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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/RichardSaxon on 2024-11-11 17:39:31+00:00.
“Captain, do you have a moment?” Henderson asked quietly, concern clearly present in his eyes. “It’s Levi. He’s not doing too hot.”
I sighed, still not sure what to make of the situation. He’d been out of it for the past twenty-four hours, and mission control hadn’t yet been informed regarding his status.
“Let’s talk to him again,” I suggested.
I glanced out through the window, staring down at Earth’s brilliant, blue shine below. We were more than five hundred kilometers up in the atmosphere, and should a medical emergency arise, we weren’t equipped to handle it, but notifying our superiors would mean a premature end to our journey. It wasn’t a choice I would make lightly. With no one back on Earth even aware of our covert mission, we couldn’t afford a do-over.
We pushed our way through the station, floating around corners towards our bedchambers at the station’s rear end. Levi had been confined to his room since he started displaying symptoms, but in spite of his poor mental state, he had not yet made an attempt to leave his room.
He sat against the wall, sobbing quietly, not taking the time to acknowledge our presence.
“Levi, how are you holding up?” I asked as comfortingly as I could.
“We have to find her. She has to be out there. She’s not gone,” he mumbled to himself.
“Find whom?” I asked.
“Why are you pretending like you don’t know,” he went on. “Carey is out there. She needs us.”
I glanced over at Henderson. We shared a confused expression before redirecting our attention back to Levi. His eyes were bloodshot, heavy bags lining their underside. Even under heavy sedation, he hadn’t slept a single minute.
“Levi—” I began, “there is no Carey. There’s just the four of us here, and we haven’t had an EVA in over a week. There’s no one outside. There can’t be.”
“How can you say that? How can you look me in the eyes and pretend like you don’t know?”
It was a discussion we’d had on more than one occasion in the past day, repeating it would only serve to exhaust all of us. And getting increasingly worried by the minute, we excused ourselves and locked him back inside his room. Though stuck in his bizarre delusion, Levi made no attempt to resist his confinement.
We returned to the bridge, where Adriana Lowe was waiting for orders on what to do next.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Mental break?” Henderson suggested. “I just don’t know what set it off.”
“What about a tumor? Neurological disorder?” Lowe asked.
“The company put us through a barrage of medical tests, including an MRI. Unless he grew a brain tumor in the past two weeks, that ain’t it,” Henderson replied. “It’s only been a day, and—”
Henderson was interrupted mid-sentence by a bang reverberating throughout the station, appearing to originate from the outer hull.
“What the hell was that? Did we just get his by something?” Lowe asked.
“Not a chance, anything up here would have torn through the exterior,” I replied. “Check the computer. Confirm that nothing’s malfunctioning.”
Lowe pulled herself over to the control panel and started performing a system’s check. Though no alarms had been triggered, there were a handful of non-emergency errors, enough to prompt a worried expression on Lowe’s face.
“Captain, we’ve got a problem.”
Already by her side, I started reading over the alerts.
“We’ve lost contact with the T-driss?” I half asked, half stated.
“I can’t realign the antennas, only four of six are even operational. We can’t contact mission control,” she said.
“I don’t understand,” Henderson began. “Didn’t Levi check this yesterday?”
“It’s just a minor power failure, isolated to the communications’ array. Probably a blown circuit,” Lowe explained.
“That’s the bang we heard?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t have been that loud. None of the alarms went off either, so no fire,” Lowe went on.
“What do you suggest?”
“Not sure yet, we just have to find the damage.”
“I’m sure Levi was working on the solar array electrical supply yesterday. In his state of mind, he could have easily crossed some wires, since they run through the same sections as the Antennae,” Henderson suggested.
“I’ll get the repair logs,” I said. “Lowe, have a look at the wires in the meantime.”
Grabbing the repair logs, I started flipping through the handwritten pages, looking for the last entry. All of us had taken our turn maintaining the systems during our two-week tenure aboard the station, mostly one or two sentences to confirm that everything was in order. I didn’t even need to check the signature, seeing as I had become well acquainted with our team’s handwriting during our several years of training. Henderson’s, Lowe’s, Levi’s, my own—but an entry by a fifth, unknown person caught my eye, with loopy handwriting and an unintelligible signature. It was an entry by a person not stationed aboard the CSS.
