Zero-G

by Rob Boffard

  Mikhail looks as if he wants to break Prakesh’s arms right there and then. Instead, he pushes himself off the wall and floats back onto the bridge. “One move,” he says, as he passes Prakesh.

  But Prakesh doesn’t respond. Because he’s looking at something over Mikhail’s shoulder.

  It’s on one of the screens at the back of the bridge. It’s filled with fast-scrolling text, the background the same sickly green as Okwembu’s tab screen. The text is too far away to read, but Prakesh can just make out the enlarged writing in the giant, blinking text box superimposed over it.

  PRESSURE LOSS IN AIRLOCK 3A. OUTER DOOR COMPROMISED. DO NOT USE.

  Prakesh stares at the screen, thinking hard.

  It takes a hell of a lot for airlock doors to fail. Short of a speeding tug smashing through them, it’s extremely rare to get something like an unplanned pressure loss. When they came in the airlock, it was a clean entry. The seal was good.

  Could the tug have dislodged? Could there be a problem with the seals? It’s always a possibility, but Prakesh doesn’t think so. Someone else is trying to get through that airlock.

  Riley.

  It’s impossible. His mind is playing tricks on him, letting him believe something is true when there’s no possible way it could be. He’s only setting himself up for a disappointment, and he’s had about as much of that as he can handle.

  And yet …

  Prakesh looks around, taking in the bridge. No one is paying attention to him – not even Mikhail, who is talking with Okwembu.

  There’s no way he can take back the Shinso’s bridge.

  But that doesn’t mean he can’t go find out what’s causing the pressure loss in airlock 3A.

  Moving as quietly as he can, he swims over to the bridge doors, scraping his fingers against the floor. Halfway there, he looks up to see Syria’s eyes on him, narrowed in confusion.

  Prakesh shakes his head, very gently, side to side. Then with one last look back over his shoulder, he pushes his way out through the doors.

  98

  Riley

  Moving down the corridor is easy. I shoot from one handhold to the next, ignoring the nausea still bubbling deep in my stomach.

  There are no doors along the walls to break the monotony of the steel panelling. There aren’t even any signs or power boxes – and certainly no graffiti, like you’d see on Outer Earth.

  The corridor takes an abrupt left turn, heading deeper into the ship itself, and I push my way around it. The buzzing sound is still there, but now it’s joined by others: the slow, creaking groan of the hull, louder and more insistent than Outer Earth’s. The low rumble of the engines, felt more than heard. And somewhere deep in the Shinso’s guts, there are voices. Almost impossibly distant, but there.

  Guts. The word feels right; the corridor seems to go on for miles, like the intestines of some enormous creature. One that’s spent its entire life in the deepest reaches of space.

  Somewhere, deep in the bowels of this thing, is Okwembu. And with her: Prakesh.

  I screw my eyes shut. No. He’s not with her. He might have helped her and the other Earthers inside a tug, but that’s just how he is. He wouldn’t have let them die. There is no way that he’d have helped them beyond that. He would have tried to stop them. They could be holding him prisoner right now. They could be torturing him. They could—

  I make myself stop.

  I can’t just run in without a plan. If I take off, if I try to save Prakesh, I could get myself captured. I have to be careful. I don’t know what condition Outer Earth is in after the breach, but I do know that if anybody is still alive there, they need that asteroid.

  More than anything else, I have to stop the ship. That might mean going in the opposite direction to Prakesh.

  I have to trust him. Trust that he’ll be OK.

  After an age, the corridor opens up into a spherical chamber, with other passages leading off ahead of me, and to the left and right. The voices are louder now – ahead of me, I think – but I still can’t hear the words.

  There’s a sign set into the wall at the entrance to each passage. I move around to the one on my left. The words are grimed over, their cleaning neglected by astronauts who know their way around the ship blindfolded.

