Memoirs of Kitty Siam Ch. 36

Kitty, wake up! Kitty, are you ok? Kitty, can you hear me? Kitty, wake up!

I heard the words echoing in my ears for several minutes as the Lieutenant shook me to rouse me from my sleep. As much as I wanted to return to the real world, I also wanted to remain in my unconscious state to explore the meaning of what I had just witnessed. Most would say that I just had a dream, but it seemed so real, so alive, and so prophetic. It had been over fourteen hours since I had left Jarro on the flight deck and he had become concerned that I was sleeping for far too long and on the advice of a medic on Mars he woke me. When I opened my eyes the events of the day caught up to me once again and the tears began to flow freely as I thought of the billions of people who had perished on Earth.

Jarro brought me a small bowl of broth and some crackers and insisted that I eat to keep up my strength. The Lieutenant made several attempts to feed me and I did my best to resist. A loud unexpected feral growl from me finally made him surrender the spoon. I sat up, took the spoon and bowl from him and sipped it slowly. My mind and body still felt numb and though I was not 100% human, I felt as if my entire family had just been found murdered. I tried to push this out of my mind but it kept popping back in, and even though I did not want to ask, I just had to ask Jarro what he had discovered while I was sleeping.

While I was out, several other small vessels had jumped into Earth space from Mars, and Proxima Centauri to began a survey of the planet in an attempt to determine what had happened and who could have committed such genocide. Jarro also mentioned that several war ships along with a dozen or so large science vessels were enroot and would be here in a few days. Central Command was concerned for our safety, and they feared that whom ever infected the Earth would return to keep us from investigating.

I asked Jarro if anyone would be making an attempt capture a sample of the bio agent to see if a vaccine was possible. I was saddened when his answer was a firm, "No." Jarro went on to say that we were ordered not to enter the atmosphere and that one of the science ships would perform that task once they determined a safe way to do so.

I did not tell Jarro the specifics of my genetic makeup but I did think long and hard about the boasts that Osaka Eugenics made about their genetic constructs being highly disease resistant. It was well known that their constructs were some of the most widely used and disease resistant whores in the galaxy. Though I was not intended to be a whore, I did share the same disease resistance features as the others that were designed by Osaka Eugenics. After pondering this for a bit I mentioned to the Lieutenant that if they needed someone to go down to the surface that I would volunteer.

The Lieutenant nodded and passed along my offer to command, then started spewing chapter and verse from the regulations as to why I would not be going down to the surface anytime soon. Of course I tuned him out as my mind wandered back to the dream that I had had earlier and how realistic everything in that dream had seemed. I slid my feet over the side of the bunk and tried to stand, but as I did Jarro gently pushed on my shoulders to keep me seated firmly on the mattress. He told me that I needed some rest, but I resisted and stated my case that I had research to do. He would hear none of my argument but he was kind enough to pass me my tablet and insisted that whatever research I wanted to do could be done from the comfort and safety of my bunk.

I accepted the offered tablet, then fluffed up the pillows behind me to make it more comfortable to sit. Jarro suggested that I get some rest and leave the investigation to the science vessel crew as he left the habitat module. I blocked out his parting words as I activated the tablet and connected it to the data streams going in and out of the various ships that made up the investigation team. There was nothing of use in the transmissions that we did not already know. An advanced plague-like biological agent that was not known to exist on planets inhabited by humans contaminated the Earth. There were still no EM readings or transmissions coming from the Earth on any of the normal frequencies available to an advanced culture.

Seeing nothing new there I pulled up traffic control display for the immediate space around Earth. I was not preparing to file a flight plan or to navigate through Earth space, but I did want to see a real time representation of which ships had arrived while I was sleeping and where they were located in reference to my ship. Once I had a clear display of where we were I tied my tablet into the Fleen, a KC scout ship that was passing by Transfer Station Romanov, which was the largest of the Earth to space cargo transfer points.

As the ship turned its scanning beams toward the station I began to read the incoming data... no electronic signatures, no life signs, no activity of any kind. It was as if the station was just a large drifting hulk in space.

I looked at the Fleen's position relative to ours and determined that we would be passing Station Romanov within the next two hours. During that time I sent out commands to our on board maintenance bots to prepare an external repair module and several probes to accompany the module. During the next two hours I lost myself in the data stream and kept a close eye on what information was coming in, but unfortunately there was still nothing new on the mystery of what had happened on Earth.

As we came upon Station Romanov I used my private connection with Sheba to move us along side the lifeless station, and dispatched a maintenance module. I took direct control of the module with my tablet and directed it to the massive external communications array on top of the station. Once in place the maintenance bot attached to the module and deployed a probe into an external access port at the base of the communications array. The bot initiated a series of tests to determine the condition of the array and as expected, all tests failed. The readings that I receiving from the series of diagnostic tests indicated that the problem was either a lack of power to the array, or that possibly the array had been taken out by an EMP blast similar to the one that took out the Annu base on Mars.

