Titan's Plague: The Trial by Tom Briggs (story reading .txt) 📕

Bruno used his left hand to tap an on-screen button. “They’re on the maintenance floor, looking into the problem.”

“I thought they were in their cabin, sleeping.”

“Once things started going south with life-support, I hit the alert button.”

“That’s my call, Bruno,” Pati said.

Without turning to face her, Bruno looked up from his console and shrugged his shoulders. “Pati, I don’t have time to wait for orders during an emergency.”

Pati clenched her fists. She took a step to punch him in the head for insubordination, and then she stopped. This was an emergency; if she clocked him again, he’d go downstairs to his cabin and sulk for a few days. To re-power the life support system, she might need his expert electrical skills, so she had to have him working. “Fine, Bruno,” she said. “In the future, notify me immediately.”

Bruno didn’t reply. He lowered his head and resumed tapping buttons.

Pati returned to her chair and activated the command console. She calculated that without power to the life-support systems, they would survive for eight more hours in the air already generated. That would be plenty of time to rig a secondary source of power to hold them for the return trip to Titan. The twins knew the danger and would work toward that end.  Of course, they wouldn’t save the whole crew if they didn’t have to. She activated her intercom, “Jeff and Jake, I need a status report.”

“This is strange, Pati,” one of the two replied.

“What’s wrong down there, Jake?”

“We’re trying to find out why life-support power is blocked. It’s crazy because each node in the conduit between life-support and the engine shows a full power flux. It’s like the life-support systems won’t accept the power.”

“You want me to send Bruno down?”

“He’ll only get confused,” Jeff said, and she turned for a moment to look at the back of Bruno. His neck phased into a pinkish-red, so he heard the insult. Jeff was right, though. If the problem called for an unusual solution or seemed intractable, Bruno wasn’t your man.

“Any other ideas?” Pati asked.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Jeff said.

“Which I’m sure you two had plenty of practice at growing up,” Pati said. She heard the false moans of insult, then added, “Don’t use all of your tricks yet. Try for another fifteen minutes, then get your asses up here.”

After a few seconds, Jeff said, “Acknowledged.” Her screen went dark, and then an unusual flash lit it back up. She realized it was a reflection, and she turned.

It was the most beautiful vision she’d experienced since leaving Earth. Like a flame one meter high, it glowed next to the ladder. The yellow reminded her of a sun she no longer experienced. Then she heard that voice.

“Hello, Pati,” the apparition said. If the vision was unmitigated beauty, the voice was dredged from the bowels of Pluto.

“Richard, you’re supposed to be dead,” she said. Pati didn’t believe in ghosts, so she decided it could be a trick from her crew. She looked at Bruno, obviously scared out of what little wits he possessed, so he wasn’t in on it.

“Well, you killed Richard,” the apparition said. “Except Richard agreed to become my host, and while you ended his existence, the people of my species are not so easy to kill.”

Pati didn’t respond. What could she say to this—thing? She stared until the apparition continued the conversation. “You see, Pati, my people are the predominant species on Titan, and although we are happy to have you visitors from Earth, we need to have you here on our terms. I was working toward that end when you eliminated Richard, and I must admit, I take offense at disruptions in my plans.”

“What do you want?” Pati spat out. The terse reply came out so easy to that voice.

“Oh, I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase, ‘to err is human, forgive divine.’”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Well, those of my species know little about your divinities. What phrases we have are closer to ‘an eye for an eye.’  So, I’m blocking the energy to your life-support systems. Even though I harbor no hate towards you, I’ve decided I must kill you.”

“What about my crew, are you going to kill them, too?” She didn’t lie to herself that she cared about her crew; it was the only straw she had to grab.

“It is regrettable, I agree. I had no other opportunity to eliminate you before you returned to Titan, though.”

“Why didn’t you do this on our first mining trip to the rings?”

“I had to let the humans punish you for killing Richard. Hopefully, you’ve learned your lesson, and have been rehabilitated, even if it doesn’t matter now.” The glowing object faded away.

