by Mark Gardner
Gauge Schneider sat up and said, “I’ve been thinking about that for quite some time now, Cap, and I have an idea. This is the only internal room with a double airlock and reinforced walls. It was built to protect the sick and injured no matter what happens to this ship so, as it stands, we are safe. If the ship is not salvageable, this may be home for us until we get rescued.”
“That could be several weeks, if we’re lucky. Several weeks with dead bodies everywhere, no rations, and an unstable ship. We don’t even know what set off that explosion. How do we know it’s over?” Winchester said.
“Are you proposing we just give up?” Gauge asked.
“Of course not! But I know where you’re going with this, and I won’t have you putting your life on the line when you may be the last one left with any kind of medical experience. I know this ship, and I have the access codes. So make yourself comfortable and hunker down. I’m going to see if I can find my engineers, and I will radio back through Femke’s comm.”
Gauge made to object but Winchester ignored him, pulling on his launch suit and sealing the helmet. He waited until the suit went through its process of powering on its computer and filling up with oxygen, then glanced over at Gauge to give him a thumbs up.
He looked at Femke, strapped in and unconscious with a grimace on her face, and he reached down to touch her hand. Even though the thick glove of the suit prevented him from feeling the warm, clammy, dampness of her skin, he imagined what it felt like and hoped she would wake up soon.
Marisol was still asleep, and it struck him as odd, so he turned from the bed to once again regard Gauge Schneider and said, “Hey, Gauge, whatever you do to pass the time, try not to fall asleep.”
He walked over to the panel, checked the gauges, and saw the atmosphere was in good shape. There were some poor readouts on the Kerwood’s Medical Support System (KMSS), but the computer was not telling him why. He assumed it was due to the electricity problem or yet another result of the earlier explosion. Gauge had managed to pull one of the medical kits down to use it, but if Femke’s situation worsened, he would need to use the actual system.
The artificial gravity was in the green. Like the bridge during long missions, it was a technology that relied on the room spinning against its exterior shell to produce the centrifugal force needed to generate a form of gravity.
The technology was restricted to the two rooms due to the Kerwood’s architecture. Newer ships would stay rotating during flight—like a spiral corkscrew—but the Kerwood was an older model, built when the technology was new, so the only places deemed necessary to have gravity during flight was the bridge, and the medical bay.
If you looked at the diagnostic blueprint of the Kerwood, you would see the bridge and the medical bay were really two spheres that spun rapidly during flight. Within each sphere were the hexagonal rooms that they occupied, and it could rotate in eight directions on all points. This was how the gravity could be pulled down instead of forcing them to walk on the walls like the first generation anti-gravity rooms, but this beautiful luxury was what also made the exit to the lower decks complicated.
The bridge’s frame had become ruptured in the explosion, and they were lucky the lower level had been opened prior to launch. With the lower level open, there was no spherical rotation so it provided a direct access point to the medical bay.
In space, there was no true up and down, so coming in from what would be deemed the top of the ship were parked on a planet or moon, meant that you would be coming in on the side of the medical bay. It would be spinning perpendicular to the bridge, so the gravity would take hold, and though disorienting, you would be forced to stand with the beds and KMSS.
What Winchester hoped was that, upon exiting this haven of medical wonders, is that he wouldn’t be stuck between airlocks trying to force open the other side. The door could be damaged with something heavy lodged against the wheel, and he already felt fatigued.
Those long days on Egeria-13 had weakened their immune system, and the ISS supplements had been cut from the manifest due to the limited budget of the Kerwood. It was a bad idea and, when he made it, he knew it would somehow come back to get him. What was I thinking, he thought. It was bad enough that the woman he loved was in bad shape, but now she had a weak immune system to defend her body.
Numerous miners were probably in sexual relationships, his valuable engineers, and Marisol, if the rumors were correct, was pretty busy herself. They would never have thought about the effects of this exposure on their normally resilient bodies. Many had probably gotten sick from bodily fluids, assuming it would be the same as sleeping around on a space station. He on the other hand, was well aware, and he felt guilty for the oversight.
“Captain,” Gauge called, and he turned to face him after punching the area near the panel in frustration. “Do you think someone did this? The explosion. Do you think a rival crew sabotaged the Kerwood so that they can get our assignment next time?”
Winchester was taken aback by Gauge’s conspiracy theory. Not because it was so far-fetched, but because it was unlike the disciplined German giant to lower himself to such suppositions. But they had been sitting in silence for over an hour, and if you give a man time with nothing but his thoughts, you would be quite surprised at the things that escape his mouth.
Sabotage was very likely, after all, he had some of the most meticulous people on that bridge running checks prior to launch. Jeremy Thompkin was a top notch engineer, and despite his personal feelings toward Lady Marmalade, he knew she wouldn’t have green-lit a lift-off if even so much as a piece of lint was seen floating anywhere near their engine.
But what if there had been some sort of sabotage? A timed bomb, strapped to an area of the engine where it would have been invisible to the computers and to any human eyes that didn’t take the time to crawl up into the grid looking for anything out of the ordinary. No, he thought, we can’t start down this road. I’m mad enough as it is about this slag. I can’t allow myself to think that someone would be trying to kill me. No, not going to think like that.
