by Samuel Best
Amidst an eruption of glass shrapnel, fire exploded down from the ceiling, licking the air of the promenade before vanishing almost instantly. A section of wall between two shops cracked apart. The lightning-bolt crack ran up the wall, crawling toward the ceiling.
Tulliver turned around and left the promenade behind, refusing to look back as more explosions rent the air.
Sweat poured down his face in streams. His eyes were frozen open, wide with fear.
Decks 3, 4, 6, he kept repeating in his mind.
The promenade was on Deck 5.
He found the nearest stairwell and drifted upward, holding the handrail for support.
Emerging on Deck 4, he was greeted by a blast of hot air which flapped his jacket and cheeks. Tulliver blinked away the sting and stared into a wall of liquid flame.
He retreated, moving quickly up the stairwell to pull open the door to Deck 3.
There was no fire here…yet.
He kicked off the door frame and drifted down the red, carpeted hallway. A black door on his left opened onto an unexpectedly industrial hallway that seemed more like a utility room than something meant for passengers to see.
As Tulliver entered the long, dark hallway, he reflected that, in the event passengers would see this section, their situation would be so bad the aesthetics wouldn’t matter.
Steam hissed from pipes near the ceiling of the long, dark hallway. Rust covered much of the grated metal floor. Thick metal hatches, like small bank vault doors, lined one wall. Tulliver drifted to the first metal door, but could find no way to open it. Then he saw two thin rectangles embedded in the wall above a control screen. The red rectangle glowed brightly, but the green was dim.
Tulliver tried the next door, but found another red rectangle.
He soared down the hallway, gaze flicking to the side at each hatch, finding only red lights.
The walls shook around him, blurring as he watched, before gradually smoothing out again.
He burst through a wall of swirling steam and collided with another passenger. The impact spun him sideways, into the wall, where his head cracked against a metal pipe and everything went dark.
MERRITT
Merritt drifted into the industrial escape pod section on Deck 3, Gavin clinging painfully to his neck.
Gravity had given out as Merritt followed the mass of passengers flooding out of the observation lounge. Screaming and flailing, their momentum carried them out of a short hallway and into the atrium, where they bumped into planters and tumbled upward. Some managed to grab hold of palm fronds, which wavered in zero gravity as if floating underwater. Most bumped into the domed ceiling, collecting in a clump, like debris on a storm drain.
Merritt stayed low, grasping the leg of a secured bench, then working his way across the floor of the atrium with one hand, holding Gavin with the other.
Making it to the aft section of Deck 3 hadn’t been too difficult, but the explosions that seemed to follow them through the ship had Gavin shaking like a leaf in a storm. The boy trembled as he clung to Merritt, teary eyes buried in his father’s neck.
There were fifty escape pods on Deck 3, Merritt knew. He drifted down the long hallway, steam hissing at him from cracked pipes, searching for a pod with a green light.
He reached the fourth pod from the end, the first one to show green. With a quick glance, he saw that only two of the remaining pods beyond it hadn’t been claimed.
Merritt dug Gavin’s red ticket out of his own pocket and swiped it across the pod’s control screen. The green light blinked off and the metal hatch swung open. Merritt waited anxiously, glancing back down the hallway as a distant explosion shook the walls and rattled the grated floor.
Gavin whimpered and Merritt kissed the top of his head.
The pod’s black, curved hatch slid up with agonizing slowness. Merritt stared at the small space within, stricken dumb by the minuscule size of the padded compartment.
He pried Gavin’s arms from his neck as he drifted into the pod, turning so his back was against the padding. The compartment was barely large enough to contain a single adult, so he turned slightly on his side to wedge Gavin next to him.
Merritt slapped the rectangular yellow button by the hatch and a shrill beep chirped above him. He looked up at a flashing yellow screen which read ONE PASSENGER ONLY.
Merritt pounded the yellow button with his fist, but the hatch wouldn’t close.
Another explosion shook the walls of the ship.
Merritt’s lower lip trembled as he drifted out of the pod. He turned to push Gavin back inside. The boy had grabbed a fistful of his father’s coveralls and followed after him.
No no no, the boy signed rapidly with a shaking hand.
Merritt yanked the small leather pouch he wore around his neck, snapping the cord. He pressed the seed pouch into Gavin’s small hands as the boy tried to sign Daddy, no, I’m scared—
He held Gavin against the back wall of the escape pod and said, “I love you.”
He pushed the yellow button and the pod’s hatch slid shut.
