Space

A spaceship was adrift around 15 kilometers from mine, and I approached cautiously. It always pays to be careful in the areas crowded with pirates. It could easily be a trap, but on the other hand, it could easily be a tidy sum in my pocket.

Closing in, I could feel the familiar sense of fear, even though I was an old hand in space, the excitement and fear still kept me on edge. I suspected that once the fear failed to show, I would be dead.

In the far frontiers of space, you need to be afraid; fear keeps you on your toes and helps you survive. Many of my friends were disintegrated once they lost their fear, when their edge was dulled by time and weariness.

“Joe, the scan is complete”.

Ally’s voice cleared my head of these thoughts, and I leaned in to the screen to see what she found. Ally was the ship’s AI, my sidekick and my company in the lonely reaches of space. Without the company of AIs, humans would be unable to travel for so long on their own.

The screens showed nothing unusual, the ship appeared to be what it looked like, a derelict hull drifting through space, no life signs, no heat, no movement, no nothing. I did not think about it for long, and decided to approach.

The next few minutes passed in silence, Ally knowing full well that I needed the peace and quiet to focus, and that checking the equipment required a lot of attention. Out here, your equipment was your life, there was nobody else around for light seconds, and no help would be forthcoming if I got myself in trouble.

I sighed, and made my way to the airlock. I knew that the weariness that was my companion lately was not a good sign, and that I was overdue for some R&R, hopefully the derelict ahead would provide me with the means to do so. Perhaps even save some money in the bank.

These thoughts stayed with me, as I was dragging on the bulky space suit and checking the air supply and all the countless things that could and sometimes did go wrong. The nature of space is such, that with most it was enough that they went wrong once.

All system green, a final “Good luck” from Ally, the airlock cycled, and opened into the cold space. No matter how many times I did this, the raw, unfiltered view of the infinite number of stars always took my breath away. I gathered my wits, and floated out of the airlock. “Can you hear me?” I enquired, and Ally’s steady voice confirmed the radio connection was open.

I floated through the empty space, the two ships around 300 meters apart, propelling myself with gentle thrusts. I heard stories of spacers who got too excited, and creamed themselves on the armor of their targets, moving too fast.

I gently landed on the hull of the empty vessel, the hull pocked with asteroid marks. Normally, the shields will protect the ship from such impacts, meaning that the ship has been here for a very long time. The ship was clearly human, even though the language used for the markings was not one known to me or Ally. Perhaps the age of the ship explains that as well.

I engaged the magnetic shoes, and made my way towards what seemed to be the bridge, a slight bulge towards the front of the ship. Soon I found an open airlock, a gaping white hole in the black hull, with black streaks etched into it, it was clearly forcibly open, but the traces were as ancient as the pockmarks. Nevertheless, I cautiously made my way inside. The ship was open to space, and the darkness was complete, my flashlights could only penetrate so far, and I could see strange markings on the wall, seemingly hand written messages left behind god knows when.

I initiated another scan, and busied myself with the console next to the airlock door. The news were mixed, while the console was unresponsive, I did detect a weak current running through it, perhaps the auxiliary life support on its last legs, but perhaps the sign that the reactor was still ticking over. The scan came back, with a rough layout of the ship, and I determined where the reactor is most likely to be.

While walking through the ship, my soundless steps would cause dust flying in all direction, and I started to relax, the ship was ancient, nothing has lived or moved here for centuries. And I soon drifted away in thoughts, thinking about my life; I traverse the empty gulfs between planets, visiting old battle locations, points of interest and so on, looking for salvageable items that I then sell on the open market.

However lately, I have been thinking of myself less and less as a salvager, and more and more as a scavenger, simply living off the work of others, taking what I could and flogging it on without any respect for the most often dead owners. This was an illogical train of thought, and I know salvagers were just as useful as many other professions, but the feeling was there to stay.

So occupied I made my way through the dead ship, my light shining into rooms small and large, some quite evidently living quarters, while with others I could only guess about their original purpose.

As I was nearing the reactor room, I suddenly bumped into a dead plant, frozen solid in the airless cold, floating in the middle of the weightless space. This was a curious sight, as generally plants were not encouraged outside of the hydroponic gardens, their pollen would get everywhere, clogging the filters and feeding bacteria, and they produced dust, which can be an annoyance in zero-g.

The further in I got, the more plants I bumped into, it was hard to say what they were in their shriveled state, but Ally quickly analyzed them and discovered they were plants, something from a ship’s garden, yet Ally could not pinpoint the exact species.

Some hit my suit, shattering on impact, sending tiny slivers of frozen matter through the corridor, twinkling in the light of my torch. Ally distracted me from the sight with the report that some of the plants seem less ancient than others and that the closer I was to the reactor, the younger they were.

My curiosity was roused; did it mean plants used to grow in these corridors, until they were finally snuffed out when the ship was exposed to vacuum? Why would the people on the ship allow the plants to grow unchecked in the living quarters, and even worse, the reactor area? Putting the questions aside, I pushed forward, shattering several more of the dead plants as I went along.

Soon, there were enough of them that I could barely see ahead, and I could hear them shatter on my suit. It was a strange tinkling sound, and to me it sounded strangely melancholic, probably because of what it represented.

Nearing the reactor, I started to have a bad feeling about the whole situation, I could feel the ground vibrate slightly, which was supposed to be a good sign, meaning that the generator still is producing something. But why didn’t the scans pick up on it?

The answer suddenly appeared through a hail of dead plants, I was standing at the door to the reactor chamber, it was wide open, and plant meteorites were slowly drifting through, as if propelled by a gentle breeze, which was impossible.

Stepping through, I was faced with an incredible sight, the whole reactor room was bursting with plant matter, and it was in motion, I could feel the hum of the reactor and yet I could not see it, the plant matter was everywhere, and I started feeling claustrophobic, thousands of floating objects were hitting me, shattering and flying away on collision courses with the rest of the room and soon I was enveloped in a blizzard of plant flakes.

I pushed on, towards the reactor, soon losing sight of the door, when I bumped into something solid, yet it was unlike any reactor I have ever seen before. Perplexed, I ran a scan, realizing that this, this was the source of the remnants that floated along the corridors.

I will never know what happened to this abandoned ship or its crew, but it seems like that at some point after it was abandoned, the plants spread across the ship, and started converging around the generator, the only source of heat and light, and then when the airlock was blown the growth around the reactor managed to somehow survive, feeding off the reactor itself, while slowly losing the outer layers to the hard vacuum of space.

I must have been standing there for 10 minutes, an immobile snowman, covered in the dead matter, watching it live, survive, and die in front of me. In a state of shock, I moved to the control panel, and wiped the thick layer of dust, of dead life from it, checking the readouts and the ship, it seemed to be in working order, and even the atmosphere generator was chugging uselessly away, producing air that got sucked out into space. That probably explained why the plant was still alive and the slow eternal movement of the dead parts towards the open airlock.

The ship was in good condition, and it would bring me enough money to retire for a number of years, perhaps even for good, all I needed to do was get rid of the plant, and the bounty was mine.

As I stood there, deciding, watching the plant choke the reactor, a parasite entangled around the sleek mechanical provider of sustenance, I knew what I had to do.

Returning to my ship, I quickly gathered the ballast material used to block the unlikely hull breaches, and it was a matter of minutes before the airlock was closed and sealed from outside influence.

I ordered Ally to turn our ship around, and I felt I could hear the approval in her “Yes Captain". The derelict cut an incredibly black shape in the sky filled with stars, as it drifted on, slowly filling with air, and the plant would now be able to spread and claim the ship as its own.