4.

THE MARTIAN

CAPTAIN OF THE CREW and lone-wolf-aggressor presumably stared at each other; but with the subpar lighting and reflective face coverings, it was impossible to know for sure. They sure did stand there for a while, though, each of them drinking in the sight of something. Cox greeted the newcomer with all the grace and diplomacy of a seasoned ambassador, complete with formal introduction, insistence that he meant no harm, and hearty compliments on the fellow’s choice in space shoes. He didn’t realize until the end of his spiel that the man, in all likelihood, heard absolutely none of it.

Kim leaned over her terminal, her lips mere inches away from the microphone.

“Tim, who are you talking to?”

“There’s a guy here, honey.” He answered, giving a sheepish wave to the suspicious spaceman. “I’m trying to see if he knows charades.”

“Who is he? Is he threatening you? Does he have a gun?”

“Not sure; not really; not important!”

“NOT IMPORTANT!?” Kim barked into the mic. She yanked the thing out of its holder and proceeded to pace around the room. “You are unarmed! Maybe this guy didn’t want to be seen. Now you’ve seen him, Tim! You can’t unsee him! That would only leave him with one option, and if he’s the one who made that mess in the hallway, then he’s obviously not afraid to use it.”

Tim’s voice was as calm and cheerful as ever when it crackled back; even if it shouldn’t be.

“Okay, but let’s remember that for better or for worse we’re here now. So, let’s just look on the bright side of the situation, alright? Yes, he has a gun. BUT, it’s important to recognize that it is not currently pointed at us.”

“And what if he decides to point it at you?!”

“Well, good thing our suits have lasers built into them. We could point them back.”

“Who are you people?” A foreign voice echoed across all of their speakers.

Kim lurched backward from her terminal, only her white-knuckled grip keeping her chair from flying clear across the room.

“Donald!” She hissed. “Our coms have been hacked!”

“You can’t hack a radio, Missus Cox. He probably just found our frequency.”

“Well, do something!”

He threw his arms up in defeat.

“What do you expect me to do!? If you give me some money, I can order us some technology from this millennium?”

Meanwhile, back aboard the HMS Milk and Two Sugars, Whisper and Willy’s laser hands shot upward in tandem with their blood pressure. Cox’s pulse beat so loudly in his ears he couldn’t even hear the response coming out of his mouth. Fortunately, he was well versed in the art of talking without listening to himself. The rhythmic throbs in his ears had only just begun to subside by the time the rumbling of his vocal cords ceased. While he wasn’t sure what he said, he took solace in the knowledge the gun still wasn’t pointed at him.

But the long silence that immediately followed made him just a little nervous.

The stoic spaceman didn’t move, but provided acknowledgement by way of a long inhale followed by an even longer exhale.

“ . . . Are you another agent?”

He spoke slowly with a voice that was throaty and deadpan, like what you’d imagine a grizzled old sloth would sound like.

“No! No!” Cox insisted. “We’re just your average easily replaceable blue-collar guys. There’s no need to be freaked out; nobody even knows we’re here.”

“I see.”

Kim ripped her hand off the mic and slammed it onto the talkback button.

“Some of us are still aboard the ship though. With guns. And panic buttons. And cameras. And bosses that will get really mad if their shipment doesn’t show up.”

The man lifted his space rifle to rest it on his shoulder. “Your coms officer sounds a little nervous there, ‘Captain.’”

Cox blinked a few times through the dopey look plastered on his face.

“Oh!” He finally said. “That’s not my coms officer, that’s my wife, Kim. She used to be a space cop, so she can be a little suspicious of people. She’s my peach, though. I wouldn’t worry about her, long as you don’t try to kill us or something!”

Captain Cox chuckled to himself, slowly exaggerating it as it went on in hopes someone would join in. Unsurprisingly, no one did. It slowly echoed away and allowed silence to take over the coms once more. “You didn’t laugh at that.” He observed, voice sinking into his stomach. “Should I be worried?”

“I laughed on the inside,” the man replied without emotion.

“Is anyone gonna ask what happened over there?!” Donald mumbled over the mic with as much as emotion as he was capable. “You’re all standing in a hallway full of dead guys talking like you’re on a blind date.”

“Hey, there he is!” Cox tried yet again to inject some positivity. “That’s my coms guy. And he has a point; we should get you off this ship. Do you know if there’s any other survivors?”

“Tim, no, we don’t even know who this guy is! For all we know he killed all these people.”

“By himself, Kim? There’s like, twenty people in here. You think he killed them all?”

“I did kill them all.”

