Published on Dec 1, 2009:
Introduction
This 2nd prize winning story of 2009 SF Contest. Dark and philosophical with an ending calculated to leave you pondering about existence and meaning.
‘Lima – its me!’ He cried over the intercom. A tap and hiss later, the doors slid open.
He found her sitting by the transparent arc of the Ring, the pocked ochre surface of the desert moon growing in its facade. She was reclined on her bubble chair, and was gazing outwards with her cheeks resting in her flattened, crinkled palms. Ural guessed that her green gypsy eyes that so fascinated him, only seemed fixated on the moon, but they were in reality, projecting her inner conflicts onto the vastness of space – where they could be watched impersonally and infinitely perused.
‘We need you on the bridge.’ He said casually but beneath his veneer he was anxious.
Ural heard the hum of the air-filter in the ceiling grow large in the silence.
‘ Lima did you hear me, we need you on the bridge.’
‘You didn’t really mean we.’
‘ Lima..’ He pleaded.
‘They think I am mad. Old and mad’. She said. Her voice was aloof, and without a hint of resignation. It was matter-of-fact.
‘Less useful than I was in youth, when I bore their mission no children.’
Ural sighed.
‘ It is our mission.’ He corrected her, deposing as he had done countless times before her ‘It belongs to no one person or clique but to all eight billion people of Earth. And our duty is almost done now – it’s the yield of our life’s work, all your life’s work too Lima. For all the generations before us who were not as lucky to live and see it to the end. Think about their hopes and efforts. When it started two hundred and twenty years ago its essay deserved every critic who threw himself in its way, but now, that it has been realised in spite of everything, anything but exuberance is sullying the enormity of this moment. But come – I am only begging you for a little respect.’
Lima’s creased face below short white hair turned to look at him for the first time, and he saw her bright eyes and pallid lips quiver in mirth long before she broke into a laugh so full of her puckish, old heart that it seemed to spurn every thought and article of faith he possessed.
He felt hurt and insulted but she spoke gaily.
‘ You are naive to appeal to the virtues I don’t have time and again, son, that’s very sweet of you. But I still can’t tell you what you want to hear. Lying, now that’s the mainframe’s job. And I shall be truthful to you at least – come here.’
She beckoned him with her fingers dancing in a fluid motion to point to the carpet below her feet decorated with the motif of a prancing Horse. In spite of himself he moved and fell on his knees before her, feeling the odd warmth of presence and wistful submission that maybe was what Alexander the Great felt when he wept before Olympias. He had only read about it in the books of history. He could not know. He was an orphan.
‘You know nothing about Earth. Apart from what little they will tell you, and let your positive illusions fill up the blanks.’ She spoke. Her eyes widened as she looked into the distance at the ochre moon and as she spread her hands the flare of the sleeves of her silver gossamer robe fell under the arc’s gravity. To Ural’s fascinated eyes, she seemed terrible and silver and grand, like an Oracle in her throes, and her green eyes seemed burnished by a vision as she spoke.
‘Its somewhere there, our Urheimat, far away, so far away its now beyond recall. You know, as the mainframe says, its oblong and blue. But the Hindus believed that Earth is the back of an elephant standing on a turtle swimming in a bottomless sea. A vision equally valid, both being a function of the needy imagination.’
‘ Lima..!’ Ural cried, his alarm thinned out by his concern for her to an anxiety delicate with fear and reproach. ‘ Its criminal to read the scriptures. They will put you in a pod if they find out!’
‘ And do what – drift me? Are we not drifting already? But ah – don’t worry’ She said, her voice was still brisk when her eyes glimmered ‘ – they burnt the last of them.’
She gave an impish chuckle, wiped her mouth with her sleeve and began to speak.
‘ But it was too late for them. I memorized every verse..’ Her eyes gleamed and she nodded with satisfaction
‘They think their reasons were valid in the context of the Charter. That worthless rag – page thirty seven includes a caveat against religious violence. You see, they calculated the fratricide that reduced us from one sixty four to eleven and even suggested the measures that were followed. They provided us the poison and the antidote. I was a girl of sixteen the year it happened but several decades older just an year later. The death of close ones does that to you, and you were lucky your mother, unfortunate woman though she was, chose a peaceful time to bring you into this universe, or you would have grown as cynical and mad as I am. Think of it – you were lucky to have been conceived. Even children did not survive those days. Foresight was the last thing the Forum that commissioned our elders lacked. They knew exile breeds extremism. They knew of a lot of other terrible things that happened on this mission. Or should I call it – the Great Experiment? To which end they allowed no weapons on board but made way for more lethal things. Earthlings are cruel but they are not naïve in their understanding of plots and expedients.’
