Waypoint Magellan

by L S Roebuck

  “Well?” Dek asked over his radio.

  “Dek, I show we are at optimal alignment,” Sparks said. “This is as close as you get. This is your best shot.”

  “This is our only shot,” Kimberly said. “Blow the door, Dek.”

  Dek pulled the emergency hatch open.

  Suddenly, Dek, Amberly and Kimberly were ejected out into space, sucked out of Firebird’s cargo bay.

  Everything was silent.

  Then Amberly could hear her own breathing inside her helmet.

  “Dek? Dek?” she said nervously into her suit’s radio. She already knew Dek wouldn't be able to hear radio signals because of the jamming interference flooding space by the American Spirit’s communication array.

  She looked around but couldn’t seem to orientate her body so she could see Kimberly or Dek. They were not between her and Magellan. Amberly assumed they must have been floating behind her, but she couldn’t be sure.

  She was completely free floating now, shooting head first towards Magellan. She was propelled solely by momentum, closing rapidly on the waypoint, but not yet in the pull of its artificially enhanced gravity well.

  She could see the large, jagged hole in the garden dome and could see a plume of dusty air being projected into space. Already, she could tell she was colliding with the escaping atmosphere, and it was slowing her down. If air being expelled in the opposite direction slowed her forward progress entirely before Magellan’s gravity caught her, the wind stream would push her back out into open space the way she came. The space suit had no means of self-propulsion.

  More than 100 meters separated Amberly from the gaping hole in the gardens, and she was rapidly decelerating. She looked to her left and saw the American Spirit, gleaming brightly, reflecting the blue-tinted light of HD 238921, Spencer Minorum.

  She turned her head and looked forward again at Magellan. With her helmet blocking peripheral vision, when she looked forward it filled her entire field of view. The vast metallic saucer, with its garden dome, now bleeding a mix of atmosphere, dust and various plant limbs and leaves, was both beautiful and grotesque at the same time.

  Amberly had seen photographs and videos of Earth from space, and there was no denying the home world, a brilliant spherical swirl of blues, greens, browns and white, was truly beautiful. And when she compared the image of her Earth in her minds eye with Magellan’s harshly sloping hull, jutting with tubes and metallic recesses and pocked with various-sized viewports, the waypoint was distinctly artificial. From the topside view, it was a huge, uneven grayish spinning dish with a green eye. Now that eye was cracked.

  For Amberly, Earth was foreign and might as well as have been mythical. When she saw Magellan, now less than 50 meters away, she saw… home. Somewhere between Rick’s and the Science Corp labs, the topside gardens and Chinatown, somewhere in the mess before her was her heart. In those places where she had played with Kora, danced with North, laughed with Lydia, and even played games of chess with Skip, those memories and people were as much a part of Magellan as the bulkheads and antimatter reactor, the Tube and the hangar.

  It was her home. It was worth fighting for. And now Amberly felt it was worth dying for.

  The people on Magellan, progressives and traditionalists, atheists and believers, the native-born and the Ararans, men and women, all worth saving: They were Magellan, both adjective and noun. Those unique, individual lives were worth something, not just as the collective population of Magellan, or even as a social team that kept Magellan running smoothly as a key link between Earth and Arara. Individually they were worth celebrating and worth protecting.

  Amberly now felt like she was barely moving at all.

  The only noise she could hear was her rapid breathing as the vibrations generated by the cardio activity echoed in her helmet.

  Then, she looked to her right and saw infinity: the billions of sparkling points of light, scattered throughout the universe, with no end that she could comprehend. At once she experienced basest human emotions of fear and loneliness. She felt small as she gazed out into black sea that she would never cross — at least not alive. She was a speck of nothing in the infinite universe. The blackness of space seemed to absorb her mind, pulling her focus into the places between the stars.

  She imagined the sparkling stars as some sort of bitter, tragic symphony. Tchaikovsky, maybe, she thought, Swan Lake perhaps.

