Days Until Home

by Mark Gardner

  “Siebert,” Jeremy said, “what’s your first name?”

  Siebert kicked gently off the bulkhead and rotated his body, so he floated above the display. “Matt,” he replied.

  “Well, Matt,” Jeremy responded, “what’s your specialty here on the Kerwood?”

  “Disposal,” Matt said, pride squaring his shoulders.

  “When I fell into your lap, you followed my orders, and we got to safety. A lot of the Kerwood’s crew didn’t make it.”

  Siebert reached up and screwed his collar, exposing himself to the atmosphere. Jeremy nodded and returned to the panel. He could only see location transponders out to about thirty-five meters. There were large portions of the ship he was blind to. Solid dots indicated a crew member whose suits registered the occupants’ life signs. Hollow dots revealed most of the miners were dead. The problem was that, without an atmosphere or gravity, those dots moved around the ship as well.

  There were spaces on the Kerwood that still had an atmosphere, but unlike the escape hatch, not all of them had double door airlocks. The escape trunk did connect to passageways that led to the lower bridge, the main EXT engineering plant, one of the cargo bays, the galley, and several minor deck spaces. When the Kerwood was built, the escape trunk was integral to moving large machinery and components inside the ship once it had a skin. Most ships didn’t use it, but the Kerwood had been known to smuggle something in it once or twice. Adelaide insisted it be maintained as part of the regular maintenance routine, and when the Kerwood sat on Egeria-13, Jeremy indulged her in her odd proclivities. Now, he was glad she was so insistent on keeping the trunk up to code.

  A warning sounded from the speaker in Jeremy’s helmet. The seal was broken, and the hybrid suits collected oxygen from the environment to replenish the suit’s supply. Even with the suit sealed, the reverse osmosis filter would collect oxygen. He pressed a flashing icon on the panel hard enough to make it shift.

  His eyes focused on the escape trunk on the schematic. “Seal your suit,” he declared and rotated his collar.

  Siebert did the same.

  Jeremy looked at the cluster on his forearm, then at the jury-rigged panel. “Below us.”

  “Where most of the damage is?” Siebert asked.

  Jeremy nodded and realized Siebert couldn’t see the action from his vantage. “I think so,” he vocalized.

  Siebert grabbed a canvas bag that was tied to a handhold. He pulled out a long tube with a grip and trigger on one end and two large tanks opposite the stock. Gleaming copper pipes connected everything together. Siebert examined an analog gauge on the side near the trigger.

  “What in Hades is that?” Jeremy asked.

  Siebert looked up. “A chemical welder. It’s one of the few things that’ll work without an atmosphere. They’re used in zero-G hull maintenance.”

  Jeremy scowled. “I know what they’re used for, I mean, why are you loading it?”

  “Just in case.”

  “Relax, Mister Siebert,” Jeremy replied, manipulating the touch screen, “We’re all on the same side here. Besides, I think we’ll be fine.” Jeremy sucked air in through his teeth. “I’ll be damned.”

  Siebert readied his weapon. “What?”

  Jeremy pointed to the screen. “Erika Ängström,” he whistled as he stared at the transponder information. “I thought she was ejected during the explosion.”

  “She safe?” asked Siebert.

  “I think our odds of survival just went up,” he declared. “She’s got another miner and someone from deck division with her.” He lunged for a handhold, sparing his right shoulder, and made his way down to the bottom of the trunk to meet Erika and her party at the airlock.

  Siebert followed, using his toes to maneuver from handhold to handhold, the chemical welder pointed toward the airlock.

  A chirp emanated from his forearm cluster, and a warning displayed on his HUD. The airlock had been evacuated, sealed, and re-pressurized. Someone was trying to access the trunk hatch controls. He peered into the airlock through the Plexiglas window and his heart thundered in his chest.

  The helmeted face looking back was not Erika Ängström.

  Days Until Home: UNKNOWN

  Adelaide saw the shock in Jeremy’s eyes. She grinned sheepishly and punched in the sixteen-character override code to open the hatch. It was a tight fit with the four of them in the narrow airlock designed for two. Plus, Erika had to hold her right arm over her head to keep from jostling it too much. Adelaide couldn’t believe that Erika was still with them, but her eyes had grown cold since she was reeled in from the dark. They all had an assortment of gear and supplies tied to their suits. A pile of tech, gear and supplies lay just outside of the inner door. There wasn’t enough room for them and the supplies.

