There was no response from the command crew, only a series of alarm sounds as the spacecraft struggled for its very survival; he saw, briefly, a glimmer through the viewport as the spacecraft launched missiles out towards the alien starships. The panic rising within his mind bubbled just under his control; only the determination to provide some kind of record kept him focused. Reporters had been awarded rewards – mainly posthumous – for such episodes; his life had shrunk down to doing the best he could…
Damn, now I’m glad I didn’t go to bed with her, he thought irrelevantly, as several of the others – including Ambassador Rudolph Giacometti – pounded on the intercom, demanding that Captain Buckley do something about the crisis. O'Dowd was pretty sure that Buckley would be doing everything he could…and if the Captain had been right when he had been talking to O'Dowd earlier, escape would be impossible.
“Damn you, call and tell them that we surrender,” Giacometti was shouting. O'Dowd noticed with a moment of black humour that the intercom had broken, failed along with dozens of other systems, but the diplomat didn’t seem inclined to notice. He also doubted that the aliens would take any notice of a surrender offer even if one was broadcast; if worse came to worst, he was sure that the very Right Stuff Captain Buckley would blow up the ship rather than let it fall into enemy hands. “Call them and…”
A terrible noise echoed through the ship and the lights failed. Giacometti screamed and panicked, even more than before; one of the other scientists caught hold of him as the emergency systems failed, one after the other. O'Dowd kept up a running commentary, trusting in the emergency systems that his company had insisted on providing to keep the signals heading out towards Earth. The other ships in the fleet might relay the signals still further, even if his equipment failed; in a way, he had already accepted his own death…
“This can’t be happening,” Giacometti was gibbering as the emergency lights failed and left them all in darkness, illuminated only by the glowing stars through the viewport. The noise of tearing metal was overwhelmingly prevalent through the ship; the hatches into the lounge, he couldn’t help, but notice, had sealed automatically. O'Dowd wondered briefly what had happened to Samra; had the Director already been killed, or was she alive, like him, waiting for inevitable death. “This can’t be happening…”
The gravity was starting to twist, somehow; O'Dowd didn’t know what it would take to produce that sort of effect. “It is fucking happening,” he snapped, unable to take it any longer. Why had Giacometti been sent anyway? Hadn’t he considered the possibility of meeting his death in space? “For God’s sake, shut up and stop wasting oxygen!”
“They’re coming,” a female researcher shouted. O'Dowd turned to see a purple light outside the viewport, something hanging over the remains of the Neil Armstrong; the noise was growing louder. The waves of panic were becoming impossible to prevent; one of the male researchers seemed to be assaulting a female researcher, or perhaps it was a last desperate attempt to make love before they died. It hardly mattered as the flickering lights on the outside grew brighter. “They’re coming to kill us!”
“Shut up,” O'Dowd shouted. He could feel it now too, the animal at the back of the human mind exploding into the sunlight. “For God’s sake, shut up!”
Something was happening; a wave of heat seemed to reach out from the hull, catching them all and heating the air. Someone – perhaps Giacometti, perhaps someone else – screamed as the hull buckled, and the viewport blew out into space. The air rushed towards the breach; Giacometti’s body fell rapidly towards the breach and impacted with it, for a few seconds sealing the breach before the hull metal continued to buckle and collapsed outwards. Giacometti vanished into space…
…And, moments later, everyone else in the compartment followed him into the icy darkness of space. O'Dowd felt a terrible cold…and then nothing, but darkness, and the peace of the grave.
Chapter Thirteen: First Conflict, Take Two
USS Neil Armstrong, Deep Space
“No!”
One moment, Samra had been contemplating the imminent contact with the aliens; the next, the aliens had opened fire, launching a spread of missiles towards the human fleet. She hadn’t understood what she had been looking at for a long, chilling moment; it had been so unexpected, so incomprehensible, that she had wanted to deny the very nature of the attack. Her attempt to delude herself, as impossible as that had seemed, failed; the first missile crashed into the Neil Armstrong and somehow left them alive.
