A Return to Purgatory

I went back to Purgatory. Where else could I go? The moon was guarded and the shuttle didn’t have superluminal drive, so the nearest star system was thousands of years away. Besides, I had an injured man on my hands. I’d already sent my preliminary report to Mairon and signaled Purgatory flight control that I had a medical emergency.

My hands shook slightly as I signaled that we were ready for the docking procedure. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, turning my thoughts to the medi-pod. The man inside felt like hope.

After about an hour of flight, my numerous scratches were healed, and my leg wound was sealed up, but it still twinged when I walked. It had been a deeper wound than usual and wouldn’t be completely healed until I had a good night’s sleep.

Lancelot sat on my shoulders looking down at the smooth glassy control panel. His meaty paw reached out and pointed. “I used the coordinate programmer to pilot the shuttle and find you,” he yowled in his cat speech, clearly rather proud of himself.

“It was an emergency,” I replied a little too gruffly, “You should have used the automatic systems and homed in on my Q-com.”

He went quiet and settled back upon my shoulders. After a long pause, he grumbled in my right ear, “Why don’t you go… just leave?”

I shook my head. “You know there’s nowhere to go, Lancelot,” and I stared into his golden-green eyes until he finally looked away.

At that exact moment, the controls flashed red and the control panel locked as the automatic docking controls took over.

I was trapped once again.

Around 175 kilometers in circumference, the station was stuck between hell below and heaven above. The fiery hell of Gehenna burned below, and distantly beyond, barely visible in a haze of blue light, the Paradiso pleasure domes glittered on the bright blue moon—twenty-eight in all, each one owned by a wealthy COMSEOC member. There, the gravity was light, three-quarters that of Earth, and twice as pleasant—if you believed the propaganda. Miners weren’t allowed to visit though. That’s why we called the station Purgatory. We were shut out of heaven.

The shuttle, with its silvery skin glistening in the sun’s light, dove towards the docking port on the dark side, its engines winding down in pitch. The bright blue light of the Maian sun slipped behind Purgatory’s tall solar shield, and the infrared cones in my eyes flashed bright for a split-second before the shuttle’s interior lights compensated for the sudden fall of night—the only night we had on Purgatory.

The shuttle buzzed to a stop with a dull thud and the engines died into silence. There was a long pause. There was no one there to greet me; there never was. It was a single shuttle bay, one of many, designed for isolated use and maximum security.

The bay doors rumbled shut behind me, but the interior security door didn’t open and the red warning lights continued to flash on and off at their regular intervals.

The shuttle remained locked tight.

Still silence.

Finally, a female voice from the Q-com filled the shuttle. “This is flight control. COMSEOC employee number 84326-12, there is a message from your employer.”

I held my breath as a yellow text message flashed upon the window of the shuttle, framed by the black gloom of the shuttle bay:

LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN.

He wouldn’t deign to speak to me until he was ready. That might have sounded casual to most people, but I knew it was dripping with sarcasm and contempt. I glanced at Lancelot, and he took a little breath and growled low.

I spoke into the Q-com, “Mairon, wait. I can explain—”

You failed me! the message flashed again.

“He’ll die if we don’t do anything.”

Why should I care for this mess of a man you brought back? came the reply, still in text. Who is he? Why should I authorize medical care?

The auto-controls of the medi-pod bleeped and flashed orange and then red. Flight control had seized complete control of the shuttle’s systems and everything in it. They were shutting down the life support systems in the medi-pod.

“Wait!” I cried. “He knows something. I can prove it if you give me a chance.”

How?

“He’s a new Starsong hunter, and he’s different. He must be a dome dweller. And there’s always a chance he got there first.”

There was a long pause.

Finally, the lights in the shuttle bay brightened.

The shuttle’s hatch seals broke and it hissed open.

