Ghosts of the Vale

by Paul Grover

  “Are you okay, Shannon?” Hoff asked over her com-link.

  “Yes, thanks Hoff. It’s big out here.”

  “Remember your training. Focus on what is in front of you and remember there is no drag or gravity; you’ll keep going in whatever direction you are heading, unless you do something different. If you feel sick stop and find a reference point. Your perception of up and down will constantly change.”

  She clicked her link twice and pushed off into the black.

  Once clear of the airlock she flipped so she was facing the station. Vents on the arms and legs of her suit emitted puffs of vapour to adjust her position. It gave the illusion of gravity but compared to flying a J1 JetSuit this was terrifying.

  She called Hoff. “How do you spacers do this, Hoff? The reference points are different to flying in air.”

  “You get used to it, trust me,” he replied.

  “Is it normal to be this scared?”

  “Oh yes, it scared the living shit out of me every time I did it.” His tone turned serious. “It’s okay to be scared. Fear won’t kill you, panic will. If something goes wrong, take your time and think your way out.”

  Shannon thanked him and turned her attention back to her mission.

  Ahead of her the steel side of the station rotated slowly, specks of light moved against the dark hull. She suspected they were maintenance and cargo bots.

  Tish came over the comm. “Shannon, I have sent you a vector to an external communications array. It’s a long way, but it is the only one down for maintenance.”

  Shannon waited as her helmet display updated. A pip appeared showing the direction to fly.

  “Okay, Tish I have it. On my way.”

  Shannon aligned herself with the pip and hit the rockets. Her body tingled with excitement as she increased her relative velocity.

  “Hoff, I am underway. It feels good.”

  “Stay focused, Shannon. It’s easy to get into trouble.”

  “Understood.”

  Shannon tucked her arms tight into her body and adopted the aerodynamic shape of a suit racer. It was unnecessary in the vacuum but the familiarity helped her relax and find her balance. It reinforced the sense of moving toward the station rather than falling toward it.

  The flight took just under eight minutes. Shannon crossed the curve of the hull. She fought back nausea as the steel wall passed beneath her. She slowed her approach until she hovered above grey surface.

  She opened her link. “I have arrived. The scale of everything is overwhelming.”

  Tish came on line. “Shannon, you need to locate the comms array.” Her voice was tense and heavy with fatigue.

  She had worked solidly for twelve hours to program the device she called a limpet. Shannon had watched her in the engineering workshop. She had been in her own world, talking and mumbling to herself, almost unrecognisable from the carefree pirate girl Shannon had first met. Ben Jones had proved to be a competent assistant and Shannon was impressed how they seemed to read each other's minds.

  Geeks share a common language… it's no different to when I talk to JetHeads.

  “Moving,” Shannon said. She had studied the design of the station based on sketches Tish had made. The array was a domed structure on the hull; it routed internal and external communication in and around the station. Baikonur had 12 nodes; this was the only one in an idle state. A thought occurred to her.

  “Will they know I am here?”

  “All deep space sensors will be offline. If they were working you would cook from the inside out. Just hope no one looks out of the window,” Tish replied.

  “Great,” she replied.

  “Shannon,” Tish said. “I appreciate you doing this. I don’t know what else to say, but I’ll make it up to you, somehow.”

  Tish’s voice trembled. Shannon’s suppressed emotions got the better of her. She double clicked the link to avoid speaking.

  Using her rockets Shannon continued her slow run over the surface. The scale of the structure was beyond her expectations. The pressure hull was covered with towers and vents the size of small buildings.

  The comms array was ahead of her. It was exactly as Tish had sketched, a featureless hemisphere rising from the bulkhead. The outline of the dome was picked out by red strobes.

  Without warning her perception flipped; she was no longer moving toward the array, she was falling. The side of the station became a vertical cliff.

  She fired the stabilisation jets and stopped the perceived fall. Shannon closed her eyes and let the vertigo pass. When she opened her eyes sweat clouded her vision. The side of the station was still a vertical wall of steel. She took a breath and used her rocket motors to edge toward the domed structure. She imagined she was tethered to a ledge high above her and her rope was lowering her. The delusion worked and the feeling of falling abated.

  She arrived and activated her mag boots.

  “I am on the array,” she reported back.

  “Well done, Shannon. You are looking for a service hatch. It will be about a metre square, secured with four screws. It’s labelled 44AX1,” Tish said.

  Shannon clambered over the featureless surface. She was about to call in when she spotted the panel. It was close to the where the dome rose from the hull. She released, guided herself in and anchored herself back to the deck.

  “I have it.”

  “You need to unscrew the screws and remove the plate. There is a rubber gasket underneath; take care it does not float away. If it does when they power up a leak alarm will go off.” Tish paused. “You have 45 minutes EVA remaining… sorry that’s space speak for air; in 45 minutes you’ll have none.”

  Time was running out.

  Shannon used a power driver to release the plate, securing the screws and the bolts to a magnetic pad on her suit’s thigh. The gasket floated free, she caught it and slipped it over her arm. The cavity revealed a featureless grey relay box, just as Tish had sketched.

