The Terminal
Flash fiction, 700 words. For IAM's prompt, "The Station." Thought this would be Christmas-themed? Wrong! It's space parasites, baby.
The Terminal’s blue gingerbread façade loomed over the snow-crunchy street with forced cheerfulness. Like a mother hen guarding her chicks, it spread its shadowy wings over the market day in the plaza, but it did not join in the fun. Shoppers avoided the entrance.
Samantha Salles didn’t have that luxury. Her uniform marked her as a coroner; her grim expression marked her as a busy one. The Terminal she entered was the planet’s only outbound station. And since the living weren’t permitted to leave, it only served the dead.
The cause was Poseidon. The planet was a tiny water world. But it was dense and thus had a fine gravity. Its water table was high and its land silty and fertile. But a high water table and land value at a premium meant no space for graves. Poseidon was also a frontier planet and thus the need for graves was high.
The solution? Space for graves. Or rather, graves in space.
Her job was to examine the bodies lined up in the Terminal and follow the checklist:
1. Is he dead?
2. Is it obvious how he died?
3. Was it natural?
4. Was it self-inflicted?
5. Was it homicide?
Samantha determined what she could with a cursory check of the bodies. There were few salts or preservatives on Poseidon, planet of fresh water and bountiful precipitation. The climate was humid in the summer and just cold enough for snow in the short winter. Bodies didn’t last long. Any and all conclusions except No. 5 meant a quick trip into space. No. 5 meant the same, just with more paperwork. Since people came to Poseidon at their own risk and no one wanted to pay the taxes for a proper police department, homicides went counted but unsolved.
Twenty white-shrouded corpses waited in a patient line for her arrival. She examined them with care, recognizing two. She knew most people on Poseidon, it was a small planet physically and socially. A lot of convicts released from Vesta came here to start over as farmhands – or try to. Vesta’s reformatory was notorious, but the lesson didn’t always stick.
Well, the governor wouldn’t be able to blame convicts for this score. Three had drowned, a common unmalicious hazard; two had starved, malicious on the part of society but not illegal.
The rest had succumbed to the Slow Gangrene, caused by native parasitic worms good at burrowing into living flesh undetected.
The parasites were impossible to kill without also killing the host. An infection in a limb meant a simultaneous infection the blood. The slow-gestating eggs deposited in this state were toxic and necrotizing, and were immune to all medical intervention, including radiation. The emerging adults could be killed, but by then it was too late for the host.
Samantha took out her special pen and marked a big “X” on the foot-side of the shrouds. They were good to go. A ship – the only one allowed to leave Poseidon – would load them and then disembark them beyond the gravitational well, leaving them to float forever in a vacuum, drifting nowhere or slowly, so slowly, toward Poseidon’s bright young star.
No one left Poseidon. Supply ship crews weren’t even allowed shore leave. The reason was the same as had killed the fifteen, and it would probably land Samantha her own space-bound berth eventually. Thirty years ago, the Slow Gangrene worms had been secret passengers on a ship in Poseidon’s early days. They had made it too four different planets and quickly spread into the water, killing – slowly – every living thing they encountered.
People said Vesta was a one-way trip. But Poseidon truly was, for everyone. Samantha’s parents had settled here before the Slow Gangrene was known. Locals had since composed a satirical advertisement for newcomers:
Go to Po where the water is fresh,
It’ll only take your flesh
People come when they have nowhere else to go
And the Slow Gangrene is slow.
It was just as well that her job as coroner meant frequent trips to the Terminal but little else. It gave Samantha time – it gave everyone time – to plot how to kill the parasites. In theory, the solution was simple: The worms, like snails, desiccated in contact with salt.
All they needed to do was turn Poseidon into an ocean. Then they could leave. After all, without the wonderful fresh water and verdant fields, why stay?