The shuttle window now flashed: Medical Intervention Authorized. Proceed to Medical Center Sixteen. The medi-pod stopped bleeping and all its lights went green. It levitated into the air, flew swiftly out of the shuttle, and passed through a hatch of its own—presumably fast-tracked to the medical center. Mairon had likely examined the DNA of the medi-pod occupant and that proved my story was at least plausible. Moon citizen lives were considered far more important than the rest of us, mostly because their deaths tended to result in lawsuits.

I strode out the door of the shuttle and down the loading ramp with Lancelot in tow, but I was stopped by a shout over the Q-com.

“Stop right there!” flight control shouted. “What is that? A weapon?”

I glanced down and realized that I still had the gravbaton clipped to my belt. I hadn’t consciously expected to get away with that one. I shrugged in a confessed mea culpa and raised my hands. They scanned everything, of course.

“You know better than that,” she continued. “All weapons must be secured prior to disembarkation. Place the plasma rifle, the plasma pistol, and the gravbaton in the security locker.”

I sighed and went back to the shuttle and retrieved the plasma rifle and pistol, the latter being the one that our mysterious man had been carrying. A section of the black, metal wall of the shuttle bay opened up with a hiss. A frigid mist and a whiff of chemicals emanated from it. I unclipped the gravbaton and placed it upon the rack inside. The plasma weapons followed. The door of the locker snapped shut and the weapons were whisked away with the sound of icy suction. The refrigerants inside rendered the fusion fuel in the plasma bullets inert; the weapons would then be cleaned and stored for later use.

I stood in front of the shuttle bay door with my hands raised waiting for them to finish their final scan. Lancelot growled low with impatience until I was forced to hush him.

Finally, the bolts shot back and the door opened.

“Security clearance complete,” flight control announced. “Alien biological material detected. Proceed to decontamination.”

“Decontamination?!” I cried. Then, I glanced at the residue of green goo sticking to my shirt and quickly changed my mind. “Oh, yeah, right.”

I walked out and turned the corner and immediately grimaced with irritation.

The corridor was blocked by an enormous glass panel and airlock, hermetically sealed against contamination, and on the other side stood a tall man. He was old and blond, and despite wearing an enormous well-coifed graying beard, he looked more like a sad aging Viking than a king. He peered coldly at me through one eye, the other covered by an eyepatch.

“Well, hello there, prancer. How was your vacation? I see you got your nice clothes all dirty.”

“Yeah, whatever, Nils,” I replied with my grimace deepening. “I’ve had a tough day, so let’s just get on with it.”

He smirked and dragged his mechanical leg prosthesis a bit closer to the glass wall. “Since you were a messy baby down there, you’ve got to have your diaper changed.”

I glared back at him.

“It’s the corridor to your left.”

I turned to go. “Wait here, Lancelot. I’ll be back.”

“Oh, no,” Nils ordered, “your little cat goes too.”

“Now, wait a minute!” I protested, drawing closer to the glass. “He never left the shuttle.”

“I don’t give a damn. The scan detected alien DNA on both of you,” Nils replied, pointing at Lancelot fiercely. “Now, get the fuck in there.”

I’d killed a hexapod like the one that had disabled him, and this was the thanks I got. I looked closely at Lancelot. He’d climbed on my shoulders in the shuttle and gotten some of the schmutz on him too. “Come on,” I said, reaching down to grab him.

“Mean man is making me take a bath?” he whined angrily.

“Yes,” I replied, striding to the decontamination suite. “Now, come on.”

“The animal decontamination chute is just inside the corridor,” Nils said, laughing. “Maybe it’ll get rid of some of his mange as well.”

Lancelot snarled and tried to leap across the corridor at him, but I held on tight.

“Come on, let’s get it over with.”

“Asshole!” Lancelot snarled at Nils in his cat speech.

“What did he say?” Nils snapped back.

“He said, ‘he’ll see you on the other side’,” I replied.

Nils settled down into his chair and stretched out his prosthetic leg. “Stupid cat,” he muttered under his breath.