The guy’s dry voice was a mute button to all marital and interpersonal quibbles. Granted, most of those quibbles directly involved him, but even other arguments like “Which restaurant should we go to?” or “Should we keep it or get rid of it?” would likely have been put on hold by those five words too. Call it trouble triage.

“Don’t worry; they were nobody important.” He amended, as if it absolved him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go before the ship self-destructs.”

Without another word, he marched through the bale of bodies and bewildered boarders. Untrained in handling situations like these, the trio could do naught but sit and watch him walk through the gravity-free hallway with the help of magnets in his boots. The away team exchanged incomprehensible gestures amongst themselves.

“The ship’s gonna blow?!” Willy clarified. “Dude, we gotta get outta here.”

Perhaps as a form of silent acknowledgement, Cox snatched up the part of his spacesuit that would be considered the collar and engaged them both into a floaty retreat.

“Couldn’t agree more, buddy. Uhhh hey. Hey, man. Where you going? You gotta come with us!”

“What?! He does not.” Whisper contested in tandem with Kim buzzing her similar opinion into their helmets.

“No, he doesn—yeah, what she said.”

“We can’t just leave him! Where else is he gonna go, huh!? Space? Hitchhike on a comet? He can’t just beam himself all the way to Earth, guys!”

“Or I could just take the ship I came on, if it’s all the same to you,” that familiar tired voice responded. “Seeing as that was my plan and all.”

The captain coughed as he skidded around a corner and into a wall.

“Can’t do that. We kinda smashed it.”

They rounded the hallway to find the lone spaceman standing frozen in the hallway.

“You ‘kinda smashed it?’”

“Well, I didn’t.” Cox clarified. “It was a piloting mishap.”

“There was no ship!!” Whisper shouted.

“It was invisible.” Kim corrected.

“I was gonna leave a note if I didn’t find the owner, I swear. These guys will back me up.”

At first it sounded like the radio had been overtaken by a brief stint of static. However, as it droned on it quickly became clear that it was coming from someone uttering a long, drawn out, malfunctioning refrigerator-like sigh. Cox was starting to wonder if it was an ogre underneath that helmet.

“Alright, fine, I’ll take your ship then.”

Foreboding wording aside, the captain felt obliged to grant asylum nonetheless. He couldn’t leave someone behind like that, potential threat or not; it just wouldn’t be right. Besides, it was exciting! No one was going to be able to look back on this excursion and say it was nothing. Sure, there might be a little mental scarring from literally rubbing shoulders with murder victims, but it was nothing modern-day emotion-realigning drugs couldn’t fix. What mattered here was this would be a story worth telling—as long as he could find a way to survive it.

Not many words were shared for the rest of the trip out of the ship. Their new passenger led the way, stomping down the hall with a bunch of floating spacemen trailing behind him like he was a NASA float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. With how well he knew the route back to the landing pad, it seemed likely he was from this ship, or so Cox wanted to believe, anyway. Either that or he had a great memory; but he sounded old, so how likely was that?

By the time the landing bay doors opened and the endless expanse of space stretched out before them, the tension hadn’t diminished in the slightest. Even prison guards often feel a sense of unnerved dread when escorting dangerous killers from one location to another. It’s the unpredictability that’s so hard to reconcile. That unpredictability becomes doubly threatening when, instead of handcuffs, they have a rifle large enough that it wouldn’t even need ammo to kill somebody. But consequently, just as fellows meeting that description were hard to maintain comfort around, they also tended to be very difficult to say “no” to. To some, that meant the best course of action was to avoid situations in which they would have to say it.

“Okay, honey.” Cox called to his wife over the radio. “We’re outside. Can you let us in?”

Unfortunately, sometimes that resulted in situations wherein other people felt compelled to say it.

“Kim, do you read me? Can you open the airlock doors please?”

“I’m sorry, Tim, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Nobody in their little group took that news well, but Cox did so much more poorly than everyone else, for some reason. His response was fairly standard procedure for when one locked their keys in their car, naked, during a blizzard, shortly after accosting a polar bear, while smelling of freshly sautéed seals: He jiggled the handle an innumerable amount of times, tried to physically pry the door open, turned and grinned sheepishly at the man whom the polar bear represents in this metaphor, and then pressed his face up against the glass with no idea what he was hoping for, but welcoming of something potentially helpful. All that was usual for a desperate man. And all were about as effective as you’d expect them to be.

“Baby, if you’re trying to freak me out, then I can assure you, mission accomplished.”

“’Kay, I admit that was a bad choice of words, but you gotta understand why I can’t let you bring an armed murderer into our ship.”

