MERCY HOSPITAL STATION – OUTER KUIPER BELT
We knew three things before docking at Mercy Hospital Station.
- The docking and comms systems were offline.
- No one knew what had gone wrong.
- A lot of people were going to die preventable deaths if we didn’t do our jobs.
Rex Alberts, our team lead, was the first to cross the umbilical and force open an airlock into Mercy. Aggie Raine went next, oddly graceful in Zero-G despite their massive frame. And then there was me, Jessamine Clark, at the rear.
I floated over, eyes focused on the sides of the station where silver metal and crimson lettering towered over us, lit by exterior lights. There was nothing obviously wrong with the structure, no leaks or fires; but the windows were all dark. Best case scenario, the station just lost power; worst case scenario, the station was empty, everyone disappeared into the Void.
They made my guts twist around themselves.
“See anything?” Rex asked as I uncoupled the umbilical and slapped the airlock closed.
“Don’t see nothing structurally wrong. But they don’t got the lights on.” I spoke softly as I peeled off the EVA suit over my armor. I knew Aggie and Rex could hear me through the mics. “Not sure anyone is home either,” I added as I shut my gear in a locker.
Beside me, Aggie’s hands trembled as they went through the same motions. I didn’t comfort them, though they might have expected it. They knew what they were signing up for when they joined Charon Defense Force Emergency Response.
No one joined ER if they had another option, or anyone at home. It wasn’t good for business. We were the first responders to any crisis, and the first to die should something go wrong.
But I had faith that Aggie would calm down as soon as we were on the Station proper. He was too young and inexperienced, too caught up in the heroics of the job, to feel the doom that had settled over me.
“Ready?” Rex called to us from the Station entrance. I knew from our hurried briefing that beyond was a series of long hallways leading from the Port to Registration, and the rest of the hospital branched from there.
Passing Rex, I took up my usual position as point.
“Ready,” I confirmed as I did one final check of my suit and rifle. It was snug on my back, easy to draw, easy to fire. I was nervous, more so than usual. Something gave me the creeps.
“R-ready.” Aggie stammered from the rear.
“Mission Log: Mercy Hospital Station went dark at 03:47 on the 17th day of the 13th month of the year 2345. ER Team Octo responding.”
Rex’s voice was calm and collected. I wondered if he felt the same vibes I did. The same wrongness with the Station. If he did, he didn’t vocalize it; that was why he was team lead and I was just a grunt.
“Proceed into the station at your convenience, Clark.”
I hit the override button on the door, an orange light beside it flashed green and the door hissed open to reveal darkness.
I stepped forward, from light to dark, from safety to certain danger, as dim emergency lights flickered above me. They revealed swathes of red splattered across the corridor. Thin rivulets streaked the walls, widening as they met the coagulated slick that spread across the floor.
I sucked a breath through my teeth and proceeded, though the smell that hit me, that coated my tongue and throat, almost made me turn back. Thick copper and sweet rot coalesced into a nauseating miasma that permeated everything, including the masks we wore. It would be infinitely worse without them.
As I tread down the hall, my boots slid through the muck, releasing with wet slaps and hitting with anguished shrieks. Aggie gagged behind me, a rancid hacking that was all the worse for his scratchy mic.
A door came into view, the override already flashing green.
WELCOME TO MERCY STATION
PLEASE PROCEED TO REGISTRATION
The femme voice had a metallic quality that grated on my ears. It wasn’t a real voice, just something cobbled together from recordings and sold to the highest bidder. Artificial Intelligence was all the rage now, and Mercy apparently picked up on the trend.
I wondered why the AI was still online, but didn’t say anything.
“Registration is at the end of this hallway.”
There was no light beyond the open door, so I flicked through my suits commands, turning the flashlight on. “Power seems to be off in the whole station.”
Single file, we walked through the engulfing darkness that was the Registration Hall. Shapes formed on left and right: half walls, waiting booths, gurneys, and…corpses.
“We have casualties,” I called out as I took in the body parts lay scattered across the hall, slick with blood; organs oozed from ripped torsos, smashed beneath some footprint or other heavy object; piles of limbs lay separated from the whole of their former bodies. I stepped around the parts as best I could while remaining on one straight path. I was almost unfazed by the death.
At the far end of the hall the registration desk rose out of the darkness.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MERCY STATION
A HERMES ANDROID IS ON DUTY TO HELP
The desks came into view, their consoles as dark as everything else within the room. But behind them stood a powered-down android, the first I’d ever seen in person.
I sucked in a breath, my heart stuttering, as my eyes roved over the manufactured man.
Pale eyes flashed rhythmically within the faux-human face. Its resemblance to I, or any other Terran, was questionable at best. With translucent skin over a white carapace, the android’s limbs were oddly proportional, in the way that art or design depicted humans.
There was no texture, no rise or fall of the chest, no blinking. Nothing emanated from the thing, save a low-level charge my suit picked up.