  She looked at the stars, visually sharp, twinkling red and blue and white, separated by the eternal darkness. They were so far away. She reached out with her hand, and time seemed to stop. Something solitary in her core longed to know them. Amberly longed to know the unknowable.

  She thought about her dad. Remembering his face clearly was hard, but she could still hear his voice. “That’s what heaven is for,” he’d say. “All the mysteries of the universe, everything we couldn’t understand, we’ll know.” Cloaked in her mother’s empirical worldview, she didn’t agree with him, but even now she wondered where he had acquired his undeniable optimism. His hope, perhaps unfounded, Amberly thought, would be welcome right now.

  She tried again to picture Alroy Macready in her mind’s eye. A warm smile, trimmed with reddish beard and nearly perfect white teeth. His green eyes were warm and inviting, bright and full of life. He wasn’t tall, but his arms were strong and reliable. Even when he was extremely tired from piloting an excessively long trip, his spirit never seemed to lose its energy.

  As Amberly thought about her dad, a particularly bright star caught her attention. That must be dad, looking out for me, she thought. Amberly smiled. She didn’t think the spirit of her father had really become a star, and he certainly didn’t believe such a thing, but the what-if of the thought comforted her now.

  Amberly’s forward momentum had slowed considerably when she was just a meter or less from the torn hole in the topside garden dome. Even though the escaping atmosphere was so thin now it offered no detectable resistance, for a moment Amberly thought she might be pushed back into the darkness of space.

  There were probably worse ways to go than floating into infinity, Amberly frowned.

  And then she felt a familiar tug: She had slipped into the reach of Magellan’s artificial gravity field, a force she knew well. Home was literally pulling her in.

  As Amberly slipped through the jagged portal left by the collision with Firebird, her suit caught on a dislodged, warped reinforcement bar. The tear immediately depressurized her suit as she started to fall rapidly and dangerously to the surface of the Magellan garden, now just a few meters away.

  She hit the dirt hard, landing on her side. The impact knocked her air out. Although most of the atmosphere was gone, dirt and leaves and other organic material still swirled in the garden.

  Amberly was breathing hard as the air in her suit became almost too thin to inhale. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She didn’t get up. Tchaikovsky was still playing in her head, and she began to see black spots.

  “I am going to pass out,” Amberly said aloud to no one. “I am going to die.”

  And then she looked up and saw her mother seize her by both arms and begin to drag her through the dirt storm. And she looked ahead and saw who she thought was Dek kneeling over a floor portal.

  Dek had already removed his gloves and was working frantically to get Kimberly’s hacking box to open the door. Kimberly set down Amberly after half-dragging, half carrying her daughter inside her space suit for several meters. Kimberly took a deep breath and removed her helmet and then quickly unfastened the rest of her space suit, stepping out and then stripping a now unconscious Amberly out of her suit as well. Dek almost had the portal open.

  “I’m starting to feel light headed,” Dek said as the whipping wind in the dome started to calm. The atmosphere seemed nonexistent. Dek took in a deep breath, but the air was thin and his lungs started to burn.

  Kimberly was calm and focused. Dek noted the thinning air didn’t even seem to bother her.

  To Dek, th
e hacking box seemed like it was taking hours to bypass the computer lock on the portal, but in reality, just five seconds had passed.

  “It won’t open!” Dek wheezed to Kimberly, panic in his eyes. He wondered if he could put his space suit back on before he suffocated. “It’s not working!”

  “Save your breath,” Kimberly said in a disappointed monotone. “It is just having to run a secondary hack because the computer knows this side of the portal is depressurized. It’s a safety feature.”

  Kimberly’s words did not comfort Dek. He felt the temperature start to drop rapidly, and the plants that did not get sucked out into space started to freeze.

  Within another five seconds, the magnetic locks on the door released, and Dek pulled the round portal open. Immediately, a geyser of air from the lower decks of Magellan shot out into the under pressured topside gardens.

  The force of the air blast knocked Dek off his feet, and he stuck his head into the rush and took in the thicker air.