  They had found two more survivors: William “Telly” Tell Bianconi from deck division. He worked under Daisuke, the supply officer. Adelaide had always seen Telly in the galley. She didn’t know what his job was on the ship, only that he rarely left the galley or his quarters or the passageways that connected the two. Telly clutched a container of something to his chest. He mentioned essential supplies when she inquired about it earlier.

  The miner she knew was a friend of Jess’s. DeJoseph was his name, and he was like the quartermaster for the mining crew. He was definitely born on one of the lunar colonies. He stood over seven feet tall and had to slouch in the airlock. She knew that he often had to fight for his contract, being almost too tall to wear the mining gear. She could see the stress on the suit at the boots, waist and shoulders. Jess had told her that DeJoseph liked to collect depleted drill candles and that, back on Luna, he had quite the collection spanning more than four decades of mining tech. He even had an elaborate safe installed into his apartment to store what he thought were the most valuable parts of his collection. When Adelaide heard about the prank on Old Vicky, she suspected that DeJoseph was involved in some way. Depleted candles were cataloged and stored for disposal back on Luna. Jessica, Jimmy, DeJoseph and that guy from operations were always pulling pranks. Pooh Bear was always complaining to Jeremy, and Jeremy always complained to Adelaide.

  Jeremy placed his hand against the Plexiglas window. “I’m not sure how you pulled it off, but I’m glad you’re still with us.”

  Adelaide nodded and replied, “I pulled a Crazy Ade.”

  She grinned when she saw the recognition in Jeremy’s face. Before he could sputter a denial or an apology, the latch on the hatch clicked. Without gravity, and due to the close quarters, Adelaide knew she wouldn’t be able to open the hatch from the inside.

  Jeremy spun in a lazy circle, and positioned his legs to the side of the hatch and pulled at a recessed handle. All the hatches and doors in the escape trunk could be removed. The process was time-consuming, and the only reasons to remove the hatches were to allow egress when the entire ship was without atmosphere. Like when it’s being built.

  No one knew that Adelaide knew the precise methodology to remove the doors. Engines aren’t my only skills, she thought as she floated through the hatch. She had practiced on a mockup of the Kerwood that Sapphire had arranged for her. The Kerwood station had as many hidden and out-of-the-way spaces as the Kerwood mining ship. Probably, even more, she thought. Telly followed next, then Erika, cradling her ruined arm to her chest, and finally DeJoseph. Jeremy strained to close the bulky hatch and initiated the sequence to repressurize the airlock.

  Adelaide checked the forearm cluster on the spare suit, allowed the bundle she carried to float away, and rotated her collar. She pulled off her helmet, produced a knife, and cut her suit away exposing her coveralls underneath. Everyone watched her with fascination. She bounced off the trunk bulkhead, snatched the bundle, and struggled into a new suit. Flakes of something crusty floated away from her hair, and she used the slashed suit to clean the inside of her helmet.

  “That’s a much faster way to get out of one of those suits,” Telly remarked, his helmet under one of his long arms, th
e fabric taut over the seal at his gloves.

  The rest of the survivors each opened their collars so they could hear the conversation. Adelaide finished her wardrobe change by removing the forearm cluster from the spare suit and methodically attaching it to hers. She examined the suit for a moment, and then tilted her head first to the left, then to the right. The pop that twice sounded out was satisfying. The overextension of the neck was not possible in the helmet, and after the hours it took to get her party to the trunk, it was long overdue.

  She ignored the look in Jeremy’s eyes. She wasn’t going to answer the question, why isn’t your transponder working? She refused to draw attention to the copper mesh beneath her coveralls and, instead, examined those in the trunk with her. The miner that had a welder trained on them finally lowered his guard and joined the motley crew at the bottom of the escape trunk.

  “We need to find medical supplies and figure out what to do with Erika’s arm,” Adelaide announced.