A white and gold uniform covered its body, a mockery of the doctor and nurse uniforms worn by the living, breathing workers who lay broken at our feet. Their blood coated our uniforms, while the androids was crisp and clean. Too clean for my tastes.
Rex whistled low. “Haven’t seen one of these before. Looks brand new from Tau Ceti.”
Sweat coated my palms and I wished I could wipe it off. “What do you know about them?”
“They look like us, if you’re lookin’ sideways. Talk like us if we had metal vocal chords.” He stopped and hummed. “They were created to help humanoids, but many people see them as abominations.”
“I can see why.”
I gave it another once over. It was eerie seeing something so human, yet also so inhuman. It claimed too much of my attention, attention that should be on the mission.
“Wait,” I said through gritted teeth.
I stepped away from the Hermes and flicked my motion scanner on. Nothing moved in the room; nothing breathed save the stench rising from viscera and ichor.
I crept from corner to corner, letting my suit scan the room, noting signs above the doors. The tension in me rose as I passed bodies, limbs, ropes of intestines coiled in corners, caked and coagulated blood covering my boots.
Whatever happened on Mercy had been a massacre.
My comrades came into view as I skirted our earlier path. “All clear,” I told them. “I found more bodies, and nothing pinged as alive. There are three doors out of the room that lead to the Wards, Surgery, and Systems. ”
In my helmet’s map I added pins. WARDS in the left wall, SYSTEMS in the right, and SURGERY behind Reception.
I turned to Rex, his face aglow in the dark.
“That checks out,” he replied. “We split up from here. If anything happens, haul ass back to the ship and don’t forget your stims if you get hurt.” His voice sounded strained from the carnage we waded through to get here.
“Aggie, you take Surgery, I’ll take Systems, and Jessa, you get Wards.”
I nodded and turned towards the pin on my map, a door half-open in the far corner of the room.
“Be careful, Jes,” Rex whispered over our private channel. “I have a bad feeling about all of this.”
The channel closed before I could respond. I’d be careful, I always was. Rex always worried about me, but now I knew that the wreck of human life we’d found had him on edge, too.
The entrance to Wards was an elevator lobby with stairs in the right hand wall. I hoofed it up three flights before emerging into another dimly lit hall of horror: gurneys lay overturned, the remains of patients still strapped in and disassembled, while organs lay in neat piles between broken bones and crushed skulls.
I stopped at one gurney with a woman torn in half, the wet remains of her lungs sagging below an exposed ribcage, her skin hung ripped below her breasts. It looked like she’d been torn apart by someone’s hands.
Her legs were nowhere to be found.
“Medical scanner initiate.”
The scanner lines were pale yellow in my helmet as they roved the body. Data appeared and disappeared beside the woman as it finished.
ADULT TERRAN: K. DALY
GENDER IDENTITY: WOMAN
NO VITAL SIGNS DETECTED
LOWER EXTREMITIES REMOVED BY FORCE
PATIENT WENT INTO SHOCK AND BLED OUT
DECEASED
I almost laughed at the absurdity of telling me that she was dead. But the scan provided useful information and now I had an excuse to check in with Rex and Aggie.
I swiped over to the group comms channel. “Jessa checking in.”
“Go ahead Jes,” Rex replied.
“I just ran my medical scan on a body I found and she was ripped apart by force. Which I take to mean that someone did all of this damage.”
Static filled the line for a moment.
“Not just one person; a whole crowd of people on Rush couldn’t take out an entire hospital station.”
Rex was right, of course. But there was a thought nagging at the back of my mind.
“It could be the androids.”
“We have no reason to believe that androids can hurt people.”
Despite Rex’s insistence, I didn’t quite believe him. Or, rather, I didn’t have faith in these machines.
“I haven’t seen any androids besides that one in reception,” Aggie chimed in. Their voice was more chipper than earlier. “There’s no bodies here in Surgery.”
I turned away from the woman and tapped off the medical scan. “None? That’s…unexpected.”
“I’ve seen blood and evidence of a struggle, but there’s neither people nor androids in Systems either.”
I swallowed and looked horror around me. The sheer number of corpses, either whole or in part, were here in the Wards.
“I found all of them.”
“Be careful, Jessa.” Rex had an annoyingly fraternal tone to his voice. The kind that made me feel like a younger sibling, despite being older than him.
“I am always careful, Rex. You two head back to the airlock. I’ll meet you there when I’m done.”
“You sure you don’t want company?”
I grimaced as I stepped around another pile of parts. “Protocol says we clear our areas and then meet up.” I paused for a moment. “But, yes, I’m sure. I’ll check back in when I have more to share.”
I tapped the channel off. They could reach me on our private channels, but I would give them an earful if they did. I needed to finish here, find some sort of evidence for who or what committed this massacre, and then get the fuck out of dodge.
Floors two, three, and four were much the same as the first: bodies and parts in a mess of blood and gore.
