by Rob Boffard
The panel snaps right off. Steadying herself with a quick thruster burst, Lorinda goes to work, plunging her hands into the opening. There’s a thermal shield, all right. It’s there to protect the electronics from the vacuum, and can be removed when the ship is in dry dock so that technicians work on the ship’s insides.
How many times did Lorinda tell her rig-hounds to be careful with exposed therm-shields? They’re good at keeping the internal temperature consistent, but hit ’em wrong and they pop right off – she’s seen it happen a dozen times. Whatever advanced tech this ship carries – and it’s definitely not alien, that much she’s sure of now – the schmucks that built it didn’t bother upgrading the basics. Allowing herself the barest smile, Lorinda digs her fingers in, wrenching the panel free.
The vacuum does the rest. There’s no spark, no visible effect, but the doors stop moving. There’s perhaps six feet of space between them, as if the eye is partially closed. The last sphere is still just beyond the opening. Behind it, cold stars glitter against the black.
The launch bay goes wobbly in front of her, and for a few seconds she feels like she’s going to pass out. Yesterday, she was on vacation. She was in her room, shoes off, propped up on the bed, wondering whether she should go to a restaurant for dinner or if she should just grab the fluffy bathrobe and order room service.
With what feels like every ounce of will she has, Lorinda brings herself back. There’s no point pulling the same electronics trick on any of the spheres – a shutdown sphere, with its electronics frozen, is no use to her. Either that, or they’ll explode when she tries it. She’s hurting, and more scared than she’s ever been in her life, but she’s got no desire to die today.
Most of the spheres are inactive, the lights on their surfaces black and dead. That makes sense. If you’re a weapons platform like the Colony ship, you don’t engage the enemy with a thousand bombs inside you that could go off at the slightest jostle. You activate them right before launch.
But the two uppermost spheres on the rail are alive, the lights on their surfaces shining in the darkness. They must have been activated already in preparation for launch, and whoever tried to shut down the weapons system has either forgotten about them or can’t turn them off. That’s what she needs to go for. But if she can’t mess with their electronics, then how …
The impact sensors. Every sphere has them, little black nubbins dotted across their surfaces. She’s worked on enough sensors before to recognise them – every dig site she’s ever been on has had sensor arrays to detect clouds of micrometeoroids, and she’s repaired plenty before.
She moves across to the line of spheres. She can’t get over how alien the things feel. Each one reminds her of a virus, pictured close up: misshapen, dead, evil. A tiny bomb with just enough awareness to hunt, destroying itself and its target in one go. Each one is perhaps six feet across, and looking at them makes her shiver in her suit. She’s seen a lot of different vessels, and dealt with a lot of different tech over the years, but she’s never seen anything like these spheres. They move through space as if they’re alive.
Please let the Panda be OK. Please, Lord, don’t leave me stuck in here.
Moving as quickly as she can, she makes her way up to the lowermost active sphere, careful to avoid touching the sensors. She manages to position herself on top of it, next to the bracket connecting it to the launch rail, half kneeling on the sphere’s metal surface. With no tether, she has to lock her arm around the rail itself.
Through the sweat-smeared helmet glass, Lorinda examines the bracket. It’s a foot-long metal cylinder with four heavy-duty claws at its base, locked into slots at the top of the sphere. The top of the bracket is attached to the transport track like a cable car.
There’s got to be a way. There’s got to.
And then she sees it.
The weak spot.
The brackets will be reinforced against forward motion – the slight jerk whenever the rail moves them towards the launcher. What they’re not protected from is a sideways impact, perpendicular to the rail. If she can dislodge just one sphere …
There’s no time to interrogate the idea. Right now, it’s the best she’s got. She uses her thrusters to get herself in position against the launch bay wall, her back against it. She doesn’t know how much force a single kick will generate, but she can’t think of another option. She focuses on the point just above the claws holding the sphere in place. If she can plant her strike there, it might just give her the leverage she needs.
She brings her leg back – and stops.
I can’t do this.
The pain is everywhere now. She hasn’t worked this hard in years – even when Craig was still alive, when she was still out with the rig-hounds, she’d begun relying on machines to do most of the work. This kick, if it even works, is going to destroy her.
Well, hell. She might be old, but she got inside here, didn’t she? And it’d be an awful shame to stop those doors from closing and then punk out at the last second.
With a grunt, she fires her front thruster, forcing her body back against the wall, and kicks.
If she hadn’t been braced, she would have gone flying. As it is, it’s a miracle she manages to stay in one place. The zero-G saps force from the kick – it takes her almost everything she has just to build up any momentum. But she strikes the bracket clean, making the ball rock slightly. The pain is indescribable. Inside her helmet Lorinda screams.
One more. Just one more.
She draws her leg back, squeezes her eyes shut, and kicks again. The impact makes the sphere shudder – but it doesn’t move, the bracket keeping it locked in place. Please, God, enough.
But she has to. Wailing, she lashes out a third time, driving with her heel. At the very last second, her fingers move of their own accord, firing every one of her rear thrusters. She explodes off the wall, the force from the thrust channelling down into her foot.