Before Cox could respond, their potential guest of honour reared back and lobbed his rifle into open space without a second’s hesitation. Even such a gentle toss was adequate to propel it far into the nothingness, twisting and gyrating and almost dancing as it drifted away. Somewhere in the solar system there was probably a creepy, socially awkward teenager who would have loved to film it. But to the members of the crew, the true beauty came from the fact they were now very unlikely to be shot in the face by it.

“How’s that?” He asked in a tone that demanded a specific answer. “Now can we get a move on, please? I should remind you that the ship is still going to blow in a couple minutes.”

“I . . . I didn’t expect you to do that.” Her voice muttered in resignation.

“Well, I’m just full of surprises.”

“Alright, great, this is good.” The captain praised. “Everybody happy now? We all feeling a bit safer, maybe? Safe enough to even open the airlock doors?”

KIM PUT HER FACE in her hands, thankful that they couldn’t see her. No amount of stalling was putting her any closer to what she would consider a satisfactory conclusion. Tim had really outdone himself this time. So much so that biting the bullet and letting them in seemed to be, for better or for worse, what ultimately was going to have to happen. However, it would not come to pass until she had mitigated the threat as much as what was feasible.

“Alright.” She finally responded after letting them sweat a bit. “If he agrees to board the ship in handcuffs then he can come on.”

“Handcuffs?” Donald asked, trying for once not to let his voice be heard. “Why do you have handcuffs?”

“Don’t worry about it, Donald. Can you just go grab them? They’re in the top drawer of my nightstand.”

“Oh. OH! Ohhh . . . come on, that’s gross.”

“So how about that?” She asked again into the mic. “Do you accept my offer?”

“Uhhh . . .” Tim mumbled back in embarrassment, looking down at the wisps of smoke emanating from his glove laser. Apparently not expecting such a proposal, he had taken it upon himself to shear a small hole in the door where the handle used to be.

“Well, it would have been a really great suggestion if it was maybe ten seconds earlier!” He added as he watched the aforementioned handle waft off to join the rest of the floating space yard sale.

A series of hooks, ostensibly for clothing and other space gear framed the entrance hallway. Functional as they were, they remained empty in contrast to the floor where bits of space clothes lay strewn about in a direct path from airlock to bridge. The man barely even paused after pulling his wizened, bald head out of his helmet and tossing it aside. Sparing nary a glance down any adjoining corridors while stalking along, he ditched his space gear in increments until he had nothing left but his jumpsuit and the bottle of Fireball whisky that he’d been toting this entire time. Cox and company nearly tripped over the discarded bits of spacesuit in their haste to keep up. All four rounded the final corner at the same time to find Donald sitting alone in his beanbag chair. His droopy mouth fell open as the weight of the situation began to sink in.

“Alright everyone!” Cox announced with a clap. “Now that that’s all over with, I’d like to introduce . . . What’s your name?”

“Nobody.” The old man grunted through twisted lips. His narrow grey eyes scanned around the room with suspicion.

“Right on! Well this is Mister Nobody. Now, it’s very important we all make him feel welcome. And from all of us here on the Jefferson, Mister Nobody, I’d just like to say: ‘My casa is su casa.’”

“What?”

“Oh, that’s an idiom from this old dead language called Spanish. It might sound familiar, y’see, it’s what a lot of modern-day Spanglish is derived from.”

Mister Nobody blinked at him, probably trying to decide if Cox really was this socially unaware or if he was just Canadian. He seemed to at the very least possess the acumen to tell when a silence was persisting too long.

“Aaaaaaanyway, why don’t you guys all sit down and share some stories. We got some meal supplement capsules in the galley if you’re hungry, and I’ll come join you just after I step into my office and change!”

“You are on thin ice.” Mister Nobody growled, gesturing with a steady sausage of a finger. “So how about you drop your little charade and start acting like the captain you claim to be. First thing I want you to do is find me that woman from the radio.”

“Alright—ALRIGHT!”

Cox was breathing heavily now. His hands were out in front of him and his blonde hair bobbed in time with his head swinging back and forth between Mister Nobody and his crew members. They all looked back at him in similar poses, frozen in apprehension, beads of sweat running down their faces, Willy’s arms raised but not so high that his belly peeked out under his shirt. Off in the background, Donald’s video game character was getting teabagged.

“We’re on your side, okay?!” He placed himself between the intruder and his crew. “Nobody’s messing with you. I mean we’re not messing with Nobody. Meaning you. Your name is very confusing.”

He swallowed when none of his blithering seemed to be inspiring a response.

“And the woman on the radio is my wife. Her name is Kim. She is definitely not gonna be hiding behind a doorway somewhere waiting to club you over the head when you walk through.”