Having determined that the communications system was dead, my next move was to have the maintenance bot cut a small hole in the side of the station near the command deck and insert several small hover bots through the opening that would explore the inside of the station by remote control. As the hole was being cut I moved to the science module as the monitors and consoles there were better for viewing the data and pictures being set back from the various bots. Once the bots were inserted, I instructed the maintenance module to circle the station and take up a position outside the main door that led inside to the station's hangar bay. It was at this time that I asked Lieutenant Jarro to join me.

When the Lieutenant joined me he was a bit miffed that I had moved the ship so close to the Earth station but as he looked over the monitors, his words of derision came to an end and he began assisting me with my study of the interior of the station. As the bots moved along the inside of the station, we could see bodies floating in the corridors. It was clear that the artificial gravity was disabled, as was main power.

For some odd reason there were still emergency lights active in the hallways. Jarro suggested that perhaps they were being power by a battery system or a solar panel that was EMP protected. That made sense as several Earth stations had been subjected to solar flares in the past and were disabled, so having an EMP resistant backup system was most likely what we were seeing. This did get me to wonder why life support was not connected to this backup system as well.

Jarro and I agreed that what ever had happened on the station had happened quickly as there was no time to don encounter or survival suits. The bodies that we were observing were in standard military uniforms and various types of civilian dress. Also we noticed that none of the emergency bulkheads had been deployed, which would have happened immediately had there been a warning of an attack. Also as we scanned the outside of the station, the ion cannons of the station's defense grid were still stored safely inside the station and had not been moved out to their firing positions.

While Jarro took control of several of the bots for me, I concentrated on medical bots that had fanned out through the inside of the station. As the bot passed each floating body I had it take scans to determine a cause of death. After scanning many of the deceased and reviewing the data, the common cause of death for 100% of the bodies scanned was asphyxiation. After three hours of scanning bodies, all of them had died the same way. I was expecting to find that some or all of the deaths were caused by the plague that had silenced Earth, but from what I could see, the plague did not travel from Earth to the station. I had been on Romanov station several times and it was one of Earth's finest achievements, and being such had some of the best safety measures available, so giving that the cause of death was asphyxiation, something had to have gone horribly wrong for so many to have been killed so quickly.

I set the medical bots on autopilot and instructed them to report back any deaths that were not related to oxygen deprivation, and then turned my attention to the maintenance module holding position outside the main entrance to the fleet sized hangar bay. I moved the maintenance module closer to the access panel covering the emergency activation mechanism for the hangar bay door. It took only a few seconds for the maintenance module to remove the bolts holding the cover in place and expose the inner mechanism.

Normally the doors to the station are opened and closed by actuators, which require electricity to open. An emergency system is available incase the main system fails or becomes damaged. The backup system is operated by air pressure stored in huge tanks below the hangar floor. It was an easy task for the maintenance module to flip the lever between the normal and emergency settings. Once the lever had been moved, the colossal hangar doors began to open and allowed us an unobstructed view of the inside of the hangar bay through its mounted camera.

Once the door was open I moved the maintenance module inside the doorway and released several small maintenance bots inside the bay and ordered them to fan out in multiple directions to make detailed scans of the inside of the bay. As I watched the pictures and data coming in from the various bots I could see that the hangar bay was pretty much empty. The few that remained were under repair, or were assigned to the command or maintenance staff and were still moored magnetically to the hanger deck. All of the Earth Force ships of the line were missing from their berths.

I panned the camera of one of the bots around the many berthing points and took note of the names of the ships that had permanent berths aboard this station. Many of the names painted on the berths matched the names that adorned the hull sections on the debris we collected in orbit around Mars. I continued to pan the camera until I came upon the hull of a ship that was about 50% complete and as I read the name, "Shinawatra", a shiver ran through my body and my mind traveled back to the dream that I had where the Shinawatra was destroyed.

Lieutenant Jarro's jostling brought me out of a trance-like state and as he shook me, the words, "Kitty, are you ok?" kept echoing in my ears.

I pushed his hand away and responded that I was just distracted and then I directed his attention to my view screen and told him in detail of the dream that I had. We flipped through the video feeds that the various bots were sending us and we came to the conclusion that some of the station's systems were still operating, but at a reduced level as indicated by the dim lights a few of the control panels inside the hangar bay. We discussed the possibilities from the data that we had collected from the bots and I proposed that next step in our investigation of the Romanov Station was for us to go inside ourselves.

The Lieutenant tentatively agreed, and before he had a chance to change his mind I was on my way to the flight deck to start our docking procedure. Along the way I used my wardrobe device to deploy my flight suit with EVA mode enabled, then slipped into the pilot's seat and deactivated the autopilot.

It was an easy landing for me as I had landed in this bay several times before while on training missions to Earth. I deployed the magnetic landing struts that latched us firmly to the deck of hangar bay. As I was securing the ship, Jarro used the external scanners of our ship to perform a more detailed scan of the inside of the hangar bay and he discovered that the bay was structurally sound and would hold pressure if we could get the life support system online.

