Fuel
I took a job on the Navigator because I needed the money. I had no idea what it would actually cost.
I turned in the grass to look at her, smashed more of the blades down to the dirt. I could have laughed, she was asleep, blissful. I guess I was just too tickled about how good she looked to do much of anything besides look at her. The sun beat down upon us. I find myself thinking about her often, knowing that I will never see her again.
Six years ago I boarded the Navigator as a mechanic. I was assigned to the ship as it traversed nearby moons to collect Helium-3. Fueling operations in space had all but replaced fossil fuels but the competition had become cut-throat between mining corporations. There was a huge demand for workers to pilot their scouting vessels. Which meant, for sorry sods like me with no education, that we could get a high risk but high paying job that would fund my meager lifestyle for at least a couple years, easy.
I remember the day I climbed into my piece-of-shit car and the dashboard blinked a luminous 4:00 AM. I drove into the desert. I was impatient and even excited. I added ridiculous and hopeful numbers in my head, tallying the cash I would make on this job. The stuff I could buy when I returned home. I could laugh now, what a waste. I considered rigging my piece of shit car off a cliff, just to know I’d never have to set my sorry eyes on it ever again.
The air base was gigantic, I entered through the huge steel doors and joined a line of shabbily dressed people just like me. I had a small duffel bag full of clothes swung over my shoulder, which was now all I owned. Some annoying, stick-up-his-ass, guy in uniform starting barking orders at me and pointing me around. I found my way to the ship. I have to say, it was a mechanic’s wet dream. It was obviously the best equipped and well designed craft in the hangar. Sleek, sheer white and built for speed - it was more than I had hoped for. The massive engines were built securely into the sides, cylindrical and powerful. My fingers itched to take them apart and see the mechanics and wires sprawled underneath. The whole ship was built like a bullet cut in half. The sides fanned out to achieve minimum resistance for re-entering the atmosphere. It was a powerful ship but it seemed unnecessary for our mining operation. I didn’t give it much thought. There was money here, whoever got the gas first made the rules - lucky for us. Printed across the side of the vessel in sleek silver letters read, “Navigator.” A young guy in a green jumpsuit reading “D. Crayfold” was pacing around absorbed in his clipboard. He looked up at me as I approached, his eyes quickly scanning his list. “Samantha?” He took another quick look at me, his jaw set with an uncomfortable look on his face. “Er... Sam?” I could have rolled my eyes. Yeah, I didn’t look like a Samantha with my head shaved and wearing a wife beater. “Samantha.” I corrected him.
The cock-pit shakes violently around me as we brace to enter the atmosphere. I strain my neck to look out the window at the planet surface rising beneath us. My eyes dart to the fuel meter on the giant control panel. It had been flashing red in a maddening pattern for longer than I want to remember. I look over at the captain, he’s gripped the armrests with white knuckles. The planet surface grows closer, I grip the controls. The vibration of the metal through my body makes my limbs numb and my teeth rattle. “Brace yourself!” I yell over the loud squeals of the alarms. The ground rises hard and fast, I see the ghosts of buildings rise and pull up hard on the controls. It was too late, we smashed through one and collide with the ground with monumental force. The sounds of bending steel sounded like screaming that echo around us. I cover my head with my arms and get sprayed with shattered debris. Then, silence. “Adams?” I ask, my hands scramble to undo the shredded strands of my seat belt.
A hole in space. It appeared on the navigation system in the middle of the night. The captain made the same choice that all of us made, reward over risk. I was playing a round of poker with some other techs when the power went off. There was a scramble. Panic. I grabbed my oxygen mask I had stored away under my bunk -- and my knife too. There was shouting from the hallway and I peeked my head out of the cabin. The sight from the multi paned window in the hall looked like a bad CGI movie. It was as if someone had pulled the plug of the universe and everything was swirling down the drain.
The gravitational force of it was more than anyone had calculated. It was a slow horror as we watched the giant anomaly pull us in and swallow us. I watched from the window of the crew hangar - I could see the nose of the ship from the outside of the window and it looked as though it was bending around a curve of reality like I was looking in a fun house mirror. The way that light and colors moved in there-- it was unlike anything I could have imagined. It warped the fabric of reality, bent space and time. It pulled us through to somewhere far, far away from the home we knew.
When we reached the other side, my crew confirmed that Navigator, impossibly, saw no damages. It had taken us somewhere, hundreds --if not thousands-- of years away from home. I remember those first few days. We still had the echoes of signals from earth. They seemed to follow us through the hole, but the time was distorted. We saw the years tick by on earth in those first few days - receiving flurries of communications from home every minute without us able to send anything back. I sat at a computer in the main hangar, watching my bank account grow to a new astronomical number every day. It didn’t matter any more. I would never get to use it.
I thought about that girl back home, how we had fought about me going. I had been so tired of not being able to pay for anything. She paid for me with her shitty bartending job. I had wanted to take her out to a nice dinner before I left but couldn’t muster up the cash. I remember the shame when I told her I didn’t have the money to take her like I promised, it still makes me queasy to think about. I still daydream about waking up with her warm next to me. In those days, I thought about that when I was lying in my cold sterile cot, a hood pulled over my eyes so I wouldn’t see my overzealous cabin mates trying to impress me with their exaggerated body exercises.
People started to get sick in year three. It was a sickness unlike anything we’d seen on earth. It would start with a section of the body turning a pale silver and then progress into a deadly fever. The crew would die in their cots, delusional and swimming in sweat. The death count rose, we couldn’t do anything with the bodies besides shoot them out into space. The ship soon became unsettlingly empty. Each of us soon had our own cabins where we had shared it with twenty men before. We started to use the Helium-3 gas that we had collected to fuel ourselves; in vain attempts to get to somewhere recognizable. The power dynamic completely shifted. I informally began to refer to Captain Chris Adams by his last name. We would have dinner of dehydrated meats on the pilot’s deck, where we weren’t allowed to step foot before. And then, in a flurry of excitement, we found a fuel source. Our ship was rigged to find fuel and it did exactly that. Although, it took us eight months to get there. We had lost our lead engineer, Maria, to the fever and none of us could correctly guess how much fuel it would take to get there. But the closer we came, the more we found signs that there might be life on this planet. We lost communications with Earth long before we found signs of this planet. I didn’t receive statements from my shitty bank account any more.
We had fifty men and women at year four and twenty by year five. We did the best we could to sterilize everything, my job increasingly changed from mechanic to doctor, coroner, janitor, even pilot. I expected I would get sick and die, so I just made the most of it. Which, for me, meant drink the small reserve of booze we had left and try to retell my best stories of home.
The emergency exit of the Navigator flies open and I push through it, pulling Adams. Both of us are fully clothed in space gear. His arm is thrown over my shoulders. The rest of the crew are dead. It’s just Adams, who I no longer call Captain, and me. The Navigator is completely destroyed from our landing and looking back on it I give up all hope of refueling it to make it back home. My heart drops into my stomach when I see it and I drop his arm. He grunts in surprise. “What?” He calls weakly through the mic in his suit. He raises his head and let out a half-groan half sob. It towers above us, a symbol of our lost hope -- a sputtering Starbucks logo with the decimated strip mall and the rest of our ruined civilization behind it. It is a bitter welcome to a place that we once called home. But now it serves as a ghost, of the lives that we once had and gave away willingly.