The Last Voyage of the Sakura. Part 5

Posted on 06 May 2018 @ 3:06pm by Ensign Miraj Derani

588 words; about a 3 minute read

Day Nineteen
(MD123)

O'Keefe is dead.

He didn't show up to the shift this morning. I wasn't bothered at first. I just did course checks and the routine stuff, then went to his cabin. He didn't answer. The computer said he wasn't inside. The computer said he wasn't on board. He was last on board at 0214, according to her.

The computer said the door was not responding, so Borgon forced it open and we checked his cabin.

O'Keefe was on board the ship. He was lying in his bed, staring up at the ceiling. And definitely dead. The smell gave it away. He's not my first corpse, and I could tell the body was wrong. Human faces shouldn't be that shape. Contorted. Jaw all lolling down, his cheeks all saggy. Eyes all bulgy and his eyelids practically peeled inside out inside his sockets, and eyes don't generally do that. It can’t be natural. He's too fresh to have gone funny with rigor.

I didn't want to touch it, so Borgon brought the holoemitter from the sick bay, and plugged in on a long lead from the corridor as the power in O'Keefe's cabin wouldn't work. The EMH had trouble reading the body. We tried three tricorders before it could find anything. Ancient crumbly tech.

He declared it natural causes. Heart gave out. He was only fifty. We sealed his cabin up again. But as we closed the door, I was sure there was something in there. Something I couldn't see. In the shadows.

Day Twenty
Things are getting weirder. I was going through some of the logs from the Norfolk Island Mostly to keep my mind of O'Keefe. Borgon was running round dealing with low grade power failures. He says it’s just because Sakura is overdue to be scrapped, but high volume ships just don't get built any more, not by Starfleet anyways, so they just keep patching them up.

So I was reading the logs and the technical readouts. Whatever they ran into those five light years out, from what they got from those primitive scanners, it looks like some sort of gravimetric disturbance. The changes in gravity, strange radiation, and the readings on subatomic particles which Norfolk Island couldn't identify, but feel to me like verterons. The computer thinks there is a seventy two percent probability I'm correct. All of which sounds like some sort of geodesic fold to me A fold. Or a tear? Maybe?

After going through it, they experienced random power losses and surges, judging from the graphs. These would then fire the thruster rockets - actual hydrocarbon based solid fuel rockets - at random for the next five months, until the fuel was exhausted, and they were left drifting on the course that finally intercepted us some four hundred years later.

And then the internal sensors start showing life signs ending. Sudden jumps in alpha brain waves, rapidly accelerated heart rate, and then pop. Nothing. Flat lines. Each ended life sign followed shortly by drops in mass on the ship. It varied. Fifty kilos here, seventy kilos there. The lowest drop was sixteen kilos. The highest, one hundred two.

People sized lumps of mass.

I think something got on board the Norfolk Island from that geodesic rip. And ate the crew. And I know I'm right, because five minutes ago, Borgon just barged into my cabin, demanding to know what I did with the Captains body.

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