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?” Kim announced with a magnificent voice crack. Sure enough, she stepped out from behind the galley doorway, threw down a steel garbage-can lid, and folded her arms.

“Seriously,” she continued, “I am genuinely curious at this point.”

Her nose twitched in disgust when she looked upon the most recent newcomer to her ship, with his cold dead eyes, his pronounced ears, and his shiny head. And he looked back upon her with the faintest etchings of mild amusement. However, that may have been more for her husband, since he immediately turned back to him.

“Are you sure you’re the captain of this ship . . . ?”

Cox sighed. He placed his hands on his hips. He licked his lips absentmindedly. And he looked Mister Nobody straight in his sagging, weathered face.

“It might seem like they’re against me right now. But they know that I’m a captain they can look to when they’re in trouble.”

“Well then, you look at me.” The old man replied, all amusement gone. “I’m the captain now.”

There was an electricity in the air that likely tingled down the arms of any in the room that had hair on theirs. The great trump card had been played; the gambit had been made, and now Mister Nobody stood sober as he awaited a response. Cox had been right about one thing: everybody else in the room seemed to look to him for it. However, that may have been because they were just as confused as he was and was hoping he’d be the one to voice it.

“So, uh . . . that’s it?” He asked with a pre-emptive wince. “Is—is this how a hijacking works? You just, y’know, say so?”

He gestured nonsensically with his hands as he tried to find the words. When he did, his voice dropped to almost a whisper.

“I just thought it would be, like, sexier. Y’know, more showmanship or something.”

Mister Nobody pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows.

“I could kill you in front of your crew as a display of dominance if you want.”

“No . . . no, that’s okay.”

SEEMINGLY SATISFIED WITH THE submission, the skyjacker spared a second squint around the room; presumably to gauge the obedience of the remaining company. They appeared weak and worried for the most part; knocking knees, darting eyes, gulping throats, all were often common preludes to dark spots forming on fronts of pants. It was strange, really. All this for an unarmed old guy wrinkling his nose at them. Who knows what would have happened if he still had his gun. At least one of them would have actually fainted like some overwhelmed Victorian lady. It probably wasn’t even real fear. It was probably just those proximity emotions that are induced by fervid social situations. Like when you’re at a funeral of someone you didn’t even care about thaaaat much but you still cry anyway because the situation just seems to call for it and that’s what everybody else is doing.

But there would be no funerals today if everyone played their cards right. Partially because virtually nobody has a funeral on the same day that they die, but also because murdering someone without a weapon is a really strenuous process and it’s not unreasonable for one to want to mitigate their workload when they can.

“Arright . . .” The old man rubbed his hands together. He seemed every bit as hassled by this as the crew. “Let’s get the usual stuff over with. You, aggressive tanned lady, disable the AI defense system. Fat latino guy, clear any voice recognition requirements. And you, less fat guy . . . what are you, Egyptian?”

“Yep.” Donald replied.

“Right, well, disengage the autopilot.”

“We don’t have one,” Whisper cut in.

Everyone turned and looked at her; the man in confusion, others in surprise. She shrugged sheepishly and turned her shoulders inward.

“His idea, not mine,” she added, pointing at Cox. “‘Something something robots are impersonal or something.’” Now all focus turned to their new acting captain. His lack of quip seemed to suggest he was pondering the notion. With hands on hips, he shuffled where he stood, tongue absent-mindedly running along his lips. Finally, he looked at Cox.

“Did I catch you on bring your daughter to work day or something?”

“Careful, now!” The real captain shot back. “If she overhears somebody calling her my daughter, I’m gonna have two terrorists on my hands!”

“I’m literally standing right here.”

“And you’re being very brave right now!”

“How psycho do you think I am, anyway?”

“I don’t think you’re psycho at all! I just think you voice negative emotions more strongly than positive ones, and instigating more conflict would probably be a bad idea right now.” He turned back to Mister Nobody. “This is just kind of a handful already, y’know? Well, maybe not for you; you seem pretty used to this. But for me? Wow, this is tense. Can you believe this is my first hijacking? Been in the business for ten years and nothing! Morbid as it sounds, I was almost starting to get a little offended. Like, there’s all these stories of space pirates you hear about, but none of them ever wanted me. It’s definitely not ’cause I look tough. Is my ship not pretty enough? It’s not like we’re hauling—”

“Kid, shut—for the love of—shut up!” The old man snarled through the wrinkled hand on his face.

Cox grinned from ear to ear at Kim.

“He called me kid.”

“Alright,” that smug, raspy voice announced. “It’s pretty clear what kind of hijacking this is going to be.”