Salvage Conquest

by Chris Kennedy

  “For that, Joth, Tretra, Farnog Corp, and Tomeral and Associates thank you.”

  The audience started to applaud, and Pete felt a flush of embarrassment. He suppressed the urge to sneeze. There was no point in starting that again…although...

  About thirty seconds in The Suit would take care of it.

  * * * * *

  Robert E. Hampson Bio

  Scientist, author, and educator Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D., has created or assisted in the creation of (fictional) future medicine, brain computer interfaces, unusual diseases, alien intelligence, novel brain diseases (and the medical nanites to cure them), exotic toxins, and brain effects of a zombie virus. His science ranges from understanding human memory, to trying to develop prosthetics for the brain. His nonfiction writing ranges from the mysteries of the brain to TV/movie diseases, and from fictional depictions of real science to living in space. He published short stories ranging from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Good, The Bad and the Merc & Tales from the Lyon’s Den - Chris Kennedy Publ.), the Black Tide Rising universe (Black Tide Rising and Voices of the Fall - Baen), in Science Fiction by Scientists (Springer), to the TRADOC Mad Science Writing contest (Small Wars Journal). Current projects include sequels to his first novel: Do No Harm (CKP) and a new anthology of interplanetary exploration The Founder Effect for Baen Books following on the success of the mixed science and fiction anthology STELLARIS: People of the Stars (Baen, co-edited with Les Johnson).

  Dr. Hampson is a Professor of Neurology and Physiology/Pharmacology with over 35 years’ experience in animal and human neuroscience. His professional work includes more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles ranging from the pharmacology of memory to the effects of radiation on the brain. He is also leading a multi-institutional clinical research effort to develop a “neural prosthetic” to restore human memory following damage due to aging, injury or disease—the first such device to operate using actual neural codes for information derived from a patient’s own brain activity. He is available as a Futurism consultant via SIGMA, and as a subject matter expert through the Science and Entertainment Exchange – a service of the National Academy of Sciences. His combined professional science and science fiction author website is http://REHampson.com.

  # # # # #

  Desperation by Mark Wandrey

  Collisions are supposed to be impossible. Or so they tell you. Your ship drops out of alter reality after traveling between the stars, and poof, there you are—with a little piece of the universe all to yourself.

  When I activated the jump controls, went through the stargate, and Arcturus popped out of the gate in the Theta Orionis system, everything seemed fine—for about one second. Then my ship’s residual momentum interacted with the ship I’d just “shared” space with, and both were ripped apart in the most violent experience in my life.

  I dimly remember being slammed against the control console, the wailing alarms, then the gut-wrenching feeling of an explosive decompression. I stared in disbelief as Arcturus’ status board went dark, indicating the automatic systems weren’t working, and I floated out of my chair as artificial gravity failed. I ridiculously flipped switches and smacked at the controls, screaming for them to function, even though they obviously had no power.

  When you try and take a breath, but there’s not enough air pressure to fill your lungs, well, we who live in space call it a moment of brilliant panic. The galvanizing image in your mind solidifies, and you know you are moments from death—unless you act.

  Maybe if I’d known what had just happened, had even a glimmer of it, I wouldn’t have bothered unbuckling from the control station and pushing off toward the emergency locker. Even the emergency lights, which had snapped on a moment after primary power went the way of the dodo, were beginning to flicker. I caught a handhold, using the backup piloting chair to swing around and into the emergency locker.

  I didn’t stop so much as shoulder check into it. My lungs were starting to burn as I braced a hand against the wall and used the other to wrench the locker open. Inside was a standard, on-board, emergency pressure suit and five eight-balls. The suit would take at least a minute to work. The burning was becoming a desperate, soul-sucking need.

  Gotta stay alive.

  Instead of trying to inhale, I drew on a lifetime’s experience in space and did what I’d been trained to do. I exhaled. Already, I could feel my eyes bulging and the pressure of the air in my lungs, so I let the pressure leak out between my teeth as I pulled the suit out, then grabbed an eight-ball.

  Gotta stay alive.

