The Stowaway

I am a stowaway, it is what I am and what everyone calls me. A fitting name and the only one that I care to use these days. I am the first person to ever manage to do it on a colony ship. The fact that I designed the life support system for this class of ship was great help for me to succeed with my plan, one that I put together in a hurry within the last few months. Moving to another planet to live out my golden years had always been my goal, but a lung cancer diagnostic forced me to improvise. Saving up all my life to buy a ticket off-world was no longer an option. I did what I had to do, and now I am on my way to a new world.

I had gotten caught of course, but that was part of my plan. I knew that I couldn’t stay hidden for the five year journey. I needed to remain hidden for fifty three days, past that point, they would not be able to send me back to earth. I managed to stay hidden by staying in the life support system, the area of the ship that I knew best. I never endangered the lives of any passenger, as even two hundred extra people on-board would not come close to stretching its resources, because children would always be born during the long journey, as they had done on every colony ship before. That is what happens when you put thousands of people on one ship with nothing to do for years on end, they find ways to keep entertained.

I make it sound like the ship is bare, which couldn’t be further from the truth. This ship was state-of-the-art. It had every convenience that you could find at home and then some. The quarters that they gave me, a stowaway, were better than the apartment I had back home. Even so, resources were not wasted and having me lay in the brig for the whole journey was not an option, so they gave quarters and duties. I cleaned floors for eight hours a day. Quite a step down for an engineer, but this was fine with me. I had a life of minimal responsibility and was able to enjoy the ship’s many amenities on my time off. Mostly, I spent it reading on the promenade, which was a corridor on the inside of the habitat ring, the ceiling and walls were mostly glass, making it a perfect place to relax and watch the vastness of space. It was also the ship’s main hub of activity. The habitat ring was slowly rotating around the core of the ship, which housed the bridge and engines. The irony of a people who had the imagination to build interplanetary ships but couldn’t come up with more creative names for things was not lost on me. Still, for me, life was idyllic.  I was enjoying a good book while slowly sipping coffee when the ship exploded.

I was looking up at the core when it happened. There was no sound, just fire blossoming out for the ship and a great chunk of metal detaching itself slowly for the cylindrical core. I am not sure if it was actually moving slowly, or if time stood still for me, but in the end, it didn’t really matter as I was frozen in place. My mind could not comprehend what I was seeing, there had never been such a disaster on a colony ship before. I watched as the piece of the core crashed into the habitat ring. The explosion was silently eerie until the habitat ring was hit. As loud as fireworks going off in an elevator, I was stunned by the sound, thrown by the vibrations, and knocked out by the impact with the rapidly approaching deck. Blackness came over me.

I must not have been unconscious for very long since the other passengers were also picking themselves up from the deck. I looked up at what remained of the core, and saw right away that the ship was doomed. The core was going to go critical, and that would be the end of it. A final flare sending a signal into the void asking not to be forgotten. Of course, anyone who saw this signal would have forgotten us long ago. I really don’t know why facing my mortality makes me look to the future.

When the evacuation alarms finally blared their awful sound across the ship I had been busy getting people to escape pods. I wondered what took them so long to call for the evacuation as any idiot could see the damage was too severe to save the ship. If they were trapped on the bridge the information they would be getting from the relays would be extremely minimal with all the damage. I had not stopped helping people to escape pods, loading them with as many supplies as possible. I had been able to get most of the escape pods launched as soon as we received the command from the bridge. I then searched the damaged sections of the habitat ring and found students trapped in their classrooms when the automatic bulkheads came down. It was easy for me to override the system and get them out. Who knew that being an engineer would’ve come in handy when evacuating a ship? Most of them had been in good shape, but needed medical attention. Fortunately, the escape pods were programmed to group together, which meant that they odds of them having a doctor available were actually pretty good as I had seen a couple of them myself unto the escape pods.

There were many escape pods that I could have boarded, but I preferred to stay and help those that I could. I was heading towards one of the last remaining pods to see why they hadn’t launched. I was getting close when I heard the sound of a baby crying. The alarms made it hard to know where the sound was coming from, but not impossible. Inside some quarters I found a women frozen in place. She seemed to have been heading towards the bedroom, as that was where the crying was coming from, but she was not moving at all. I found that extremely strange, if it was her child, the cries should have compelled her to act, not scare her stiff. Once I made it around pillar that was partially blocking my view, I understood, she was not frozen in place, she had been impaled by a metal rod that had been blown through the floor and into the pillar, holding her up as a grotesque statue. I could not believe what I was seeing. I was hoping that the end had been quick until I looked into her eyes, she was still alive. She could not talk, not with the rod coming out of her neck, but I could feel her silently pleading with me to save her baby. Maybe I was imagining it, but by the time I had retrieved the child and returned to the poor women, I saw the light leave her eyes, yet could swear that before it did I saw the relief in her eyes that only a mother knowing their child was safe from a terrible disaster could have. Most probably wishful thinking on my part, but I decided to live with my illusion.

The escape pod was waiting for me when I arrived, mostly because the automatic launch was damaged and they were frantically trying to get it to work. I handed them the baby and told them to strap-in, as I was going to reset the system, join them, and we would be leaving the doomed ship. I knew there was no way to reset the system, and when they were ready, I simply closed the door and sent them on their way, much easier this way. I returned to the promenade, continuing my search for other survivors when everything became the brightest of whites, as the core went critical, and then the darkest of blacks, as I was knocked unconscious.

I was dreaming that I was floating in space while listening to a faint hissing in the distance wondering why there was sound in space. I finally understood that I was no longer dreaming, but floating inside a small section of the habitat ring. There was no power, no heat, no life support, and no artificial gravity. Bulkheads had closed off the section in order to try to trap the remaining air inside, but the effort was in vain. Would the cold or the lack of oxygen kill me first? I wonder which one it will be. Floating helplessly, as far from help as anyone can be, I realised that there was at least one hundred people that had survived today because of my actions, including one baby.

I decided that I could die with that…