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- Herausgeber: BookRix
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
Sci-fi horror carnage abounds when a spaceship must contend with the outbreak of a very nasty virus. Get ready for plenty of fun, mystery, suspense, and horror!
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Space Zombies
BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 MunichCopyright
© Copyright 2022 Ramsey Hudson
All Rights Reserved
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter One
The spaceship Nimbus cut steadily through the vast expanse of space until Earth was nearly in sight. It was a relief on a number of counts. The endless void was the purest form of cabin fever. The insignificance of existence was never more stark after a jaunt into the black nothingness of everything beyond the beacon of Earth. The crew hadn't eaten proper food for eighteen months and - more importantly - had a sick crew member with an illness that had so far proven to be a mystery to their brilliant medical officer Dr Michael Cooper. Try as he might, Cooper had not managed to explain what was wrong with Angel. The captain continued to press him on this strange affair, sometimes to the point of irritation as far as the doctor was concerned. The two men were not friends and it seemed to inject an aura of distrust and suspicion into what was a puzzling and harrowing situation. The constrictive nature of the Nimbus did not help matters. Ships like this were not designed for a large crew. They were designed to save money.
The Nimbus had been on a routine mission to mine small Zantium deposits on the deserted planet Betamax. Betamax was a planet that had never really been claimed. Both the European Federation and the Asia-Pacific League believed they had rights to the planet but neither apparently cared enough to make much of a deal about it. The European Federation in particular was notoriously bureaucratic so their disinterest was a relief. European Federation starships were often trapped in space dock for months at a time waiting for the relevant paper work and regulations. If you had to contest a claim to a planet with the European Federation you'd soon be filling out forms and appearing in court as often as you took a leak. The crew of the Nimbus were different and flew under no flag. They were not a corporation or an alliance of nations but mercenaries. Even modest amounts of Zantium made a big difference to their Bladzik credit accounts on Earth and if the planet was empty of other humans mining the surface that was fine by them. But then David Angel had become ill after working on Betamax and they decided to terminate their mission a month early even though there were - by a conservative estimate - still around 27 microzarks of Zantium in the quadrant they had been drilling.
The men worked at the bottom end of the drilling market. They seized chances left by the more ruthless corporations. All the major deposits of energy in the known universe were taken and out of bounds. Men like this had to find the places that were forgotten or no one else wanted to go. Their employers were equally thrifty and flexible. To get a foot in this lucrative market you had to be prepared to do the jobs that no one else would. And this was where Betamax came in. The planet was hardly the stuff of corporate dreams. Betamax was a desolate rock forever shrouded in darkness. Electrical storms ravaged the sky and gave the planet the atmosphere of a haunted house hidden in the stars. It was a grim and hostile place that you wouldn't send your worst enemy to mine. Betamax was so little known it often failed to appear on Star Maps. It was one of many thousands of planets and asteroids that companies had looked at and bypassed. They would leave this world to more foolish and desperate people. They preferred to drill where Zantium was plentiful and there were colony buildings that were elaborate and fitted out with home comforts. They liked to create distant empires in the stars where they knew the Zantium would flow for decades and even centuries.
Betamax was discovered over fifty years ago but no one had shown any great interest in this nightmare world. There was no life, no microbes, no water. Betamax was largely forgotten and bypassed ever since Japanese Space Rangers had taken remote readings of the atmosphere and designated it to be a place that would not yield enough Zantium to ever make a major operation there worth the effort. And so it was that the planet got a joke name that only the most forensic historian versed in popular culture from centuries past would understand. Just the briefest look at any readings that filtered back from Betamax were enough to have surveyors scurrying off to search for more fertile pickings. There was something plainly foreboding about this distant. It just wasn't worth the hassle. The big companies didn't dirty their hands with worlds like this where the conditions were harsh and the Zantium available was unquantifiable.
What of Zantium? What was this precious resource? Zantium was much prized, as much even as oil had once been in Earth's past, but it was famously elusive and scattered in the dust of the great void. If you wanted to mine Zantium in any significant quantities you had travel far into space and invest in De-Rig Alpha technology for extracton purposes. All of this was hugely expensive. Zantium was the third most used power source on Earth now after Sintek 7 and Wham. It was unstable (the great Zantium disaster of 3029 had seen the Dutch city of Amsterdam almost completely destroyed) but worth its weight in gold. There were attempts to ban Zantium (especially in Holland) but vested interests (the president of the European Federation was a former director of a company that mined Zantium) prevented this from ever becoming a realistic proposition. Profit always trumped safety and no one cared about the environment.