  I rub the dirt off to read them, and the granules hang suspended as I knock them off. Some of the fine particles drift up my nose, and I sneeze – the motion pushes me back, sending me into a fast tumble, and I have to grab a handhold on the floor to steady myself. I’m hyperventilating, the air coming and going so fast that I’m suddenly light-headed. The sign I was cleaning swims in front of me, upside down now. I’m angry at myself, furious that I’m not better in zero gravity.

  It takes me a few minutes to get my head right. The sign indicates a corridor heading to Mining, Astronautics, Engines. Moving around as carefully as I can, I get my bearings. I can go straight ahead to Ship Bridge, or drop down the passage to the right, to Crew Quarters, Mess, Gym, Reactor Access.

  Bridge is out. Sure, I could stop the ship from there, but not without fighting through Okwembu and her Earthers.

  So what, then?

  My eyes drift back to the other signs – and settle on Reactor Access.

  At the very edges of my mind, a plan begins to form. Before I can poke holes in it, I’m pulling myself down the right-hand corridor.

  If anything, the passage is even narrower here. I find myself drifting towards the ceiling, and more than once I get caught up against it, the impact jarring my stomach and sending little shocks of nausea up my throat.

  It’s not long before the passage opens up again – this time, into a dimly lit hallway lined with six closed doors, three on each side. In the middle of the hallway, there’s an abandoned plastic food carton, slowly rotating as it hangs in the air. There’s a tiny slick of something brown in one of its corners.

  I move past it, glancing at the doors as I do so. Each one has a name stencilled onto the wall next to it, in block capitals: DOMINGUEZ, LEE, BARTON, OLAFSON, SHALHOUB. Right at the end, perched on top of KHALIL, someone has drawn a surprisingly detailed grinning cartoon devil, looking over its shoulder at me, pulling down black pants to flash a bare ass. Next to it, in black ink, someone has written: Rashid, the demon of the Asteroid Belt.

  The passage gets narrower again, and this time the lights fade entirely, either dead or turned off. I can just see by the light of the crew quarters behind me, and, at the far end, there’s another glimmer of white light. By the time I reach it, pulling myself out into another spherical chamber, a spiky fear has joined the nausea, jostling for space in my stomach.

  There’s a passage in the floor this time, dropping down into darkness. There’s a big sign next to it, laid out in more stencilled letters:

  REACTOR ACCESS

  WARNING AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  I grapple towards it, steeling myself for the darkness, when I happen to look up and see something strange.

  There’s another passage, heading off to the right. According to its sign, it leads to the Mess. At first, I think that there’s just a lot of grime covering the wall, but I stop myself, my body half in the lower passage, and take a closer look.

  It’s not grime. It’s too thin, too wet looking.

  Almost without realising it, I’m pulling myself out of the passage, heading towards the mess hall, wanting to know and desperate to get as far away as possible. The splatter I saw is blood. There’s not a lot of it – it wasn’t shed by anyone living.

  And when I get through the passage – when I pull myself out the other side – I find them.

  Four bodies. All Shinso crew. Suspended in mid-air, loose-limbed, with eyes that are glazed and dead.

  99

  Riley

  I turn away, pushing myself tight into one of the walls, my cheek against the cool metal. It’s at least a minute before I have the strength to look at the bodies again.

  My gaze drifts along the wall. There are seats built int
o it, with heavy straps that would go across the chest. I guess if you’re eating in zero gravity you need your hands free. There are lockers running along the wall opposite me, and there’s debris floating around the room, too: half-empty, opaque pouches of liquid.

  The bodies are clustered together in the centre of the room, their loose limbs bumping up against each other. Two men, two women. One of them is facing me, and I can see the gaping stinger wound in her chest.

  There’s nothing I can do for the crew now, but perhaps there’s something in the lockers that would come in useful. I pull myself along to them, swimming across the bottom of the room to avoid the bodies. When I get upright again and spring the lockers, the items inside tumble out, joining the cloud of debris scattered across the room. More food pouches, bars, pressurised water canisters. An entire sealed plastic container of straws tumbles out of one and drifts away, its contents bouncing around inside it.

