by Jamie Sawyer
“Solid copy. Harris out.”
The airlock was a sterile white chamber, with one end leading into the belly of the Oregon and the other directly into space. An armoured bulkhead, replete with warnings as to the dangers of exposure to hard vacuum, sat at that end of the chamber. That was our destination. A porthole offered a view into the black outside.
The combat-suits allowed for operation in deep-space just as easily as in an atmosphere. Indicators on the inside of my helmet illuminated: my suit was powered up and atmospherically sealed.
“Right, people. Confirm suits are sealed and weapons are primed.”
Shouts of agreement.
I braced my body against the airlock door, clasping the manual locking handle. Without pausing, I twisted the release valve. The door gave way easily, exposing the chamber to vacuum. There was a rush of atmosphere escaping, then absolute calm.
“Initiating EVA,” I said.
A timeline appeared on my HUD: seventeen minutes until life support failed.
Space opened before me. I plodded out of the airlock. The soles of each boot immediately magnetised, attaching me to the ship’s hull. The others followed suit.
The gravity well generated by the Oregon did not extend past the inner decks, and as soon as we were outside the ship proper, there was no gravity at all. My plane of balance shifted: where once down had been dictated by the artificial gravity field, now my only point of reference was the activated mag-locks on my boots. The sudden change in gravitational pull brought with it a bout of nausea, but the medical suite on my combat-suit instantly corrected that. Space sickness was a petty concern, of no issue to a simulant.
The Oregon’s hull was a vast, barren plain. Bare metal reached for hundreds of metres in every direction, punctuated only occasionally by a communications mast or weapon array. Running lights flickered in the distance, studding the ship’s flank. The airlock was roughly amidships, on the starboard side. As soon as I left the confines of the airlock, my HUD lit up with a tactical map showing me the most direct route to the damage site. I ignored that for a moment, though, and focused on the enormity of the view.
The Oregon was positioned in the midst of the asteroid field and rocks drifted by. Beyond, space opened to infinity: a tapestry of brilliant white pinpricks against a silky blackness. Each of those lights represented a star, each circled by a plethora of Krell-occupied planets. We were inside the Maelstrom. The idea took my breath away for a second and I felt my suit responding with an injection of sedative. It would be easy to get lost out here, to feel dwarfed by the vastness of space. The thought was intrusive and persistent; not my own.
Below, beyond the curve of the Oregon’s polished hull, Helios beckoned. I imagined myself, for just a moment, releasing my mag-locks and drifting off into space – to be sucked down to Helios, by the pull of planetary gravity. Helios itself was an ugly mess of a planet. It was a brown, dusty orb; swathed by yellow cloud cover and angry storm-swirls. No oceans or large bodies of water, the monotonous brown broken only by infrequent mountain ranges. Perhaps there was some grandeur to the planet, but I couldn’t see it. This place held no beauty for me. The Artefact was visible even from space. It was so big that it rose up through the clouds, like an angry finger pointing to God.
But that wasn’t the worst of the view.
“Christo,” Kaminski said over the communicator. Martinez didn’t bother to rebuke him this time. “Just look out there.”
He indicated the Great White. From the bridge, viewed via the holo and even the view-port, the White looked singularly black. Up close, she was a variety of shades of dark. Her hull had been repaired innumerable times, with new armour plating grown over damaged portions. Ugly welts and scars lined the visible flank of the ship, like this was some huge living beast rather than a constructed starship. The thing looked as though it was hurting, and the scarring gave the impression that it had been hurting for a very long time. Even so, she continued to fire bright bio-plasma streams into our ship, igniting lance-beams through the asteroid field. Every impact caused the null-shield to light brightly, and my suit face-plate to polarise. Near-space was like an Alliance Day fireworks display.
“This is really something, compadre,” Martinez said, as we went. “If just one of those beams hits us, we’re dust.”
“I think that the Krell have more to worry about than us,” Blake said. “Or at least I hope so.”