  Four pairs of eyes focused on Erika, and she held her right arm out. It was quite the scene, everyone floating against the sides of the hatch, trying to act like they weren’t all going to die.

  “What about fixing the ship?”

  Adelaide spun to face the miner with the welder. “Siebert, is it?” Siebert nodded, and Adelaide continued. “Erika is an engineer. We need engineers to fix this tub.” Her eyes narrowed. “If she dies, we have less of a chance to survive this.”

  Siebert clutched the welder to his chest and nodded.

  “Listen up, people,” she declared. “We all work for the ChEng here now.” She winked at Jeremy. “Deck Division, miners, engineers, bridge crew, all that us versus them slag doesn’t matter now. We’re all survivors. You need to stow that slag. I’m not gonna die in a slagging tin can so some other conglomerate can come along and pick the flesh from our bones. I’ve spent too many years making this hunk of junk work for some asshats to steal it from me.” She met each pair of eyes of the other five souls in the trunk. “From us,” she concluded.

  Everyone nodded, so she continued. “Let’s get this done.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Days Until Home: UNKNOWN

  Viktor drifted through his cube-shaped bubble of atmosphere a few millimeters per second. Such slight movement was practically still relative to the walls, but the airlock was small enough that, within seconds, he neared the ceiling. He reached up with his good hand and let his fingertips absorb the inertia. The result was that he floated back the way he’d come, a fraction of a degree slower than before.

  There was a comfort, there. Whatever disaster had befallen the Kerwood, the laws of physics still applied. A reminder that they were still in the world of the living.

  He couldn’t muster the energy to do more than float back and forth. He couldn’t muster the energy to care. Once the adrenaline from the action had worn off, extreme exhaustion had taken its place, like he’d worked a double shift in high-G with no calorie break. Simply floating there was a soft, calm luxury.

  When Viktor was a child, his father had taken the family on a trip to the Caspian Sea. The people in the markets there were exotic compared to the stoic Russians. They called their wares in high-pitched, almost singsong voices, pointing out strangers and gesturing wildly to attract attention. One rotund man sold blown-glass ornaments, small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, intricate and precisely crafted. Viktor had never seen glass with colors swirled inside, greens and reds mixing and dancing like water. He’d begged his father to buy him a glass figurine of a ballerina, leg extended and dress blown out in a swirl. Of course, they could not afford it, and Viktor’s father had been angry at the request.

  The man selling the ornaments had smiled sadly at Viktor. What he remembered most about the man was that he wore a white turban around his head, tightly wrapped like a cloth beehive.

  The gauze wrapped around Jessica’s head wound reminded Viktor of the glass salesman. A big, swollen turban.

  Jessica occupied the wall opposite him, looking alarmingly like a dead body, though he knew she lived and could see her chest rise and fall. Despite what she said, the pain from her scalping had become too severe for her to suffer. Viktor shot her up with drugs from the medical bag before wrapping her head in gauze. They clipped Jessica’s tether hook onto the wall to keep her in place.

  Viktor envied Jessica her unconsciousness. He wanted to curl up and sleep. Not in his Kerwood bunk, but in a real bed, with the warm lump of his wife an arm’s length away. A warning indicator on the wall next to Jessica changed from green to yellow with an emphatic blink. He knew he should be thinking about what to do, but he couldn’t bring himself to focus.

  Jimmy smashed the comms button again and spoke louder, as if volume were the reason nobody was responding.

  “Hey there, boys and girls, it’s your friendly precious mineral extractor here. Still here. In the airlock. Waitin’ for death. We’ll be here for, oh, I don’t know. A few more hours, depending on how much O2 I consume speaking into this squawk-box.”

  He paused.

  “Actually, we’ll be in here longer than a few hours. We just won’t be alive after that. Because of the impending death I mentioned. It’d be super terrific to avoid that, so if anyone wants to take a stroll and help us out, I’ll give them a big ‘ol kiss on the lips.”

  “You are wasting your breath,” Viktor said. A moment later he thought, our breath.

  Jimmy ignored him, focusing on the terminal as if he could make someone respond by willpower alone. Finally, he pushed the button again.