  There’s a knife inside the locker, velcroed to the back. For a moment, I’m confused – you don’t use knives and forks to eat in zero gravity – but then I see that it’s more like an old hunting knife. I’ve seen a few like it on Outer Earth – heirlooms, objects from the planet below us. This one has a wooden handle, worn smooth, but the blade has been kept good and sharp. It must have belonged to one of the crew. I reach out and grab it.

  Now I have a weapon.

  I tuck it into my belt, telling myself to make sure it doesn’t drift loose. Then I take two deep breaths, and pull my way out of the mess hall.

  I’ve nearly reached the spherical chamber leading to the reactor when there’s a voice not ten feet away.

  “You think they got aboard?”

  I choke back a breath, not letting a single sound escape, and push myself against the wall. My hand just touches a slick of blood, and I have to force myself not to yank it away again.

  In the chamber, the owner of the voice floats past, his back to me. He’s with another women, moving slightly above him. Both of them are Earthers – I recognise them from the battle in the dock. How many made it on board? Those tugs aren’t big enough to fit more than a dozen people – maybe twenty, at a push. Strange to think that of all the Earthers I saw, only a tiny fraction made it here.

  “Of course they got on board,” says the woman. “You saw the airlock alert.”

  “I’ll push ’em back out if they’re still there.”

  “She wants them alive. You know that.”

  They’ve headed back into the passage, moving towards the crew quarters. I can’t risk following them. Even with the knife in my belt. I wait for a beat, two, three, until the voices are gone completely. Then I slip out into the chamber, and pull myself into the passage leading to the reactor. I go feet first, and the darkness swallows me.

  There’s a ladder running down the one side of the shaft. I fumble more than once, cursing under my breath as I lose my grip on the rungs. But there’s a light at the bottom – a tiny, bright, yellow glare – and it keeps me centred. Before long, I’m pulling myself out of the shaft into the passage at the bottom.

  It’s at right angles to the drop, the ceiling low and cramped. The metal here is rusted in spots, coated with a kind of yellowish rime. The floor below me is a grate, laid on top of a tangled mess of pipes and wires. The sounds I heard earlier are muted – all except one. The buzzing noise. I’m closer to the machine now, and the sound has become a growl, so low it rattles my insides.

  I have no idea what I’m going to do when I get to the reactor. I know it’s a fusion core, like the one on Outer Earth, only much smaller. It’ll have shielding, but there’s got to be a way inside.

  I have to disable it somehow – it’ll stop the Shinso in its tracks, cut all power to the engines. Of course, I might blow it, and myself, into the next world. And it might cut power to everything else, too, including the life-support systems. But there should still be enough air to breathe for a while, and if I can get Carver and Prakesh, if we can then make it back to the tug …

  I stop counting the ifs and the mights. Instead, I look around the cramped passage for a handhold, and pull myself along it, heading in the direction of the buzzing noise.

  I’m expecting another airlock at the end of the passage. There is one – but it’s been left open, the doors recessed into the wall. Good. That means there won’t be any alarm triggered when I go through. I can see part of the reactor chamber on the other side, bathed in a clinical white light.

  The room is laid out in a circle, like a rotunda, and the floor slopes away from me, with strips of light leading to the machine in the middle. It rises in a giant cone to the ceiling, twenty feet above me. Like its bigger brother at the centre of Outer Earth, its body is cocooned in cables.

  I push myself off towards it, looking around the room for a control panel. I’m half hoping that it’ll be as simple as telling a computer to shut the reactor down, but there are no controls anywhere. The only thing that disturbs the shape of the walls are several metal storage boxes, each one five feet long, held to the walls by more velcro.

  As I get closer, I can see the body of the reactor underneath the tangle of cables. Thick steel plates, the joins between them sealed with thick, grey rubber. The same substance runs around the cables where they meet the body.