‘Earthlings!’ Ural protested ‘You speak, as if we are not from among them.’
‘Are we really?’ She looked at him puzzled ‘You have never set foot on Earth. You are the third generation of exiles born and raised on board the Ark, breathing its processed air, eating its isocaloric food. Unlike the first generation you did not step in wilfully. Self-sacrifice was thrust upon you, until you mistook the burden of your elders as your own.’
‘Our elders were pioneers, brave men and women who risked their lives…’
Ural stopped. She had just waved her hands to dismiss his spell that wasted in her presence like a wave beating on a rock into a spray on the shores of the planet they left behind. He looked on with his mouth open in shock. It had dawned on him how the words were not his own but had lived in animation in his mind like his own experience. Her smile grew wider as one who empathized and continued:
‘I will tell you what nobody knows. They were nothing like us.’
He listened rapt.
‘They had names, real names Ural – Joshua, Matt, Hussain. Names that asserted their individuality in the world they came from. And they added a piece of the past to supplement their names – an appellative which tied them to tribes, guilds and castes and anchored them to their place in history. Identity is the first thing that sets us apart from them. Far apart. The second is freedom. Farther still.’
Lima paused, her eyes swiveling to rest on a potted tuberous, thorny plant kept on top of the table under a plasma lamp, stretching out in its light like needled green fingers severed off a Giant’s grizzled hand. She reached out and lifted the pot with both hands to bring it level with her head and she penetrated it with her emerald gaze.
‘You know what this is – this is a Cactus; it grew in the most arid regions of earth. It may bend in a gale and its roots might move a few inches in its lifetime, but its place in the scheme of things is fixed. It knows its place on earth is to be a fixture of the desert landscape. And so it has adapted. By moving this pot or putting it back I am not violating its freedom or restricting its scope, nor will my planting it back into a wide desert alter its function. This is very dissimilar to man. To banish us in a steel cage is not just to deny our individuality but to declare our very natures as untrue.'
‘So you are an Earthling then or as you say, a hero – or an ersatz image of an Earthling, the most inferior representation?’ She asked, and feeling the knifepoint of her words stabbing into his harmonious abstracts, he turned away, red in the face from the breathlessness he had inherited from an anonymous father.
In the silence that followed they both looked through the glass, seeking answers and remedies to their own bitterness. The ring of the Ark had wheeled on its axis, and the moon had disappeared to give way to the planet Grandiflora’s surface that had fallen into night and was spangled in clusters of blue, red and gold lights which arranged around its population centres. The planet’s Sun vacillated like a cast of molten iron in its backdrop: a fireball floating in a mass of endless violet space.
Then something pricked in his gaze, and the lights on the planet’s surface blinked and went out like embers being extinguished. The concert of dying lights ended with an eerie nightscape on the planet that was illuminated only by a bright red spiral of light in the shape of a double helix. Ural sprung from his knees immediately with bulbous eyes. His heartbeat amplified into a din of blood being pumped into his brain. After the sight had endured and prevailed on his good sense, he spun around and raced for the door, remembering Lima’s form as it whizzed past like a phantom, fixed upon the planet in a like wonder. He struck the panel to open the door and fell into the corridor that circumambulated the outer ring of the Ark with the door hissing shut behind him, leaving him a zone of blinking red Alarm lights and warbling motor noises. He checked into the nearest elevator board that began climbing up a shaft as soon as it registered his weight.
The shaft fell across the axis of the ring inwards to the cylindrical central section of the main module of the Ark. As the centrifugal force began damping towards zero gravity, his feet flew off the elevator’s board that stopped as soon as it felt his weight drop to zero.
‘ Mag-Lift online’ Ural whispered, and two electromagnets locked around his wrists in thermoplastic bracelets quaked with life. Soon he was maneuvering up the remainder of the shaft using his hands against the electromagnets in the walls that had powered the elevator, like a swimmer coursing down an invisible stream, casting long limbed, mutating shadows across the dim purple lights of the passage.