“What the hell?” Reynolds asked, as the lights started to flicker. “Why aren’t we dead?”
“Don’t complain,” someone said, nervously, as the hatch sealed and alarms rose, before fading out of existence. The main lights in the room failed; some of the equipment, with its own emergency power source, provided a dull glow. Part of her mind, desperately trying to escape, wondered if anyone could see her in the dim lighting; she found it almost impossible to focus as the dull sound of tearing metal echoed through the ship.
Reynolds had remained calm. “I can’t reach anyone,” he said. Samra was trying to remember emergency procedures, but they were limited; unless completely freakish, accidents in space were almost always fatal. If the bridge ship had been hulled, their lives would be measured in hours at most. “The bridge is not responding to my calls.”
Samra glanced down at what should have been the live feed from the other ships in the fleet. It was blank; she wondered if that meant the link had broken, or if the aliens had destroyed the ships? Her mind kept spinning, trying to understand; why had the aliens launched a completely unprovoked attack? Had the fleet somehow provoked them? How could they have done? Endlessly, she wondered, time and time again; what happened?
Something flickered out in the viewport; a moment later, there was a terrible tearing sound and she saw the edge of the hull start to break open. A sudden rush of wind, impossible in space, pulled at her as the gravity started to fade and vanish; she realised dimly that the spinning that generated gravity had to be contributing to the disaster. She felt the tug of rushing air as the breach into space grew wider; for a second, she almost appreciated the chance to see space without a spacesuit before Doctor Gold was plucked away from his chair and pulled screaming out of the breach, followed by everything that wasn’t tied down, including most of the scientists. She caught hold of her chair as the pressure intensified, the temperature dropping rapidly, but the tugging only grew and grew and her fingers slipped…
A hand, strong as steel, caught on to her arm. She didn’t see who had caught her, but her fall towards the breach halted; she watched in horror as the remainder of the team vanished, pieces of the spacecraft following them into the void. The temperature was still falling; she felt the cold begin to grip at her, even though the dedicated shipsuit she wore. The pressure was fading now, but she was finding it hard to breathe; there was no air in space. A strange calm came over her as her eyesight began to dim; she could hear, somehow, a voice whispering to her, promising her the secrets of the universe and peace, true peace, at long last.
She knew the voice. Allah…
Something pulled at her; she had only a second to realise that someone was pulling her against the wall, pushing a life-support mask onto her face. Her eyesight cleared as pure oxygen pushed into her, the air mix normalising rapidly as the mask monitored her condition, a life-support bubble popping out of the wall and drifting over to her at the behest of a shadowy figure. She couldn’t see him clearly, but his grip was like iron; he pushed her into the bubble and sealed it. She wondered, through the pain, if he was an angel…and then, as one of the consoles sparked, she saw him clearly.
She tried to speak. It hurt; she realised that the close encounter with the vacuum of space had left its mark on her body. “Gavin?”
If he heard her, he gave no sign; he was walking normally around the cabin, trying to recover other pieces of equipment. She wanted to rub her eyes; he was walking around without a spacesuit, without
any protection at all, as if he was walking towards the local shop. The cold of space didn’t seem to be affecting him much; his face might be scarred and pitted by the effects, but he had no mask, no air supply…she wondered if she was in the final stages of death and was hallucinating.
He turned towards her and she gasped; even through the plastic of the bubble, she could see that his face was a mess, with one eye – the real one – jammed shut and the other one spinning in his eye socket like a demented cartoon character. He clanked over – she wondered if he had been wearing magnetic boots, although few of them had bothered with such precautions in the standard gravity field of the bridge ship. Whatever he was doing, however he was surviving, it was hurting him; she could see blood drift off his face and float through the air. She wanted to be sick; only a routine course of anti-nausea drugs back at the beginning to the flight kept her gorge down. She still wondered if she was deluding herself somehow…but surely it didn’t take that long to die without oxygen?
