ScienceFiction ... April 2018: Beacon ... Write about someone lost who finds a beacon that promises rescue or guidance, but something is amiss. (1000 words max.)
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Ziig was sound asleep when her ship's holographic AI materialized in her quarters, setting off an alarm and waking her in the process. She rolled over in her bunk and popped open a single lid to look at the hologram. "What is it?" she croaked, not feeling too happy about being disturbed from her slumber, which was harder and harder to come by these days as her mind was slowly unraveling.
"There's been a change."
"A change?" Ziig repeated in little more than a whisper. A change could potentially be life altering. She scrambled out of her bunk straight away and raced the short length of the ship to the bridge.
She heard the change before she saw it. It was a ping - constant and consistent. The ship's sensors, after three months of picking up nothing - not a spec of dust, an asteroid, a moon, a star, or a far off galaxy of any kind - had finally found something in all the frightful blackness of dead space. The ping bordered on miraculous.
"What is it, Shu? What have we found?" Ziig practically shouted at the hologram as she ran straight to the operating console.
"It's a navigational beacon, Captain."
Ziig stared blankly at her salvation - a tiny green flashing light on the screen in front of her.
She gripped the console tightly to keep from collapsing to the floor as her eyes filled with tears of relief and overwhelming joy. She hardly knew how to breath in that moment. Wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her jersey, she gazed down at the screen again in total wonder. The green dot was still there and it was still flashing.
"Shu," her voice cracked with emotion as she looked over her left shoulder at the hologram, "set in a course for the beacon right away."
"Yes, Captain. Setting in a new course now."
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Ziig collapsed into the navigator's chair, pressed her head against the headrest and let out a shaky laugh. This was the best news she'd had since the day of the interstellar derby when she got her hands on a classified military-issued Expedite Portal Pass (mEPP). That mEPP was suppose to be Ziig's ticket to victory in the biggest and most lucrative Tri-Solar Speed Rally there had ever been in the clustered solar system she called home. Little did she know the pass was really her ticket to dead space. She shuddered involuntarily just looking at the unending darkness stretching out before her now.
Frowning with deep displeasure, she reminisced about that terrible day. It never once occurred to her that the code might be corrupted - that she could punch in one destination and end up elsewhere in the flash of a nano-second. She had no way of knowing her first expedite portal jump on race day was also going to be her last. And, it came as a total shock when the code landed her here in this infinite blackness.
She'd heard about dead space. It was a legend told to terrify small children and wind up adolescents. Dead space was suppose to be the oldest part of the universe and the stars there were said to have all died out billions of years ago. There was no light and no life there. The thought was deeply unsettling. No child or teen ever wanted to encounter it. Ziig laughed morbidly to herself. She wasn't any different from those spooked children and teens. Dead space was a nightmare.
Sadly, the last 84 days had proven that the 'dead space myth' was real. Ziig had not found a single sign of star-life anywhere. Not even her long-range sensors were able to detect a single galaxy, star cluster, or nebula that she could head to. There was nothing out there until this inexplicable ping.
Finding the navigation beacon was a game changer because having a destination, after three long months of flying blind in all this uninterrupted tenebrosity, was like throwing a life-line to a drowning man. The beacon was everything. It was life itself.
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Days passed and Ziig just slept. The anticipation and anxiety were too much for her fragile peace of mind. Her body coped by shutting down. She was in one of her restless sleeps when the alarms went off in her quarters.
"What?" she mumbled.
"The beacon is in view," the hologram replied.
Ziig shot out of bed, stumbled down the corridor to the bridge, grasped the edge of the open doorway, and looked out the bridge window. "Enlarge it Shu. I can't make it out," she complained.
As the image was magnified Ziig made her way to the navigator's seat. She plunked down in it and placed her index finger on the green dot. The dot was real. The beacon was real. Ziig cried and laughed at the same time. It was nerves. Her's were fraying fast.
Ziig blinked several times. There was either something wrong with her eyes or with the enlarged image. Feeling unsure, she commanded the AI, "Enlarge again, Shu."
The image grew and so did Ziig's worries. She expected to find the beacon on the edge of some kind of star-life. It should have been orbiting something - even a small moon - and she should've been able to detect, with her naked eye, any number of other signs of life such as planets, possibly stars, or even a galaxy or two somewhere beyond the beacon.
Instead, the beacon appeared to be entirely stationary and surrounded by more and more empty space. In order to remain stationary in space, the beacon would have to have some kind of propulsion system, which the sensors showed it did not. Or, it had to be attached to something with a propulsion system - something very large - something cloaked.
Ziig cursed and then laughed out loud. But the laugh turned hysterical very quickly.
The beacon wasn't a light in the darkness as she had hoped.
It was bait.
(998)
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