The bracket snaps clean off, wrenching from its rail. The sphere, LEDs blinking, begins to drift, moving towards the opposite wall.
Working on raw instinct, she keeps firing her thrusters, following the sphere, only just managing not to collide with the rail. Then she executes a second, flawless forward flip, like a swimmer reaching the end of her lane, and plants both feet squarely on top of the sphere.
She has no idea how she manages to avoid the impact sensors, or even how her overloaded legs have the energy to do what she does next. She bends her knees, the pain almost making her black out, and launches herself up and out.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The sphere rockets down the launch tube, plunging into darkness, its blinking lights illuminating the metal walls. Lorinda goes in the opposite direction, popping out of the top of the launch bay.
She doesn’t know how much fuel she has left – the tears are messing with her lens, blurring her display – and she doesn’t care. She burns it all, firing every thruster she has, exploding away from the Colony ship.
She’s not alone. There’s a figure approaching from below, clad in a dark grey spacesuit, rocketing towards her in a cloud of compressed gas from the suit thrusters.
Somewhere, deep in the launch tube, the deadly sphere finds its mark.
There’s no oxygen to carry the shockwave, but Lorinda’s lens goes crazy. Heat bakes into her back, her suit turning into an oven, warnings flashing everywhere –
Craig!
Chapter 27
“Push it,” Jack says, unable to look away from the sphere. “Push it harder.”
“I’m at full thrust,” Volkova shouts.
“There!” Anita is pointing to something that might have once been part of a ship, moving past above them. “Get behind that.”
“Too big,” says Brendan. “We’re still underneath it.”
“We have to!”
The sphere is still heading right at them, a few hundred yards away now. Volkova starts to move the ship upwards a little, but the sphere simply adjusts
its course, keeping its lock.
Jack turns away, eyes squeezed shut.
This is it. This is how it ends.
Volkova might have been able to steer them safe for a few minutes, but they were never going to make it. It was only a matter of time. They’re trapped, caught in a spiral of debris, hemmed in on all sides. If anybody’s piloting the sphere, they can chalk this one up as an easy kill. For them, it was probably fun.
His next thought surprises him. He’s not going to look away. If these assholes want to kill him, he’s going to look them in the eye while they do it – or at least, he’s going to stare down that sphere. They’ve got seconds left. A single turn, a single minor course correction, and the sphere will smash right into the Panda.
As he does so, a clean, clear thought slices through his mind: Seema was right.
There’s no way the Colony ship would have stranded itself here. There’s something else going on. Someone was playing a game, and they were a part of it, and now they’re going to die never knowing what that was.
“Wait …” says Brendan.
The sphere vanishes under the bottom edge of the cockpit – Anita gives a horrified moan as it does. Jack flinches, expecting an explosion at any moment, but it doesn’t come.
The thing shot right past them.
“Where is it?” Everett says, peering out of the cockpit glass. “Anybody see?”
Nobody replies. Jack glances at Brendan and Seema, and Brendan shrugs, bewilderment on his face. It doesn’t make any sense. It was coming right at them.
Seconds tick by. Half a minute. Volkova, still muttering, begins to turn the ship – they’ve come out of the spiral of debris they were trapped in, and everybody scans the viewport, trying to spot the sphere.
“Look,” Corey says.
In the distance, off to the right, there’s a flare of fire. It’s slowly going out, the vacuum extinguishing the explosion. Smaller shards of debris are flying out from the sphere’s impact site.
“I don’t get it,” says Malik.
“Are there any more?” Hannah leans over the control panel, looking up through the glass.
“Nyet.” Volkova sounds as puzzled as everyone else.
Jack doesn’t want to speak. Doesn’t want to move, or even breathe. He can’t help feeling that it’s a ruse – that there’s another sphere, waiting just out of sight, ready to launch itself at them the moment they think they’re in the clear. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t feel on edge like this – he supposes it was when he was still on the station, but the memory is distant, hazy, like a half-remembered dream. Something that never happened.
Volkova continues turning the ship, bringing them nearly three-sixty, and that’s when the Colony ship swings into view.
Or what’s left of it.
In relation to them, it’s upside down, tilted slightly to one side. It’s not quite split in two, but it’s getting there, a ball of silent fire burning in its guts. Jack’s mouth falls open as more fires appear, dotting the ship with light. A glittering cloud of glass shards surrounds the cockpit. They look like the glimmer where light from the rising sun hits the ocean.
“I don’t understand,” says Seema, sounding stunned. “Did they malfunction or something?”
“No malfunction,” Volkova says. But she doesn’t sound sure.
“Then what …”
“Maybe they hit some of the wreckage?” Everett says.
“Who cares what it was?” Jacks says. “We need to get out of here.”
“Not without Lorinda,” Hannah says.
Brendan frowns. “You think she even – whoa shit!”
A spacesuited figure appears at the top edge of the cockpit glass, shockingly close to them. Lorinda. Her back is to them, and she’s holding something in her arms. Something big. Her body blocks it from view.
“Oh my God,” Hannah says. “Did she—”
Lorinda turns, and Hannah stops talking. She, along with everyone else in the cockpit, stares in total confusion.
Lorinda’s not holding something.
