Normally, business at the Elizabeta Pub on a Sunday afternoon is spotty. Too far away from the chartered and cruise ship levels on Ochoa Star Port to receive an influx of arriving and departing passengers, too deep in the recesses of one of the commercial decks to attract an exclusive crowd, the Elizabeta appeals to the crews of working ships, or to the locals who need a drink before heading to the residential wing of the port.
The Elizabeta is small and dark, with low ceilings and no pretense at grandeur. Unlike most pubs on the Ochoa Star Port that lack a view, the Elizabeta doesn’t try to recreate one. The walls are brownish black, mostly, although a large oval on the back wall is a rather sickly gray. The wall’s surface leading down the narrow corridor to the restroom is peeling; long strips of material, curling like bits of shaved chocolate, hang at eye level, promising more damage as time progresses.
The area doesn’t smell like chocolate, though; the environmental system there malfunctions enough that the regulars don’t even notice—except one or two who took it upon themselves to routinely report the problem to the pub’s owner Beta Linde, usually in stark and humorous terms:
The walls farted again, Beta.
or
For the sake of all that’s sane, Beta, what’ll it take for you to get rid of the smell of poo?
Beta Linde is immune to it all—the peeling walls, the gray patch, the bathroom stench. She’s a second-generation pub owner, and likes to joke that she was raised on the rails beneath the bar, and learned how to mix a drink before she could walk.
Not that she mixes many drinks. The clientele of the Elizabeta drinks the alcohol made locally, everything from strong ales to equally strong (or stronger) whisky. No fruit juices are added to get rid of the bitter alcoholic bite that every type of alcohol brewed (or curated) on the port seems to have.
Some of the other bars specialize in exotic drinks, mixing the local alcohol with coffees or something caffeinated. And a handful of the bars, closer to the tourist decks, serve imported alcohol, which is usually smoother and easier to drink.
But the clientele of the Elizabeta doesn’t need help drinking, and it doesn’t seem like they’re in the pub to cater to any refined taste. They’re in the pub for camaraderie and, let’s face it, to get drunk in a safe space where no one will take advantage of them.
Beta is a big woman, more muscle than fat, and often gets mistaken for a man when her back is turned. In the decades she’s run the pub, her hair has gone from black to grayish black, just like the walls. Her skin has a leathery quality that is reminiscent of the whisky she serves. Amber in good light, muddy brown in bad.
She took over the pub from her parents when she was just twenty-five. Her parents decided to travel after years of listening to others talk about faraway places. Beta hasn’t heard from her parents since. If anyone dares ask her about them, she shrugs and says she assumes they’re dead.
Beta is the one who built the business, one customer at a time.
She did so by chucking out the tourists and letting the locals have a private space, one where they can discuss anything.
They often do. They’re in each other’s business, even though they pretend not to be. And Beta knows more about her regulars than she’s willing to admit.
Or than she was willing to admit, before the loss of the Gabriella.
That final Sunday—July 15, 0099, by the Old Spacer’s calendar, Midsummer 15 495, by Ciudad Orilla’s calendar, and you know, that day before the Gabriella left by the pub’s calendar—the Elizabeta has a distracted air.
Beta claims all days prelaunch are like that. Families hanging around the edges, crews preoccupied, and drinks flowing. Perhaps so, but some locals claimed this was worse.
The Elizabeta does not keep security footage—then or now—and the pub itself is a camera-free zone, so there are no recordings of the interior. The lack of visual documentation frustrates the legal system and makes Beta’s private (but illegal) security possible.
So what follows here is this: direct quotes come from interviews with me, paraphrased dialogue recounted from memory appears as italics, and the rest (usually a consensus opinion) appears as part of the narrative. These minute (but important) distinctions are one of the many reasons I have chosen to tell this story in writing, rather than in the other media available to me.
That afternoon, every member of the Gabriella’s crew walks through the Elizabeta. Some stop to drink. Others pay their tab in person, a spacer way of saying goodbye without the bad luck of speaking the words.
In the corner, near the stench and the gray patch, Corey Burfet and Belinda Pete huddle over ale and chips, arguing about money. He’s a thin, small man, barely five-five and underweight, not intimidated by zero-g or by malfunctioning equipment. She’s a large redhead, with tired eyes, and appears, to outsiders, to be the stronger of the two.
“He wanted to stay,” Belinda says about that conversation. “He didn’t like the idea of exploring the crater. But the job paid ten times more than usual, with half up front. I was the one who pushed him to go. I actually said you’ve been in tough situations before, and survived. What makes this one so different?”
He looks at her, lips thin, frown on his forehead. She has the sense he wants to argue with her, but doesn’t. Spacers like Corey aren’t the most articulate people. He worked alone in ship maintenance, babying the equipment that should repair itself but never really does.
