The Sludge

Midshipman Gerry Brill jolted awake and squinted into the gloom. The stata-luminous walls provided the young man enough light for him to make out the interior of the escape pod and the shapes of the four other crew members that had joined him in their hasty exodus from the ship. However, the lack of brighter illumination meant that the powered lights weren't working for whatever reason.

"A.I.L.A.?" he called out, but the Artificially Intelligent Learning Agent didn't respond. With a click, he unfastened the restraints holding him in place. Suddenly his world turned sideways and he fell into one of the other crew members, his hand squishing into a large breast before he was able to regain his footing. "Sorry," he offered the woman.

"Uhh..." she moaned. "Wha'hoppen?"

Now that he was closer, Gerry realized that this was Midshipman Natalie Morris, who had trained him in his duties. She was a couple years older than him but pretty, with brown hair and large boobs that were always distracting in her tight Astronaval uniform. "Um, looks like the pod lost power and we came down hard. A.I.L.A.'s not responding."

"Shit," she responded to the news.

"Yeah, shit."

Gerry turned to the new voice. Another woman across from them was extracting herself from her crash harness.

"Wait!" Gerry rushed forward, but with a click, the crew member slipped out of her seat and fell toward him. The two of them went down, Gerry's body taking the brunt of the impact.

"Fuck!" the woman growled and pushed off of him, unmindful that Gerry had just saved her from a possibly bad fall. As she reared back, her knee swooped low and glanced off of his ballsack.

"Urgh..." he moaned, doubling over as the woman righted herself.

"Fucking useless engineer," the woman spat. "Pick yourself up."

Natalie helped Gerry to his feet. "Be nice, Olive...we're all members of the same crew here."

Gerry squinted. His clumsy, hopefully accidental assailant was Midshipman Olive Piker, from the security division, with an athletic body and her short dark hair in a severe cut that swooped across her forehead.

"Hmp," was Piker's only reply. Then she turned. "Chief!" She rushed forward to one of the other crew members who sat unmoving in their harness.

"Could you please assist me, Midshipmen?" came a soft request from the other direction. "My harness is not unfastening."

Gerry rose with a wince and he and Natalie stepped forward to pull at the latch keeping Midshipman Bo in place. The hairless, androgynous, and singularly-named alien seemed unperturbed, as they usually were, patiently waiting as Natalie finally pulled her multi-tool from her belt and cut at the restraining belt.

This time Gerry was ready, and caught Bo as they tumbled sideways. In the dark, all bundled up by the safety system, it was hard to tell that the pod was lying on an angle, but Gerry had his feet under him now. He had always found the otherworldly crew member Bo intriguing, with their human-ish face either handsome or pretty depending on the angle.

Bo stood up, their hands on Gerry's upper arms. "I thank you, Midshipmen Brill and Morris," they said, their head turning to each in turn, and then they looked past them. "How is Chief Warrant Officer Helmuth, Midshipman Piker?"

"Not good," the angry woman responded. "I think he hit his head harder than the rest of us." She huffed. "The air in here's getting thin...is the atmosphere breathable outside?"

Gerry, Natalie and Bo looked at each other.

"Jesus, you fucking useless twats!" Piker railed. "A.I.L.A., report on the exterior of the pod!"

"A.I.L.A.'s down," Gerry replied, "you heard me say that earlier."

He heard beeping and turned. Bo had found a hand sensor.

"An oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, with a higher balance of oxygen than we're used to...relatively warm, 22 degrees celsius. Gravity is 0.7 of standard, which explains why we didn't hit harder, and...hmm..." Bo folded up the device and powered it off.

"What?" Natalie asked.

In the dim light, Gerry noticed Bo's face crease with confusion. "Something was draining the power in the sensor while it was in use. I have powered it off to conserve its charge."

"Help me here, Bo," Piker directed, and Bo stepped forward under one of Chief Helmuth's arms while Piker took the other. "You pissants open the door."

Gerry looked at Natalie and then they worked at the manual controls of the pod's door until it popped open. A gust of slightly warm wind blew in and Gerry realized that this was the first non-artificial atmosphere he'd breathed in months. He closed his eyes and took another deep lungful.