“Mr. Schneider,” Winchester said in a way to remind Gauge that he was a professional. “Let us concentrate on repairs and survival without going down a road of accusations and what-ifs about the explosion. Sabotage or not, we are here now, stuck and hurting. We may be the ship’s only hope, and I owe it to all of you to get you home, even at the cost of my own life. I am your captain, and it was my duty to get us through the mission safely. I’ve failed at that, so I’m asking you to stow the conspiracy theories until we’re at a place of luxury where we can entertain those thoughts. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Captain Hayes, you are one hundred percent correct, sir. I’ll look to fixing what I can here,” Gauge said.
Winchester realized he was lucky to have Gauge as his partner during this crisis. He had called the man a robot many times in the past, but a robot was reliable, never changing, and void of emotion. Had it been Femke, he would have been stuck on getting the Kerwood back in ship shape with little concern for what was going on in the lower areas. Marisol Vega would have had him tearing down the door, Kerwood-be-damned, to see to the miners and their health.
He tried to imagine Angelo Lu or Booker, but both were a painful reminder that only an Earth day ago, they were all joking around and talking.
Lu was one of the only men he could have truthfully given the label of friend, and Booker was who he planned to give the Kerwood to—after a lengthy and necessary discussion with Angelo first—whenever he retired. It hurt his heart to have lost so many talented people in the explosion, and this made it difficult for him to put one foot in front of the other, let alone launch a rescue operation.
“Give me two hours, Gauge, and if you don’t hear from me, pull up my vitals. If I’m still around but out of contact, consider I’m either trapped somewhere or dead with my suit malfunctioning. At that point, the Kerwood is yours, and you must do whatever it takes to get you and these two women rescued
. Wake Marisol when I leave so she can help you with your repairs. If I don’t make it, Gauge, I want you to know that it was an honor to share my bridge with you. Reliable men are a rarity these days, and if I had a question about any area of this ship, it was never navigation.”
“Thank you, Captain. I have the deepest respect for you, too. I believe that you will find our people, and we will find a way to fix this vessel and bring back our dead comrades to their families.”
Winchester cranked the wheel hard on the airlock and tugged it open. He glanced back once at Femke and paused as if he meant to say something, then stepped through and sealed the door behind him. The tight space lit up with lights when he locked the wheel in place, and he could hear the motors working to keep the medical bay’s gravity in place.
He pushed off from the door to float over to the blue wheel, which would open the airlock to what should be the living area for the crew. He wiped the condensation from the panel near the wheel and touched the dark sensor below it. A display of numbers, made to look like buttons outlined in cobalt squares, appeared. He punched in the code to allow him entry, and the area around the wheel displayed a series of lights that rotated to show him which way to turn it.
Winchester grabbed the wheel and turned it, and was relieved to feel it move without any resistance beyond the ordinary. He opened it up and slid inside, pulling it shut so that the automatic lock would spin the wheel clockwise and reseal the airlock.
The change in perspective was disorienting as he found himself in the near pitch-black room with one flickering light revealing the dead that hung in their chairs on one side of the room. It was a scene from a horror film, and he was never a fan of those. He reached inside of his suit and produced a flashlight, which he shone along each wall to try to assess the situation intelligently.
Something had torn through the hull and the Kerwood reacted, extinguishing the oxygen from the room. But something else had managed to cook these people alive, and he wondered if it was the explosion.
Winchester Hayes considered himself to be a brave man, but there was something about being in this exposed room of corpses that gave him a sense of his own mortality that he disliked. He had to get past it and onto whatever other horrors the rooms would reveal until he located the engineers who he hoped were still alive.
His muscles were jelly and his head swam. The task of moving Femke and Booker into the medical bay had been one of mental and physical effort. And though he could not complain to Gauge, he could use some rest and a stiff drink or two.
The effort to stay positive, while keeping the past in the past was enough of a struggle, and now he was seeing the stunned and blank expressions of people behind their masks. People who he’d scoff at as he pushed past them to gain the bridge and his coffee.
The same ones who would tell him, “Good morning,” and he would blow them off as mere obstacles. Now he wished he had gotten to know each and every one of them by their name. To feel something else other than dread at their lifeless faces, to feel more human since knowing them would lead to remorse, unlike the disgust and disappointment that was in its place.
He got to the far door after much effort of floating and climbing past the dead crewmen. When he gained the passageway beyond the room, he stopped to think about his engineers. Were there any other rooms that would be as secure as the medbay they would congregate in? There was the main EXT engineering plant, but wasn’t it there or somewhere near it where the explosion occurred?
He moved along the passageway, trying to conjure up a mental blueprint of his ship. What he needed was something that ran the length of the Kerwood. A place where a person from these lower spaces would look for sanctuary.
“Hey, Gauge, you there?” he spoke into his comm.
There was a long pause, and then he heard the comm come on, followed by the sound of someone struggling with something. “Hello?” Winchester pressed, wondering what the source of the noise was.