Belinda’s right; he has survived awful situations, and mostly they’ve become the stuff of self-indulgent legends: the time he rebooted an entire environmental system on a cargo ship at the very last minute; the time he shared a tank of oxygen with a co-worker he hated to keep them both alive; the time the gravity in his boots failed, and he spiraled into space, only to have a crewmember literally throw him a lifeline.
But the one Belinda is thinking of, the one she and Corey have only discussed once, is one he rarely talks about.
Corey was a junior midshipman on a cargo ship heading to the outer reaches of the sector, remote areas known only in stories of a lost civilization. The Desert Bloom had picked up 17-gallon drums of something—Corey never said what that something was (if he knew) and my research never turned it up either—and that something got stored in the smaller cargo bay below the bridge.
That was a flaw in The Desert Bloom’s design, albeit not an uncommon one. Regulation for cargo ships is spotty. Most of the regulation dealing with cargo ships concerns their cargo, not their design, unlike commercial ships and passenger vehicles, where safety of the inhabitants is as is important as an efficient use of internal space.
The cargo in that ship was most likely unregulated. Belinda does not know, and neither do the transport authorities, who have incomplete records of the incident.
Belinda knows only what Corey told her: that he nearly died on that trip, and he had the scars to prove it.
The incomplete records tell a similar story. Two days after picking up those 17-gallon drums of something, The Desert Bloom suffered a series of rolling explosions. The first happened in the center of that cargo bay, right in the middle of all the 17-gallon drums.
Corey was three cargo bays over, moving equipment and supplies out of the way to make room for the next cargo pickup. The Desert Bloom rocked in a way that never happened on ships—at least in his experience.
His cargo bay was doubly reinforced since The Desert Bloom occasionally trafficked in weapons. Corey never worked on those runs because they scared him. The Desert Bloom usually kept the weapons systems on the exterior bays, so they could be easily jettisoned if someone detected a problem.
Because of the double reinforcement, Corey didn’t hear the first explosion or the second or the third. Only when The Desert Bloom rocked yet again, and the warning sirens flared, along with the automated announcement for all crew members to don environmental suits did he know something was very, very wrong.
Corey already had his suit on, as did two other crew members working beside him. They had been instructed to illegally dump any materials that either hadn’t sold from previous runs or hadn’t been unloaded, so they were already handling materials that could be dangerous.
The rumbling of the next rolling explosion reached them, along with black smoke coming out of the environmental system into the cargo bay. Then The Desert Bloom’s environmental system abruptly shut off.
Corey felt an unnatural calm. He told investigators that calm saved him and the two crew members he was working with. He instructed them to activate the only escape pod inside that cargo bay as he opened the bay door.
The two crew members climbed into the pod. He was heading toward them when the walls around him exploded.
The explosion was so severe it shredded the back of his suit, injuring him. He could still move, and he pushed himself to the pod, barely catching it. The two crew members pulled him inside, sealed it, and set it to flee The Desert Bloom as quickly as possible.
The dry details sound orderly, but Belinda says what really happened was not. Corey would scream Let me in, you bastards! in his sleep and once, she says, he shouted, I know how to destroy this thing’s alert beacon. No one will find you! When he woke after that, she didn’t tell him what he said, but did get him to confirm that he had been having a nightmare about the destruction of The Desert Bloom.
The three people in that pod were the only survivors of The Desert Bloom. The ship’s destruction, recorded by nearly a dozen ships in the area, show explosion after explosion, finally igniting something on the outer edge of the ship, and engulfing it all in white light, before it broke apart, sending bits of itself all over the cargo route.
The pod got picked up within the hour by another cargo ship, which immediately took Corey to the nearest star base, where he underwent medical treatment for his injuries.
The scars were deep, but he couldn’t afford to have them removed. The nightmares were deeper and, Belinda says, often caused him to lash out in his sleep.
Corey wanted nothing more than to stop working on spaceships. He’d moved from cargo vessels to maintenance vessels to exploration ships. He thought exploration was the safest job he could find, but he learned it was dangerous in a completely different way.
His instincts told him to avoid the Gabriella. His finances told him to take the work.
His finances won, to Belinda’s eternal regret.
She blames herself for his death, saying he would be alive now if he hadn’t listened to her.
But Beta tells a different story. Beta knew Corey longer than Belinda did, and Beta says that Corey had this discussion before every mission.
“He wanted to get land-based work, or so he said.” Beta shrugged as she recounted this. “But he never looked for any land-based jobs, and when he had money, he spent it. He didn’t use it to pay for retraining or to move somewhere on Ius Prime. He was all talk. He knew the money was in space, not on land. And he couldn’t really figure out a way around that.”