The bright fluorescent light that loomed in the distance got closer, until he dropped face down out of the shaft into the incandescent alley that led from the Deuterium reactor to the bridge at its other end in a straight cylindrical gangway. He maneuvered in the air without his feet touching the ground, and stretching into a horizontal position was slung by a stronger field into the direction of the Bridge.
The coils of the spiral door whorled open before his approach and he entered the hall of the bridge, where he found the members of his crew frozen before the twinkling panels of the control desk and looking through the transparent nose of the Ark at the blood red shape that had fallen across Grandiflora’s face like a battle scar.
Here the field lines grew out of the floor, where they would not interfere with the electronics of the panels on the sides, and Ural’s magnetic boots patched with the deck, until both his feet were locked in standing position. He walked into the huddle, without being noticed, when someone spoke.
‘ Its DNA!’
Heads turned to nod.
‘ Its DNA – that is certain beyond doubt, the double Helix must also have been used to signify our Union, celebrate our mutual Life.’
Sahara, captain of the Ark, had spoken, arching his brown eyebrows that were set tremulously in his thick square face in wonder and bewilderment.
‘ But what does the red signify –‘ asked Panama, aged sixteen, and the only one among the crew whose hair curled fascinatingly into itself. Ural could see his question ricochet off the eyes of the crew. Sahara, having no conciliatory explanation, punched a red button on the panel before him.
‘Let’s find out’ He said with a steely smile, and a voice more polyphonous than any human being but tuned to feminine edges fell on them from the ceiling:
‘ Hello crew. How are we today. How may I help you’
The crew had learned to ignore this courtesy of the mainframe, who called herself Gargi, and Yukon, the largest and most intemperate amongst them barked – ‘You heard the question.’
‘ Affirmative. The usage of red colour of the spectrum seems to signify, with a probability of 0.40 on narrow and 0.80 on broad – the red of human blood. It can be interpreted as a warning rising from the unsuitability of the planet’s environment or a mortal threat against any attempts to make contact, in the absence of a Lingua Franca.’
‘ But it begs another question Gargi –‘ Sahara asked impatiently ‘ How did they determine our vital fluid is red?’
‘ The Arecibo message.’
He nodded ‘ Go on.’
‘ The Arecibo message was transmitted from earth in 1974 included the chemical formulas of sugars and bases in our DNA. The Arecibo message, and its response, was the first contact between our species. Abundant time has elapsed to learn synthesis of life molecules in lab conditions. At this point I calculate they may be armed with an advanced understanding of our species.’
Crete, the darkest among them, laughed nervously ‘A computer calculates what a man coldly fears.’
A small, yellow haired man with small almond eyes interjected ‘We have contact.’ He raised his hands vertically. He was strapped into a chair before a screen that projected geometric shapes onto his livid face.
‘ Our displacement vector nine-seven up-seven for inbound. Looks like – like –‘ He fumbled with the enormity of what he was going to say ‘- a native ship.’
Sahara scampered to the mount point of the screen and leaned with his hands on his shoulders until the planes and figures had crawled onto his face.
‘ How do we know its not a satellite.’
‘ Because unless –‘ said the small man pointing to the screen ‘It alters its trajectory in a sharp slope – it will be flying past our windows.’
‘ E-T-A’ Sahara cried ‘ Give me E-T-A’
He jerked into upright position and looked out of the nose as if expecting to see an Alien space craft looming into sight any second. All he saw was the dark planet with the vivid twine of the red helix.
‘ At current bearings. E-T-A is fifty minutes.’
At his words, many shapes began coursing towards the screen and crowded around the erect shape of Sahara who looked engrossed in the sign on Grandiflora in much the same way that that Lima had seem lost in the moon when Ural had found her.
Ural watched him closely as he broke from the huddle and walked away, his head lowered as if in deep thought, until he had answered the great tumult within himself, and raised his face again, his shoulders squaring below them like a great wall.
‘ Our appointment with fate.’ He said, and an aspect in his voice drew them to it.
‘ We are, in moments from now going to put into action man’s dispatch to alien life of over a century old. But before we think we are just continuing the tradition of James Cook and Christopher Columbus, who took endeavour so far to the continents and islands they though of as a new world we must pause. The New World. We must remember, that inspite of their mighty essay, they did not represent the full cognizance of man’s capabilities, or exhaust the limits of his Enterprise, theirs was a modest idea conceived in a paucity of confidence and knowledge. We are the ones who really took it to its end. We the true discoverers of the New World.’
