The Sylvester Part 1

On what is probably the worst place to be stuck without any means of communication with the outside. And mountains of dirty laundry.

The ship was far in the distance. Long, heavy, dark, slightly glimmering. Like a whale gliding through the abyss. I looked at it, and a shiver travelled up my spine. That was a long stretch of space I was going to be beamed through. A wide expanse, through to that silhouette looming in the distance.

‘We won’t be able to call you back.’ I turned towards Henry, the technician, who was setting up the beam with a frown. ‘The beam has a shorter range for returns… and I’m afraid that ship is beyond it. I’ll have to set the power to maximum just to send you there.’

I had to take a deep breath before talking. ‘That’s fine. I’ll use their beam to come back. The Sylvester is fully equipped, just like us.’

Henry glanced outside the window. ‘So that really is the Sylvester… She sure is moving slowly.’

She was, even for the standard of our big cruise ships. Leisure trips at leisure speed. Our elite guests didn’t fancy spoiling their round the clock buffets with space travel queasiness. The Sylvester and our ship, the Balthasar, were the crown jewels of the company, with every luxury and comfort. We were programmed to go at the minimum speed possible. Even so, it looked like the Sylvester was set to break the record.

‘Get me a maintenance kit, just in case, will you?’ I said. ‘They haven’t responded to any of our radio calls. It’s long range, but still…’

‘I agree,’ Henry nodded, getting up from the beam and heading towards the storage room. Upon reaching the door, he turned back towards the window and pointed at the outline in the distance. ‘I know I wouldn’t want to end up stranded on a ghost ship in deep space.’

According to my digital watch, that was more than ten hours ago. And now, here I am – stranded on a soon-to-be ghost ship in deep space, this conversation playing in my mind like a cheap twist from some stupid science fiction flick from way back when. Sitting on a pile of dirty pillows. I get up and start walking around, patting my arms to warm up. It was the first thing I noticed when I arrived, the cold.

I was beamed to the control room of the Sylvester, but as soon as I arrived, I knew something was wrong. The cold, as I said. Also, the smell. Control rooms rarely smell musty and sweaty. I opened my eyes and, sure enough, I was not standing on a beam’s platform. Around me, everything was unnaturally silent. The technician’s remark about ghost ships came to my mind, and I looked around the room to chase away the sense of dread. Under the dim ceiling lights, I found mountains of clothes, linen, towels; they were stacked up to the ceiling, and the room was filled with their moist, sick smell of concentrated humanity. I had landed in the ship’s laundry, many floors underneath the control room. I was looking for a way out when I heard a shuffling noise. Turning around a pile of greying sheets, I found a man.

He was wearing the white uniform of the company’s attendants, but his was crumpled, and his beard looked unkempt, which was against the rules. His sleeves were rolled up, and he had his hands immersed in a bucket of muddy water. He must have heard me approach because he raised his head. His eyes went wide, and he stumbled back, the bucket wobbling and dripping water. I tried to approach calmly.

‘Hello, I’m Officer Granada, from the SS Balthasar. This is our sister ship, the Sylvester, isn’t it?’

The man blinked, staring at me, then he started laughing, a loud, joyless laugh. ‘Oh, you’re on the Sylvester all right, Mister Officer. How lucky for you… not! Should have stayed put, my friend. Has nobody taught you to let the dead rest in peace? Well, tough, now you’re here. You’re here with us! How lucky…’

‘Cut the rambling, now, and take me to the control room. I need to speak to the officers in charge. ‘

He immediately stopped laughing. ‘Oh no, not the control room. It’s closed now. No officers, no control. It’s just us now. And you, who are now us as well.’

‘In the name of the Earth, the Sun and all the solar system, what do you mean? Who are you? What is happening here? And why have we not received any answer to our radio calls?’

More gibberish was the only answer I got; I looked at his gaunt frame, and a thought came over me. The maintenance kit’s rations.

‘Would you like a drink? Something to eat?’

He fell silent and his eyes suddenly lit up.

‘Boy, would I ever! Let me take you to my dining room.’

He made his way through the piles of laundry until we reached an oddly shaped table with two chairs. Coming closer, I realised it was an ironing board, and the chairs were two piles of bed pillows, covered in stains I didn’t care to identify.

‘This is your dining room?’

He opened both arms in a grand gesture. ‘The laundry room is my palace!’

I put on the table a tin of concentrated meat and a travel-sized bottle of bourbon, mentally thanking Henry for keeping the kits up to scratch. The man ate avidly and emptied the miniature bottle in a split second. His eyes cleared a bit. ‘This is nice. Thank you, Officer. Sorry for earlier. It was just so weird seeing another human down here, and from another ship, no less.’ He suddenly frowned. ‘Say, why’d you come, anyway?’

