Entity [ONC 2024]

2

The ship soon became a bustle of activity as the crew began to make preparations to survey the ship they had found, but Porter had reservations. The captain had made it clear that he intended boarding the derelict but, to Porter, that held so many dangers she couldn't begin to choose which could persuade him not to complete the task. He had always come across as headstrong, but a good leader considering the amount of dead-time the crew had to suffer. This was not headstrong. Nor did she consider it good leadership.

With little else to do, she examined the footage and the data that they had for the derelict. It wasn't much to go on. Over two thousand metres in length, eight hundred in girth, the ship looked as though it hadn't so much crashed into the icy asteroid, as it had landed. She saw little damage on the surface. No heat signatures at all. No radiation above that expected of most objects in space.

Something, apart from it being an alien craft, felt off about the derelict. It looked nothing like any ship Earth had produced. Almost tubular, it looked more like a metallic whale. She saw none of the obvious details a ship should have. No rotunda to give any crew a sense of gravity. No distance between engines and crew quarters and operations. Of course, being aliens, that crew may not even need gravity, or need to protect themselves from powerful engines.

The captain tugged himself back up to the bridge, already in his environment suit, only needing his helmet to complete the outfit, ready to exit the ship. Porter doubted he would listen to her, but she had to voice her concerns before he, and the rest of the crew, did anything reckless. She floated into his field of vision as he checked one of Chen's screens.

"Cap, we need to talk about this." She tugged at his arm, trying to turn him to face her. "You've been off this whole rotation and I don't think you're acting rationally. Protocols state that we should contact command before ..."

"There aren't any protocols for this!" The captain wrenched his arm from her hand, scowling at her, and then pointed to the visuals of the derelict. "This is the greatest discovery of our time, of any time, and I will not let some desk-jockey take it away from me, from us. Because that's what they'll do. They'll come out here and take charge and take all the credit and we'll be left with nothing! I can't ... I need this!"

"What is wrong with you?" She reached over, switching off the displays, trying to keep his attention. "We have no idea what's down there. We don't know if these aliens are alive, whether they're hostile if they are. That ship could carry pathogens and toxic materials unknown to us. If someone becomes ill, how can I treat something I don't understand? You were never like this before."

As he floated in the near-zero gravity, the captain looked pained. His eyes flickered back to the blank screens and then back to Porter. They had never spent much time together, considering their close confinement in the ship, but she had always thought him capable, rational. He looked nothing like that now. Acted nothing like it. He could as well be a completely different man than the one that had welcomed her aboard on her first rotation, and laughed at her wide-eyed innocence.

Between that first rotation and this one, the captain had become almost a different person. Irritable, solitary, spending as much time sitting in the rotunda, smoking that foul-smelling weed as he had on the bridge. The captain's chair had sat empty for most of the journey. Missing his scheduled, mandatory check-ups when he had sought her out for them before. From a good captain to a bad one in the space of the few months of downtime between rotations. He looked close to tears as chewed upon his lip.

"I'm dying." He stared at her, daring her to say anything, but the shock had silenced Porter. "I learned about it after the last rotation. By the time we get back, I'll have, maybe, a year to live. Probably less."