  “You go down first,” Kimberly ordered. “I am going to hand Amberly down to you.”

  Dek was eager to comply and forced himself against the sustained upward blow down the same hatch that he and Amberly had climbed up on the night they met. Kimberly hoisted the unconscious Amberly into the hole and slowly lowered her down. Dek was on the deck below now, and he reached up and grabbed Amberly’s legs, catching himself absentmindedly admiring their attractive shape. Amberly’s red hair blew wildly as she passed through what effectively was a wind tunnel.

  Dek immediately felt guilty admiring Amberly’s beauty while she was unconscious as he took her full weight from Kimberly and set her gently down on the floor.

  Kimberly slowly climbed halfway into the hole, forcing herself against the shooting air. She looked up into open space through the fissure in the top of the garden dome. So begins the end of Magellan, she thought, as she pulled the portal closed behind her. Kimberly dropped more than three meters to the floor, where she landed in a shock-absorbing crouch next to the prone Amberly.

  The mother hovered her ear above her daughter’s mouth, put two fingers on Amberly’s neck and was still. Dek could see that the young Macready breathing shallowly.

  “She’s going to be fine,” Kimberly told Dek. She ran a hand gently over Amberly’s mid-torso. “She may have fractured a rib. You’ll have to carry her Dek, so be careful. I know you are not strong as that North fellow; do you think you can handle it?”

  Kimberly’s dig at Dek’s strength was a not subtle way for Raven One to remind the younger man that he was vulnerable to silly patriarchal rivalries.

  Dek put an arm under Amberly’s knees and an arm underneath her shoulder blades and lifted her up, careful not to show any sign of strain. Amberly wasn’t heavy by anyone’s definition, but she was 45 kilograms.

  “Let’s get down to the command center,” Kimberly said to Dek, taking off at an aggressive pace toward the tube. “You know, I am glad I was able to visit this place one last time before we torch it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  North and Twig had double-timed it to Rick’s. When they arrived, they found the bar empty of patrons except for the contingent of Marines Acting Commander Moreno had dispatched from the Marine HQ.

  The trip from the airlock where they left Adams to Rick’s was chaotic, with panicking residents scurrying about the main halls and capillaries, and various Chasm operatives attempting to cause mayhem. Twig had used his stun gun four additional times on people he believed to be Chasm troublemakers.

  Examining floor schematics at the bar were three Marines, Leo, Boro and Wong, and two civilians, Kora and Lydia. Kato was the lone Rick’s employee in the bar, and he was serving up drinks.

  The Marines stood to attention when North and Twig entered the bar.

  Kora ran up and gave North a hard squeeze. North winced as she brought too much pressure on his injured arm.

  “Sorry,” Kora said.

  “North, Twig,” Leo said to the two officers, “We have to move, now.”

  “What’s going on?” North said anxiously, reflecting the intensity in Leo’s voice.

  “We just heard from Central Command,” Wong said as he pulled out his infopad, “the Firebird successfully punched a hole in the garden dome.”

  “No!” Kato gasped. “Our food source for —”

  Twig frowned at the barkeep. “We’ll have to deal with that later. Right now, we need to get the station locked down and make sure that the damage is contained.”

  “It might be more complicated than that,” Wong said. “Apparently three people, well, jumped from the Firebird through the fissure.”

  “Jumped?” said North incredulously. “How?”

  “Space walked right through the new hole. But listen — about four minutes ago portal 1425b from the topside garden into access hall 14Y was hacked, opened and resealed.”

  “We need to find those three now,” Twig said. “They could be planning some sort of sabotage. Maybe they brought a bomb or some explosive material?”

  “Could it be Amberly?” Kora asked, voice full of hope.

  “Maybe, but with whom?” Twig said.

  “Saddle up. Let’s go find out,” North said.

  Leo pulled out an infopad from a green supply pack that slung across his back and called up a map. “If we split up and move to these three junctions and converge here, there should be no way for these guys get past us,” Leo pointed to three hall crossings on the map.

