If Bones Could Talk

Chapter 11 - 15 Hours Inside

They had drifted to the back of the line as the crew slowly made progress toward the bridge.

"You should have told us earlier," First Mate Bouchard said to the small Kelar floating alongside her. "If we had known, we'd all be sitting on a beach somewhere now, sipping drinks in the sun instead of being trapped in this dark hell."

Plav-tor-fel-mak bristled at the accusation. He had observed her behavior toward the two Kelar crew members throughout the expedition. The sting of being overlooked when she assigned tasks at the barricade earlier still lingered in his mind.

"How could I have known?" he replied, angry at once again being singled out. She probably just doesn't like Kelar, he thought, despite knowing deep down it wasn't true. Yet Plav-tor-fel-mak felt the crew had always snickered behind his back, mocking his keen eye for detail and his appreciation of beauty.

"Maybe you did know and just didn't tell us," Bouchard said. She knew the accusation wasn't true. She just didn't care.

"Perhaps you just wanted all the gold for yourself," she concluded, savoring the power of putting the little lizard in his place. The deeper they ventured into the wreck, the more her control over the situation had slipped away. But now, she had discovered a way to reclaim some of that power, even if only for a fleeting moment.

Bouchard had never had any problems with the Kelar ground sample specialist or any of her Kelar crew members, for that matter. She had always appreciated their eye for beauty in the finer things in life. But now, in the oppressive shadows of the ship, she was starting to see them in a different light, their dark eyes betraying thoughts she could not fully comprehend. Thinking back on the events of the past day, she couldn't really see how they had contributed to the expedition in any meaningful way. At the barricade earlier, Plav-tor-fel-mak hadn't helped at all—he had just stayed out of the way, letting the Terran crew do all the hard work.

"I don't know what—" she started to say, but Plav-tor-fel-mak would never learn the end of the sentence, as the first mate's voice through the radio was replaced with a sickly gurgling sound that filled him with dread. In that moment, the terrors of the night had returned to claim their prize.

It all happened so fast. From the shadows of an adjacent room, something had struck Bouchard. All Plav-tor-fel-mak had time to see was that it was tall, thin, and white, but beyond that, it was all a blur. With a single stroke, it had severed First Mate Bouchard in two, her head and torso now drifting away from her legs in the weightlessness of the wreck, blood bubbling from her waist as it simultaneously boiled and froze in the cold vacuum of the ship.

Drifting three meters in front of them, Murray and Est-mar-kort had not noticed the attack. Plav-tor-fel-mak and Bouchard had been on their interpersonal comm circuit, and the darkness of the corridor and the isolating vacuum of space had shielded their teammates from the sounds and sights of the horrific spectacle that had occurred only meters behind their backs.

Frantically, Plav-tor-fel-mak switched his radio to group comm, screaming into the dark void for his two crewmates to help. In his panicked state, it seemed as if they rotated in slow motion, limited as they were by their maneuvering thrusters. When they finally completed their turn, he could see the look of pure terror on their faces as they watched the two halves of their first mate drift apart in the pale beams of their flashlights, eventually disappearing into the shadows of the dead ship.

Their screams made him wish the comm system had a mute mode. For safety reasons, it did not—it operated either on group or interpersonal mode, the latter automatically switching targets based on proximity.

"Hurry! We need to get out of here!" he shouted at his teammates.

Once again, turning around became a slow, laborious task, their urgent desire to distance themselves from the scene sharply contrasting with the constraints of moving in microgravity. Grabbing the shoulder of Est-mar-kort, he pushed her forward, trying to speed up their escape, but he miscalculated the physics involved, and she started to spin in the tunnel, the conservation of momentum sending him into a somersault in the process.