"Move!" Piker shoved him out of the way and stepped out with Chief Helmuth and Bo. It was light out, which as Gerry stepped out he saw was coming from a small blue sun in the sky. The ground was purplish...Gerry realized that it would probably be light red or pink without the blue overlay of sunlight, which seemed a strange color for ground, but he hadn't been in the Astro Navy long enough to see many planets firsthand himself. The surface underfoot seemed to be stone or clay, and was mostly smooth, except where it had broken up around where the pod had impacted.

Piker and Bo were about to lay Chief Helmuth onto the ground. "Wait!" Gerry called out before dashing back into the pod. There, he unfastened a seat cushion, brought it back out, and then manipulated some fasteners to unfold it into a makeshift bed.

"You remembered your drills," Natalie commented with a cute smile.

Gerry smiled back. "I had a good teacher. Nice to have an engineer along?" He directed that to Piker.

"Yeah, that's fine, Brill," Piker said as she and Bo gently lowered the Chief to the padded surface. "Bo, can you tell how hurt he is?"

Bo examined the Chief's head. "I am not in medical, but I see blood coming from his head. Midshipman Morris, will you please...? Ah." Natalie held out the medical kit she'd grabbed as she left the pod.

"Engineering's on it!" Gerry commented as he held out his fist to Natalie. After first making sure that Piker wasn't looking, she bumped him back.

Bo pressed a stick patch to the Chief's neck and waited.

After a moment, Piker stood up. "Why isn't it working?"

Bo examined the patch and frowned. "I think that the medical nanobots have had their power drained as well. We will have to wrap the chief's head and hope that he recovers on his own."

"FUCK!" Piker shouted up at the strange alien atmosphere, and then her face went slack. "Oh...fuck..."

They all looked up to where she was staring.

"What...is that?" Gerry asked. A small patch of the sky looked like a piece of cloth that someone had torn a hole in. What should have been light blue atmosphere was black, with a scintillating red edge. It looked...wrong.

Natalie stepped up next to him. "That's what happens when a fold engine overloads. The ship's gone."

---

They took shifts, one of them staying with Chief Helmuth while the other three fanned out to look for shelter, water, food, or other survivors. They had rations in the pod, but that would only last a couple of days, and without power, the pod's water recycler, which could have kept them living off of their own urine indefinitely, was useless.

Gerry stepped lively in the lower gravity. He saw clouds in the sky, which raised his hopes for finding water, but he found no lakes or streams, or any other meaningful body of water, not even a puddle. The surface wasn't entirely flat, but the tallest features seemed to just be small rolling hills.

The lack of trees and other vegetation didn't bode well for finding food. There also didn't seem to be any other life forms, not that he was relishing the idea of eating another living creature. His great-grandfather had talked about eating cows back in the day, but the concept turned Gerry's stomach. Farmed proteins and greens were just fine, thank you very much...not that he was likely to find anything like that here.

After what he guessed was a few hours, he returned to the crash site. Natalie didn't seem to be back yet.

"Nothing?" Piker asked Gerry, eyeing his half-unfastened one-piece uniform as it gathered at his hips. With all the walking, it had been too hot to keep done up. He shook his head and walked over to Bo, who was sitting on top of the pod.

"I am contemplating the sun," they said as he approached.

Then he realized Bo was staring up at it. "You shouldn't look right at it!"

Bo turned their head and Gerry started at the sight of their eyes...they were fully white! Then he saw the pallid shade slip down, a membrane that disappeared under their eyelids so their gray irises were visible again.

Then he remembered. "Right, your people are very, um, adaptable."

Bo held out their arms and slipped down the rounded surface of the pod toward him. Gerry caught Bo's arms as they landed in front of him, but he bet that their people, whose name he could never pronounce correctly but were sometimes referred to as 'Adaptans', could have handled the fall just fine without his help. Then, realizing that he was still holding Bo's hands, he let go and stepped back. "So, you mentioned the sun?"

"Yes...blue stars are the hottest in the universe, but that one is very far away. The warmth of this planet doesn't make sense." They knelt down and placed their palm on the flat surface. "I believe that the heat may be geothermal. However, without being able to use the hand scanner, I will be unable to prove that without direct knowledge."

"Direct...?"

"If we can find a way underground. The lack of mountains indicate that this planet has not experienced geological upheavals typically associated with molten cores, though. It is a conundrum."

"Huh...not really my forte," Gerry responded.

They bunked around the pod. As the blue star faded from view, Gerry realized that night wasn't much cooler than during the day, which gave Bo's theory some weight.

