2 Mar 2007

Oh bury me not…

Posted by joncooper

(The text on the following pages is taken from the memoirs of Captain George Randall, one of the many people the Empire sent out to search for the long-lost Nehemiah IV space probe while the Exiles were still trapped on Arcadia. His memoirs were rediscovered in February of 2199 during the reconstruction of the galaxy.)

I saw it coming long in advance but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. It was like watching the week-long implosion of the singularity out by Rudolph’s Planet back in 1379: you could see the massive neutronium structure give way and space collapse onto itself in a horrifying (and expensive) mess, but not even all the might of the Empire could stop it.

I really tried my best, though. I pleaded with Joe Carson, my first mate, to reconsider dying. I told him that he’d lose his pension if he died and that the contract he signed to become the first mate of the Ares didn’t expire for another year, thus binding him to continue to serve for at least that long. Joe, though, wouldn’t be dissuaded; he died on April 15, 1385 A.D., and despite all Doc Martin could do he remained quite dead.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: everyone has to die sometime, right? Out of all the uncounted trillions of people who ever lived only two managed to avoid dying, and it was a sure bet that death was going to take old Joe one of these days. Joe Carson wasn’t even upset over it; he said he’d been looking forward to going to be with Jesus for a long time, and he died in peace. Joe was definitely ready to go and firmly believed he was going to a much better place. What he didn’t understand, though, was that these new environmental regulations make dying on board a starship really problematic. Not many people follow the reams of legislation that come out of Headquarters these days, but starship captains have to and I, unfortunately, happened to be exactly that.

Doc Martin certainly hadn’t been following the latest rules. When he saw how upset I was he assumed it was because I had been very fond of Joe and because he’d been such a good first mate. I told him that was all true and then I dropped my bombshell: I asked him how he planned to dispose of Joe’s body, since Joe wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

He scratched his head for a moment. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep him in cold storage until we return home next year. We’ve got plenty of room on board and he won’t be in the way.”

I shook my head. “Can’t do it; Headquarters forbids keeping a dead body on board a ship for more than 30 days. They say it’s bad for crew morale.”

Doc thought a moment. “I suppose it might be at that. Well, I guess we can bury him on Doravane, then; we’ll be there in two weeks and – ”

I shook my head again. “Nope. The planets out in the sector we’re exploring are classified as virgin territory, unmarred by the hand of man; regulations prohibit burying someone in virgin territory – might upset the delicate balance of nature, or something.”

Doc nodded. “Makes sense. Ok, then I guess we’ll have to put him in a coffin and eject him into space, unless…”

“Yes, Doc, regulations prohibit launching bodies and other objects into space. They say it makes for a navigational hazard.”

That got Doc to thinking. “Well, hmmm. We can’t incinerate Joe; Joe wouldn’t have liked it, and besides, we don’t have the equipment to do that on board. I bet, though, that there’s a regulation prohibiting cremating the dead on board a ship, isn’t there?”

I nodded.

Doc kept thinking. “Well, we can’t bury him, we can’t eject him, we can’t cremate him, and we can’t keep him with us. That leaves you with a bit of a problem, doesn’t it?”

Doc Martin had finally grasped the situation. I had a big problem: what could I possibly do with the body of Joe?

. . . . .

 
During the next two weeks, as we plowed through space heading toward Doravane, I gave it an awful lot of thought. How could this possibly have happened to me? Here I was, exploring space, trying to find that crazy lost space probe, and my first mate thoughtlessly went and died on me. How could Headquarters have come up with such insane regulations? More importantly, how could I get out of this? It’s so easy for the people back home to go around making rules; they’re not the ones that have to follow them.

Then one day a thought hit me. Surely I wasn’t the first person to ever be in this mess, right? I’m not the first captain to explore uncharted space by a long shot; other people must have died in space before, and I could just do whatever it was they did. I had Aaron, our artilect mechanic, run some requests through our not-so-bright-computer Eliza and see if he could find anything. I began to feel relieved; I was sure that things were going to be fine.

Then Aaron came back. He said he had Eliza conduct an exhaustive search through all the death certificates of all the men who had ever died while in space to find out what had happened to them. He even had her tap into the main datacore back at Headquarters to see if she’d missed anything. The end result, he said, was nothing: Joe was the first death since the regulation was passed a week ago that bodies couldn’t be ejected into space. The past couldn’t help me; I was the first to fall victim.

