Termination Shock

by Gillian Andrews

  We all nodded at that.

  Oznard swept away. There was a murmur of sound as soon as she had left. Our future was decided. Now we could go and help some of the people affected by the explosion. There was a rush for the door.

  Yesterday’s carnage lingered in the docking ring area of the space station. I was horrified to see just how many innocent people had been culled by the explosion.

  Even though the explosion had happened the day before, there was still plenty we could do to help. Not all of the bodies had been removed. The Tyzaran authorities were taking their time, it seemed. I was surprised. For such an advanced member of the Major Shells, they were unwieldy. I had assumed, wrongly, that they would be far quicker in their rescue attempts. I was glad to belong to the Spacelander community. We trained exhaustively to combat emergency situations.

  The worst area affected was the Aurynth dock. And it was not only the space station. Because the Aurynth had still been alongside the space station, the force of the explosion had torn into the ship’s flank too. Large holes peppered the side of the ship facing the station. I could see several bodies trapped within the debris. Many of her crew members must have died. Decompression would have torn through the ship, and most of those inside would not have been protected by EVA suits. The ship wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

  I looked around at what seemed to have become my little group. They were staring expectantly at me. Waiting for instructions. Even Mel, usually fear-stricken into immobility, was eager to help. I gave them a nod. “Let’s clear a path through to Aurynth. There may still be something we can do to save lives on board. We owe them our support, I believe.”

  The two Enif led the way. It was the first time I had seen them heading together into physical work. Eshaan was behind Didjal, true, but its arms were just as committed as it began to work its way through bent metal spars and other debris that was blocking the docking ring.

  Mel and Sammy were close behind, followed by Anzany and Neema. Zenzara marched in the rear and I was trying to make sure she was safe. She could still be in danger, though most of the people in the area did appear to be concentrating on rescue rather than attack. Seyal had fallen in behind us, but I had shaken my head at her.

  “Stay here, Seyal. You are about to give birth. This is not something you need to do.”

  She had hesitated. Then her small padded hands had gone to her stomach in a protective manner. She knew that I was right. In the end she had simply nodded and stepped aside. She was far too close to going into labor to risk her whole pregnancy again. She had been very lucky so far that all the events we had lived through had not provoked damage to her son. At least, I hoped that they hadn’t.

  Even so, her face had shown regret as she was left behind. She felt she was letting us down.

  Behind me, a rather poker-faced Denaraz had appeared. Whether he had been assigned to watch over us or not was unclear. Perhaps he was there voluntarily. I had no idea. I was finding him a difficult man to read.

  The buckled and twisted metal made our progress slow. If it hadn’t been for the two Enif, I doubt we could have cleared a passageway to the Aurynth. With them, we moved steadily towards the broken hatches.

  I stared down at the patch of charred deck plating where the attacker had stood. I could see him if I closed my eyes. His image had been burned into my retina. I don’t think I could ever forget it. That split second when I fired, knowing it was too late to change anything.

  “You couldn’t have stopped them.” Denaraz had come up silently and was staring, grim-faced, at the same spot. His leg looked much stronger; he was hardly limping. “There were more than one. This was simply the first assassin. Bombs were detonated there …” he pointed, “… and there.” He pointed again.

  “Were they? I was too busy trying to save myself.” I could hear the shame in my voice.

  “You saved your crew. You were entitled to save yourself. You did well. You saved me.” His own voice hardened. “Yet I was not able to save my own crew.”

  “Do you know how many casualties there were on Aurynth?”

  He shook his head. “I have been isolated from my ship until now.”

  I could tell that the uncertainty was eating away at his spirit. “All right.” I touched his arm briefly. “Then let’s find out.”

  The pain was written across his face. “Yes.”

  We began to move more and more of the debris out of the way. I tried not to look at the bodies floating so close on the other side of the airlock. You could not have recognized them, in any case. The prolonged exposure to the vacuum had caused space-swell to bloat their remains into grotesque balloon figures. It was easier not to look.

  At last we made it to the airlock. Denaraz shouted over to some of the Tyzarans who were working nearby. They nodded. A portable airlock, roomy enough to accommodate a couple of men in EVA suits, was manhandled across to us, together with a couple of the EVA suits themselves.

  He and I struggled inside the suits and then shuffled into the portalock. These are contraptions that clamp up against standard airlocks and can be used once to decompress and once to compress. They must then be discarded. However, they work well to override the failsafes of traditional airlocks, and permit a limited form of transit through to vacuum environments.

  Just before the portalock was decompressed a figure pushed its way into the portalock with us. It was Didjal.

  “You might be needing a good engineer,” it told me with some severity. “I am an extremely good engineer.”

  Denaraz was staring.

  “It’s all right,” I reassured him. “The Enif can take full decompression for much longer than we can. Didjal will be fine, at least for a few hours. Right, Didjal?”

  The Enif gave its equivalent of a grin. “Sure.”

  Denaraz rolled his eyes, an unspoken comment on the sanity of the newcomer. I nodded. He wasn’t wrong.

