Welcome to the end of the story. And well done if you’ve made it this far. If you have subscribed since the story started, or somehow stumbled upon this page, I would suggest you start with part I. Unless you want to go postmodern, of course, and read the ending first.
As I mentioned in my intro to part I, this story is included in my first little collection of speculative fiction stories, Rejected Messages, a copy of which (e-book) you can also purchase from Smashwords here, for the princely sum of only $2.49. It’s well worth it, if I say so myself. Two of the stories in the book together make up a novella on which Katrina’s movie Meet the Paschats is based (as she may have mentioned in her journal somewhere). Those who are familiar with Shakespeare’s classic Tempest will recognise it as a somewhat offbeat retelling of that most majestic of plays. So, if you have enjoyed this present story, and my other speculative fiction here on my Substack, then I am without doubt that you will enjoy that book too. As well as the seven (mostly interconnected) stories, there are also a number of non-fiction essays, mainly on the subject of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), one of which you can in fact read here. If you’ve been following Katrina’s DEXOS stuff (here’s part I), then you will get a taste of this kind of thing in the final two parts, which she will publishing in the coming days (I’ll update this page with the links when available).
Following that, we’re finally going to be starting on the series, What to do about Katrina (likewise link forthcoming), hopefully towards the end of next week.
In the meantime, please enjoy the end of The End of Space Station Fifteen. If you need a recap to the previous part 5, there’s the link. But it does appear that proceedings have taken a significant turn for the worse for our two intrepid heroes, as they are about to face the dreaded airlock treatment. It’s not looking good. So how are they going to get out of this one?
Well, without further suspenseful ado, I think we’d better find out. After we’ve concluded our Katrina’s little Vatican cameo.
Enjoy, and, if you wish, feel free to like,
or even..
Katrina could never betray or desert her beloved Anna. Once her series of interrogations were done, after making her peace with God, one final communion at Mass in St. Peter’s, she left the Holy City of her own volition and boarded a plane to London to meet her fate with the greatest of faith. She was allowed to spend one last night with her family, before giving herself up to custody. She was taken to Holloway where she was reunited with her Anna.
But not before she had spoken in private with the Holy Father and given him the necessary instructions. Along with the tape recording from her listening device.
She told him the intervention would happen sometime during the month of Scorpio in the year 2024. By that time, the capitalists will have built at least one space station, a resort for the ultra-rich. A rotating series of rings in accordance with Von Braun’s specifications. His successor would need to select twelve of his most trusted young acolytes, who would need to adopt aliases and book their holiday for that entire month, preferably arriving a day earlier. By then, the contents of the tape and any other important files could be digitised, fitted on a small memory storage device no larger than a few centimetres. One of those acolytes will need to be skilled in computer encryption, he will need to insert those files into the space station’s computer, to be remotely unlocked by us via quantum teleportation when we deem the time to be right.
One day, sometime within the twenty-second century, humanity will construct a ship, the Centaura, and launch a voyage to your nearest system, Alpha Centauri, where we shall be waiting. All the digitised files, along with others telling the true history of your world, not the official narrative but the truth, should be transferred to that ship’s computer for the crew to study and learn during their fifteen-year journey. Their character and attitude by the time they arrive will determine the fate of your species. Only then shall we be willing to renegotiate.
Perhaps others could also be selected and their salvation paid for. But make sure there can be no tracing the payments back to the Vatican. The most wise, intelligent, knowledgeable and deserving of survival. The fewer billionaires on board when the time comes, the better. The future of humanity will depend on the character of their descendants, their way of life, their beliefs. And those of the ones on board the Centaura. The intervention will continue until such time as humanity has cured itself of evil and of fear. Then we will help humanity to terraform their planet back to life again.
His Holiness did not of course understand all of Katrina’s instructions, but he understood their importance, because Katrina was a saint. And he promised to do as she requested.
And so one final blessing for this otherworldly girl, and then she was gone. To meet her fate with purity and faith.
Anna, as agreed, was found not guilty on both charges.
What happened to Katrina? Well now, that will have to be a different story.
“Vassily! Wake up!” Anja had been slapping his face for several minutes by then. “Wake up! Vassily!”
He finally groaned and slowly opened his eyes, staring up at the only girl in the universe with whom he would be happy to spend his final moments. She helped him sit up.
“We’re in the airlock. And they disabled the EM-shield. Look.”
He turned to follow her eyes. Through the thick reinforced glass there was nothing but clear empty space above the black planet. No hazy electric sheen anymore.
He sighed. And then smiled sadly at her. “Would this be the opportune moment to declare my true feelings for you, Anja, or would that be too much of a cliché?”
She smiled back kindly. “You never said.”
“It never seemed the right time. You know how it is.”
“Well, just in case I don’t get another chance during the next 22 hours and 16 minutes I just want you to know that I feel the same.“
“Really?”
Cute and loving smile. “Really.”