“Sorry, Cap, I had to get to Femke’s helmet. Mine and Vega’s are in need of repairs so… erm, sorry, rambling. What do you need me to do?” he said, followed by what sounded like a deep and guttural sigh.
“Can you go to the main panel in that room? See if you can pull up a status report on the Kerwood’s current state of—“
“Captain, the computers in the medical bay are only tapped into the equipment here. For that sort of information, I would need to go up to the bridge and use our equipment there.”
Winchester weighed his options for a minute and considered turning around and doing it himself. He truly didn’t want Gauge to put himself in danger, but he didn’t know how long it would take him to search for Jeremy and his engineers. He needed to know which areas could sustain life. The Kerwood had lost atmosphere in several rooms, and it would cut down his search if he knew which ones to avoid.
“Hate to have you do this, Gauge, but I need to know. If you could go back on the bridge and push the schematics to me that would save me several hours of searching for our people.”
“No problem, Captain, I’m heading there now. I will let you know when I am in front of the computer and in need of the codes to get you synced. You sound beat, is it that bad down there? I was beginning to wonder if I’d hear from you after all.”
Winchester glanced down at the corner of his helmet and saw that the time read an hour and a half past the time that he left Gauge.
“Wow, didn’t know I was gone so long, and that was me making it through two rooms,” he said. “That’s why I need those schematics, big man. I appreciate the concern, but finding our people is more important than me being out of shape.”
Fifteen long minutes passed with dead air on the comm, and Winchester fought against his impeding thoughts of doom. He was about to ask for an update when the screen on his helmet lit up, asking for his permission to allow a direct connection to the navigation computer. He quickly approved it and was presented with a diagram that showed red, yellow, and green spaces inside of the Kerwood.
There were several places where the survivors could be, but only a few showed life signs unlike the dark areas that ran near the hull. Is this a glitch, he wondered as he scanned the numerous life signs. There were plenty of blips in an area that didn’t register on the schematic, but only one or two in the places he assumed they would be.
Were they hanging on outside of the Kerwood? That wouldn’t make a lot of sense, would it? The explosion could have pushed some out, and they may be huddled together on the exterior but—ohhhh. Winchester stopped when he realized where they were. How in the hell did they know about the escape trunk? He hadn’t thought about that hidden area of the ship in years.
He saw where he was on the schematic, in a long passageway of red, and he saw one of the few access points leading to the trunk adjacent to it. He started toward the portal, knowing it rested as a sealed hatch right next to the mess.
“Did you get the link, Captain?” Gauge asked through the comm, causing him to stop and refocus.
“Got it, and I’m tapped in, big man. I now know where I’m headed. Get back to the medical bay, and I’ll update you in a few. Looks like there are a number of survivors so I’m going to them to get a better idea of our situation.”
“That’s good news, Captain, but if you don’t mind, I am going to see if I can work on some things up here,” Gauge said.
“Of course. I appreciate it. Beats sitting in that room with the injured and the dead,” he said, not realizing he had said out loud what he intended to only think. Slag, he thought, that was not a cool thing to say. “Do what you can, Gauge. Oh, and, thank you.” He signed off awkwardly and set a course toward the hatch that would give him entry to the trunk.
Winchester passed more bodies, some dislodged, others drifting within their launch chairs. Others, who had somehow managed to disobey the order to strap in, had become exposed when the Kerwood reacted to the explosion.
“What a waste,” he whispered as he pulled himself past them towa
rd his destination. It was becoming harder not to be affected by the loss of life, but he was not going to let it get to him.
How did they gain access to the trunk, he wondered, his suspicions playing at him as he struggled to know. The engineers knew the ship almost better than he did, so it would have been one of them to find a way past security. He was at the sealed hatch, and he felt around it for the loose panel in the bulkhead that would give him access to its override.
His gloves found the groove, and he pulled at it violently. The plate came off and drifted away, revealing the familiar screen with the cobalt buttons waiting for his access code. Winchester punched in his code, and the door unlocked. He entered and sealed it behind him, taking note of where he was. He had entered a tight space, where an old-fashioned twist-and-pull door barred his entrance.
He pulled it open and floated in to the shocked expression of several crewmen, engineers and, surprisingly, miners. After sealing this door, and removing his helmet, Winchester scanned each and every one of their faces.
He had walked in on some sort of discussion with Lady Marmalade holding court like a post-apocalyptic queen in a cheesy dystopian film. The look she gave him reminded him of Cole, his son, whenever he would walk in on him playing around with the model of the Kerwood. He would tell the boy it wasn’t a toy, but no matter how hard he punished him, or where he hid it, the kid would find a way to get into his office to play starfighter with his model.
Where Cole was cute in his mischief, Adelaide made his heart skip. The thought of sabotage crept back into his mind, especially considering where they were now. He wondered if these crewmen had been here, safely, when the explosion was busy killing everyone off.
He saw that several of them were hurt, but she was unscathed and, as their eyes met, his mind gave way to his suppressed emotions, and the words were out before he could think better of it.