  Didjal squeaked as the air disappeared from around us, but that was the only sound it made. When the air had finally disappeared from the portalock, it grabbed at the safety-overridden hatch and helped us tug the emergency T bar out of its housing.

  It took all three of us to force the bar ninety degrees around so that the mechanisms on the other side of the hatch would disengage. I realized just how much force the Enif can put into their forearms. They might seem slim when you first look at them, but they are extremely strong.

  Finally there was a quiet snick of metal retracting and the hatch opened for us. We propelled ourselves out into the vacuum to the opposing hatch on the Aurynth. It must have been around fifteen meters away.

  Since the hatch was now standing as a lonely sentinel between two decompressed atmospheres, the safety was not engaged. It was a simple matter to open the hatch and pass into the ship’s airlock.

  That too, was standing open.

  I checked Didjal, but the Enif was still showing no signs of distress of any type. Some advantage, in a spacefaring race! My own EVA suit was as heavy as hell, making it quite hard to make progress along the corridor.

  We worked for six hours, before we had everything tidied up enough to be able to seal the breaches and compress the whole area once more. Didjal had returned to the space station after the first hour, and spent the time getting a replacement docking tube. The two Enif set it up so that once we compressed again there could be free transit between the ship and the station.

  We had come across twenty bodies. We knew that more had floated away from the station overnight. The shrapnel expelled was enough to put an outwards velocity on the cadavers. The final total, Denaraz thought, would be closer to thirty. And that was only from his ship. The total casualties were thought to be in the region of 200 dead and 550 injured. It was a devastating blow to the space station.

  Denaraz worke
d ceaselessly for all those hours. I came to respect him. If we were forced to accept a spokesdesignate on whatever ship we were given, then he might not be a bad choice. I could see how affected he was by the loss of so many of his crew. That may not make him a good person, but it did show that he cared for those who worked under him. Most of the Tyzarans I had met seemed to be very cold. I couldn’t see Supreme Oznard giving a fig for the people she worked with. She had far too inflated an opinion of herself.

  At last we were done. The link to the space station was up and running and fully compressed. The air was breathable.

  Just in case, we tested it by removing the EVA helmets. The air was tainted, but acceptable.

  I ran a hand through my hair, which was flattened from the EVA helmet. I caught Denaraz doing the same with his crests. We grinned at each other. Such a small thing, but it did bring us closer.

  We walked up to the airlock that had automatically sealed the rest of the ship. Denaraz rapped sharply on the bulkhead to one side. We waited to hear corresponding raps back.

  He looked at me and then pressed the automatic reset on the safety valve override, inputting a long password when prompted.

  There was a click, and then the hatch rolled quickly to one side. We found ourselves staring into the gazes of the remaining crew. Their expressions of wariness quickly became relief as they spotted their commander.

  I was glad to get the man back to his ship. Even so, the Tyzaran spokesdesignate appeared shell-shocked. His previous certainty had morphed into hesitancy. He was not the same leader he had been the day before. He had been diminished in some way by the attack.

  “I never thought I would live to see Tyzaran attacking Tyzaran,” he had said to me in a small voice as his eyes sadly took in the gouged metal which marked the explosions in the skin of the space station. “We always thought we were superior.”

  I shrugged. “You were. Technologically, at least. None of the other races would have got far in space without Tyzaran artificial gravity plating, after all.”

  He pulled what few wrinkles were left on his face together. “But not socially, it seems.”

  I couldn’t deny that. What had happened here was barbaric.

  He was still bemused. “Why would the Enclave do this? What did they hope to gain by eliminating the new Chyzar?”

  “I don’t imagine they wanted to gain anything. They simply wanted to destroy something they can’t understand.”

  “But we are Tyzarans!” His voice had gone up in pitch. “Not Nepheals, to be scared of gathering predators!”

  I thought that was a little unfair to the Nepheals. I liked the tall beings as a race. It was hardly their fault that the ancestors to the Vaers had come close to exterminating them.

  Now his eyes became glazed as he examined inwards instead of outwards. “I shall have to resign my commission,” he said firmly. “I have caused too many of the men under me to die.”

  “You were not to blame for the actions of the Enclave.”

  “I should have foreseen more trouble. I had warning, after all.” His face was stony. He waved his fingers in my direction. “Even you told me to wait!”

  “You were under orders.”

  “I should have exercised discretion. I am responsible for many deaths.”

  I grabbed up at his shoulder and gave him a fierce shake. “You are not responsible for any of it. Now, stop it! You were under orders and you could not have known what was planned. Stop beating yourself up!”

  His eyes came into focus on my face. He made a clear effort to pull himself together. “You are right, of course. I am sorry.”

  I peered at him. “You are not really going to resign?”

  He lifted his shoulders. “How can I remain?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Look, will you wait for a week? Please? I have an idea, and it won’t work if you have resigned your commission.”

  He seemed more confused than ever. I squeezed his shoulder some more. He frowned as my fingers bit into his muscles, unused to such informality. “Oh, very well! I suppose I can wait a week.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was a good reunion with the rest of the crew, but I saw the emptiness in Denaraz’s eyes. He would not forget any of this in a hurry. He waved a hand in agreement as I made signs I was leaving.

