NASA/JPL-Caltech
The perverse chorus of screams and howls was underscored horribly by wrenching metal, explosive bolts of lightning, and most troublingly: shrieking winds. Had the ship’s oxygen field been compromised? Were they measuring their lives in minutes, or seconds?
Captain Elena Gonzales bestrode the Helm like a Colossus, deviating not one step from her place. All around her, Chaos reigned like an angry and evidently confused god: the type of god who, while searching for his keys in the dust bin for the third time, violently insists that someone must have snuck into his flat and stolen them. Gonzales indulged herself by tugging at her high collar for a second. She took as deep a breath as she could; holding it, thinking for the forty-second time that it seemed irrational to require ladies, especially star-ship captains, to wear corsets.
Well, at least five seconds had passed, and they were not dead. Clearly, the oxygen field of the SS Icarus had not been broken. This could only mean that the banshee-call of the super-stellar winds was so loud, so unearthly immense, that it reverberated through the virtual walls and into the ship itself. Still, being torn to shreds by winds traveling over five-hundred-thousand miles per hour in about ten minutes when they inevitably destroyed the oxygen field was a damn sight better than being torn to shreds by winds traveling over five-hundred-thousand miles per hour right now. All in all, things were looking up.
Captain Gonzales looked up. The crew was running about, pushing things one aught not to push, pulling things one aught not to pull, yanking on things on which one aught not to yank. The cafeteria crewmen, Sponde and Titan, were huddled between the Map Deck and the Solar Telegraph, no doubt murmuring to each other about black cats and broken mirrors; what they were doing on the flight deck in the first place was unclear. Ferris, the First Mate, was running back and forth between two undamaged pieces of equipment, evidently trying to fix what was not broken; or rather, what was not yet broken.
Doctor Andromeda was calm. That was odd. Not odd for Andromeda himself, as he rarely rose above a seethe, but he was not the man Gonzales counted on for courageous sangfroid under duress. That man, Daedalus “Deuce” Divine, the Pilot, was nowhere to be seen. The Captain allowed herself a brief “Hrmph.”
A full forty-five seconds had now elapsed since the first shock to their hull, and the crew showed no signs of returning to their positions. ‘Well,’ Gonzales thought to herself, ‘this little holiday has gone on quite long enough.’ With a sturdy middle finger, she flipped a switch on the Pilot’s Wheel, and a megaphone sprang down from the ceiling. The Captain indulged herself one final time by clearing her throat, something frowned upon greatly by her childhood vocal instructor.
It should be noted that all three of Captain Gonzales’ aforementioned indulgences had centered around her throat.
“Now then,” she spoke into the megaphone, clearly, articulately, and moderately. One might suspect that, even through a megaphone, the Captain’s equilibrious tone would have failed to arrest the attention of her crew. Fortunately, this was a Gargantua’s Brand Industrial Quality Loudener product, and was well equipped for even super-terrestrial use. The Captain’s voice shook the SS Icarus more bodily than the storms without; so much so that the tumult following her first sentence seemed demure by comparison. As one, the crew stilled themselves and looked to their commanding officer, hands held dutifully over their ears.
Gonzales, her own head ringing with her own voice, in her own ship no less, pressed on stoically. “Ladies and gentlemen, kindly return to your posts. The oxygen field, a product of the good people of Inpenetro’s Encapsulation Emporium, has proven to have withstood the onslaught of this fearsome tempest. We have endured four-hundred-ninety-three nights’ travel to reach the surface of Europa, and I should be sorely disappointed to be frustrated not a day from our goal by something as tedious as my own demise. Please do your captain the favour of ensuring that the beeps continue beeping, the clicks continue clicking, and the supra-attenuative-thrustal-motivators continue… motivating.”
The crew, as a body, continued to stand and stare.
Perhaps more goal-oriented leadership was required. “Mister Sponde,” Gonzales, with the aid of the herculean megaphone, inadvertently bellowed, “please coordinate with Miz Titan and search for Mister Divine. I should dare say we are in need of a pilot at present. First Mate, I would appreciate your company at the Helm.”
She briefly considered shouting “Now” into the already deafening device, but was preempted by a particularly ferocious knock to the ship from without. This seemed to galvanize everyone more effectively than the supra-attenuative-thrustal-motivators, as the entire crew exploded into action once more; and while much of that action seemed largely either for show or self-assurance, the two cafeteria crewmen were indeed moving in a specific trajectory, and the Mate was indeed gravitating toward the Helm.