Damn him, she thought. Until thirty seconds ago, she had no belief in extraterrestrials; except the apparition was definitely the man she killed four months ago. Even if the voice was mimicked, the personality left her no doubt it was her ex-husband. The stupid joke about “to err is human” was too much like Richard.

Even worse, as a human, Richard was very competent. If he said he’d accomplish a task, she knew he’d run through a wall to get it done. If this, thing, had any of Richard in it, she didn’t like her chances of getting their life support running again.

Then again, he didn’t always succeed. There were multiple means available to the technically proficient to generate air on the ship. Even if Pati was no mechanical genius, Bruno and the twins could do magic when properly motivated. Living to see another day should be sufficient motivation.

“Bitch!” Bruno screamed as he tackled her from behind. Before she could react, he wrapped his left arm around her neck and punched her in the head. “You got us all killed, you bitch,” Bruno said. He hit her in the head again. “Except the ghost won’t kill you. I’ll kill you first.” His left forearm locked around her throat and pulled with more than adequate strength to close her windpipe.

Pati dug fingernails into his forearm and pulled, but his leverage was too much. She gasped for breath and mentally grasped for straws. Even if she threw Bruno off her, would he follow her orders to save his own life?

Pati reached behind with her right hand, feeling for his crotch. He’d pinned his body against hers while leveraging the chokehold, so she couldn’t quite reach his soft spot. Instead, she grabbed the inside of his thigh, right above the knee, and pinched hard.

“Aaaah!” he screamed. “I’m going to kill you!” He reared his right hand back to punch her in the head, and Pati felt his left forearm loosen. Instead of digging fingernails into it, she grabbed his left hand, twisting it forward to break the wrist.

Bruno fell over her left shoulder to prevent his wrist from breaking. He tried to grab her hair as she twisted and then let go altogether to keep his wrist in one piece. Pati struggled to get away. When Bruno tried to keep up with her, she kicked him in the nose.

She bounced up with only her shoes holding her to the floor. Bruno got up, rubbing his nose. Red-faced again, he bore down to attack.

Pati had to force him to stop so she could work on the life support and knew only one trick to disable him fully. When he tried to tackle her from the front, she knuckled her middle finger and punched him in the Adam’s apple. The blow stopped him cold.

He stood there, grabbing his throat, trying to suck a breath. Where he turned red before, he now phased into purple. His body shook, and his eyes grew large as he struggled. Finally, he stopped moving and floated, attached to the floor by his shoes.

Pati checked the pulse in his neck. It confirmed that she’d killed another person in her twenty-four years of life. Unlike Richard, she felt remorse even though Bruno had tried to kill her. He was just an idiot who didn’t know better.

She turned to the ladder and saw two weasel faces above the opening. They immediately slipped down to the next level, closing the hatch tight around the ladder. Pati jumped over to the ladder and pushed down on the hatch with her foot. The hatch would normally open with the application of a slight downward force, but they had locked it shut.

Another bound and she was back at her command station. She pulled a two-inch metal key from her left-sleeve pocket and inserted it in a slot next to her console keyboard. The command menu displayed on-screen, a menu the crew didn’t know about.  She touched the on-screen button for crew dispositions; Jake and Jeff were in the common area below, working from the console down there. They had just cut the bridge off from what life-support functions they could access and rerouted the air to the common area. Lights on the bridge dimmed before she could reverse their work. She re-energized the lights and opened the intercom. “Jake and Jeff, Bruno attacked me. I had to disable him. Now we’ve got to work together or we won’t get back to Titan alive.”

She waited for an answer. When one didn’t come, she said, “Look, we can make it if we work together.  If we fight it out, we’ll be writing our own death certificates.” She hoped they’d see the logic, but if they didn’t respond, she’d have no choice but to cut them off from life-support. She’d give them sixty more seconds to reply; after thirty-five, her screen went dead.

Jake or Jeff had cut the communication link from her command station to the ship, and the lights dimmed again. Pati jumped over to Bruno’s console and logged on as the ship’s commander. She had priority access once again and reestablished her life-support. This time it only took them a few seconds to cut off Bruno’s console from the ship.

Pati stood up and floated over to the ladder before everything went dark. She climbed and activated an emergency light separated from the