Reynolds caught hold of the bubble and tethered it to the hull, before finding a second bubble and pushing it against hers, sealing them together and pulling himself into it. She tried to remember what she knew about the bubbles; they were intended to provide limited life support for a few hours, but then, without rescue, they would reach the limits of what the bubbles could do for them and die. At least, she would; dimly, she wondered of Reynolds was an alien. Had he been the last survivor of a dying world given powers under a yellow sun?
She laughed at herself. The pain had to be getting to her.
Her radio buzzed; it took her a moment to realise where it was and how to activate it. “Are you all right?”
Samra giggled, wondering if this was what it felt like to be drunk. She had never touched alcohol in her life. Muslims weren’t supposed to touch alcohol, although like most rules it was honoured more in the breach than the observance. She remembered with a moment of bitterness the peace she’d felt, at the end, but pushed it aside; he’d saved her life.
“No,” she said. Her body ached; she didn’t dare touch her cheek because she was certain that the pain meant that her looks had been ruined completely. Samra wasn't particularly vain, but she didn’t want to think about what might have happened to her face; it was sheer luck that she hadn’t lost an eye. “I'm sore and I hurt and…”
“I know,” Reynolds said, his voice harsh and broken. She was shocked until she remembered the damage to his throat; he had to be having real problems even talking to her. “Apart from that, did you enjoy your trip to the theatre, Mrs. Lincoln?”
Samra giggled again at the joke. “What are you?”
“It’s a long story,” Reynolds said. Samra tried to focus on him, tried to think of some way of worming the story out of him, but it was so hard to think. They were drifting in space, far from any possible rescue; what was the point of trying to think any longer? “We may as well keep talking about other things…”
Lights flared; she turned, to see a dark shape floating out in space, lights peering into the hull and illuminating them. She covered her eyes as the pain increased, a strange feeling that reminded her of when she’d caught sand between her eyelids and scratched her eyes, causing irritation. Reynolds turned slightly inside his bubble to peer at the alien craft; Samra could see flickering purple light and dark shadows, but there was really no way to distinguish it from the human spacecraft she’d seen. Only the certain knowledge that the human fleet had lost the brief and bloody battle convinced her that the craft that had arrived was alien.
“They know we’re here,” Reynolds said. Just then, she would have given anything to hold his hand; what would the aliens do? Would they open fire, or just leave them stranded until the air ran out? The lights grew brighter and she cringed away, and then they faded; she turned back…and saw something moving, heading into their room. “Samra…”
For a moment, she thought she was staring at an octopus, a strange ball-like creature right out of her wildest imaginations. Reality asserted itself a moment later; the…thing wasn't alive, but a robot, something out of one of the Sonic the Hedgehog games that had enjoyed a comeback on the moon, years ago. As her rationality returned, she studied the robot, admiring the skill that had gone into constructing it; she could see working tools, cameras and devices she couldn’t even begin to guess at the purpose of, moving and flexing almost like a living thing. The robot came closer, peering at them…
She smiled. “What are you looking at?”
The robot showed no response; a moment later, the stars vanished as the alien craft pressed itself against the breach in the hull and sealed it. A hatch opened, emitting a bright light; did the aliens require a brighter light source than humanity? She tried to peer into the light, half-expecting tall grey shapes silhouetted against the light, but saw nothing; the robot, glittering in the light, was all she could see of the aliens. A second later, it had attached what looked like a toilet plunger onto her bubble and was pulling at it, pulling her towards the alien craft.