  Nobody ever thinks they’re going to use one of those damned things. It’s not even a ball; it’s more like a massive, black, pill-like capsule about thirty centimeters long. It, like the other four eight-balls, was strobing insistently. They’d lit up the instant pressure dropped by more than two-thirds. The flashes were bright enough to hurt my eyes, but that was so they would be impossible to miss. “I can give you a few minutes of life!” the flashing light spoke to a spacer like me.

  Gotta stay alive.

  I had to clench my jaw hard enough to feel my teeth creek to keep from panicking. Pressure was almost gone. My eyeballs felt like they were going to explode. As I reached out to grab the emergency suit, I could see the capillaries on my hand, bright red, and some already ruptured. My blood was floating in tiny, perfect spheres.

  I hugged the suit to my chest, held the eight-ball away from me as far as I could, and squeezed it as hard as I could. Nothing immediately happened. Come on, gotta stay alive. I somehow found more strength and squeezed even harder. The eight-ball ruptured in my hand. Of course, I didn’t hear the eight-ball explode, but I sure as fuck felt it. In a blur of motion, the plastic domes grew out, extruded by the ball, and surrounded me, closing in less than a second. With a Whoosh! air exploded from the eight-ball.

  I took a shuddering breath, then coughed blood. Regret began to set in. Now that I could breath, pain flooded in as fast as the air had. “Oh, God,” I groaned. “Still alive.” I coughed hard, spitting bloody chunks which hit the transparent bubble around me. I was having trouble focusing, and I wondered if my eyes were screwed. But after a few seconds, I wiped away mucusy tears and could see better. Oh sure, I’d messed myself up, but my eyes were working—to some degree—I could still breath, and I didn’t feel the telltale sensations of nitrogen narcosis.

  The eight-ball had done its job; saved my life. The tiny display built into the module showed 10 minutes of oxygen. I looked at the suit I’d pulled in with me and sighed. Without a real spacesuit, I wouldn’t stay alive for long. “Still alive,” I breathed, controlling the coughs.

  Despite the sense of fear the counting-down oxygen display instilled in me, I took a minute to breathe and revel in the fact that I was still alive. I didn’t really feel better after the precious minute, but I felt more centered. I remembered the words of an old instructor when I first went to space. “You need to survive the first minute of a disaster before you can survive the next one.” It had seemed a little ludicrous at the time. Not now.

  Outside, the bridge was in near darkness. The emergency lights were barely glowing. The other eight-balls were bouncing around, ricocheting off walls, dutifully flashing to let someone know they were available to save a life. It was a little like being inside an old fashioned pinball machine.

  Gotta stay alive.

  I began donning the emergency space suit. You’ve all done this, you can’t have not done it if you’ve flown in a spaceship. Every human government I’ve ever known requires a compulsory 20-minute class—Donning and Use of the Mk19 ESVS—Emergency Survival Vacuum Suit. Or whatever model you might be using in your day. The class is so egregious, it’s listed as the number one reason to get your EVA qualification badge, so you don’t have to take the damned class every time you climb into a starship.

  As a licensed spacer, I was way past the need for qualifications like that. Of course, it also meant it had been years since I’d last put an ESVS on. I�
��m not even sure how many years. It took a couple of minutes to figure out the best way to get into it. Minutes I quickly wished I could have back.

  The entire process was made worse by my being stuffed into a plastic ball less than two meters across. It was like trying to do acrobatics inside a toilet bowl. The eight-ball’s display said I now had seven minutes of life left. But I didn’t worry, because I was in the suit.

  The suit was so simple, it didn’t have a heads up display. Instead, all the controls and displays were on the arm. As soon as I pulled the helmet face shield down and it snapped into place, the arm control panel came alive, and my heart jumped into my chest.

  “Oxygen—00.00%,” read the display.

  I just floated there, staring at it in disbelief, for at least another minute. Then I opened the face shield and reclosed it, causing the ESVS’s computer to reboot. The result was unchanged. When I reached a hand around my back and felt for where the oxygen cylinder should be screwed in, there was nothing there.

  I had nobody to blame but myself. Arcturus was my ship, I was responsible for the various lifesaving systems, which included being sure the ESVSs all had oxygen bottles attached. Somewhere, in the back of my oxygen deprived mind, I remembered going through and servicing the various suits a couple months back. When I got the bottles back from the shipyard service which recertified the pressure vessels, I’d been in a hurry and didn’t realize they’d shorted me one until I was already in space. How often do you need an emergency space suit on the bridge of your ship? Well, now I knew the answer to that question. You’d only need it once, if you forgot to get an oxygen bottle installed.

  Floating in the eight-ball, I considered my options. The oxygen-supply display counted down as I slowly rotated. The eight-ball had no lock and no way to manipulate its surroundings. It was designed to buy you a few minutes of life to don a spacesuit or wait for rescue. Nobody would be rescuing me, and my space suit had no damned oxygen.

  “Well this sucks,” I said. My voice had a strange tinny sound in the low-pressure envelope of lifegiving air within the vacuum of my starship. The timer was down to five minutes. There was probably oxygen in the main hangar, just behind the cockpit. Only you can’t move in an eight-ball, and I was slowly spinning in the middle of the bridge, anyway, the nearest bulkhead out of reach. Four minutes remaining.

  Gotta stay alive. Somehow, just stay alive.

  Exiting an eight-ball, as you must know, is a one-way action. You release the valve, and it decompresses. When the pressure drops below a couple pounds per square inch, the ball pops apart. I checked the seal and observed where the valve exhaust was pointing. When the spin was at the correct angle, I twisted the valve.

  Whooosh! The lifegiving atmosphere vented from the eight-ball in only a couple of seconds, propelling me toward the back of the bridge. My timing had been good—the ball popped open just as I reached the rear hatch, and I was able to grab it. The suit began an insistent beeping, and the arm mounted display flashed a message. Warning—No Oxygen. Attach oxygen source!

  “Thanks for the suggestion,” I mumbled as I hit the door control. Of course, nothing happened—there was no power. I screamed in frustration and yanked open the access panel over the manual control and started cranking.

  Twenty cranks per inch, I thought as I worked as fast as I could. It was a race between fatigue and oxygen depletion. All the oxygen I had was what was in my suit. How long had it been? One minute? Two?

  Gotta stay alive.

  The door was open a foot or so, and in desperation, I pushed myself into the gap. I was starting to feel giddy, a sure sign I was running out of air. My logical mind knew I wouldn’t fit, the suit and I were too wide. So when I slid through, I paused for a second in amazement. One of the eight-balls bounced through behind me, and I grabbed it without thinking.

  The corridor was dark, and I flipped on the ESVS’s nominal helmet light. Debris was everywhere, bouncing off surfaces in infinite variations. A toilet seat rebounded off my face shield, and a long line of fiberoptic cable tried to snake around my arm. I grabbed the cable, noticing it was coming out of a blown access panel, and used it to propel myself down the hall. Less than 40 feet away was the upper deck airlock. It looked like a mile.

  As I floated down the corridor, I tried to slow my breathing as much as possible and concentrate on the debris I was seeing. A large amount of it was electronics and structural, which meant it came from aft of Section Four. I still didn’t know what had happened to Arcturus; I was more concerned with staying alive for the next few minutes.

  Debris pelted off my helmeted head as I moved. It was almost like being in a rainstorm. My eyes must have drifted closed, because when I smashed into the airlock door, it was a complete surprise. Enough that I almost didn’t grab a handhold in time, but I managed.

  The airlock was at a T intersection of the main corridor. From there, it went back to engineering one way, and the small craft bay the other. If I’d missed the handhold, it could have been bad. The small part of my brain with any remaining curiosity noted there was a veritable sea of debris floating in the hallway here. Something must have exploded in engineering, I concluded as I pulled the airlock panel open and reached for the release handle.

  It’ll work, gotta stay alive.

  The release flashed green, and the door slid aside. Of course, the airlock had its own power system. If it hadn’t, trying for the lock would have been suicidal. I tried to remember if I put a new oxygen tank in the lock. I did, right? The air was so stuffy in the ESVS, it felt like being zipped up in a sleeping bag with blankets over your head. The alarm continued to buzz.

  I fumbled open the locker to reveal two regular space suits and a solitary ESVS. I remember heaving a sigh of relief, coughing, then reaching for the helmet releases, only to jerk my hand away as if it were a viper.

  “Jesus Christ,” I hissed, “I almost opened my helmet in vacuum.” Being exposed to near vacuum once in a lifetime would be enough for most people, but twice in a day? Cursing, I forced my foggy attention to concentrate. The space suit was tempting, but I braced on the wall, pulled the ESVS free from its retention clip, and spun it around. The sight of a metallic oxygen tank greeted me.

  Still alive. Oh, sweet God, still alive!

  I remember my eyes tearing up as I grabbed the bottle and gave it a hard twist, then a jerk to release it from the suit. I can’t really imagine a harder operation than putting a tank into an ESVS from behind. I was almost desperate as I twisted my right arm back and jammed the tank at the mounting point. You can only imagine my surprise when I felt the unmistakable sensation of the tank fitting going right into the receptacle. I was so surprised, I almost pulled it back out to try a second time, before realizing I’d hit home on the first try.

  A simple twist and click, and the tank engaged the suit’s system. All at once, the alarm silenced, and I heard the sweet, sweet sound of air hissing into the backpack’s support pumps. Immediately, the interior began to cool, and my sensors’ alarms cleared.

  After a second to breathe the clean refreshing oxygen, I checked the arm-mounted display. “Oxygen—99.9%” was displayed. I would live, for a while longer. With renewed grim determination, I began thinking—what next? Stay alive, of course. Just stay alive.

  * * *

  In possession of a few hours of life once again, I could take time to try and understand why I was floating around in a spacesuit inside my very expensive starship. I knew something serious had gone wrong, obviously. The question of what that might be was another matter.

  My nightmare began shortly after returning to normal space, so maybe it was a catastrophic powerplant failure? The ship experienced unusual forces in alter reality, so messed up and damaged ships weren’t unheard of. But I’d never heard of a ship being completely wrecked coming into normal space.

  I eyed the full spacesuit for a minute. The ESVS wasn’t suitable for long term use because of the short air processing cycle and its meager power source.
The latter limited its ability to heat and cool a user. I was already feeling cold. The trouble was switching from the ESVS to the spacesuit. Not really something you could do in vacuum, obviously. Besides not wanting to risk another stint in vacuum, it would take several minutes to get into the bulkier and more complicated spacesuit. I doubted I could survive the experience.

  “Once I figure out what went wrong, I’ll change suits,” I said as I dug into the locker for magnetic hand grapples and foot pads, light duty magnets which would allow me to maneuver around the ship. I’d worked a bit in zero gravity and knew the basics. One was a magnet on a rope, in case I got stuck in the middle of a room. I added a toolkit to my belt, along with a few other pieces of equipment, and left the locker to investigate what kind of condition Arcturus was in and what needed to be done to bring it back into working order.

  Back in the hallway, I used an arm-mounted, high-intensity light I’d grabbed to look both ways. The corridor to the left went to the small craft bay. Considering the little skiff could well be the only way for me to survive if the ship proved unrepairable, I headed for it. The automatic bulkhead a few yards down the hall was already closed, so when I reached it, I locked onto the wall with a magnetic grapple, popped open the access panel, and checked the bubble.

  Each airtight door had a simple glass gauge with liquid inside. If a ball was visible, there was pressure. If not, vacuum. I couldn’t see a ball. I cursed as I pulled out the miniature drive motor from its place in the toolkit, attached the universal socket to the manual wheel, and braced an arm as the motor spun up.

  This door had the same crank ratio as the one on the bridge. Thankfully, the motor made this door much faster. It moved aside slower than it would have if the power was still on, yet still quickly enough. When it was halfway open, I had enough room to move through, so I pointed my arm to shine the light inside and froze. A short distance inside was a bulkhead which hadn’t been there only hours ago.