I began to collapse into despair. What was I going to do?

. . . . .

 
We encountered a pretty big surprise when we got to the planet Doravane. According to what fragmented records we could find about this ancient area of space, Doravane was supposed to be a habitable planet; it had oceans, continents, trees, an atmosphere, the works – all courtesy of the amazing Nehemiah class of space probes, which could terraform planets as easy as splitting an atom. It still amazes me what those ancient engineers built: how could they build a series of machines that could go from planet to planet and rearrange it to make it perfectly habitable and self-sustaining? I’d seen systems where the most advanced Nehemiah probe moved planets and even altered the structure of stars to get things just right. I don’t wonder the bigwigs at Headquarters wanted to get their hands on these ancient devices, or that they sent out my ship and a bunch of others to track it down – they’re quite a prize. Still, I don’t think they’ll ever find her: she’s got a pretty wily AI system and probably has ways of hiding we will never unravel. No Nehemiah probe has ever been found in anything approaching working order and I don’t expect any ever will.

Anyway, up to the point when we arrived in this system we were expecting to have a good time on Doravane – maybe get some short leave, uncover a few new life forms, and so forth. We’d been cooped up on the Ares for about three months just trying to get here and we really needed a breather. Doravane, though, didn’t cooperate: in fact, she wasn’t really there.

There was simply no planet left: instead there were a bunch of rocky fragments where Doravane was supposed to be. We analyzed them and found that they were evidently all that was left of the planet. This led to more questions than answers, though: what on earth had happened to this place, and did the Nehemiah IV have anything to do with it? Had it finally lost its marbles and started destroying planets instead of rebuilding them, or were our records horribly inaccurate?

Thankfully, Aaron came through and pieced the mystery together for us. Based on readings taken of the wreckage of the planet, he had Eliza ran a bunch of calculations. The upshot was that around 300 B.C. a very large starship, equipped with a fully-fueled antimatter drive, ran into the planet at a speed approximately 0.001% less than the speed of light. Maybe that ship’s calculations were off or maybe they weren’t aware of the existence of Doravane, but they ran right into the planet and they hit it hard. The impact alone was devastating, but the explosion of the antimatter when that drive’s containment field collapsed was even worse: Doravane was instantly vaporized and only these fragments were left. We asked Eliza if the probe we were after could have been the ship that collided with the planet and Eliza said no: the probe ran on something a lot more advanced than an antimatter drive and besides, it had enough sense to avoid hitting planets.

It was Doravane, though, that provided the answer to my problem. As Aaron was combing the wreckage for clues he found a little graveyard. It seems that some time after the main accident happened that destroyed the planet somebody went back and built a graveyard on one of the planet’s fragments, complete with tombs, a memorial, rows upon rows of metal crosses. The memorial was written in an unknown language, but our extensive experience chasing wild gooses – ancient space probes, I mean – had given us a few ideas about how to translate it. As best we could figure out, this is what was written on the memorial nearly two thousand years ago:

“This graveyard holds all that remains of the starship Olympia and those aboard it who died when it crashed into this rock. The pit this graveyard was placed in is the actual crater created by the impact. Please do not disturb the graves, the tombs, or the other artifacts that are here. However, do not forget that this graveyard merely holds the physical remains of the dead; the final resting place of these souls will be decided by God on Judgment Day. Be sober, but remember: those who were truly Alive at the time of the crash are Alive still.”

Finding the graveyard in space was a terrific stroke of luck: as soon as I saw it I knew that all of my troubles were over. Of course! There were definitely no regulations (at least yet!) against burying the dead in graveyard; in fact, it was positively encouraged. It’s true that regulations prohibited us digging up the soil and burying him there, but there were crypts in the graveyard, and we could easily place his coffin in one of those.

So, with the blessing of Headquarters, we took Joe, put him in a coffin, and transported him into that underground memorial. There we held his funeral service and laid him to rest. I was a happy man: Joe was in a graveyard safely tucked away, and no regulations were broken since no soil was disturbed. I was sure that Joe would be pleased.

In the meantime, I decided to pass a firm law on board the Ares that nobody – positively nobody – was allowed to die on board again without giving me at least 6 months’ notice. I was not going to go through this again.

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One Response to “Oh bury me not…”

  1. I remember this from the Key; I had to work very hard to read the story on the panel in episode 1

     

    cyJFarmer