She’s holding someone.
Another person in a spacesuit, hanging in her arms.
Chapter 28
For the second time in as many minutes, everybody is frozen to the spot.
Corey stares at the second figure in confusion. The spacesuit is different; it’s more streamlined, dark grey, with a diagonal orange stripe across the chest. The helmet is sleeker, too, not as bulbous as Lorinda’s, although there’s a chunky communications module on the right side. Whoever it is isn’t moving.
It doesn’t make sense. How did the Colony ship get destroyed? Is the person Lorinda’s holding from there? How did they manage to change into a spacesuit before the ship was destroyed? What did Lorinda do?
Unless … did the person in the other suit do it? Sabotage their mission? Why?
Doesn’t matter. They need to let them in. Like, right now.
He takes two steps backwards, half turns, brushing against his mom. She makes a belated grab for him, but he’s already gone, spinning past her. He pushes between Malik and Seema, turning sideways, then sprints out onto the main deck.
The stairs to the bar are on his left. He grabs the railing, using it to spin himself one-eighty, then launches himself down the stairs. Cold air licks at his skin, but he barely notices, thundering towards the airlock.
Except – where was the access panel? Corey flicks his head left and right, searching the space on either side of the bulky inner airlock door. He saw Lorinda go outside, saw her step into the airlock, so why can’t he remember?
There! Corey leaps forward, reaching up to pull back a latched panel in the wall. It’s to the right of the door, a grid of six labelled buttons below a digital display, glitchy with dead pixels. As he hunts for the right button, he realises there’s a chance that he might accidentally open both doors at once. That would be really, really bad.
Lorinda. The only person on this ship who isn’t crazy. No way he’s leaving her out there to die. Besides, they wouldn’t design an airlock where both doors could be open at the same time. Right?
His fingers are about to push the button labelled OPEN OUTER DOOR when he’s pulled backwards. It’s Jack, pushing between him and the panel. “Just wait a second—”
“What are you doing?” Corey tries to get past him, can’t do it. “She’s still out there!”
“I know, but just listen to me.”
“Corey?” It’s his mom, yelling his name. She and everyone else are coming down the stairs, sprinting across the bar.
Corey points at Jack. “He doesn’t want to let them in.”
Jack holds up his hands. “I just think—”
“Out of the way.” Hannah looks both terrified and determined. Jack tries to block her path, but gets distracted when Everett Livingstone puts a hand on his shoulder. He wheels around, angry, which gives Hannah just enough room to squeeze past. Corey feels a burst of triumph as she pushes the right button, not even minding when his mom grabs his arm. There’s a muted hiss as the airlock vents itself, followed by the hum of the outer door opening.
“We don’t know what’s out there,” Jack is saying.
“Lorinda is out there.” Corey can’t believe they’re even talking about this.
“Yeah, and so is whoever she brought with her.”
“So what? You think we should just leave them?”
He puts his hands up, like someone’s pointing a gun at him. “I’m just saying, we should talk about this.”
Anita is opening her mouth to speak when Volkova’s voice comes through the speakers above their head. “They’re both inside. You’re OK to open up.”
“All passengers please stand clear of the airlock doors,” the ship says.
Hannah doesn’t waste any time, fingers darting around the grid, searching for the right button. As she pushes it, Jack throws up his arms, muttering under his breath as he turns away.
“You’re such a shithead,
Cor,” Malik says, too quietly for their mom to hear.
Corey blinks at him. “What’s your problem?” The adrenaline is starting to drain out of his body. His skin feels hot and cold, all at once, his hands starting to shake.
“We don’t know who that other guy is.”
“It doesn’t matter who he is. We can’t just leave him out there.” A weird thought occurs: it might not even be a him. There was no way of telling if the person inside the other spacesuit was a man or a woman.
At least they know the ship was crewed by people, not AI. But it doesn’t make any sense. How were they planning to get out of here, if they blew up the gate allowing them to pass through the wormhole without getting zapped into a zillion pieces?
Malik is about to say something else when the inner door slides open. Corey’s view is blocked for a few seconds, as everyone crowds the airlock. When he finally pushes through, he sees Lorinda lying on the floor, facedown. The other figure is sprawled across her.
There are scorch marks on both suits: black welts on the fabric. And there’s something else, too: one of the thin hoses on the second guy’s oxygen tank has been disconnected, pulled away from its helmet connection. It’s standing upright like an aerial, waving gently.
Neither Lorinda nor the other person are moving.
“Help me with her,” Hannah says. She pulls Lorinda away, dragging her out of the airlock. The second figure’s helmet clunks off the deck. Corey jumps in to help, grabbing Lorinda under one of her arms. She’s a lot heavier with the suit on, and it takes Brendan and Seema on each leg to get her into the bar itself. Corey’s parents and his brother, plus a reluctant Jack, bring the other figure inside, setting him down next to the bar.
Corey is first to Lorinda’s helmet, fingers fumbling with the catch. Hannah helps him. Together, they slide the helmet to one side, the clunk followed by a hiss of escaping air. It takes them a few more seconds to get the helmet off. Lorinda’s eyes are closed, and, to Corey, she looks very, very small.