---

The next day went much the same as the first: no food, no water, and no shelter, and without water it was getting really uncomfortable. As he headed back from his second foray that day, Gerry gave his dry lips a lick.

He looked up at the wormhole that had destroyed the ship. It seemed smaller. As he approached camp, he saw that the rest of them were folding up their makeshift beds, other than the one holding Chief Helmuth. He hurried forward.

Natalie gave him a dazzling smile. "Olive found a cave with a spring!"

He beamed back. "That's great!" He grabbed his stuff and they headed off, Bo and Piker holding the Chief up between them.

Gerry stepped up beside Natalie as they walked. "Hey, does the wormhole seem smaller now?"

She looked up and squinted. "Yeah, it'll collapse soon enough. The universe doesn't like imbalance."

"Do you think any other ships will come looking for us?"

"Maybe," she responded. "We would have transmitted the coordinates of our next jump to central before opening the fold, but it'll take a while before anyone realizes we didn't send the all-clear upon arrival."

Bo called back, "We also don't know why the ship's engine overloaded. If it was caused by something environmental, another ship may also explode upon arrival."

"Fuck," Gerry exclaimed.

"Indeed, Midshipman Brill." The androgynous crew member turned their bald head forward again.

The cave was about a half hour away. The entrance was large enough for two of them to use at once, and the interior high enough that they didn't have to duck down while being wide enough that they could spread their beds out without bumping into each other in the night. A spring burbled away in the corner, its runoff going back into the strangely smooth rock. It seemed perfect! There was also a tunnel heading further in, but it was too dark to see once you left the main area.

Bo used a test from the medical kit to determine if the water was safe to drink. Like the stata-lumininous treatment on the inside of the escape pod, it was chemical-based rather than electronic, so wasn't affected by the strange power drain. After a few seconds, they gave everyone a thumbs-up.

"Water and shelter," Piker nodded, satisfied with herself. "With luck, we'll find something to eat tomorrow, before we run out of rations." She looked out the entrance to see it getting dim. The planet's day seemed to be about 16 hours long, so they only had about 8 hours of light. "For now, though, we should rest. I'll take first watch."

"Why?" Gerry asked. "There's nothing living on this planet but us."

Piker glanced at the still-unconscious Chief Helmuth and then turned back to Gerry. "Why don't you leave security up to the person who actually works that department, nerd?" Then she stomped out of the cave.

"Oookay, fine."

They tried to get some sleep, but the shorter days messed with that concept. It would probably take a while to get used to 'the new normal'. Gerry rolled over to see that Natalie was looking back at him from her own bed. "Oh, hey."

"Hey."

"When you said the ship was gone, for a moment I thought you meant it had left," he asked. "I didn't work with the engines much."

She frowned. "The ship would have been torn apart by the dimensional stresses of the wormhole the engine overload created. At least it would have been quick for the rest of the crew still onboard."

"Unlike us," he replied despondently. "I'm not looking forward to starving." The rations were almost gone and his stomach grumbled at that thought.

Natalie slipped from her bed to take his hand. "We found water and shelter. I believe a higher power's looking out for us, Gerry...just you wait."

He twisted his mouth. "What...like God?"

"Whatever you want to call it. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'"

He sighed and pulled his hand back. "We're not on Earth, and this is definitely not heaven, Natalie. Also, Hamlet dies at the end, remember?"

"Oh no!" Bo called out from the next bunk over. "I was going to read that next week, once I finished Romeo and Juliet. Hm...I guess I won't have a chance to finish that, either, without a working computer. Such a romantic story."

"They die too," Gerry informed them before turning over with a harumph.

"Oh..."

---

"Feeling a little better today?" Natalie asked Gerry when he sat up the next morning.

"I guess," he responded, looking about. Piker was napping. Helmuth was still laying in his bunk, though Gerry could see that the man was still breathing. Bo was at the entrance of the cave, looking out, their slim form neither manly nor womanly.

Gerry got to his feet. "I had an idea about checking out that tunnel, if you could both help me with cannibalizing the pod."

It was a bit of a trek there and back, and some hard work gathering what they needed, but they returned with strips of the stata-luminous treatment from the pod's walls. Ripping some of the sticky, plastic-like substance up, the three of them fastened bits of it onto the tunnel walls as they moved deeper into the dark.