But before I could examine the entry any further, a loud knock was heard, as if something had slammed against the station’s exterior.
The sound was loud enough to garner the attention of our entire team, but none could come up with a plausible explanation of what had caused it. Until the sound repeated, and Henderson had an idea.
“Lowe, you said two of the antennae were non-operational?”
She nodded.
“The way they were installed, it’s mostly clinging to the station by the cables running them. It’s possible the base detached, causing them to dangle around and periodically slam against the hull.”
We waited as the sound repeated, coming from approximately the same spot. Henderson could be right, and it meant fixing the problem would require a session of extravehicular activity.
“Don’t worry, I’ll go outside and fix it,” Henderson said, as if he could read our minds.
“An unauthorized EVA session? Mission control won’t be happy,” Lowe chimed in.
“How are you planning to contact them to ask permission? Captain Foley is in charge. He can make the call,” Henderson replied as he gestured towards me.
I could only nod in agreement. “We don’t exactly have another choice.”
“Right… let’s get to it then,” Henderson said as he started heading for the airlock.
We accompanied him to the inner hatch with its preparation chamber equipped with spacesuits and tools. He quickly got dressed and entered the airlock, hesitating for but a moment to glance back at the three remaining suits.
“There’s only four suits in total,” he pointed out.
“There’s only four of us here,” Lowe said.
“Still, five bedchambers, even if the station isn’t manned to max capacity, there should be one suit per bed.”
“I can’t remember there being more than four,” I said. “Does it matter?”
“I’m not sure,” Henderson said, but he ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the time it took to discuss it. He closed the inner hatch to the airlock behind him and attached himself to the EVA safety-line. If he was right about the antenna, it wouldn’t be a hard task to reattach it to its base. He quickly climbed to the topside of the station and called in via radio to relay his findings.
“I see two broken antennae,” he said. “But they’re just broken and bent, not detached from the base.”
“Can you clarify?”
“I mean, the noises we heard, it couldn’t have come from the damaged antennae. It looks more like something tried to rip it out. There’s no impact damage.”
“Can you repair it?”
“Yeah, absolutely. Give me thirty minutes. Have Lowe look at the wiring in the meantime, there’s bound to be some damage to that as well.”
“I’m on it,” Lowe said, allowing me to stay on the line with Henderson.
“It’s weird, though. There’s nothing out here that could explain the damage nor the banging sound. It must be coming from inside,” Henderson said.
“Inside? How do you figure that?”
“Could be a fault with the pipes,” he said. “Or maybe someone moved into the walls.” He chuckled at the last quip, but I could tell he was nervous about the situation.
We tried to stick to small talk to ease the tension, but Henderson had to keep his mind focused, and I didn’t want to distract him from the task at hand with conspiracy theories. Still, my mind kept reverting back to the handwritten entry in the repair log, written by someone not present on the ship, though clearly dated more than a week after we arrived in space.
“Captain, I know you’re thinking about the repair log. I could tell you noticed the aberrant entry. I saw it too. I wanted to say something earlier, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”
“Did you recognize the signature?” I asked.
“No, but it made me think—” Henderson began, only to stop dead in his tracks.
“Henderson?”
He remained silent until I repeated his name over the radio.
“I think I see something,” he explained. “Yeah, there’s definitely something outside. It’s moving.”
“What do you see?” I asked, not yet understanding the gravity of the situation.
“It’s just like a weird silhouette. It’s hard to say, it’s too far away. It’s definitely moving though—Shit, it’s getting closer. Jesus Christ—it’s alive! Get me out—”
“Henderson?” I near yelled into the radio. “Henderson, respond!”
Another few seconds of radio silence, but Henderson wouldn’t respond. I kept calling for him, loud enough to catch the attention of the remaining crew. Lowe came rushing back to my position, startled by the ruckus.
“What’s going on?” she asked as she saw me gripping the radio with all my might.
“Henderson, he saw something outside. I think he—” I tried to explain before Lowe cut me off.
“Henderson? Who the he...
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