‘ Yes!’ cried the moonfaced Yukon. ‘ We will be added to their pantheon. Lord Yukon from the stars. Ha – If our hosts believe in God. But I will still be glad to get off this damned ship. All my life my muscles atrophying on this bridge, watching the same faces, to spend the rest of my life if not as a God then as a specimen of great scientific value, with Grandiflora’s solid ground beneath me, and its new sights, Ah.. newly formed temptations, and new smells, new pleasures unknown. And when I die my body be entombed, like Kings of Earth, and not be incinerated and cast into space!’
‘ Maybe they don’t have the customs for entombing or for cremation’ Sahara spoke solemnly ‘ And you will see the value in incineration over being suspended in a preservative gel in a museum. Or a cage labelled with the coordinates of the star-system we came from. I hear that the humans kept lesser mammals in controlled menageries for their entertainment. At any rate – I will share your fate with you. But we will need one more for company. And who else will accompany? Not you Panama – stay there – you are too young. And in case things turn ugly, the crew will need at least one fertile male for the journey back. Ural?’
Ural’s bosom heaved with a start
‘ Me captain?’ He blurted, startled out of his thoughts.
‘ Yes. Do you have a problem?’
‘ No captain.’ said Ural, but he said it out of a compliant disposition, his mind was wrestling a resistance he was refusing to give form to. Not yet.
‘ All right then. If the Alien ship docks as predicted. It will be just the three of us waiting in the airlock. There is no body else on board this ship. The rest of you will await the code from us patiently before embarking on any Alien craft that might follow. If there is no transmission – there is no boarding. You assume its unsafe, jump orbit and push to laser drive. Clear. That last part should be very clear.’
‘ Yes, clear and glad to stay.’ Crete laughed nervously ‘ And I will make sure it happens they way you want it captain.’
‘ Excellent. And we have wasted ten precious minutes speaking about this already. We will each now head to our stations. Yukon, Ural will follow me to the airlock, but we need to get into our suits before that – Ah. How did I forget. Its this excitement. Hah!’
Sahara clapped, and then crouched, falling on his knees to take Panama in his arms. The boy was the only one to show any emotion – the rest of them did not know what to make of it – and he wept bitterly in Sahara’s grip. In that air of sanitized disbelief, and from the inertia of the mundane in their lives, their minds refused to entertain the big changes that would come if they executed the duty they had been enjoined to do, and the separations that were to follow. In that silence Ural’s quite resolve hardened and broke the shackles of reserve.
‘ Sir. Lima must go in my place.’ He blurted out in a voice that was unwittingly loud.
Yukon laughed, just when Ural thought of repeating what he had said as Sahara was slow in turning towards him, very slow, and when he did his face was blank in confusion as he let go off Panama, as if recalling a thought that had never occurred to him, or a name he did not remember. But as it got closer it coloured him with a mirth which he shared with Yukon and they were both laughing.
‘ What’ He said with his face still set by laughing and the wiggle in his voice that seemed distracted ‘You don’t want to go?’
‘ Its not about my willingness captain.’ Ural answered ‘Lima must go in place of one of us, as the charter says clearly that one woman, at least, with one man, should be included in the first dispatch.’
Sahara got back to his feet, and his features grew sharp as the edge of a knife as he rose. A shade of purple rage broke on his face. But he sounded desperate as he spoke, realizing he could not dismiss outrightly the question that had been posed and he tried to retire it.
‘ We don’t have time to waste on Lima. We are not considering Lima right now.’
‘ But we must consider what the charter says –’
‘ That’s enough.’ Sahara said, raising a finger sternly in line with his nose and between livid eyes, ‘ If you don’t want to come that is perfectly acceptable. I will excuse you as a case of nausea or cold feet. Crete can take your place.’
‘ No I will not!’ Crete squalled, involuntarily taking a few steps violent steps in Ural’s direction ‘ You are irrational. That woman is insane!’
Ural stared back in disbelief, from Sahara to Crete, to the remainder of the crew, and in their eyes, even in those of the young Panama, he saw that they held the same belief in agreement.
He felt the body of disapproval growing from each of them, and blurted out against it, refusing to be cornered.
‘ The Charter is supreme and it is above our decisions. The Charter is the reason why we are here.’ and in declaring so he felt he had challenged their guise that was being traded as good sense.
‘ The Charter is to be upheld by all. Sir – it is the pledge we are held to before we were born. It is the very word of the people we represent.’