  I could feel his eyes boring into my back as I walked away. But he would be a good choice. At least he had doubts, was prepared to examine his conscience. I would far rather have him than any of the other spokesdesignates. And I really didn’t think the Supreme Council would allow us to fly away with only Anzany to represent Tyzar. This could be a good compromise. If he accepted, that is. He might. It could help to damp down the crippling guilt he was feeling for all the deaths on board the Aurynth.

  As I walked through the docking tube back to the mangled space station, I saw Mel racing along the platform to meet me.

  “Come quick!” she gasped, almost falling in her haste to get to me. “It’s Seyal! It’s time!”

  Well, of course it was.

  Chapter 11

  We stared at the ship. It was two weeks later, and none of us could find any words.

  She was beautiful. A brand new, shiny, beautiful Myndraka-class patrol ship. She glittered under the artificial lighting in the enormous hold. She was somewhere between a burnished gold and a shiny copper.

  We were on a secret base, somewhere behind the second-largest Tyzar moon. We had been spirited off Tyzar as soon as the main space station had been cleared for normal trading. The Supreme Council were taking no further risks with their future Chyzar.

  Seyal and her new baby were standing to one side. The baby was making chortling noises as it played with its mother’s hands.

  “What are you going to call it?” asked Oznard, who seemed to be in a reasonably affable mood for the occasion. She was referring to the ship, not the baby.

  I looked the ship over again. She had two normal-height decks on top and a deeper deck below for cargo and shuttles. She was around sixty meters overall, with a beam of about twenty and a similar height. She wasn’t sufficiently reinforced or rugged to be a cruiser. But I liked her. She was smooth and sleek, shaped like a rounded chrysalis or lozenge with two slim E.P. receptor rods spiking out some ten feet in front of her. That made her a space-faring patrol ship, not meant to touch planet-side ever. She looked harmless, but I had been told that she was well-equipped with state-of-the-art ABlaser canons and defense rail guns.

  There was an organic look about her. Sitting glittering in the hold, she reminded me of something.

  “The ship looks just like one of those brooches you wear,” I said to Zenzara. “The ones that look beautiful but can be deadly.”

  Zenzara ran her eyes over the elegant ship. She nodded. “The Nivala.” Her head tilted to one side. “That would be a good name.”

  “Nivala it is,” I told Supreme Oznard. “And it’s a her; she’s a her.” I frowned, trying to figure out which of those two options was right. I find pronouns confusing sometimes.

  Oznard inclined her head. “Very nice,” she said. “Nivala, then.” She looked along the ragged line of crew members who were about to take off in the new ship, her gaze stopping at Denaraz. Her pleased expression vanished. “Spokesdesignate.”

  “Supreme.” Denaraz came to full attention. So did his crests. I saw that the site of amputation had healed well. The scar was hardly noticeable now. His leg had recovered well, too.

  “I hope you realize the importance of your mission.”

  “Certainly, Supreme. To take care of the Chyzar.”

  “At all costs.”

  “At all costs, Supreme.”

  The Supreme turned her eyes to me. “Exactly,” she murmured. “At all costs.”<
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  I shivered. I didn’t like the tone she had used. I hoped that I hadn’t made a mistake in suggesting Denaraz for the job of liaison between Tyzar and ourselves.

  Zenzie was practically jumping up and down on the spot. “Can we see her? Can we? Can we?”

  Oznard pasted a smile back on her face. She made it look difficult. “You may, Ty Zylarian. But please return here when you have finished your inspection. I would like to … err … ask something of your … err … group. Since you will be needing a maiden voyage to shake out any shipyard faults, that is.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. But it would do us no harm to listen. Would it?

  Zenzie ran ahead of us onto the Nivala and up the gangplank. She touched the shining side of the ship as she raced inside. It was nice to see her laugh again. There hadn’t been much of that recently.

  In fact there was an air of celebration about all of us. It felt so good to have the prospect of somewhere we could adopt as our own. Like flotsam being finally swept into a safe harbor.

  The two Enif bounded along the gangplank after Zenzara. They seemed pleased at the height of the corridor beyond. They disappeared, examining their surroundings curiously.

  Sammy stomped along in their wake, still limping slightly. I saw him turn back and grin at Mel. He held out his hand. She hesitated, then her face cleared as she slid her own fingers into his. He squeezed the hand, silently trying to help her over her claustronetia. She smiled back, straightened her shoulders and walked on, head up. I was glad for her that this new support seemed to be helping.

  Then our new adepts walked inside. First Denaraz, newly promoted to the prestigious role of Guardian of the Chyzar. He strode on. He seemed glad to be treading new ground, even though he knew that the promotion actually hid a diminution of his responsibilities. Whatever the Tyzarans had claimed about the Aurynth, I was convinced that she had never been a research vessel. He was no longer captain of a fighting ship, no longer even figured on the ship’s organigram. From now on, he would only be required to monitor and attend the new Chyzar. Yet he was now on an intermediate level between the spokesdesignates and the Supreme Council. His official title was now Adjunct, but he had already told me to address him simply as Denaraz.