  “You know, maybe it’s silent on account of I’m the one talking. I mentioned Vicky and Jessica are with me, right? They’re pretty well-liked around here. So if you’re leaving me to die, just remember you’re leaving them, too. And Jessica could use some real medical lovin’.”

  He let go of the button dramatically. “I swear, if this is a prank…” He eyed Viktor. “You don’t think it’s a prank, right? Cause I don’t like it. I never done nothing like this, you know?”

  Viktor gave a noncommittal shrug with his good arm.

  They’d been in there half an hour. Their suit transponders were functional, he’d checked. Jimmy shouldn’t have even needed to radio anyone. Ship sweeps should have happened by then.

  Unless everyone else was dead, of course.

  The thought floated across his mind. He tried to grasp it, focus on it and think harder about the deeper implications, but it drifted through his fingers like mist. Why was it so hard to focus? Why didn’t he care? Maybe he’d lost more blood than he thought.

  “Okay,” Jimmy told the comms, “how about this. What’s the difference between jam and jelly? It’s my best, most dirty joke. And if you want to know the punchline, come on down to the aft airlock and I’ll tell you in person.”

  “You’ve told that joke a hundred times,” Viktor said.

  Jimmy let go of the comms button. “Shh! Maybe someone hasn’t heard it yet and the curiosity’ll get the better of ‘em.” He tapped the side of his head as if the plan were cunning instead of ridiculous.

  “Maybe so, Jimmy.”

  Viktor watched Jessica’s face, frowning and cold. He didn’t know her well, but he felt a workman’s compassion for her as one of the few other miners who pulled more than their weight on the job. He hoped she wouldn’t die. If she could die, it meant he could, too.

  It should have been obvious, with the hallway full of dead miners on the other side of the door, but his brain had compartmentalized that. Tucked it away into a box, closed the lid, and placed it in a closet for later examination. He wondered if that’s why he felt so cavalier about their situation. Some human defense mechanism dating back to when they used sticks and rocks.

  The warning indicator on the wall blinked. Viktor closed his eyes to it, annoyed at anything trying to occupy his attention. Then curiosity began to take hold. Blinking might be bad, but it also, improbably, might be good. He mustered just enough energy to push off the
wall with his feet and float the two meters toward it.

  He frowned at the small LED and the letters stenciled into the wall.

  “Jimmy.”

  He tapped at the screen as Jimmy approached. The kid sighed at the info.

  “Nice. The airlock scrubbers are pulling a lot of xenon. That’s just fantastic.”

  Viktor squinted a question at him.

  “Xenon’s inert, right? A safe, stable way of fuelin’ the ship? Well, it turns out that don’t mean slag when it mixes with O2 and becomes xenon tetraoxide.” He made an exploding motion with his cupped hands. “And right now the airlock air scrubbers are mixin’ it all together like a bowl of cake batter.”

  “Xenon tetra…” Viktor tasted the word.

  “Combustible above a certain temperature. Bad slag. Might be nothin’, might be more than nothin’,” Jimmy said. “Way I see it, we’ve gotta assume it’s more than nothin’.”

  Viktor cocked his head. “How do you know this thing?”

  Jimmy shrugged awkwardly, then covered it with a grin. “I’m not the idiot you all think I am. Sometimes I learn about other ship systems. For fun. Hey, it’s helpin’ now, right?”

  “Right.” Part of Viktor was suspicious, but it was drowned out by the other part that screamed staying alive is more important.

  “So, yeah. We’ve gotta get out of Dodge like it’s yesterday,” Jimmy said.

  The immediacy of their problem helped Viktor focus. He nodded. “Move somewhere else in the ship. Away from the problem. Find some more air.”

  “If there is any to be found.” The silence of the inoperable comms hung in the air. “If not—”

  “Then we die,” Viktor said with a shrug.

  Something changed on Jimmy’s face as he stared at the airlock. There was none of his usual charm, now. “We need to go outside. Outside,” he added for emphasis.

  Viktor opened his mouth to ask why, then closed it again. If they returned to the interior ship through the launch hallway, which was in vacuum, all of the interior doors beyond that would be locked-down against the vacuum. Even if they came across a functioning part of the ship, they wouldn’t be able to enter without exposing it to vacuum. Not without double-door airlocks.