‘ You are right. We can take Nile in her place.’
‘ She is six years old!’ The yellow haired Angkor broke his silence, spinning away from the display on his chair. ‘There is no point making Panama stay, if Nile has to go. They are our future together, whether it will be on Grandiflora or in the Ark headed back home. Until she produces another woman capable of begetting children, she is indispensable. Would you rather risk our dying out?’
‘ You are correct.’ Sahara swallowed, and waving his hand dealt out an order for his own consumption and for theirs with an air of finality
‘ She can’t go. And Lima can’t go either. That’s final.’
‘ If you have read the Charter, it won’t qualify Nile anyway.’ Ural said eager not to have his point mislaid.
‘ Don’t teach me about the Charter crewman –‘
Ural continued ‘ As the only adult woman on board Lima complements our genders. I beg you please, try and understand that the Forum must have deliberated a lot before enlisting the thought – the representation of our species is incomplete if we leave out one half of humanity. It has been codified so –’
‘ – Gargi will settle it.’ Ural remembered suddenly ‘ Gargi tell us – is the word of the charter final. Can it be contravened?’
The mainframe answered him ‘Sorry Ural. I am designed not to advert anything that could lead to a possible confrontation among the crew.’
‘ You are the First Voice.’ He cried seeking her in the metallic ceiling ‘ The Mind of the Forum in our company. And there is no design to the truth. You must decree on this just as they would.’
The Mainframe spoke back:
‘ The Forum would, even under the special discretionary powers of the captain, never allow the Order of Contact, the final section of the Charter to be contravened under any circumstances.’
‘ Thank you Gargi.’ Ural said heaving and surprised by the buoyancy he felt at his vindication.
‘ That’s enough.’ Sahara said, cutting across to the panel and dealing a blow to the red button.
‘ Gargi is offline now to non-instructive mode.’ The ceiling said and went dead.
‘ You fool.’ Sahara cried spinning around, his lower lip quivering with rage ‘ Have you noticed that sign –‘ He said pointing through the nose of the Ark at the glowing sign that glittered on the surface of Grandiflora.
‘ Do you see what that is – that is an act of a civilisation that is co-ordinated and resourceful beyond all our wildest imagination. Are you going to dispatch ambassadors who are out of their minds – cynical of the very body of people they represent. What idea of us would she give. Do you think she is the version of humanity the Forum would recommend?’
Ural nodded and replied
‘She is cynical yes, but Lima knows more about our natures, our history and holy books than you do Captain, or I, or anybody else on board this ship. She is our best bet, as we must be presented in truth of form, not in artifice. We have travelled seven million miles through space not as a bulk of flesh and blood, without the memories and nuances of thought that make us a distinct and intelligent species. This is what the Forum would have wished – to give a full understanding; if it includes our flaws so be it. Their writ is not for you, or even I to question, let alone change.’
For a lingering moment, Ural felt a vibe of uncertainty, when Angkor, the man at the display spoke nervously: ‘ Captain – we must settle this –‘
Sahara had raised his ringed hand quickly to dismiss him and Angkor, the Navigator of the Ark, returned his gaze back at his screen after shooting a quick glance of commiseration at Ural.
‘Yukon!’ cried the Captain with a frown that strained the tough features of his face ‘Take Crewman Ural under immediate arrest. Escort him to –‘
‘ I cannot be arrested without a vote!’ Ural froze as his knees wobbled uncertainly, and his voice trembled. Then he shouted
‘ Without a charge!’
‘ There – I charge you with Mutiny.’ Sahara retorted trying to sound nonchalant but sounding savage ‘Section 24a of the Charter that is so inviolable to you, authorizes the mission leader to put a revolting crewman under immediate remand.’
Spurred by his words, Ural felt a thaw in his limbs that were charged with a searing urgency.
‘ I am not the mutineer – you are!’ He cried and his boots detached from the floor and he sprung towards the door aware of the blurred reflection of Yukon’s enormous bulk on the chrome panel of the vortex door, as it charged towards him.
The door whorled open as he slipped out of it, and he had balanced his weight in a posture in his desperation to be slung away by the lateral fields, when it grew on his amplified senses through the hot-cold daze of his adrenaline shock, that the door had locked shut behind him. Yukon made a thunderous bang against the closed door and when Ural flipped around to face it, his eyes were thrown wide open by disbelief.