I sat down on the dirty pillows with a sigh. ‘What’s your name, attendant?’

‘It’s Bo.’

‘So, Bo, the Sylvester hasn’t been heard from for weeks now. We are following the same route, but you guys seem to be way off course. Our Officers are debating whether to change course and approach, but that would add at least one month to our trip and we’re not sure we have enough supplies. First, they wanted to check what the issue was. So they beamed me in. Got it? So now, will you tell me what’s going on?’

Bo laid his head in his hands, shaking it. When he spoke, I felt my stomach freeze. ‘The engines, Officer. They stopped. Won’t work. We’re stranded. All the systems have been shutting down for weeks. One by one. All the generators.’

‘But… but what about the emergency fuel? The reservoir? All ships have one.’

Bo looked at me with a hint of pity and stood up.

‘I’ll show you.’ He grabbed two blankets from a pile nearby and wrapped one around him. ‘You’re going to need this.’ I absentmindedly put the blanket on my shoulders and followed him. As we got closer to the engine rooms, my breath was coming out in clouds and I noticed the pipes. Shiny with a thin layer of ice. This part of the ship was in complete darkness and Bo grabbed a flashlight that was hanging from his belt. My feet were starting to feel numb on the slippery floor when Bo turned to me and sighed, ‘Here we are. This is the reservoir; see for yourself.’

I looked up at the tower; it reached all the way to the ceiling, imposing and black except for the ice glittering under the flashlight. Everything was silent: the long pipes travelling from the reservoir to the engine room, the valves, the vat itself. Everything sounded dead, empty. Empty?

‘Is it… empty? Surely it can’t have been used up without reigniting the engines?’ I looked at the level gauge. Zero. It was empty. Suddenly, a voice in my head, an echo: ‘…stranded on a ghost ship… beyond range…’

‘I don’t know what happened. I only heard it from Robbie, one of the technicians, before he… he threw himself overboard.’ Bo was wringing his hands, looking down. ‘He said there was… only half a tank of fuel… we were supposed to refill at the asteroid station on Delta 354, but the Officer in charge… ordered to wait until Juno 13 at least… so that the guests could have a more pleasant stop at the hot springs instead. That was before… before the main engine malfunctioned… and the other two couldn’t cope.’

‘And with only half a tank, the main engine…’

‘It didn’t fire up! It couldn’t fire up!’

‘And the other two couldn’t cope. And so you’ve been…’

‘Stranded ever since, Officer Granada.’

‘But who’s in the control room? Take me to the control room.’

Bo sighed, muttering something like ‘might as well, nothing better to do,’ and led me to a service staircase.

‘No lifts, I’m afraid, sir.’

Up and up and up we went, under weak, flickering lamps. Occasionally, Bo pointed to our side: ‘here is where attendants sleep,’ ‘here are the dining rooms for guests,’ ‘here is the entertainment area.’ At some point, I looked up at him and asked ‘Where is everyone, Bo?’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘You’ll see. Next floor is the control room.’ He led us across a silent, dim-lit corridor up to a door. It was shut; Bo motioned to me to look through the small window at the top, and flashed his light inside, careful to face away. I looked and I saw the officers: they were sitting at the round table in the middle of the room, which looked exactly like our own table for meetings. Each officer was slumped, some had their head on the table, others hanging from the back of the chair. Even from that small window in such darkness, it was obvious that none of them would be piloting the Sylvester anymore.

‘… the bourbon.’

It took me a second to realise that Bo had been talking. ‘What?’

‘They took all the bourbon. Locked the door. They’ve been there since the big engine broke. Just drinking and whispering, sometimes crying. We tried calling them to come out and help, they wouldn’t listen. We tried breaking down the door, but it’s armoured and locked and only the officers had the code. And then… they stopped.’

My knees suddenly felt weak, and I had to prop myself up against the door. Bo saw and held me up by the arm.

‘You don’t look well, sir. We better go back. There’s some bad air up here. Even the guests avoid it. Let’s make our way back down. I might do a round as well.’

I let him guide me back to the stairs like a puppet. My head was spinning and I was starting to feel queasy. Control room doors were airtight, yet I felt something sticky in the air, something rotten. Then something Bo had said suddenly struck me.

‘The guests… where are the guests?’

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PSA

Hello, dear readers! I know this is unusual, but this story wanted to become a bit longer than what I usually write in this space. To honour the story's request and keep my monthly issues quick to read at the same time, I split it in two.

The second part might come as the November newsletter, or perhaps sooner, who knows? It depends on how long it takes Officer Granada and Bo to figure out a way out of their predicament. If they can.

Read the next chapter here: