Hayden's World Shorts, Stories 1-3: 43 Seconds, Signal Loss, Aero One

by S. D. Falchetti

  “Confirmed. It’s on an intercept course decelerating at one point six gee.”

  “Tactical.”

  “We don’t have a tactical display.”

  Kyan smiled. “I know. I’ve just always wanted to say that.” He waved fingers towards the screen. “Just make something up.”

  The map rotated, showing a three dot dance. Distance and relative velocity tags followed projected flight paths. The Aristarchus decelerated towards the impactor and would intercept it in slightly under six hours. The Badger would overtake the Aristarchus in three.

  Kyan exhaled. “That’s not good. Is that Watts?”

  “Unknown, but probable. Flight path is consistent with previous transmissions.”

  “Weapons?”

  “One class-six plasma torch on an articulated arm, starboard side. Two robotic grapples. Standard equipment for a salvager.”

  He blew out a deep breath. “Okay. Could be worse. Add the ship info to the UN emergency broadcast.”

  “Do you think the Badger is responding to the UN emergency broadcast? It is a rescue ship.”

  “Running dark, no lights, no comms?” He analyzed the Badger. “I’ve been thinking about how the odds of us all being at the same place at the same time are insane. I think it’s because we’re all here for the same reason. We’re both taking advantage of the one point in the solar system that’s opposite everything else this week. I’m using the silence to get clean sensor data, but he’s using it to hide the impactor’s flight path.”

  Rios was silent. Kyan wasn’t sure if this was simply outside of his programming, or if he was thinking about what he’d said.

  “Okay, we’re just helping him by decelerating. If we start burning towards the weapon, will we reach it first?”

  “Yes, at max acceleration we will reach the impactor in two hours and thirty-one minutes, but we will overshoot it.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got an idea about that. Will he still catch us?”

  “He is faster. Assuming he accelerates for pursuit, he will overtake us forty-eight minutes after we reach the impactor.”

  Kyan rubbed the back of his head. “I’m heading down to the maintenance bay. I’ve been thinking about what to do if another ship came for us since you mentioned it, and I’ve got a few things to bounce off you.”

  Two hours later, he sat in the command chair wearing his red spacesuit with the yellow kevlar vest buckled tightly over his chest. His head and hands were bare, but two suit gloves dangled from his left hip.

  The impactor reminded him of a business card he’d once seen. On the card, matte black text overlaid a glossy background. Tilting the card just right revealed the text. The weapon was a featureless arrowhead against a slightly different shade of dark space. It had bumps and divots in all the right locations for strobes and sensors, but as far as they could tell none of them were active.

  “Ready launcher,” Kyan said.

  “AMOIRS drone loaded. Telemetry and strobes disabled.”

  “We’ve got one shot. Let’s make it a good one. Fire torpedo.”

  “Launched. But, it’s not a torpedo.”

  Kyan smiled. “In this case, it is. Get us out of here, full burn, negative ninety-degrees z-axis.”

  Gravity switched to the wall behind him and he receded into the chair like an old shuttle astronaut doing a vertical takeoff. On the tactical display the AMOIRs drone continued in a straight line towards the impactor while the Aristarchus curved down and away from its original flight path.

  “Drone accelerating at one-quarter gee. Time to impact, two hundred and forty-eight seconds.”

  Kyan opened the keypad. He was starting to get good at typing.

  Anders - Hey, Watts, I’ve got a math problem for you. Let’s say, after a few hours of max burn, I’m going way too fast and I’m going to overshoot that weapon of yours. Before I do, I launch a 500 kg drone. Now the drone is moving at my velocity but on a collision course with the weapon.

  What happens when a 500 kg mass collides with your weapon at three hundred and fifty-nine kilometers per second?

  He looked at the blinking transmit button but didn’t press it yet. “Time until the Badger overtakes us?”

  “Fifty-one minutes.”

  “He’s still running with passive sensors only?”

  “Yes.”

  Kyan watched the dot of the drone converging on the dot of the weapon. When it was at fifteen seconds, he linked the external video to his text message.

  Anders - Stumped? It looks just like this.

  In the video, the arrow slid against an onyx sky. The frame blanched and the video switched to wide-field. A new star flickered chaotically where the weapon had been, lens flares filling the video as a million sparks blossomed and glimmered like fireworks. The star sputtered, dimmed, and died. A wreath of glowing wreckage faded to radiant orange.

  Goose bumps swept across Kyan’s skin. “I got you, you bastard.”

  He finished his typing:

  Anders - That was a seven kiloton explosion, entirely kinetic energy. I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept. Still want to convo?

  Kyan pressed the transmit icon.

  “I don’t see how that transmission helped our situation,” Rios said.

  “I know, but it sure felt good.” He watched the dying embers of the weapon. “Log the debris field and add it to the UN emergency broadcast. Set course for Earth. Either Watts is going to bail or he’ll try and kill us. We’ll know soon enough.”

  5

  Watts

  Watts’s response came ten minutes later:

  Watts - Hey, Anders. Looks like we can’t be friends.

  “He’s consistent. Reduce acceleration to one quarter gee,” Kyan said. “Launch drones two and three, fifteen click orbit.” Kyan tucked a slate in a thigh pocket, crossed to the hab, and descended three floors to the maintenance bay. The black knife sat here in a sheath and belt. He reached for it, hesitated, took a breath and tied it around his waist. His helmet was here, also, and he tethered it to his hip. “Okay, open the engine room access panel.”

  Unlike the other levels, the engine room only had a tight access ladder. Kyan descended it into dim shadows. Pockets of red light bathed panels clustered with blue displays, and virtual gauges were everywhere. The engine itself was a horizontal silver torus wrapped in black cable with oddly angled blocks of supporting equipment. The air smelled faintly like ozone and Kyan’s arm hair stood up. There was a reason he never came down here. He found the fold-down seat in the wall, sat down, and reeled out the three-point harness. “Close and lock the engine room access panel and the port comms pressure seal. Kill all internal lights.”

  The red lights went black and only the glow of the virtual gauges remained. Kyan took the slate from his pocket and a haze of blue light illuminated his dark corner. The slate displayed an external video of the Badger, a tactical showing his two drones, and windowed internal camera feeds from each level of the Aristarchus. Time to intercept decreased to only fourteen minutes due to his speed reduction. He’d lose the drones if he went any faster.

  He tapped the slate and transmitted a pre-recorded video. In it, he sat in the port comms command chair wearing his flight suit. The recording said, “Okay, Watts. Enough screwing around with text messages. I know you can hear me. If you’ve checked the UN emergency channel, your name, ship, and all the data on the weapon has been transmitting on a loop for the past day. Give it up. If you approach this ship, I will defend it. This is your only warning.”

  “Kyan, I’m still concerned,” Rios said.

  “Me too, buddy. Don’t worry, we’re going to get out of this.” He looked at the tactical. The Badger was four-thousand kilometers and slowing. He wanted to throw the drones at it, before it was here right on top of him, but it would swerve around them like a car avoiding highway debris. He rested his head against the wall, looked back at the slate, and tapped open a new window. Photos of Lake, Harmony, and a darker-haired, thinner version
of himself. Harmony’s first day at school. He smiled the more he swiped and a lump formed in his throat. It was a long ten minutes.

  “Active radar contact,” Rios said.

  Kyan tapped a command and set new waypoints for the drones. The Aristarchus’s exterior floodlights blazed to life, swiveling a wash of light across the Badger’s nose. White registry letters read Resolve. The floods continued their sweep to settle on the grappling arms and torch. Kyan pressed the drone icons and arced trajectories appeared. He set the slate down, untethered his helmet, snapped it on his suit, and donned his gloves.

  “Collision warning,” Rios said. “Sixty-seconds.”

  Kyan summoned a virtual flight control. When he pushed the control right, he could feel his weight shifting against the left harness straps. “Here we go.”

  The Aristarchus rotated and the Resolve turned, compensating. The two were now squared-off along a line perpendicular to the incoming drones. The Resolve’s silver claws extended and two clangs blared as the grapples made contact. The ship groaned as stresses settled.

  The Resolve’s starboard arm unfurled and a plasma torch flared blinding white. As it reached out for the main communications antenna a black cannonball streaked into the torch’s arm and it fragmented, ripped free of the Resolve, and cartwheeled wildly into space. A spray of yellow sparks shot from the arm’s socket and steel rain pelted the Aristarchus’s hull like a thousand ball-peen hammers striking sheet metal.

  Painful forces pushed on Kyan’s chest as both ships spun. Drone two disappeared from the tactical display. It was traveling over a thousand kilometers per hour when it impacted the Resolve.

  Forces changed direction and the floor pushed hard against Kyan. He wrestled with the flight control and edged his ship back to full burn, but Watts’s ship was more powerful in this tug-of-war. Drone one sped into the tangle of ships and the Aristarchus’s fabrication module exploded in a riot of shredding metal. Kyan’s arms and legs flailed as he banged his head against the side of his helmet, then centrifugal forces pulled on him as the ships pinwheeled. From the starboard he could hear his ship colliding with pieces of itself. A torrent of wind buffeted the other side of the ceiling.

  “Hull breach, fabrication module,” Rios said. “Fabmod pressure door is sealed.” The gale sound subsided and only creaking metal remained. “We lost twenty percent of our air before the door sealed.”

  Kyan’s hair was sticky and a bloody smudge marred his faceplate. Gravity stabilized at four-tenths gee along the floor as the Resolve overpowered all of the Aristarchus’s thrust and yanked it along the flight path it wanted. New forces pulled Kyan left and he looked at the slate. The robotic grapples were latched onto the observatory mast and airlock cylinder, flexing like great biceps. There was a jolt and a bang as the ship’s airlocks bumped, then sixty seconds of silence. Kyan could hear his own breathing inside his helmet. He watched the airlock video feed.

  A shower of gold sparks sprayed from a point at the top of the outer airlock door, traveling clockwise, cutting a new door within the door.

  “Dammit,” Kyan said. “Rios, open the inner airlock door. No point in losing both of them.”

  The glowing rectangle completed its circuit and the outer airlock door slid back, rotated ninety-degrees, and swung out of sight. The video was grainy due to low light, but Kyan glimpsed two metal arms within the smoke tendrils.

  The salvage robot rolled in and crossed the threshold on six bumpy wheels. It was big, about the size of a coffee table, and it cast long shadows silhouetted by the Resolve’s light. Red globes glowed along its frame like tail lights in fog. Three arms folded down as a camera periscoped, and Kyan looked up at the ceiling, listening to the wheels rolling overhead. He glanced back at the slate. The robot surveyed the main shaft heading up to the habmod, strobed a green laser scan, then retreated back into the airlock. Smoke still churned from the cut door. A full minute passed.

  Someone emerged from the cloud. He was lean and on the shorter side wearing a charcoal black spacesuit and helmet with glossy gray plates over the torso, arms, and upper legs. It looked like a civilian knock-off version of military armor. Several tools dangled from a belt. He flicked something on a small pistol and a flashlight beam sprang from the top of the gun. He sighted the pistol high, scanning the room, then advanced carefully. Debris and dust swirled in his flashlight arc along the fabmod pressure door. When he reached the main shaft he stood off to its side, swept his beam along its length, then glanced down and eyed the engine room panel.

  Kyan quickly queued up the next pre-recorded video and hit the transmit button. The image of him in his blue flight suit sitting in the comms room appeared and the recording said, “Watts, I’m warning you, get off my ship. I’m armed and will use lethal force if you come in here.”

  Watts quirked his head and stopped for a minute. He looked up the shaft, stowed his pistol, and began climbing. The habmod camera showed him arriving, eyeing up the overhead connection to the observatory, crossing the comms room transit tube, and stopping at the sealed pressure door. He retrieved a puck-shaped disc from his belt, stuck it to the door, and keyed a command on his forearm. A brilliant red glow spilled from beneath the disc as the puck traveled clockwise. An incandescent melted line trailed it.

  Kyan stowed the slate, unclasped his harness, climbed the access tube, and opened the panel. It was dim here, and the rectangle of light from the Resolve’s airlock cast twilight shadows down the hall. He checked the slate. Watts stood in the transit tube with his pistol drawn, pointed at the comms door. A quarter of the door was cut. Kyan darted past the main shaft, breathing hard as he stepped over the threshold of the Resolve’s open outer door. The inner airlock door was closed and had a small window. He peeked inside and saw a parts room with racks on both sides. Different robot appendages hung from the walls, and two salvage bots were docked in charging stations. He couldn’t see the entire room through the small window, but an open door on the other end showed interior ship lights. He reached for the inner airlock door panel. Either Watts was cautious and secured it, or it had never occurred to him that Kyan might board his ship. He pressed an icon and the door slid open.

  Kyan pulled out his knife as soon as he stepped through. He hoped Watts was solo, or this would be a very short ship takeover attempt. A glance at the slate. Three-quarters of the comms door was cut and Watts was still waiting. Kyan took a step towards the open door and motion caught his eye.

  The periscope on the salvage bot swiveled and its camera looked him over head to toe. His stomach sank. On the slate, Watts snapped his head up and typed quickly on his forearm keypad. Kyan sprinted towards the interior door as it slid down and he ended up flat-palmed against it. He spun towards the Resolve’s airlock door, but it was already sealed. He was trapped in the parts room holding only a knife. He eyeballed the slate. Watts was already at the core junction.

  “Rios! Close the inner airlock door!” Through the small airlock window he saw the door slide down, cutting off the maintenance bay, then he remembered the salvage bot and turned to face it with the knife. The bot’s camera followed his movements, passive. Ruby red light flickered from the window and a scintillating point burned through the inner airlock door, sparks sputtering and falling to the floor. Kyan guessed he had ninety-seconds based on the comms room breach. He couldn’t think.

  “Update the emergency broadcast with Watts’s description.” His grip tightened on the knife as he shifted his weight back and forth. He spied racks, robots, and appendages around him. Aside from makeshift clubs, nothing seemed terribly useful. Back in the bay a quarter of the door was cut.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Rios said. “Kyan, tell me what to do.”

  Kyan backed against the interior door. His head throbbed furiously. “I’m thinking. Still thinking.” He fumbled with the slate and looked at the video feeds of Watts, the maintenance bay, the fabrication module. The fabmod looked like a popped metal balloon, with stars visible where the far wal
l should be. He looked again at Watts standing in the center of the maintenance bay.

  “Rios, open the fabmod pressure door.”

  “If I do that, we will lose all our remaining atmosphere.”

  Yellow sparks dripped as the circle approached its beginning point. The pitch of his voice rose and he spoke quickly. “I understand. Then seal the habitation deck first, and open the fabmod pressure door.”

  “If I open the fabmod pressure door, Watts will be killed.”

  “If you don’t open that door, I will be killed.”

  The bay door incision completed and the excised piece fell to the floor. Watts stepped through the smoke tendrils with his gun pointed at the window. Kyan knew the pistol couldn’t breach airlock windows and stood there, knife ready. “All choices lead to someone dying. You have to make a decision right now.”

  Watts lowered his gun and walked right up to the window. For the first time he was face-to-face, and Kyan could see Watts’s features. Thin eyebrows and soft brown eyes full of anger, upturned nose with pale pink lips. Watts was female, early twenties. Nearly the same age as Harmony. She stared hard at him for a moment, glanced through the window at the room’s contents, then took five steps back.

  Kyan opened his mouth, hesitated. Watts was so young, he couldn’t help but think of Harmony, that Watts was someone’s daughter, someone whom life had failed.

  Watts raised her gun and aimed at Kyan’s head.

  A pit formed in his stomach and his voice cracked as he said, “Now would be a good time, Rios”

  With her left hand, Watts reached for her forearm keypad. Behind her the fabmod pressure door sliced open to expose wreckage and vacuum. Two entire decks of air tried to instantaneously vacate the ship. Watts plummeted backwards, striking the inner airlock door with her head and spinning off the bay ceiling before hitting the fabmod doorframe and tumbling into open space. The sharp edge of the cut door showed a splatter of blood where she’d struck it.