  Shannon reached into her equipment pack and retrieved the limpet. She placed it above the box and powered it on. A strobe blinked and the device shook as four worm probes extended. The synthetic tendrils waved in the vacuum before homing in on the relay.

  The probes bored into the casing, snatching the limpet from Shannon’s hands. They pulled it into the cavity until it sat firmly on top of the relay. The status indicator flashed and turned green. The screen lit up and Shannon entered the communication code to interface the limpet to the Second Chance’s communication system.

  >>UPLINK ESTABLISHED

  LOADING BOOTSTRAP

  HOOKING COMMUNICATION VECTOR

  WAIT………………

  BOOTSTRAP COMPLETE

  SECURE PIPE ESTABLISHED

  THREADS LOADING…

  WHAT A WONDERFUL NIGHT FOR A MOON DANCE

  READY>

  “Tish, it’s in place, you should be receiving a data feed.”

  The sound of Tish typing came across the open link.

  “Five by five, Shannon. Seal it up and come home.”

  Shannon fitted the gasket and the steel plate. As she tightened the final screw a shadow passed over her. She looked up and saw underside of a freighter. She involuntarily ducked. The world flipped over again. Shannon waited until her perception stabilised.

  “Close… I am never doing this again…”

  “Shannon! There is a ship in your area.”

  “I saw it…”

  “Shannon, get back here the ship dropped out of FTL close to the station. It has not changed course. It looks like it will hit.”

  Shannon dropped her multi tool and pushed off the deck. A silent explosion bloomed on the side of the station as the ship crashed. She activated her rockets and aimed herself back at the Second Chance.

  She relaxed a little as her relative velocity increased. The distance opened between her and the hull.

  Movement caught Shannon’s eye. A steel girder was spinning toward her with considerable velocity. She hit her b
raking thrusters and changed course. It was too late. The wreckage slammed into her and sent her tumbling into the void.

  Tish studied her screens. One showed the data upload from the station, the second a feed from one of the public traffic cameras.

  The traffic feed focused on the ship’s crash site. A gaping hole had appeared in the station’s upper habitation decks; gas and debris were venting into space.

  She checked the data stream.

  The freighter’s transponder was off. She had no name, ident code or origin for the ship.

  Tish opened the link to Shannon.

  “Shannon, that was close, the station is a mess…”

  Silence.

  “Shannon, come in, do you read?”

  Silence.

  She flicked onto Shannon’s data feed. All the lines were flat.

  A red warning flashed in the centre of the screen.

  MAJOR MALFUNCTION - ASTRONAUT FATALITY EXPECTED

  Tish balled her hands into fists and fought the rising panic.

  “We’ve lost her!” she wailed.

  Meyer stood behind her and rested her hand on her shoulders. Tish did not know how long the senator had been there. Her breath caught in her throat as she stared at the impassive green letters.

  “Shannon, do you read me? Come in Shannon.”

  “Tish, stay calm,” Meyer said. “Shannon is strong and resourceful. I’m sure she will find a way back.”

  “But Vanessa… I… she was not experienced with EVA. I should have gone.”

  “Tish, are you any better in a suit?”

  Tish shook her head. She hated being outside a ship; panic and vertigo would paralyse her. Just the thought of it made her shudder.

  “No… but, Mira would go; she could overcome her fear.”

  “Tish, you are neither Mira nor Shannon. You need to concentrate on what you do best. I want you to tell me what you need to do next. Let Hoff manage Shannon, for now.”

  Tish drummed her fingers on the keyboard. Luke Rhodes had once tried to teach her mindfulness, but she had never mastered it.

  “I need to bring the data stream online and integrate their systems with ours, otherwise their ice wall will freeze us out.”

  Meyer gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze.

  “So do it, work your magic,” she said in a gentle voice.

  Tish leant forward and tapped commands into her terminal. Every so often she would glance at the senator who met her stolen glances with a gentle smile.

  Tish muttered under her breath as her pace picked up, vocalising the current step and the next one helped her keep track of the increasingly complex algorithms she was writing.

  Code segment after code segment floated past her eyes. She became one with it. The worry and stress melted away as she crossed into a world of procedure calls, subroutines and secure breakpoints. One by one she broke through layers of the station’s security sub system.

  She tapped the final line of code and sat back in the chair. The Second Chance’s flight computer was now linked seamlessly with the central core of Baikonur Station; common code running on both systems and in Tish’s mind too.

  She glanced at Meyer.

  “I’m sorry that must have been boring. I lose track of time.”

  “I enjoyed spending time with my granddaughter.”

  Tish could not hold back a sob. She turned back to her screens. She had full control of Baikonur Station. She tapped into the security system and ran a search, drilling into the Nova Vision subsystem, then down into prisoner records.

  “I have her… the bounty is for terrorism offences. She’s on… oh…”

  “Tish?”

  “They’re holding her in the same sector as that ship came down.”