Remembering back to what Sima and I had done on Mars, I instructed the maintenance module at the main entrance to close and seal the bay door, and when that was done I used Jarro's internal scans to locate a maintenance power port near where our ship was berthed. I had parked our ship in the berth normally reserved for the heavy cruiser Noriega and I figured that there had to be several power ports available to provide maintenance power for such a large vessel, and I was correct. There were several available to us on either side of our ship. The only problem was that the power provided by our ancient Annu designed ship, was not compatible with the power needed by Romanov Station and we did not have the sort of inverter needed to do the job. The maintenance bots from Galora One did their best to try to make it work but there was no adapter that they could build for us in a timely manner that would power station like we did on Mars.

Jarro picked up on what I was trying to do and suggested that we use the main reactor on the Shinawatra to power the station as they both had the same power requirements. The thought had never occurred to me because the hull was not complete, but Jarro explained that when a large ship like the Shinawtra is built, the keel is laid first and the ship is built up from there, but it is easier to put in the reactor and engines while the sides of the ship are still open.

Our maintenance bot confirmed what Jarro had said that the reactor had been installed and was connected to the main distribution buss for the ship. It was only a matter of reversing the flow and making the connections to the maintenance ports in the hangar bay. My quick calculations told me that there was enough power in the Shinawtra's reactor to power the entire station with the exception of weapons and shields. To make the connections we would need the help of the station's maintenance bots, so we tasked our ship's bots with adapting the station's bots to accept commands from Sheba our ship's AI unit.

Over the next two sleepless days we remained aboard Galora One while inside the hangar bay our bots along with the station's bots worked at restoring atmosphere and artificial gravity to the station. Once we were verified that the plague from Earth was not aboard the station and that the hangar bay was properly pressurized, we were able to assist our bots in getting more of the stations bots online. We tasked many of the stations bots with rounding up the deceased station personnel and moving their bodies to an isolated cargo bay that we kept depressurized and open to space to keep them frozen until higher authorities could decide what to do with them.

On the third day we were able to get full life support up and running for the station. The station had suffered an EMP attack that took out the circuitry that controlled the station's main and backup reactors. The station had been built to military specifications and was fairly EMP proofed, but some of the critical control panels were placed too close to the outside of the station and suffered from the EMP blast. We were able to bypass those easy enough with the aid of the station's repair bots.

Since Lieutenant Jarro was unfamiliar with the Earth Standard Language and could not operate the communication system's controls, on the fourth day I had the honor to sit in the station commander's chair and announce to the ships in Earth's orbit, "This is Earth Station Romanov to all vessels, our docking bay is functional and we can provide quarters for your crews while they conduct their investigation." I know that I could have operated the controls for him, but being that I was the last known semi-Earth being in this quadrant, I wanted to make the announcement myself.

We did not have anyone assigned to docking control so each pilot was responsible for manually landing his or her ship aboard the station. The food replicators and the actual water showers were a big draw for the station. My job became more of a station commander than an investigator, but still, even though I was stuck aboard the station, I was able to establish a direct link with Mars and was able to monitor the communication traffic and data streams enough to know what was going on.

Once the station became active a call went out to Central Command to find a representative that could speak for Earth on the disposition of the station and the handling of the remains of the people stationed here at the time at the time of the attack. Yes, we did come to the conclusion that the station and the Earth were attacked. I was able to determine from the station's logs that the attack on the Mars colonies occurred first. This attack drew the defense force away from Earth to defend Mars. It was then that several small ships jumped in to Earth's orbit and took out Romanov Station and the other stations in orbit around Earth. What was not clear was how the plague came to Earth, as the sensors were offline after the station suffered a massive EMP pulse.

It had been almost a week since I was able to get any quality sleep. I took short catnaps now and then but there was just too much happening on the station and in Earth orbit that kept me from being able to sleep. Jarro and the others that had come aboard the station were urging me to get some sleep but I kept resisting and kept to my station and my duties. Finally Jarro and I were ordered to get some sleep. A full Captain from one of the KC ships came aboard and was put in temporary control of the station. He took one look at the both of us and ordered us to bed. Of course I had to ask if he was ordering us both into the same bunk. I have to say that this did not go over too well as indicated by the deadpan look on the Captain's face.

After being ordered to bed by the Captain I used my tablet to scan through the logs that listed the location of where the deceased station members were located, and selected quarters in the officer's section that was listed among the places were a deceased crewmembers were not found. I was not afraid of ghosts or disjoined spirits, but for some reason I just felt better moving into quarters that were unoccupied during the attack on the station.

The quarters I selected belonged to a Major who had recently been reassigned to Earth before the attack. I thought about changing the sheets and pillowcase, but I was too tired to bother. I figured that if I can sleep on the cold ground or in a sturdy tree, I could tough it out on a set of slightly used sheets.

I was quite tired but sleep did not come easy to me. From time to time I would nod off, but in the twilight of my sleep I could see the faces of the men and women that were stationed here. I could see their faces in life, and in death and even though I do not believe in ghosts, their so-called ghosts were haunting my sleep. I tried hard to think of the vision that I had the last time that I had slept onboard Galora One, but no matter how much I thought of that dream, it just would not come back to me to replace the thoughts and sights of the dead we found aboard this station. For my own peace of mind I felt that I had to get off this station if I wanted to get any quality sleep.