⚒️ A Dirge

⚒️ A Dirge

by Joel Glover

Ramón-Luis found that every ship and station had its own music; a melody played on the tuned percussion of its skin, supported by harmonics of air moving through valves and pipes, with rhythms supplied by the footfalls of residents.

There was a dock for personal audio players in Repair, added to the workbench by José-Manuel who declared himself at risk of being driven mad by the natural noise of their workspace, punctuated by syncopated silences.

Ramón-Luis left the dock empty when he was on shift alone, waving his screwdriver in time with the quiet clicking of the gyroscope like the symphonic conductor he had dreamed of being as a boy. His whistling cut through the lab, mournful and piercing, a dirge.

Today’s suit had been through Repair before. He could see Alto’s fingerprints in the burns at the end of a too hasty weld across the gut, his own stitching on the blood red thigh. Under his monocle the fabric looked a little thin—stretched—as stretched as his brain felt at the end of this twelve hour shift. He could leave it, of course, but he could not leave it and sleep well. This would be a harlequin garment when he was finished with it. The neon pink patch he cut from one unsalvageable suit fit well onto the thinning fabric. He matched it with a scrap of leftover cerulean on the other leg, to make the suit look more like an aesthetic choice than a desperate decision. 

There was a hole too, front to back. He winced as he looked at it. When he had worked the rocks he’d seen someone take a screw to the thigh. His insides had become outsides streaming off into the void in the time it took him to scream. Explosive depressurisation.

After that he got a job in Repair. His indenture would take longer to pay off, but it was a distinctly less lethal environment.

The plasma arc closed the first washer around the hole. The delicate touch he had learned, playing trumpet and violin back on Earth, served him well in his new life in the stars. 

The room warmed slightly, the plasma burning the air, an ozone smell rising up to his nostrils. The next closing pin slipped in and he tried to time the application of the washer to the station’s resonance.

There was something else, though.

Something... dissonant. 

A clatter and a clicking. This station’s music was mostly in 13/8 time, for reasons Ramón-Luis had never understood. He had asked one of the engineers, over a thimble of heavily distilled ‘water’ once. The blank stare he had received suggested that perhaps he was the only person who could hear it. With a chopstick he beat the time in the air as he did in the lab. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four. The engineer had laughed and drained his drink, but had not answered.

The polyrhythm came on, eight beats, and a pause. Eight beats, and a pause. 

Then a cacophony. 

The station came to life, discordance, alarms wailing, automated systems announcing catastrophic events. Warming white light was replaced with the red of warning, of emergency.

The polyrhythm was swept away by a white noise hiss, a tumbling, seething noise that swelled within the vents.

A grate fell onto the workbench with a cymbal’s clash, crushing glass and tools beneath it.

In the red glow, Ramón-Luis saw hundreds of eyes staring down at him from above. Beneath them, hungry mouths which opened and sang to him a keening melody, a chorus of hunger and death.

Then on they came.