  “Let’s move,” North said. “Keep your stun guns drawn and be ready for anything. Leo, you and Twig cover this corridor. Boro and Wong, you’re on hall 16Y. Kora and Lydia, you come with me. But stay back in case there is trouble.”

  Twig looked over at Boro and spoke to North. “Can he be trusted?”

  “With my life,” North smiled. “Now move. Let’s catch these people.”

  On the bridge of the Firebird, Sparks had physically propped the manual yoke with an empty soup packet, and stood and quickly made her way toward an escape pod.

  The computer spoke over the ship-wide speaker system, “Warning. Collision imminent in three minutes. Collision avoidance systems have been disabled. Do you want to enable them?”

  Sparks ignored the computer and held down an escape pod access control for ten seconds. She counted out loud as she did. A round door, less than a meter in diameter, rolled open revealing the interior of the pod. The capsule was cylinder-shaped, designed to hold two medium-sized humans. A small viewport opened into space on the opposite side of the access door. The wall was lined with rations, air tanks and other survival gear, and two gurney-like clearings. Sparks strapped herself into one and reached over to a control panel and started to input the commands that would clear the pod from Firebird’s hull.

  The door slid shut, and she could hear explosive bolts detonating. Suddenly the pod jerked free of the Firebird. Almost instantly, the pod was outside the Firebird’s artificial gravity field, and Sparks could feel herself become weightless.

  “Time to go home,” she said to no one, and then activated the pod's limited control thrusters to push the lifeboat toward the American Spirit. She was looking forward to getting back on the ship that had been her home for the last three years and the one that would take her back to Arara — for good.

  “North do you copy?” Moreno was signaling North’s radio. He was wearing a wireless earpiece, and moving down the hallway with his stun gun raised in front of him, poised to shoot. On either side of this hall were micro-factories and raw supply storage for the small production center.

  Lydia also carried a stun gun North provided for her, but she held it barrel down. Kora refused a weapon, even when North insisted. “I’ll just end up accidentally shooting a friend,” she had argued before leaving Rick’s.

  “I read you, XO,” North replied to Moreno via the radio. “We’re moving to intercept the three potential hostiles. I hear we’ve lost the gardens. How do we recover from that?”

  “The g
ardens are not important now,” Moreno said in North’s headset. Kora and Lydia could not hear Moreno’s end of the conversation. “If your friend Skip is reading our radar correctly, they may be making a run for the anti-matter reactor. Find whoever got off that ship and question them immediately and report back.”

  North’s face turned grim. “Understood.”

  About 100 meters ahead, the hall took a hard left and then converged into an area where the hallways being swept by the other two teams would intersect. North punched open the sole door on the right side of this segment of the hall and peered inside.

  “Lights!” he commanded. The room responded with a flood of artificial light, and North quickly saw there was nothing in that room but tubs of polymer pellets for 3D manufacturing work. He popped back into the hallway and sealed the door behind him.

  North heard what he thought were footfalls around the corner, so he held up a finger to his mouth to indicate that he wanted Lydia and Kora to be as silent as possible and then waved them to stop. North pointed to himself and then to the corner and pointed to the two women and put a palm angled down, indicating for them to stay.

  North took a slow deep breath and slowly crept up to the corner. The footfalls were getting faster and closer. He closed his eyes and steadied his breathing. His index finger caressed the curve of the trigger of his assault rifle. Steady, he thought.

  North sprung, rounding the corner with his weapon drawn. He saw someone he did not expect to see.

  “Kimberly?” North said, slightly confused, as he looked at an equally shocked Raven One, who was eyeing North’s assault rifle with suspicion.

  Even with Jayden’s recent revelation, North didn’t really believe that Kimberly Macready was alive, much less leading Chasm. How could Amberly and Kora’s mother be so evil?

  North didn’t want to make any hasty action. Kimberly looked lean and even hungry, but there was no mistaking her raven black hair and her round face that looked so much like Amberly’s. He had remembered what Jayden had said about Kimberly’s surviving six years of self-inflicted exile.