"Very clever, Midshipman Brill," Bo complimented him. "This should allow us to go a ways in, though our distance will be limited based on available material."

"Hopefully it's not too deep. Wait, do you hear that?"

"What?" both Bo and Natalie responded.

"Shh..." he shushed them and listened intently. "Is that another spring?"

Natalie cocked her head. "That bubbling noise? Sounds different."

They headed deeper, leaving luminous bits on the walls like breadcrumbs behind them before stepping into a small alcove. The sound was louder here, and lower, near the ground. They knelt down.

"That's...a smell," Natalie commented.

"What are we looking at?" Gerry asked. He put some more luminous bits around what seemed to be a semi-solid substance sliding along behind a gap in the wall. It moved like lava but wasn't hot. It was hard to tell the color but his mind suggested a pinkish-green with the limited input available to him.

They heard a beeping and turned to see that Bo had activated the hand scanner. "Amino acids, proteins, vitamins and minerals, and...hm."

"What is it?" Natalie asked.

Bo closed up the device. "It ran out of power before it could give me the full results. Even so, it appears that we have found a source of food."

"Did you say food?"

They all jumped as Piker came up behind them. "Nice job with the glowing trail, crew...now let me see what you found."

After getting caught up on the hand scanner's findings and its final status, the security woman stood back up. "It sucks that the scanner's useless now, but I agree with you using it here, Bo...we only have another day's worth of food. Still, we don't know if that's safe to eat."

"The scanner indicated nothing hazardous..." Bo began, but Gerry knelt down, grabbed a handful of the strange substance, and shoved it into his mouth.

"Gerry!" "Brill!" That had been Natalie and Piker.

Gerry chewed and swallowed, finding the sludge going down his throat easily. He stood back up.

"That was so..."

"...brave!" "...stupid!" Natalie and Piker looked at each other.

Piker harrumphed. "Well, what's done is done. Now we keep an eye on you to see if you die a horrible, painful death or not. In the meantime, the rest of us now have more rations to share, no matter how it turns out, even if it's just another half-day's worth each." Then she turned on her heel and walked back to the cave's main area.

Natalie and Bo closed up with Gerry. "So how did it taste?" Natalie asked.

"Actually, not bad," Gerry responded. "The, um, sludge has the consistency of a banana, maybe? Can't tell if it's savory or sweet, or if salt or sugar would help, not that we have either of those."

"And you feel well?" Bo asked.

"Yeah, fine."

Bo remained behind to observe the sludge while the rest of them headed back to the main cavern. Piker was pressing a cool, damp cloth to Helmuth's forehead.

"Any change?" Gerry asked. Piker shook her head.

Bo returned a little later, their dark pupils unnaturally wide as they emerged from the dim tunnel. As Gerry watched, those wide dots contracted in the brighter common area until they returned to normal. "The 'sludge', as you call it, seems to be a constant flow through that part of the rock. Like the spring," they gestured to the burbling pool in the corner, "I don't believe that it will 'run out' anytime soon."

Piker stood up. "Okay, some good news, then. You still copacetic?" she asked Gerry.

He nodded. "I'm feeling a little queasy, but I'm chalking that up to nervousness."

---

At nightfall, Piker crushed some of the rations to feed Chief Helmuth with some water and then went to hand the rest out to the others, except for Gerry.

"I'm good," Natalie told her. "I, uh, went and had some sludge."

"WHAT?! Morris..." Piker began.

"Gerry's fine, Olive," Natalie told her. "It's been hours...if it was poisonous, it would have done something to him by now. I'm feeling fine too."

Bo spoke up, "I concur. I should probably have sampled it first, with my more robust physiology, but it seems it is safe. I will have some tomorrow." They accepted their portion of the remaining rations.

"If you'd eaten it first, that still wouldn't have confirmed it was safe for humans," Natalie informed the alien.

Bo considered. "That is an excellent point, Midshipman Morris."

Natalie sighed. "Given that we'll most likely be stuck here a long time, Bo, and we're all the same rank, you should probably call me Natalie."

"Um...yes, Natalie. And...Gerry?" Bo tilted their head to regard him.

He nodded.

They all looked over at Piker, who sighed. "When the Chief wakes up, the ranks wake up with him, but don't call me Olive...other than Natalie." Then she sat to eat her rations.

"Why are you so special?" Gerry quietly asked Natalie.