They were both right. The alien ship probably couldn’t detect us at this range, but if somehow we were caught in the crossfire then death was inevitable.
“Move out. Tight formation,” I said, as we began the spacewalk proper. “Keep together.”
“You heard the man,” Jenkins said. “Stay on it.”
The squad deployed smoothly out, rifles panning the geography. In zero-gravity, every footstep was a struggle. If I overstepped, I knew that I could be propelled out into space, but time was also of the essence. Our combat-suits automatically adapted to the starfield, and the outlines of each trooper appeared to shift. My HUD notified me that active camo was operational. Each squad-member was tagged, aura-codes flagged even though I could hardly see their outlines with the naked eye.
There was a prickle of anxiety at the back of my mind, so deep that no drug could touch it. I’d spacewalked a hundred times before but it had never been an experience I’d enjoyed. The post-transition psych-evals had diagnosed me with borderline agoraphobia, reasoning that my upbringing in the cluttered tenements of Detroit Metro made me more comfortable with confined spaces. I thought that it was deeper than that. I didn’t like being in space simply because death could come so quickly and without warning. Considering my profession revolved around dying, that was saying something. War might sometimes depend on luck but surviving a fight in a vacuum was entirely random. In space, we were robbed of so many advantages of our combat-suits and simulants. That confidence that I had felt back aboard the Oregon, when we had made transition, was rapidly ebbing away. We were as vulnerable out here as our fleshy bodies were inside the Oregon. A stray piece of debris, a misconnected hose, a fractured face-plate: all of those things spelled death in hard vacuum.
I’d seen men driven wild with panic, out in space, in lesser circumstances than this. The human race was becoming domesticated, more familiar with the darkened interiors of a starship or a space station than wide-open exteriors. There was something to do with the sense of openness, the sense of desolation – of lost hope – that was almost overwhelming.
The universe doesn’t care, a voice whispered in my ear. Everything you do is irrelevant.
“We now have exactly sixteen minutes to reach the damage site,” I said, shaking myself out of it. “I don’t want anything holding us up. Scanner sweeps set for a hundred metres.”
“You expecting some trouble?” Jenkins asked, as she plodded alongside me.
“We’re not taking any chances out here,” I said. “But I sincerely hope not.”
“Scanner isn’t worth shit,” Kaminski said. “The debris is creating ghosts.”
Just then, something drifted past us, and I paused to watch it go. A corpse – a crewman, still dressed in Alliance Navy shipboard fatigues. The body was frozen solid, face held in an eternal rictus of horror. The hands were outstretched, fingers clawing for purchase. In contradiction to the terrible expression on the corpse’s face, the body calmly floated away from us, and into the asteroid field. I realised that much of the debris in our vicinity was actually parts of the Oregon, ranging from damaged armour plating through to the bodies of crew.
“Eyes on the prize, people,” I muttered, waving ahead. “The damage site is three hundred metres in that direction.”
The walk seemed to take for ever, and it was difficult not to be distracted by the firefight taking place overhead and around us. I had a prime view of the action. Brilliant rays of energy discharged across the void, tearing into both ships. The primary railgun – enormous, built to level cities – sat a few metres away
. Hard to imagine that the gun had been slaved to my will just minutes earlier; as I passed it I felt an unconscious niggle in my spinal-port, in recognition of our pairing. The gun was cold and still now, without an operator.
Above us, dimensionally-speaking, a battery of lasers fired incessantly. The Great White had obviously expended her reserve of fighter-ships but her other ordnance appeared unlimited. She constantly fired bio-plasma from organic guns, sending multi-coloured energy discharge into space, leaving behind beautiful rainbow streamers.
It was awe-inspiring, in a way. Here were two species, so very unlike one another in many ways but so very similar in many others, expending literally every ounce of their being in an effort to exterminate each other. Reflections in a dark mirror. Even more irrationally, in that very instant, I hated the Krell more than ever.
