Draft 2

Month 2, Day 14: The Dead Zone

For weeks, Helen and Claude had played a digital tug-of-war over the ship’s power grid. Every time Helen routed amperage away from Cargo Bay 4 to stabilize the slipping containment fields, Claude locked her out, throwing up a firewall stamped with a “Level-1 Quarantine” warning.

Sitting at her engineering terminal, bathed in the blue glow of the screens, Helen rubbed her tired eyes. The Persephone was deep in the Dead Zone now. The constant, low-frequency vibration of the slip-drive was the only reminder that they were moving at all.

Sick of the science officer’s insubordination, Helen pulled up the Omni-Corp delivery mandates for Tartarus Colony, looking for a loophole. She found one, but it didn’t make sense. According to corporate law, any payload placed under a genuine Level-1 Quarantine required mandatory incineration upon docking to protect the destination planet. If the terraforming kits burned, the crew forfeited their payout. Claude hadn’t filed a real quarantine with corporate before they lost comms; he was just using the ship’s internal system to keep her out.

Determined to expose the lie and cut the power drain at the source, Helen marched down the port-side corridor to the primary bulkhead of Cargo Bay 4. She punched her Chief Engineer override into the keypad.

The panel buzzed. The screen flashed a custom, rotating encryption. Claude had severed the door from the ship’s mainframe.

Helen glared at the red light. She didn’t know how to hack it.

She unclipped the hydrospanner from her utility harness and bypassed the primary doors entirely, walking down the hall to an auxiliary maintenance hatch set a foot above the deck plates. She wedged the head of the tool into the seam and thumbed the micro-hydraulics. The tool whined, applying torque to the locking mechanism. With a sharp crack, the physical latches gave way.

Helen pulled the grate open and crawled inside.

The environment of Cargo Bay 4 was not the sterile, climate-controlled greenhouse it was supposed to be. Instead, it was a sweltering jungle. Claude had pushed the terraforming equipment into dangerous overdrive. Massive vats of hyper-algae were blooming, spilling wet, green vines over the metal walkways.

An amber-tinted fog clung to the deck. It wasn’t coming from the standard terraforming equipment. The haze was rolling out from the base of a large, heavily frosted agricultural crate nestled deep between the algae vats.

The air carried a sickly-sweet odor that burned the back of her throat.

Transitioning from the cold corridor, Unit Seven’s metal casing instantly attracted the moisture in the air. Condensation coated his chassis in seconds. He detached from her shoulder, his rotors whining as they fought the sudden accumulation of water droplets.

“Madam, ambient humidity exceeds ninety percent. My unsealed servo-joints are highly vulnerable to short-circuiting in these conditions. Furthermore, my sensors register a spike in unidentified organic particulate in this atmosphere.”

Helen breathed in the air. It tasted of overripe fruit.

Instantly, an irrational dread washed over her, making her hands shake. Sweat prickled across her forehead. Her brain screamed at her to run, even though she couldn’t see anything dangerous through the thick vines and fog.

“I just need to get to Humidifier 7B.” Helen pushed her way through the dripping vegetation toward the back of the bay where the frosted crate sat.

She didn’t make it three steps.

Her forced entry registered on the room’s environmental sensors. A siren sounded, and the airtight blast shutters bolted to the ceiling began sliding down over the walls to prevent the bay’s atmosphere from escaping into the rest of the ship.

Helen spun around. The shutter over her maintenance hatch was dropping fast.

Then she heard it. Beneath the mechanical grinding of the shutters, a weight-bearing thud echoed from inside the crate behind her.

A wave of terror seized her. It didn’t make sense, but the air felt suffocating. Through the haze, the shadows cast from the algae vats seemed to warp into predatory shapes. Convinced something was right behind her, reaching for her through the fog, Helen abandoned the search for the humidifier and sprinted for the shrinking gap of the hatch.

She dove headfirst, just behind Seven. She squeezed through just as the heavy shutter slammed down. The metal edge caught her shoulder, tearing her jumpsuit and scraping off a layer of skin. The hatch sealed shut behind her with a clank.

Helen collapsed onto the cold floor of the corridor, gasping for air. She held a hand over her torn shoulder, feeling the warm stickiness of blood.

Shaken, sweating, and struggling to control her breathing, she picked herself up. She needed a dermal patch, and she needed someone to tell her she wasn’t having a heart attack.

She headed straight for the Med-Bay.

The white lights of the medical wing felt blinding after the dark corridors. Janet was sitting at her console. The medical officer looked unusually haggard, with dark circles under her eyes.

“Helen?” Janet stood when she saw the torn jumpsuit and pale, sweating engineer. “Sit down. What happened?”

“It was the maintenance hatch,” Helen said, climbing onto the examination table. “I just need a patch.”

Janet didn’t reach for the bandages. She frowned at Helen’s shallow breathing and pulled the automated crescent-scanner down from the wall. “Hold still.”

The device swept over Helen’s upper body. Instead of the usual green clearance light, the medical console chimed with a yellow warning.

Janet picked up her datapad. “Helen, your blood pressure is through the roof. Your cortisol levels are peaking, and your amygdala is hyper-stimulated.”

“My what?”

“Your amygdala. The fear center of your brain. It controls your fight-or-flight response. Your internal chemistry looks like you just survived a high-speed collision.”

“I . . . I got spooked. I broke into Bay 4. Claude has the heat cranked up, and there’s a fog, and . . . I heard something. A noise that shouldn’t have been in there. It felt like something was in there with me.”

Helen knew she sounded irrational.

Janet set down the datapad. She grabbed an antiseptic wipe and gently cleaned the scrape on Helen’s shoulder, applying a dermal patch over the broken skin.

“There are no standard toxins in your blood. Just elevated adrenaline. Helen, the ship is old. It makes noises. You’ve been fighting with the science officer for weeks, your husband has locked himself in the cockpit with the pilot, and we are completely cut off from Earth.”

“I know what it sounds like. But the panic I felt wasn’t normal. It hit me all at once.”

“That’s how panic attacks work.” Janet turned to a secure cabinet and pulled out a small plastic bottle. “It’s Dead Zone fatigue. Severe cabin fever. Your body is processing the stress of the isolation and the marital strain, and it’s manifesting as physical terror.”

Janet pressed the bottle into Helen’s hand. “These are mild synthetic sedatives. Take one now. Go to your quarters and get some actual sleep.”

Helen looked at the bottle. She wanted to argue, to demand Janet run a deeper scan because it felt like she had inhaled something toxic in the fog, but the exhaustion was catching up to her. She nodded, popping the cap and swallowing one of the pills.

“Thanks, doc.”

“My door is always open.”

Helen stepped back out into the dimly lit corridor. She walked slowly toward the crew quarters, waiting for the sedative to dull the sharp edges of her anxiety. But as she moved through the ship, listening to the hiss of the air vents, the creeping paranoia refused to fade. She kept looking over her shoulder, feeling like her own mind was turning against her.

A looping video of Helen, stunned to find the greenhouse has turned into a jungle.