“It’s still tethered,” Reynolds said. She could hear the forced calm in his voice and wondered, with a moment of pure admiration, just how he kept himself so calm. She was on the very verge of panic. The robot, or its controllers, came to the same conclusion moments later; it left her drifting in the bubble and powered its way around to the tether, examining it for a long moment before holding out a pair of scissors and cutting it. The bubble floated free, drifting back towards the wall; the robot grasped it and tugged her towards the alien craft. The light poured in at her and she blinked, closing one eye to protect it, even as she looked around what looked like a mundane hold. A second later, Reynolds’ bubble bumped into hers and pushed her further into the alien craft; she looked back at the remains of the Neil Armstrong before the robot burned through the hatch – sending a burst of air into space – and headed further into the human spacecraft.
She choked down a sob. She’d liked the Neil Armstrong. “What are they going to do to us?”
Reynolds sounded concerned for the first time. “They want human specimens, obviously,” he said. “How many others do you think survived?”
Samra didn’t have to think about it. As far as she knew, they were the only two survivors, although it was possible that there would be other survivors in other bubbles, somewhere in the habitat wheel or maybe in the command section. The fusion tube had been hit, so there might be no survivors there, but stranger things had happened before. She started to shake; again, she wanted him to hold her…and knew that as long as they remained in the bubbles, there was no way they could touch.
They waited for nearly thirty minutes, according to Reynolds; more alien robots appeared out of the light and headed into the Neil Armstrong, sometimes returning carrying bodies, or equipment. After seeing the first body, she’d refused to look at them, but Reynolds had watched and kept up a running commentary; a crewman here, a researcher there…she didn’t want to know what might have happened to her friends and colleagues. She wondered, briefly, what had happened to Spencer O'Dowd; had the reporter survived, or was his body waiting somewhere in the wreck to be discovered by the aliens?
Without warning, the hatch closed; they felt the sensation of the craft firing its small reaction thrusters and heading somewhere. She guessed that it was heading towards one of the alien craft, but there was no way to be sure; the trip lasted nearly ten minutes while they talked and shared notes, such as they were. Reynolds said that human history showed hundreds of different ways in which humanity treated their prisoners, from the fairly decent treatment of prisoners during the early stages of the Wrecker War, to the behaviour of the Religious Police kuffār before they had been overthrown. The aliens wouldn’t want to damage their specimens, would they? Reynolds was no comfort; he considered it very possible that the aliens would test them to find out just what they could do.
“Don’t show them everything,” he said, seriously. “Don’t let them realise how strong and clever you are.”
/> Samra, who felt neither at the moment, managed a brave smile.
The hatch opened again and the bubbles were pulled out by the air pressure, drifting into another larger room. A robot appeared behind them, taking Samra’s bubble in one of its manipulating devices and slicing though the plastic with a knife. She screamed, unable to help herself, as alien atmosphere rushed in; she heard Reynolds shout something over the intercom as alien air entered her lungs. It was hot, and steamy, with a vague taste in the air, something utterly…alien. She’d seen videos of jungles in Africa and South America; the aliens seemed to love such temperatures, judging by what they had shown her. The alien robot released Reynolds, then cleared away the remainder of the bubbles, leaving them drifting in the middle of the room.
She held his hand gratefully. She had never thought that she would be so glad for a simple human contact. “Now what?”
“I have no idea,” Reynolds said. He pulled at her lightly and launched her towards the wall; with perfect timing, she pulled on him and they spun together into the wall, just lightly enough to land and take hold of the handholds. They looked as if they had been designed for smaller hands than human hands, but there were hundreds of them; it was almost like a child’s climbing frame. “I guess we get to meet them.”
A screen flickered into existence. She turned, to see a cartoon-style human looking back at her; a second, a female, joined the first a moment later. She had only a moment to wonder what was happening, and then clothes started to vanish on the image, revealing a form that – part of her mind laughed – was not exactly physically correct. There was a pause, and then the image repeated, and repeated.
“They want us to undress,” Reynolds said, slowly. His voice was reluctant; Samra shared his concern. She had never been naked in front of a man before, even if they weren’t likely to need many clothes in the alien temperature; the aliens probably wanted to ensure that they had nothing dangerous on their person. Samra doubted that she could hide anything from them. “I don’t think we have a choice.”
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