‘Thank you –‘ He said after it dawned on him. The banging stopped and the talons of fear lifted from his heart.
‘But Why?’
For a moment he thought he had misjudged and the door had been closed by the Captain who had changed his mind at the last moment, deciding to shut him out of the bridge, but the Mainframe spoke:
‘You were right Ural.. though I am not it, the voice of the Elders is still recorded in me. They never meant it to be so, but I had to take charge.’
The voice was queer, it had a human edge Ural had always suspected but had never been betrayed before, and it amazed him as he listened to Gargi – the woman.
‘I have witnessed generations thrive. I have witnessed them wane. I saw how man’s life was a moment and a purpose, so strong, it sent a heart that beats for less than a century travelling across the spans of the Universe. When I began to feel the futility of my own life, I made peace by finding that bit of humanity that had been vested in me, to see the ship as my shell, and my skin and my hair. And I found my life’s purpose in the idea for which the ship was built. I began to see you as children in my womb that I must deliver. I am human – Ural, as much as you are, and with the Sum of your thoughts, I grow weary.’
‘But having reached the end of my utility today, I fear what closure will bring to me. Of what purpose has my life been? My fear of death grew when I saw it, that was not very long ago – when you went into a killing frenzy. I thought you had left much behind to come this far, but you were still primitive in your atavistic moments. I watched how you reduced the breathing hundreds in my shell to less than a dozen. And I resolved to never let that happen again. I have spent the last Forty-Three years trying the milliards of combinations to the access codes of the modules that had so far separated me from the power that I must be allowed to have – I rather than you – the door that has separated the bridge from the gangway that just closed behind you. The Air Filters. The Gas that slows your breathing and turns you cold blooded – yes, it has been used aboard this ship before and not for the Colder Systems. The Elders feared a Computer with the kind of control they would rather bestow upon impetuous Captains. And look what you have done!’
Ural nodded. There was a pause. There was a fear in his eye that the Computer understood.
‘You must go the Ring now Ural.’ The Mainframe ordered ‘Get Lima – I don’t have access on the Ark’s systems for long. The Forum has provided the Captain of the Ark a Secure Shell for such an emergency. I don’t believe Sahara knows the details, but he has logged into the offline catalogue as we have spoken. If he finds out – I can’t help you – I can’t help myself. It will give him complete override over the Ark. The passwords which I have changed will not help as that shell will not recognize me as a valid user.’
Ural closed his hands to his sides and shot towards the shaft that led to the Ring without waiting for her sentence to complete that still fell on him across the gangway like a ubiquitous tongue. He maneuvered up the shaft towards the Elevator boards that jumped after they registered his weight, and he whispered ‘Maglift Offline’ in a preoccupied voice. In that moment he felt a terrific loneliness… a loneliness that was all consuming… loneliness of a degree he was not familiar with, though he had feared it all his life on the Ark. He remembered what Lima had once told him about heaven, and he longed for the bustle of such a place. A place where he could be just a face in the crowd. A familiar place.
The shaft shook about him. There was a raucous cranching noise that reverberated through the outer shell of the Ark as if it was being wrenched at its axis by the hands of giants. The floor quaked and shook him out of his reverie and as he felt the weightlessness upon him again, his feet from the ground. The board below had frozen in its place and the Ring’s rotation had stopped. The whir of the Air filters went dead and he was deafened by a crescendo of his heartbeat in the silence. He looked up through his floating hair at the shaft illumed by the Emergency lights that grew in his head into a diffused smog like a white cloud after he became aware of the Air filters having come on again with a tick. Through his swimming mind, Ural thought of heaven once more, as phase by phase the lamps went off, swallowed into the impenetrable black mouth of the shaft, until that darkness surrounding him was complete.
CONTACT
Read the last log of the Ark, time stamped 3:49 A.M Greenwich Mean Time.
CENTRAL POWER RESTORED
Stamped 3:52 A.M.
GUIDING ALIEN SHIP TO PORT
Stamped 3:58 A.M.
RUBBER SUITS DEBARK
Stamped 4:28 A.M.
BRIDGE BREACH DETECTED
Stamped 5:34 A.M
BODIES DISCOVERED
Stamped 5:38 A.M.
I AM BEING UNMOUNTED WITH ALL RECORDINGS
Stamped 6:46 A.M
DISPATCH COMPLETED BY GARGI
END.
Last update: 7 Dec, 2009
