The Last Voyage of the Sakura. Part 6

Posted on 07 May 2018 @ 10:56am by Ensign Miraj Derani

802 words; about a 4 minute read

Day Twenty One
(MD125)

O'Keefe's body has vanished without trace. This stupid old boat couldn't sense it long before it vanished so we don't know when it disappeared.

Borgon's freaking out. I asked him if he'd seen anything. He said no. Way too quickly. Then, "Like what?"

"I don't know," I said. "Like, shadows moving when they shouldn't?"

"No." He said. Too quickly.

"I think something is with us. Something that was on Norfolk Island.” I push.

"You read too many ghost stories, Derani." He says

"I'm serious."

He looks at me then. "That ship's been drifting for three hundred years, and hasn't been breached. Nothing could have been on that ship and lived. It would have starved to death."

Which I guess must be true. All the crew have been gone since before the flight of the first Phoenix.

We've tried sending out a distress call. The Norfolk Island shouldn't be putting out too much radiation now we shuttered the generator. But we haven't had a response either.

Day Twenty Two
So tired. Borgon and I are splitting shifts, six hours each. Not that I can sleep. I just can't settle. I keep thinking about the crew of the other ship. Did they have bad dreams whilst whatever happened, happened? Did they know they were dying, one by one?

Borgon has spent all day shouting at the comms array. He says it's definitely malfunctioning, and nothing we've sent out has gone anywhere. He keeps losing stuff too. Power has gone in the cargo bay completely, and a couple of the other cabins. We're sharing the same quarters now.

And the shadows are still moving.

Day Twenty Three
Borgon is asleep, but he keeps talking. To people who aren't there. I've just been down to the sick bay cupboard, and talked to the EMH. I know Borgon said the being from the ship couldn't have survived, but I kept wondering. So I asked if something could survive for hundreds of years without food. And I got a lecture about dormancy and drought survival mechanisms.

But what could fit the evidence? Power fluctuations. Seeing moving shadows. Or hallucinating moving shadows. Comm interference. Sudden death. Vanished corpses.

I have no idea. I barely passed basic sciences and its fading away already. Unless it was physics related to flying. That was easy, even the maths. Anyway. The EMH said it might be related to energy. Or different types. A nuclear reactor is high end electromagnetic spectrum. Light is mid range. Human brains are super low end. "One conjecture,” he said, “is that, if there is a thing from subspace on board the colony ship, a Visophage, if you will,"

"Vis o what?" I asked.

"Visophage, an eater of power. I know it's stylistically unsound to mix Latin and Greek roots, but I thought you would confuse Biaphage with biophage, which is not correct, and Visovore sounds odd."

“There’s a thing eating power?” I had to say.

“It’s conjecture, but let’s assume its correct. A theory that could fit your observations is that this Visophage feeds on ultra low frequency energy. There’s not many natural sources of low frequency energy in interstellar space. It could be starving. Particularly if high frequency energy gives it indigestion. The radiation leak from the Norfolk Island may have suppressed it somehow, forced it into hibernation, or weakened it. I’m inclined to say weakened it. I think the power fluctuations are a result of the entity attempting to find a food source. Tastings, if you will.”

I wanted to know if it was hungry, why it didn’t just ask for help. Maybe we could do something to help.

“Well,’ The hologram says. “You’re making a typical assumption of biological organisms that everything thinks like them. If it has come from somewhere through a tear in subspace, it could not be sentient. It’s more than possible that it doesn’t even recognise you as alive, let alone capable of communication.”

Which didn’t fill me with hope. It was all the easy questions done, so I had to ask the one I didn’t want to know the answer to. Well, two related, bits. “How is it killing us? And what happened to the body?”

The EMH shrugged. “It's known that ELFs can do strange things, electromagnetically. Maybe it's feeding process affects the brain, hence the hallucinations, and whatever Captain O’Keefe experienced at death. It's possible that however it feeds also causes the molecules of the body to break down. The chances are Captain O’Keefe’s mortal remains are just floating around the air filters. You’ve probably breathed most of him in all today.’

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