. There’s 120 sleepers out there, five of those have cracked shields and the people that were in them are gone. When their shields cracked, the computer should have awakened me and them, too. And there’s nothing wrong with the computers.” I banged my fist helplessly against the door behind which were five people I knew.

Phall turned me to face her and took my face into her cupped hands. “Ceph, there’s not a thing in the world you could have done. It’s not your fault.” She saw the tears in my eyes and pulled my head to her shoulder, again wrapping her arms around me, holding me close. “It’s not your fault” she repeated. “Now come on. Pull yourself together, Ross wants to see us. He probably needs our report before we land at Panora. I’ve got the log on the desk, let’s go check the animal pods and then we’ll go see Ross.” I nodded and followed her into the secondary bays.

As soon as we opened the door the odor let us know something had gone wrong in there. Immediately I shut the door and accepted the mask Phall was extending in my direction. Slipping it over my nose and mouth, I adjusted the airflow and then slipped the bottle into my pocket. Seeing that Phall had done the same, we turned back to the bay and entered.

As we walked into the bay, the lights brightened, the sensors reading us as we passed through the door. Littering the floor in front of us and along the walkways was evidence that more than one animal had somehow awakened and been released from their sleeping pods. We both went into the anteroom to the desk. Opening a drawer, I picked up a pair of stunning wands and handed one to Phall. Activating them, we turned back to the bay and entered the walkway between the sleeping pods. I heard something moving far down on the right side of the bay, near the food stores. Phall pointed to a spot midway on the left side, but I couldn’t see anything when I glanced in that direction. “I don’t know what it was,” she said in response to my question. “I only caught a glimpse of it when it jumped or fell behind one of the pods.”

“Okay. Let’s walk the aisle, checking each pod and between pods. Note damages, deaths, and if any are empty.” I moved to the right side of the aisle and started working my way forward as I checked my side of the bay. Phall kept even with me along the left side of the walkway, performing her search as effectively as I was mine. About a quarter of the way down, I came upon a pod with the shield cracked from top to bottom. Looking into the pod, I could see the remains of six cats. And they had died some time ago. Taking the label card from the end of the pod, I read the names of the owners. One of them was Cali, my calico kitten. I felt a lump rise in my throat. One of the others was Phall’s Siamese kitten, Andromeda. She was going to be very disappointed, because she loved him as much as I loved Cali. But I couldn’t worry about that anymore. There was more important work to do. Glancing over to Phall, I could see that she had collected two or three label cards from pods herself and had them in her pocket. So there were some damaged pods on that side of the bay, also. I doubted that she had found any of the pods to be empty, otherwise she would have brought my attention to it. I slipped the label card into my pocket and moved on to the next pod. I would wait for a better time to tell her about Andromeda and Cali.

I had just leaned over to check pod 46 when an ear-shattering, shrill screech resounded through the bay, startling me. I brought myself upright, glancing over to Phall who was frozen in fear, her wand forgotten and hanging from the strap around her wrist. I quickly stepped over to her side and slipped the wand back into her hand. “Phall, whatever it is, it can’t hurt us any. We don’t have any dangerous animals on board. Domesticated and farm animals are all that anyone was allowed to bring aboard. Let’s find whatever it is and deal with it so we can get on with the rest of our work.” She nodded and brought her wand up in a defensive position. We started walking along the aisle again, this time more interested in the spaces between the pods rather than the pods themselves.

Three pods further, Phall softly called to me. I was beside her in two quick steps. On the floor, between the pods, was a dead chimp. Chimpanzees had long been family choices for a pet. Especially families with children because they were perfect playmates for the children. The chimps were naturally adaptable and easily trained. This was a larger loss than the cats. Chimps were much harder to breed and were valuable not only for their relationships with children. They were also helpful in homes, workplaces and labs after being taught simple chores. We hadn’t found this chimp’s pod yet, so we had to find it and its mate. There were two chimps per pod and they were mates. Now I knew what had caused that unearthly screech. I turned to Phall and was frozen by her terrified scream. At that moment, something hit me in the middle of my back, knocking me forward, off my feet.

Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. I felt myself falling toward Phall with a terribly heavy weight on my back. A searing pain began to make its presence felt at my right shoulder, while a rather strange warmth began to flow across the right side of my chest. I felt myself hit against Phall, knocking her sideways as her left arm swung up to catch me and her right hand, holding the wand, snaked towards me. The thought entered my mind: ‘Why is she going to stun me?’ Then I felt the side of my head strike the edge of the sleeping pod. In the next fraction of a second, I felt the overpowering and nerve shattering sting of the wand surge its way through my body, sending me into the sense-deprived world of unconsciousness.

Balth had followed Phall out of the med-lab and walked the short corridor and into the observatory that held the telescopes and the relays to the control cabin. Moving to the first of four telescopes, he flipped the switches to activate the telescope and put his eye to the viewfinder. Sighting it in on the nose of the ship, he then raised it to look directly ahead of the ship. The sun of the system ahead came into view, dampers automatically filtering down the harmful rays of the sun to protect the viewer’s eyes.

Smiling with satisfaction, Balth moved to the second telescope and repeated his actions. This telescope had a wider field of view encompassing half the system that they were entering. He adjusted the telescope to the left and caught view of an asteroid belt, and, farther away, a blue planet. Faintly, he could make out some land masses with clouds dotting the surface. He left it focused in that direction. Moving to the third telescope, he activated it and aimed it in the direction of the asteroid they had so narrowly missed. That asteroid was a mean one, easily a hundred times the size of the ship, it looked like it was a piece of a world that had broken up. When Balth turned to the fourth telescope nothing happened. He threw the switches again, but still the viewfinder remained black. He was disappointed. With the telescopes situated near the front of the ship, he had been sure that they had escaped the damage that had been delivered to the tail section. He finally gave up on the telescope and turned to the relay board. Throwing the relays necessary to transfer control of the telescopes to the control cabin, he then turned and left the observatory, heading back to the front of the ship.