Excerpt: Kalijor: Solidarity

By the time she’d staggered back to her feet, the door was sealed and she heard two faint ‘popping’ noises that could only have been gunshots, sounding through the insulated, pressurized walls of the crate.

Fumbling around in the darkness, she found a wall and followed it back toward the door and threw her weight against it a few times in a futile attempt to breach the portal. It didn’t so much as shudder under her attack.

“Now, I need to add a flashlight to my daily gear,” she mused as she resumed feeling her way around the interior of the box.

‘It’s even too dark for me to see in here,’ a familiar voice answered her.

“Frank?!” She didn’t even try to contain her elation at the sound of the friendly voice.

‘Of course it’s me. WHo else would risk lives and limbs to keep you company while you figure out how to get us out of this rather large kennel?’

“This isn’t exactly a kennel Frank. It’s a shipping crate. One rigged for exposure to hard vacuum,” Alina kept feeling along the wall for anything that might be helpful. There were supposed to be emergency signals or escape levers inside these crate just incase someone was trapped inside. Near those would be a small box with a pressure suit and a display to allow the trapped person to see if the outside of the crate was in a pressurized environment, or a vacuum.

When she tripped over something that was knee height, something that felt absolutely nothing like a hard case for a pressure suit, the last thing she expected to land on was a bed covered in soft blankets.

“What the hell?”

‘I don’t know. I can’t see without at least some residual light. It sounded like a bed when you hit it though.’

“It is!” Alina’s hand flailed around as she attempted to right herself, and impacted a hard object. She was about to curse again, but the impact somehow activated a light. Suddenly able to see again, she sat up on the small bed and looked around.

Her hand had impacted a lamp that appeared to be bolted down to an end table near the head of the tiny bed. The lamp was made of metal, as was just about everything else in the container, and appeared to be touch sensitive.

The bed was situated along one of the long walls, opposite a tiny kitchenette that consisted of a hand sink, and a tiny induction oven. Next to that miniscule bit of counter space was a pantry that appeared to occupy nearly half of the available space inside the habitable area of the container.

Another small door appeared to lead to a toilet, and there was a waste receptacle against the kitchen wall and a small sofa dividing the livable area in half. The entirety of the space occupied barely a third of the entire volume of the crate, and no amount of searching, banging, or thrumming on the walls seemed to reveal any means of accessing the rest. The back wall was just as solid, and insulated, as the other three walls.

Poking under the bed, and sofa, then through the pantry, all she found was enough rations to keep her fed for a month, even with Frank eating off the rations with her.

Her newly bio-computer allowed her to keep exact track of the time and date, which is how she knew that it was exactly six hours after the door had closed, that she felt the cargo container being jostled around as it was loaded onto a ship, and three weeks, eleven hours, sixteen minutes, and twenty-three seconds before the door opened again.