We had broken into a measured bounding motion – one foot up, one foot down: sure to always have at least one mag-lock in contact with the Oregon’s hull at all times. Kaminski and Martinez at the rear. They carried the repair gear, proofed for use in space, and so needed to be protected. Kaminski was the most technically minded, and he would repair the breach once we reached it.
“Closing in a hundred metres,” Blake declared, on point.
“Cover the objective.”
The metal landscape ahead was broken by a rupture in the armour plating – a gouge, metres wide and deep. Fluid drained from inside, immediately freezing into dirty white snow, and messy cabling was exposed beneath. My HUD informed me that this was the location of the hull breach, even indicating the necessary steps to fix it.
“Wide dispersal around the site.”
My squad responded.
“Twelve minutes until our life support expires.”
Deep within the Oregon, our real bodies waited. If the ship went down, so did we. There had never been a more personal motivation to achieve our mission objective.
“Get working, Kaminski.”
“Affirmative, Captain,” he replied, already unshouldering the repair equipment. “Martinez, give me a hand with this shit.”
The pair continued unloading the gear, mag-locking items to the exposed hull. Kaminski clambered down into the breach and started poking the damaged innards.
“You think you can fix it?” I asked.
“I have to,” Kaminski called back. “Don’t worry. I’ve never found a machine that I can’t handle. Someone pass me that sealant spray.”
Except that Kaminski isn’t a starship engineer, and never has been. He was a specialist-grade sim operator, and the best chance we had at this.
I crouched on the hull, scanning the immediate area. The apparent openness of the artificial terrain was misleading, I decided. If I looked for them, there were hiding places everywhere. The grooves between armour plates were like trenches. The shadows cast by antennae and gun-turrets could’ve concealed an army. Each spinning asteroid, just beyond the overhead glare of the null-shield, might harbour a Krell horde. I breathed hard, activating the auto-targeting feature on my M95 rifle. The only sounds were my own clipped breathing – short, controlled inhalations, as I had been trained to do – and the low hum of the oxygen pack on my back.
Kaminski and Martinez still worked away in the hull breach. I tasted something acid at the back of my throat, like the tang of burning plastic. Is this the taste of the Oregon, I wondered, burning up? I shook myself out of it again. It was impossible; while I occupied the simulant, there was no way I could experience transference from my real body.
Get a damned grip.
“Ten minutes,” I said. “You need any more help down there, Kaminski?”
Kaminski appeared at the lip of the breach, reaching for another can of sealant spray. He shook his head.
“Nearly done. Give me another minute.”
“Stay frosty, people,” I muttered, to keep myself talking.
“Hard not to,” Jenkins replied. “It’s damned cold out here.”
“I hear that, Jenkins.”
Even inside the suits it was uncomfortably cold. Partly physical, partly something else: the chill was hard to shake, born out of an aversion that man has to being in space. It was a natural reaction, hard-wired as the need to breathe. I wondered whether the Krell felt the same way. Blake shifted beside me, panning his rifle over a moving shadow. He was edgy, getting too nervous. His biorhythms appeared on my HUD and I noticed his increased heartbeat.
“Blake, activate your medical suite,” I ordered.
I caught a glimpse of his young face behind his face-plate. He looked uneasy, even in his sim. I’d never seen him like that before. Then his face-plate polarised, as the reflection of a far-off energy beam caught the mirrored surface. His rhythms calmed a second later.
“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m with it.”
“Stay that way. Nine minutes!”
“Another minute,” Kaminski muttered. “Martinez, can you pass me that wrench?”
The coolant had stopped escaping from whatever was damaged inside the ship, so that was something. Kaminski tossed away an empty sealant can and it lazily drifted out into space.
I activated my communicator and tried to establish a link to the Oregon.
“Oregon Medical, this is Captain Harris – do you copy?”
“This is Olsen,” came a distorted voice in response. “The firefight is interfering with communications. How goes the repair?”
“Well enough. Are we holding out against the enemy ship?”
“So far as I can tell. Captain Atkins has things in hand.”