  I circle it, running my hands along the plates and the seals, looking for a weak spot. Nothing. No panels, no screens, not a single thing that will let me get inside. I make my way over to the boxes, hauling them open. They’re all empty. No tools, save for a small screwdriver, strapped down inside one of them. Useless.

  And it doesn’t help that I know almost nothing about fusion reactors. Assuming I do get inside, what would I see? I picture a glowing ball, hanging suspended in its own nest of cables, and curse myself for not knowing, for not asking Carver if he knew what to expect.

  I pull the knife out of my belt, and jam it into one of the seals as hard as the low gravity will let me. It only just pierces the rubber-like material. I wiggle it back and forth, feeling the sweat pop out on my forehead, but I only manage to get a little bit deeper into the seal. It’ll take hours to get through.

  Could I cut into one of the cables, maybe? I throw the idea out almost as soon as it occurs. Which one? And how would I do it without frying myself?

  I’ve left the knife caught in the seal. As I watch, it comes loose, spinning slowly in the space in front of the reactor. After a few moments, the blade is pointing right at me.

  I freeze, unable to look away from it. Because, right then, I get another idea. But this one is like a poison of its own, seeping right through me, corroding everything it touches.

  I can’t cut through the steel plating, or the rubber seals.

  But what if I could blow up the reactor?

  100

  Riley

  I turn away from the knife, determined not to look at it again.

  But I can’t stop my mind from weighing up the possibilities. They stretch outwards in my mind, three steel cables stretching away from me in different directions, pulled taut, like the cables tethering the asteroid to the Shinso.

  Along one, I fight my way through to the bridge. I manage to avoid being captured, or killed, somehow, and I take control of the ship. I turn it around, bring it home. The station gets the tungsten it needs to shore up the reactor. Outer Earth survives.

  But that cable snaps in an instant. Getting past the Earthers by myself? Taking every single one of them out of commission with no backup, no gadgets from Carver, and no idea of the bridge layout? It’s a possibility so remote as to be almost non-existent.

  Cable two. I try to get to the bridge. I’m captured or killed, and the Shinso continues its journey. There’s no asteroid slag, no tungsten for the station’s reactor. Outer Earth dies. Anna, and everyone else, dies.

  Along the final cable, I …

  I cut into myself. Knox told me how to get the bombs out – cut the left wire. I somehow do it without dying from blood loss, or passing out from t
he pain, or blowing myself up. I get the bomb out – it’ll have to be one; the thought of cutting more than once causes my gorge to jump – and use it to blow up the shielding around the ship’s reactor. Knox said the bombs were sensitive to impact – I can use the storage boxes to detonate one of them.

  The blast probably won’t be enough to disable the reactor entirely, but it might let me get inside, assuming I’m still conscious or coherent enough to do something about it.

  Let’s say I do it. It’ll be just like back in the Recycler Plant – I simply have to put the bomb in the right place. The Shinso’s power dies. Those aboard it have no option but to make for the tug, and head back to Outer Earth. The chances that we can stop the Shinso from drifting too far and bring it and its cargo back into station orbit are slim, but still there.

  No. I won’t. I can’t.

  I’m already thinking about all I’ve been through. Everything I’ve survived. I’m thinking about Kev, and Royo, and everyone else who has died to stop this ship from leaving. I think about what I had to do to my own father to save my home. I’m thinking about Anna and her family. About Jamal, and his daughter Ivy. About everyone I know on Outer Earth.

  A voice drifts up from a very dark place in my mind: a place I’d almost forgotten about. A little black box where I put the things I never want to think about again.

  There’s nothing you can do to save it, Amira says. It’s finished. We were never supposed to live this long.

  And somewhere else, a tiny thought crystallises. It glows like a star, full of immense power, but so far away that it’s nothing more than a pinprick of light in a black void.

  I’m not you, Amira. And I never will be.

  I turn around, gripping one of the cables to spin my body. The knife is bumping off the body of the reactor. Slowly, I reach out for it, gripping its wooden handle.