I didn’t blame him too much for being jealous of my privileges, as slight as they were. Nils was a ‘retired’ miner. He’d lost a leg and an eye and could no longer work, and because he had a nice owner, he was allowed guard duty. He was effectively imprisoned in an even smaller box than I was. The experience would be humiliating for any miner, and thus he liked to dole out as much humiliation as possible.

In the corridor under a flashing screen that read, ‘Animal Decontamination Suite’, a dark portal opened.

“Do I have to?” Lancelot whined.

“Yes, Lancelot, you have to. Don’t make it harder on both of us.”

“I’m never riding on your shoulders again,” he vowed as I shoved him inside and the portal closed with a swish. An intense howl burst from inside as he was presumably conveyed along a series of tubes to be pressure washed. It was harmless, mostly. Just traumatizing is all.

I found the door marked ‘Human Decontamination Suite’. Some wiseass had scrawled the word “mostly” before “human” in a scratchy red. I entered a sterile white boxlike room with a single bench and a narrow door at one end, fully prepared for an equally dehumanizing experience.

Inside, I stripped down and tossed my clothes into a chute. The claustrophobic door at the end of the room opened and a sign above it flashed ‘Enter now’. Within that confined space, it looked almost like I had to navigate the inner layer of the station’s bulkhead.

I took a deep breath and stepped through onto a conveyor belt. With me standing sideways, the slick plastic walls still tickled my chest hairs.

After a few moments, electronics whirred away, air hissed, and the conveyor began to move. The radiation bath began. I closed my eyes.

The conveyor stopped and ultraviolet light pierced my eyelids. They were using full force because they knew I could handle it; my caretaker genes protected me as it killed just about everything else known to humanity.

The conveyor moved me along to the next station, and then came the cold plasma bath. My skin tingled and itched, and the ozone smell was so overwhelming that I almost had to switch over to my respiratory bypass system.

After another short ride, the enzymatic foam burst into action and the whole corridor filled with a gooey stinky mess that ate away at the alien DNA and also insisted on going straight up my nose.

Finally, ultrasonic vibrations shook most of the dead material from my skin. That lasted the longest, and just as I was about to get nauseous from the pulsations, the whirring of the system wound down into silence and I was scuttled out the other end like somebody’s personal commuter shuttle after an automatic wash.

This was the closest I’d ever get to that kind of luxury.

Stepping into another bright white cubicle smelling of chemicals, I found that the system had spit out more clothes just like the ones I had before. A pair of tough canvas trousers, a sleeveless tee-shirt, and a belt and boots hung nearby in the outer changing room, all black, naturally. The old clothes had of course been incinerated. I quickly dressed and left.

I emerged from the decontamination suite on the other side of the corridor, and there was yet another thick glass wall separating me from Nils. He was truly boxed in.

“As soon as your cat’s beauty appointment is complete, you’re to see your boss. He wants a full report.”

My hands started shaking again, but I tried to sound cool. “Yeah, he always does.”

I strode a few meters down the corridor, eager to get away from Nils, and a desperate distant howl grew rapidly in volume. Suddenly, a portal opened right next to me, and Lancelot leaped from the tube smelling chemical-fresh, like he’d been dry-cleaned.

“Did you howl the whole way through?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he cried indignantly.

He stood there for a few moments shimmying in place like he was trying to shake off whatever junk they’d used on him, but it had been designed to dissolve completely in under five minutes.

“Don’t lick it,” I admonished him. “Come on. We’re in a hurry.”

“Hey, showboat!” Nils shouted. “Next time you go on vacation, why don’t you go somewhere nice… like Tartarus or the surface of the sun?”

“Screw you, man!” Lancelot howled at him in his cat speech, doing my work for me.

“What did he say?!” Nils demanded.

I broke into a swift trot, glancing back. “He said, ‘Have a nice day’.”

“Oh, bullshit! That dumb cat can’t really talk.”