After wisely returning the megaphone to its perch above, the Captain shouted, “First Mate, what do you think of the Wheel?”
Ferris, a slender and fairly pretty sort of idiot, dutifully examined the Wheel. “It’s spinning all over the place,” he answered. His response was drowned out by the tempestuous howling of the stellar winds, but Gonzales knew her second-in-command-if-in-name-only well enough that she could grasp the tenor of his speech.
“Kindly arrest the Wheel,” she riposted, and without waiting for a reply, she began striding confidently toward Doctor Andromeda. A few seconds later, she was rewarded with a high-pitched yelp and the unmistakable thud of the Mate once again being thrown bodily to the floor. It was something of a habit with the boy, and probably his most endearing quality.
Andromeda paid no attention as she grew closer. “You seem remarkably calm,” she offered with no preamble, “especially in light of recent developments.”
Silence.
With her usual caution, balanced with her usual forthrightness, she reached out and tapped the short, solid man on his barely balding pate.
“Hm?”
“I said, you seem remarkably calm under the circumstances.”
Andromeda seemed to be waking from a dream. “Sir, uh… Circumstances?”
Gonzales pursed her lips in guarded skepticism. “Doctor Andromeda,” she began, a not so subtle emphasis on the man’s title, “did you happen to notice the stellar storm that is threatening to tear my ship apart?”
“Storm?”
“Doctor Andromeda,” again, with even less subtlety, “would you mind awfully, taking a brief hiatus from your meditations and looking about?”
“What? What’s wrong?”
After a moment’s consideration, the Captain chose not to sink to the level of sarcasm. “Our ship is under attack from unanticipated forces.”
The Doctor shook his head, his eyes still distant. “Who could predict or control the maelstroms of Europa?”
“Exactly my point, Doctor. Who could?”
At last, Andromeda seemed to realize where he was. He looked into the Captain’s eyes, as a clever dog being asked to provide a new alternative to String Theory. That is, confusedly. “What do you mean?”
“Well Doctor, seeing as you are the acting president of a Project whose sole responsibility was the observation of the moon Europa with an eye towards human habitation, one might justifiably draw the conclusion, if you’ll pardon my allusion to your own poetry, that you might be expected to predict if not control these maelstroms of Europa.”
The Doctor shook his head. He was out of his depth, much like a seagull in an oubliette. “It’s Fortune…” he answered, perhaps to himself. “It’s all Fortune.”
Gonzales allowed herself an unnecessary exhalation before concluding. “Your unprecedented superstition is less than conciliatory, Doctor Andromeda. Now tell me, are you at all familiar with the Inpenetro oxygen field?”
She couldn’t help suspecting that this question was purely academic, and the Doctor’s hypnotized silence confirmed her suspicions in short order.
The Captain sighed. The Captain never sighed. This was a bad sign. The fact that the sigh was quickly swallowed up by ship-rocking, cacophonous, thundering howls and screeches, unlikely to be heard by anyone other than the out-to-lunch Doctor, seemed particularly portentous.
Unbeknownst to the Gonzales, however, was that the bizarre and as-yet-unknown physics of super-terrestrial sound-waves, combined with the as-testified unpredictable nature of the Europa’s impending atmosphere, had managed to carry her sigh around the interior of the Flight Deck, where it circled several times and (much like a feather) whispered just past the ear of First Mate Ferris, who had only now managed to get the Wheel under relative control. Just as he had gotten his feet securely into a position echoing someone of greater authority than himself, the thoroughly unimpressed sigh brushed by his head.
“What was that?” he asked no one in particular.
At that exact moment, a sound like the cracking of Jupiter’s femur resounded through the SS Icarus. In a manner of less than two seconds, everything that defined what was outside the Icarus and everything that defined what was inside the Icarus, ceased to be.
Gonzales tightened her jaw. As the Captain, this was all ultimately her fault, and she was grateful that the mindless abandon of her crew would keep them from judging her too harshly, during these last few milliseconds that they were capable of judging anything at all.
In those final instants, before everything that defined what was outside her head and everything that defined what was inside her head ceased to be, Captain Gonzales heard a solid baritone shout out something.
It seemed to her that the voice shouted, “Fortunato!”
And then it was over.