  Tish entered another sequence of commands, opening the camera subsystem.

  The front section of the bounty office was badly damaged, ceiling panels were down and a fire was burning. She tried to access the cell block.

  The feed was blank.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MIRA woke as she was thrown from her bunk. Alarms shrieked and the emergency lighting flickered on.

  She shook the last vestiges of sleep from her head. She coughed. Her throat burned. The air in the cell was rapidly turning bad.

  The smell of combustion filtered through the air vents. She ran to the door and banged on the metal; she withdrew as it burned her hands.

  “What the fuck? Is the station under attack?” She paced the room. Mira assumed there was a procedure for dealing with prisoners in an emergency; so far no one had come for her.

  Perhaps they are all dead...

  Icy tentacles gripped her heart as she coughed on the fumes. She climbed back on the bunk and drew her legs up to her chest; closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts.

  After everything I’ve been through, I’m going to choke to death in this miserable cell. Fucking great.

  Time passed; she had no idea of how long but suspected it was minutes rather than hours. The air quality continued to worsen.

  A speaker embedded in the ceiling crackled, fizzed and popped into life. A voice came through distorted, barely audible.

  Mira stood on the bunk trying to decipher the words. She thumped the ceiling panel.

  “Mira! Can you hear me!”

  “Tish!”

  “Mira, I can’t hear you but I can see you. We got the internal feed working. I am opening the floor access panel. You need to get into the air duct. I have programmed the emergency lights to guide you to safety. Follow the lights, Mira.”

  “Tish, how are you doing this?”

  “Mira, I can’t hear you, but if you are asking how I am doing this, don’t. Get into the floor hatch. There are several tonnes of molten plasma burning through the decks above you.”

  One of the floor panels slid back. Without waiting Mira squeezed into the cramped tunnel. Behind her it was dark, ahead it was lit by red emergency lights.

  “Tish, I don’t know how you did this but I am so grateful,” she whispered, crawling forward.

  The fumes in the air thinned as she crawled. Breathing was easier but her knees and elbows throbbed. She lost track of how many times she hit her head on the roof of the service duct; each impact added to her growing headache.

  Mira arrived at a four-way junction three tunnels were dark, the one to her left lit. The duct sloped downward. She slid to the bottom; she might have enjoyed it save for the hot air and the smell of burning coming from behind her.

  A second left turn and another small drop led to an open grating.

  Mira tumbled out in a dark smoke-filled corridor. The air was cool and aside from the drifting blue-grey clouds there were little obvious signs of the disaster.

  She orientated herself to the stations axis. Spinward was to her left. She figured whatever direction she took she would eventually find a transport tube. She had no real idea which way would bring her to the Second Chance, so decided to follow the direction of rotation.

  The world was black. Shannon blinked. She was spinning. In the distance the station receded with each rotation. Up, down, forward and backward were all arbitrary now.

  “This is bad,” she murmured. Her body ached and she was struggling for air.

  Hofner’s words came back to her.

  Fear won’t kill you, panic will.

  She closed her eyes, forcing herself to calm down.

  Breathe… work out where you are and what you need to do to get back. I will not lose.

  She focused. Ignoring the pain, she used her stabilisers to right herself, before activating her main rocket to push herself toward the station.

  It was a long burn but eventually she reached neutral velocity. Maintaining the burn she edged toward the station.

  She used her computer to measure the distance. It showed a flight time of 56 minutes. Tish had told her she 45 minutes of air and she did not know how much time had elapsed.

  She keyed her link. It whined in her ear; the antenna
must have been broken in the collision.

  Shannon considered her options. The station was too distant. She could see the shipping lane ahead, despite the accident three vessels were on final approach. The first was a Kobo; it was out of range. The second a cargo barge, unmanned and slow moving. The last ship was only identifiable by her strobes, her jet-black hull hiding her in the void.

  The black ship was slow, restricted by the speed of the barge ahead of it and it was close. She vectored her EVA suit onto an intercept trajectory and burned the tiny thruster unit at its maximum capacity. A warning flashed on her visor’s status display. She clicked her wrist computer to cancel it. She was committed now and unlike a JetSuit her EVA suit would keep flying in a straight line if the motor gave out or she ran out of fuel. Shannon was not sure what would be worse, crashing and burning on the ground or flying forever into infinity.

  As she closed the distance to the ship she unclipped a mag harpoon from its holster on her leg. She targeted the forward upper deck of the vessel and fired. The payload was in flight for an eternity before it connected with the ship’s hull. She exhaled and clipped the butt to her suit. She activated the reel and the cable pulled her closer to the black vessel.

  Shannon recognised the ship as an Aurora. It was not a standard configuration. Plasma weapons were mounted on external hard points. The matte black paint was the type the military used on stealth ships.

  A Bounty Hunter, she thought as the landed on the ship. This could go badly. Hunters were not known for their compassion.

  Baikonur station was ahead of her. Debris floated in space where the errant freighter had crashed. The indicator strobes leading to the aperture of the stations central bay turned from green to red.