Of course it goes without saying that just as they leaned in towards each other for their fateful first kiss that’s when the station-wide alarm started howling. And she screamed at what she saw.
Vassily knew what it was before he turned to look through the airlock glass. The space between the station and the planet was beginning to rip open.
They both got to their feet quickly and he held tight to her hand, backing away to the inner door. Not that they could open it from the inside, of course, but that’s instinct for you.
They watched with mounting horror as the space-time tear grew wider. And then the first of the Other came through. SS15’s laser weapons flashed into life, lightning bolts arcing directly into the chasm. But there were clearly other rifts opening up all around the station too, they could see electric bursts wherever they looked. If it wasn’t such a monstrous portent it would’ve been pretty.
Inside the station they knew everyone would be in a panicked flight to the central core where all the lifeboats were waiting. But everyone knew of the 24,000 on those other four stations only 4,000 souls made it. How could the demons break through the defences so quickly? It wasn’t force of numbers and it wasn’t heretic subversives. Nor was it intelligent adaptation, for they were little more than beasts designed only to torture and to kill.
And drag the unhappy damned ones back through the gates to hell. Perhaps it would be better for your soul to take that death pill everyone carries? Your choice.
But our two courageous heroes no longer have that option. Cato made sure of that, the cruel bloody bastard. And neither had he provided them with anything to fight back with. The airlock chamber was just a small, totally empty space. No, it’s not possible to rip open any door control panels or prise open bits of the floor or walls or ceiling or anything. And you’ll never get through that toughened glass with human hands.
But demon claws, that’s a different matter. It was known they could tear through steel doors, so that airlock glass isn’t going to stop them. Two of them are gliding through space right now, directly towards you. Hands grip each other even tighter together, perhaps a little hyperventilating for good measure and accelerating tachycardia.
Now they’ve clamped onto the outside of the airlock glass. They can survive 12 hours in a vacuum, these terrors. Screaming won’t help, but don’t let me stop you. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the decompression will kill you before they do when those claws start tearing through. I’ll give you about another thirty seconds max.
Twenty-five… twenty… fifteen…
Time for a first and last kiss?
…ten seconds…
…and that’s when the inner door slides open, and having been pressed hard against it they both collapse outwards onto the corridor floor.
To gaze up into the smiling face of Father Shilo, who just happens to be the leader of the heretic underground.
“You took your time,” Vassily mutters.
Anja’s surprise and confusion is clear on her face. “Father Shilo!”
“Original sin is incompatible with the existence of a loving God, wouldn’t you agree, Mistress Anja?”
“She agrees, obviously.” Vassily slams the inner airlock door shut. It’ll hold them for a minute or two perhaps. “But can we get the hell out of here now, please?”
“A superb suggestion, my son. This way.”
Anja decides she’ll let her brain compute what’s going on later, if they ever make it to safety. They all spin around as one and -
“Father Shilo. I thought it would be you. Another subversive fool falling for one of my bait traps!” Cato, of course. With an electric pistol pointing at the clergyman’s heart.
But Vassily suddenly lets out an awful scream at something behind Cato’s shoulder. Cato instinctively turns around and his brain only has time to register there’s nothing there at all before Vassily’s perfectly executed right hook connects with the side of his head. Cato would certainly have registered that alright, but he was definitely unconscious by the time he hit the floor.
Vassily shakes his hand around in the air. “Ow!”
Anja smiles in adoration. Father Shilo is equally well impressed.
“Where did you learn that, my boy?”
“American movies. Everyone’s always punching each other in Hollywood.”
Anja rushes to the elevator, frantically pressing the door controls.
“Come on! We have to get to the lifeboats!”
“We’ll never make it, Mistress Anja. But I have something better in mind. We need to stick to the outer ring. This way.”
Father Shilo starts off at an alarming pace, black robe swishing wildly. Vassily picks up Cato’s pistol with one hand, grabs Anja’s with the other and a smile as they run to keep up.
“Where are we going?”
“Hangar 17.”
“What’s in hangar 17?”
“I’ll explain when we get there. Come on!”
“If we get there. Look!”
Behind them the inner airlock door was beginning to buckle. Ahead of them a huge gash appeared in one of the compression doors and then a piercing unholy scream ripped the air apart. All three of them stumbled to a halt.
“If the demons don’t get us the decompression will.”
“I think I’d prefer the latter.”
Vassily shot at the crack in the compression door anyway. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do.
“There’s a service hatch! Keep shooting.”
Father Shilo wrestled valiantly with the hatch, like a ghost trapped in a machine, but it wasn’t going to budge. And then the lighting in the corridor suddenly started flickering and then died. Only a dim glow remained.
“I hope that wasn’t me,” Vassily muttered.
“I think we’re trapped. Again.”
But then suddenly the service hatch clicked open.
“Please take the maintenance corridor on your left, Father Shilo. I shall light your path to Hangar 17.”
“Kay!” Anja cried out in joy.
