narration : three days
CHARACTERS: Hotspur. And his new babbies.
LOCATION: the hangar deck
WARNINGS: none!
SUMMARY: discoveries of a shuttley nature
NOTES: just a narration!
on the first day...
Hotspur had known a few pilot ready rooms in his time and they'd all been bustling hubs of commotion, full of pilot jocks wired up their eyeballs with pre-flight adrenaline: a place of thick, rick coffee in polythene cups; the stink of drywipe markers, kerosene and naptha; beaten up couches held together with electrical tape; and every surface scattered with datapads bearing star charts and daily orders.
The Tranquility's ready room was dead in comparison.
It sat just off the hangar, overlooking the shuttle docking bays from the other side of a thick sheet of plexiglass and an emergency deadlock door. A grey, boxy room with a few home comforts and a high ceiling that made the room feel even emptier than it already was. There was a barren flight board against one wall with wide, blank spaces absent of pilot names. No assignments, no daily patrol orders, no duty officer details. A bank of anonymous flight lockers lined one side of the room beside a gunmetal grey duty officer desk, and it was the desk that drew Hotspur's attention first. The lockers could wait.
Grinning in anticipation he fell in to the seat behind the desk and began to rummage through the draws with bated breath. Surely there had to be something there that gave a hint as to the mystery of the ship - or at least to its crew's disappearance. One draw marked with an illegible scrawl - pilots were hardly know for their literacy, Hotspur ruefully acknowledged - contained a bank of datapads, each one possessing asteroid drift charts that were out of date by at least a month. A second was locked - presumably holding the shuttle launch keys. Another had a large data file that flickered in to life as soon as Hotspur brushed a hand over the screen: an inventory of the shuttles, or so it professed. The fourth draw had a similarly large data file - the Tranquillity's shuttle flight log files, indexed down on to one datapad - that bleakly told him that all information had been redacted.
'Redacted' had sounded ominously final and Hotspur's (admittedly very basic) knowledge of hacking was quickly exhausted as he attempted a cursory poke at the log files. Alas, it yielded nothing but Hotspur had yet to be thwarted; he knew what pilots were like - and they all cared very little for proper filing anyway. If these pilots had been anything like himself and his own jockeys then perhaps there were more log files to be found in the shuttles themselves... He grabbed the inventory datapad and hotfooted it out of the ready room and back to the docking bays.
There was an old unwritten rule from back home that dictated you shouldn't board a ship without a name. As he moved around the shuttles with the inventory in hand Hotspur made up silly, simple names - just enough to get him inside for cursory inspections of the brawny hulls and cockpits for any sign of further flight logs. None of the names stuck in his memory - the naming of ships is a difficult matter, and until better names could be found the ones Hotspur picked were disposable.
A few loose ends of handwritten flight notes were all that could be found, each one poorly detailed and sketching only the most boring of training flights. It was the work of rookies - practice logs and basic in-out manoeuvres. Nothing special. All frustratingly mundane.
The inventory of the shuttles had been a little bit more peculiar. Of all the twenty-four shuttles only one was in working order; each of the others were declared faulty for a variety of engineering faults and defects that made them fatally unreliable, but with no real details on what the problems really were. Not for the first time, Hotspur found himself ruefully wishing he had a reliable flight technician with him on board the Tranquillity.
With his unpractised eye Hotspur could only really hope to pick out the kinds of faults that he would notice from the cockpit - unresponsive RCMs, faulty oxygen supplies, broken compression seals. Deciding that these things were better left in the hands of flight engineers, Hotspur resigned himself to just familiarising himself with the shuttle flight manuals for now.
on the second day...
Gloves for the kid, Hotspur reminded himself.
After having left them untouched yesterday in favour of investigating the shuttles themselves, Hotspur now picked his way carefully through the pilot lockers in the ready room. Helmets, stim patches, emergency oxygen cannisters, flight suits, flight boots, in-ear comms pieces - it was all the usual equipment. But there was something unnervingly wrong about it.
It was like rifling through the clothes of the dead. These suits had held so much life at some point - they'd been so full of warmth and a very real vitality - and now they were lifeless and gathering dust. Hotspur's fingers traced the everyday wear and tear - a smear of sealant glue over a crack in a visor, a squadron patch neatly hiding a burn mark on a sleeve, a stitched tag detailing a pilot's blood type. Traces of humanity, the detritus of lives - it was all here. Hotspur's hands delved in to a suit's pocket to retrieve a thick pair of padded flight gloves from a suit picked at random. Thick and burnproof with grips along the fingers and an adjustable wrist, they were standard gloves for any pilot and would hopefully help the kid he'd talked to earlier. Mouse, Hotspur thought he had been called.
But he couldn't bring himself to walk away with them. The weight of twenty missing pilots was too heavy, their absense too impossibly acute that it almost felt like they weren't absent at all. All the little signs of lives-once-lived that were so painfully clear on the suits themselves were just too difficult to ignore. Besides, what if the pilots returned? What if the whole crew miraculously reappeared and claimed what was theirs? And if they didn't and they were dead and gone, then it felt like a perverse insult to their memory to remove their belongings from where they had been stowed. It was wrong. Living or dead, the pilots' gear should remain untouched. A prickle on the back of Hotspur's neck told him that was the way it should be.
Hotspur hurriedly stuffed the gloves back in the locker and slammed the door shut with a fierce clang of metal on metal. The noise reverberated around the room in a dire, drawn-out ring that sent Hotspur's stomach cold with a chill of dread. The tolling of the bell, Hotspur warned himself, ringing for the souls of the dead The worst omen of bad luck. He pressed his hands fearfully on the cold metal, suppressing the ring with all his might and praying that nobody else had heard it.
on the third day...
The hangar deck was cavernous but brightly lit... and Hotspur had begun to realise that this wasn't always a blessing. Ever-present phosphoric light followed him everywhere but the dark reaches of corners and beneath the brawny hulls of the shuttles shadows began to form. Even the slightest sound travelled impossibly far and filled the dead spaces with a skittering and scuttling that set Hotspur on edge. He hadn't forgotten how the horrid clang on the locker door had reverberated so ominously and, as superstitious as ever before, Hotspur was subconsciously on the look-out for more ill omens.
Phantom footsteps - perhaps just echoes of his own - had followed him around as he climbed in to the cockpit of one shuttle in particular. She was one of the more visibly faulty ships: even without the benefit of a launch key to fire up the thrusters Hotspur could tell the artificial gravity system was blown and the comms system was missing a few particularly important connections. And that was just the faults he could see from the cockpit - he dreaded to think what the avionics and enginework would be like. Still, Hotspur liked this particular shuttle; she had a beaten up charm - and a more comfortable pilot's seat than the rest. He had faith that she could be restored, and it was Faith that he had named her.
It was from Faith's cockpit that he had made his transmission.