But the top floor was different.
I stepped out of the stairwell into a clean hallway; to the right it turned out of sight and to the left it ended at a wall.
I crept down the hall, expecting something around every corner. But with each room and corridor cleared, my anxiety and stress grew as a lump in my guts and reflux in my throat. The only sign of the death below was my bloody footprints.
I stopped and deeply, in through my nose and out of my mouth. And repeated the exercise until my heart rate slowed and my head cleared.
I still had a job to do.
At the end of the hall there was a small annex for staff. It, too, was empty and clean. As if the janitorial staff just swept through and prepared for the next shift.
Still there was no evidence for who or what had committed this heinous crime. “Found nothing. Heading back to the ship.”
“Okay. We’ve done our job, now it’s time for the clean-up crews to get this place back online.”
“See you soon,” I told Rex, then clicked off comms again.
My bloody footprints were even more ominous on my way back towards and down the stairs. They stood out in stark contrast to the white and silver, to the cleanliness within that top floor and the stairwell.
But I was done worrying about Mercy. I hoped the next team would send us their findings, but I wanted to be away from this place as soon as possible.
I hit the lobby and reception in good time, and was once again startled by the sheer violence enacted on the station’s inhabitants.
MAY I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
The voice startled me, and I turned while loosening my rifle across my back. Behind me, at the very edges of my flashlight, a Hermes stood with its now-golden eyes locked onto me.
I AM HERE TO HELP
Every tinny tone of its voice echoed in the room, giving me the impression that there were an infinite number closing in around me.
“I don’t need your help.”
I AM HERE TO HELP
It stepped closer and I clicked my rifle’s safety off. Only a meter separated us now.
“That’s close enough.”
It stared at me unblinking. Unable to blink, unable to emote. It’s mouth didn’t even move when it spoke.
I’ve long since grown accustomed to gruesome death. One must in Emergency Response. But this thing, this false human, rattled me more than all the bodies around me. I decided, against my better judgement, to try my luck getting information out of the thing.
“What happened here?” I gestured at the bodies with the barrel of my rifle.
WE HELPED
The words punched me in the gut, blasted air out of my lungs.
I AM HERE TO HELP
It lunged for me.
I dodged, turned on my heel, and ran. There wasn’t anywhere to hide and I didn’t know what the Hermes was capable of doing. Or what my rifle was capable of doing to it.
I skidded to a halt and turned once I put enough distance between us. I heard its limbs creaking as it approached, saw the glow of its eyes out of the dark. Then I pulled the trigger.
The Hermes staggered but continued forward.
I took a step back and fired again.
But the android didn’t go down.
The third shell stopped the Hermes in its tracks, and I heard a garbled ‘I AM HERE TO HELP’ as it collapsed.
Breathing hard, I opened comms to Rex.
“The fucking androids did it, Rex. We gotta get out of here.”
“Calm down,” came his response. “How do you know the androids did it?”
I kicked the Hermes and, when it didn’t move, knelt beside it. I scrutinized it; there were cracks in the translucent skin at its hands, along the knuckles and unnecessary nails. They were both stained black.
“Because one just admitted to it and then lunged at me.”
“Get back here, now.”
Comms cut off abruptly, but that wasn’t surprising.
I slipped, my boots squelching through gore. Down the hallways I sped, my rifle slapping against my back. My head spun as my lungs pumped faster.
I saw the locker room entrance and picked up my pace. But as I entered, my stomach dropped.
Aggie and Rex had made it here before me, but so had three Hermes androids. And now my friends blood and bones hung from cracked and leaking hands. Parts of the Hermes carapaces were cracked from blasts, but unlike me, Rex and Aggie hadn’t stood a chance.
The spinning in my head increased, threatened to make me sick as the station whorled through my view.
WE ARE HERE TO HELP
All three metallic voices spoke at once, the tinny sound engulfing me within my suit. They stepped forward, dropping bones and viscera now that new prey had appeared.
I fired through my battery, blasts going wide as my aim and sight faltered. When it was empty, I stepped back into the hallway, hoping I could run. But another Hermes waited there.
I couldn’t move, could hardly breathe.
YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A PANIC ATTACK
I fell to my knees as they closed in around me. My heart ran in my chest, my lungs pumped too fast. I was alone, dizzy, and terrified.
YOU MUST REMAIN CALM
I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to see the end. Wouldn’t see how right I was to mistrust machinery masked as man.
Their voices echoed around me once more as I felt something burst through my back.
WE ARE HERE TO HELP
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vesper Doom (she/they) is a queer, autistic author of SFFH. Her writing explores themes of trauma and healing through an autistic lens. She lives in the Greater Washington, DC area with her spouse and cats. When not writing, she enjoys reading, journaling, painting, and inviting forgotten gods for coffee.
You can find out more at: vesperdoom.carrd.co
She is the originator and curator for ASTROPHOBIA.