“I have been remotely entangled with the Centauri computer, Mistress Anja. Your ETI friends would be very pleased if you were to survive.”
“But why?”
“I shall explain later. Please hurry. Decompression will occur in this section in two minutes.”
They all bundled through the door and Vassily slammed it shut behind them. Kay sealed it and lit up the corridor ahead of them to their left, running parallel to the outer walkway.
“Hangar 17 is fifty metres ahead. I shall initiate the maglev ring.”
“I don’t care what that is, but it sounds good to me. Run!”
“It’s an experimental ship, Master Vassily. What Cato meant by retaliation.”
It did not take them long to run fifty metres, despite the station beginning to lurch about. Anja wondered how long the gravity would hold. Kay lit up another small door to their right, which opened into the hangar. They squeezed through, and gasped at what they saw.
Obviously it was a ship, but unlike any they’d ever seen before. It was almond shaped with a gorgeous metallic sheen to it. Some thirty metres long and perhaps fifteen at the widest point. But the real wonder was at the back, floating around what looked like a single ion exhaust, which was beginning to flare up. A wide ring encircled the rear of the ship, a metre or so from the fuselage, composed of what appeared to be pure liquid metal, spinning caesium encased in some carbon-based nano-alloy, or some similar substance. I am an exo-psychologist, not an engineer, so don’t ask me about these things.
“Please proceed to the cockpit. It will take a further thirty seconds to achieve the necessary rotation velocity.”
The cockpit was more spacious than they thought it would be, some five metres across, with a wide visiscreen on the front wall. It was not, however, displaying a pretty picture. Ahead and slightly above them, as the hangar doors slid open and the ship drifted slowly into space, another huge gash in the spacetime fabric, an onrushing horde of the Other. Other rips elsewhere, swarming over the station. Some of the lifeboats had already left the central core and were running the gauntlet to SS14. Their EM-shielding seemed to be holding though, each one encased in a blue electric flash which surged every time a demon got too close.
“I presume you know how to fly this thing, Father Shilo?”
“No. Do you?”
“I will be navigating the ship, Master Vassily. I already have the required coordinates locked in.”
“What coordinates? Where are we going? And how does this ship work? And -”
“The maglev ring will accelerate its rotation until it generates the 100,000 GeV required to correlate the electromagnetic and the nuclear spin, which will ionise the surrounding cosmic radiation. This will create a polarised charge field behind the ship greatly enhancing the power of the ion flow.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It’s the latest step on the path to electrogravitics, Vassily. The people should have been told. It would’ve given them hope.”
“They’re coming!” Anja cried out suddenly.
The demonic swarm ahead of them had turned in their direction. Gliding through space towards them at an alarming speed.
The ring span faster, so fast now it didn’t even look like it was moving. Spacetime behind the ship began to flicker. A second, smaller negatively charged ring emerged from the fuselage and angled slightly backwards. The ion stream roared into life.
Zero to .12 lightspeed in less than ten seconds.
They sliced through the demon swarm like it was so many flies of summer. And they were away.
“Where are we going?”
“There is an alien hypergate approximately 35 hours above the plane of the ecliptic. The journey to Centauri will take approximately one month.”
“This ship seems very well outfitted, Kay,” Vassily remarked, “I don’t suppose there are any luxurious en-suite chambers, are there?”
“Affirmative.”
Vassily grinned at Anja. “Plenty of time to act on some impure thoughts then.”
She smiled back. Father Shilo shot them a stern look.
And then sighed. “Do you, Vassily, take this woman -”
“Yes!”
“And do you, Anja -”
“Definitely!”
And so they took each other by the hand, not standing on any more ceremony, and, well, I think we’ll leave them to it, don’t you think?
Father Shilo sighed happily and then sadly, and watched the end of Space Station Fifteen in the visiscreen, rapidly receding behind them.
Not everyone will survive, of course. Huge gaping chasms have opened up throughout the station. There are breaches everywhere and the swarms are rushing in. Perhaps the lucky ones will die instantly from exposure to space, less than a hundred degrees Kelvin and no pressure, an environment in which no human being can survive for even a second. Perhaps their souls might make it to escape through that bright white light at the end of the tunnel before they get dragged away to hell. Or perhaps not.
But those things are not really demons, you know. That’s just the observer effect. People see what they have been culturally conditioned to see. They are simply antibodies, energy fields from another universe with different, incompatible laws of physics. There is nothing evil about them, they are simply fulfilling their function.
We shall close the fissures eventually, when either none of you are left or you have learned how to live well again, as you once did when first we caught sight of your species, sometime during your ice age.
The station is about to split in two. Like I said, not everyone will make it to the lifeboats in time. Others, families, will seal themselves into their quarters and say their last goodbyes.
There, see? An innocent young girl with wide and terrified eyes looks up into her mother’s tearstained face and then blink.
Blink.
Gone.
The end of your Space Station Fifteen…