First writing assignment finished…
And I'm going to post it here. Oh, noes! I'm posting fiction to my LJ. I usually get peeved when people do this, so I will be not at all offended if you merrily breeze by without looking at my prose. Do not feel obligated to read it or comment on it... I only post it because I know a couple people will be morbidly curious. :)
If you do read it, keep in mind that the assignment is, more or less, "Write a scene in which setting is critical, and include a character to interact with it."
The moment I stepped through the inner door of the airlock, I knew something was wrong. The airlock door hissed shut behind me and I was greeted by silence. Where there should have been the hum and clatter of a busy station dock, there was nothing. I could hear the hum of ventilation fans, and the occasional creak of the station under spin stress, but I shouldn't have been able to. Those sounds should be masked out by the sounds of the loading dock crews, machinery shifting cargo, and the usual salty language that has been associated with sailing ships since sailing was invented. Salty language like the dock foreman would typically have applied to me for dawdling at the airlock. But the foreman's station was unmanned, and as far as I could see around the curve of the docking ring, not a man was in sight. The machinery was there, cargo lifters, crates bound for planet-side and distant ports, retaining nets holding most of it in place, all the paraphernalia of a busy port. But no people. The machines were all shut off, nothing was in motion.
It was then that I noticed the fine layer of dust over the counter of the foreman's station. No, not just the counter, there was dust over everything. The foreman's terminal, the coffee dispenser, the chair bolted to the deck, and the deck itself, all were covered in a fine layer of white dust. I know the daywatch dock foreman, and I'd be willing to bet that his crew scrubs down the deck with toothbrushes every morning. Yet now it looked like nobody had used the deck, let alone cleaned it, in years. Not a footprint or trail of any kind marred the surface of the dust, except for where I was standing.
The first thought through my head was "ghostship". The second thought screamed through my head, "biological contamination," and my heartbeat tripled. But a plague that took the crew fast enough to stop them from implementing quarantine lockdown would have likely left the foreman and crew dead at their posts, and I didn't see any bodies. I checked behind the foreman's station just in case, and was relieved to find nothing but a pair of mag-boots and a crumpled coffee cup. If the cause of this mystery was biological, it was too late for me anyway. I'd been breathing station air for minutes now, and had kicked up plenty of the dust.
I went to a comm station on the wall, more undisturbed dust and keyed up station central. After a moment, the comms computer let me know that station central must be tied up with critical duties and asked if I'd like to leave a message. So I keyed up emergency medical. Nothing.
I eyed the fire alarm box, a simple red lever button under a clear acrylic canopy, on back wall of the foreman's station. If there was anybody alive onboard, it was sure to get their attention. But it would throw the station into lock-down, sealing off each compartment of the ring. Inconvenient, to say the least. So I headed for station central.