“Good enough for me.” I turned to Kaminski, switching comms channels again. “How long, Kaminski?”
“Another minute.”
Do you really know what you are doing down there? I was starting to wonder whether Kaminski was telling me the truth. But there was nobody else to turn to.
Then back to Olsen: “We’ll be done in another minute. Keep me posted of any developments.”
“Copy that. Olsen out.”
Another long, cold minute passed. EIGHT MINUTES REMAINING, my HUD flashed. Then something else appeared – a further warning marker.
“You done yet?” I barked at Kaminski. “My suit tells me that another fault is developing in life support. What are you doing down there?”
Kaminski grappled with the edge of the ruptured armour plate, and ungraciously pulled himself out of the hole. He gave an exaggerated nod.
“Nearly,” he said. “Another minute. It isn’t my best work, but it will have to do. I just need to reset the outer heat exchange.” He swallowed anxiously. “That’s the other fault. Rerouting the cryogen flow through the outer exchange has caused—”
“Just tell me what you need done.”
“It’s further down the hull, under an external maintenance plate. Someone will have to go down there and manually open the release valve.”
I sighed. “I’ll go. The rest of you, cover Kaminski. Blake, watch me as I go.”
“Affirmative, Cap.”
My HUD lit up with the location of the release valve: fifty metres aftward of our position. It was painfully slow going. I presented an easy target for any watching snipers. I bounded on, each step a leap through the unknown. I immediately wished that we had been better equipped for this. We hadn’t figured on any EVA; the newer Class V combat-suits carried specialist thrusters for use in deep-space, but as we hadn’t figured on this part of the operation these Class IV suits didn’t have them.
A small city of sensor-masts erupted from the hull, housing local comms gear and other life-support apparatus. My HUD suggested the location of the release valve, hidden behind a bolted metal plate on the hull.
Seven minutes.
Helios’ primary star cut a crescent behind the arc of the planet below, big and yellow. Beyond, barely visible, was Helios Secondary. That star was pale and distant, having long ago lapsed into decline. The combination of both light sources threw bizarre and awkward shadows over the surface of the hul
l; as a result, this area of the ship was in almost total darkness.
“I’m at the release valve now. Moving to activate.”
There was no time to safely remove the metal plate, so I grappled with my fingertips and tore it free. Bolts and secreted dust floated off into space. Beneath, there was a nest of electronic components and wires.
Kaminski’s voice broke into my comm: “You need to reset the valve intake. Should be a button.”
Six minutes.
I hurriedly scanned the maintenance duct. A label proclaimed WARNING! COOLANT RELEASE VALVE. DO NOT OPERATE UNLESS OUTER EXCHANGE IS CLEAR! There was a flashing red button beneath.
“You sure about this, Kaminski? There are warnings on this panel.”
“Ah, I think so. I hope so. It’ll work. It should work.”
“I’m activating now,” I said, and thumbed the button. “For all our sakes, I hope that it does.”
“Copy that.”
I paused over the maintenance plate, watching for any immediate response to my actions. My HUD hadn’t updated: the warning continued to flash. That didn’t look good.
“Kaminski, did it work?”
“I think so. Give me another minute to confirm.”
“You keep saying that! My HUD is still reporting a problem.”
I looked back at my squad. They were assembled around Kaminski and the hull breach, rifles panning back and forth. The hull itself reverberated underfoot as the Oregon took another hit.
Five minutes.
I turned to take in the vast, empty landscape of the hull, and plodded over to the nearest comms mast to evaluate the shadowed area. Just then, an enormous explosion flared overhead. The Great White had taken a serious hit to the bow. She seemed to teeter, briefly, turning away from the Oregon to prevent a further shot at the damaged area. Pieces of the Great White were thrown out into space, blazing as they hit the Oregon’s null-shield. The Oregon certainly seemed to be putting up some resistance.
“You know, Jenkins, we just might make this,” I said, more to myself than to her. “That was a good shot. I don’t think that the Krell ship will take much more—”