The metal outer hatch swung into place. There was a loud clunk from within the wall, and a fast whoosh as the pod launched.
For Merritt, floating in the hallway, time froze.
The rest of the ship seemed to disappear around him as he stared at the center of the metal hatch as if in a trance, eyes wide in disbelief.
An alarm klaxon blared, like an air raid siren, swelling to a shrill peak before clipping off.
Merritt snapped back to reality. He grabbed a hand-hold in the wall and pulled himself to one of the other available pods, swiping his blue card over the control screen. A warning screen flashed, alerting him he was unauthorized to enter.
He got the same result at the other pod.
It would be the same story on Decks 4 and 6, he knew. All of those pods were coded for red ticket passengers.
As he hurried back down the hallway, pulling himself along a pipe on the ceiling, a sudden burst of steam exploded ahead, forcing him to push off toward the center of the hall. He shot through the wall of steam and crashed head-first into someone else.
The other passenger rolled away and smacked his head against a pipe. Merritt held on to the wall and rubbed his own forehead, wincing in pain.
It was Tulliver.
The first thing Merritt noticed about him — after the bloody scratch on top of his bald head — was the corner of his red ticket sticking out of a jacket pocket.
Tulliver was unconscious. Steam roiled around his body, licking at his skin like gray flames. He twitched, then blinked hard. His eyes swiveled in their sockets as he tried to regain his bearings.
Merritt drifted closer, hand reaching out for the ticket. When he was inches away, a small locket attached to a thin gold chain around Tulliver’s neck floated in front of the ticket. The open locket showed a picture of a young girl on one side and a young woman with long blonde hair on the other.
Merritt’s reaching hand closed into a fist. He kicked off the wall, leaving Tulliver behind.
When he reached the exit door, he turned to look back. Tulliver disappeared into one of the pods at the very end of the hall.
The alarm klaxon persisted, flooding the corridors of the Halcyon with its ear-splitting shrill as Merritt made his way toward the middle of the ship.
Two decks down from there and a short ways down the hall, and he’d be at the stasis room.
He descended a stairwell to Deck 6 and hurried down the carpeted hallway leading toward the middle of the ship. The soft up-lighting that usually filled the hallway with a warm glow had been replaced with the harsh red pulsing of swiveling emergency lamps.
Merritt paused at the door to the stasis room, hearing someone calling from down the hall.
Willef drifted into view, leading a group of nearly a dozen passengers and crew members. Several of them wore the streamlined emergency suits stowed in small numbers around the ship.
Like Merritt, the foreman
still wore his grease-covered blue coveralls.
A sustained rumble shook the ceiling. With a sudden crack, it split open above Willef’s group…and continued to split wider. The crack reached the walls and ripped down them like lightning to the ground.
“We’re going to the officers’ pods!” Willef shouted over the noise.
Merritt turned to look toward the front of the ship. The hallway in that direction was dark. A single, dim lamp flickered in the distance.
Willef reached the door to the stasis room. He grabbed a hand-hold in the wall and bumped to a hard stop.
“Use the hypergel tanks!” Merritt shouted.
Flames exploded down from the widening crack in the ceiling. Several passengers screamed. Merritt noticed Ivan at the back of the crowd, looking behind in terror.
“They never gave us nav beacons for the gel tanks!” Willef cried. His eyes, usually squinting and observant, were wide and bloodshot. “I’m not landing in some ocean!”
“You won’t make it past the security doors!”
Willef jabbed a thumb behind him, at one member of his group. “Jenkins is an officer.” Jenkins held up his officer’s badge — a master key to unlock any door on the ship. “Once we’re past the gates,” said Willef, “the pods don’t have any restrictions.”
“Neither do the hypergel tanks in an emergency! You told me that yourself!”
As another explosion of flame burst from the ceiling, Willef shook his head firmly and pushed off the wall. Merritt grabbed his forearm, forcing him to spin around.
“You don’t have time!” said Merritt. “It will take you ten minutes to reach those pods.”
“Less if we stop yappin’. Come with us!”
Merritt looked at the frightened group of people behind the foreman.
“We can use the hypergel tanks to reach the surface!” he shouted at them.
Willef peeled Merritt’s fingers off his arm and pushed away. “I am the foreman of this ship, and I’m going to the colony!” he yelled, moving down the hallway.
Every member of the group but one followed after him. Some glanced at Merritt as they drifted past, too afraid to speak.
Ivan floated against the wall, holding a light fixture. A large purple bruise covered half his forehead. Dried blood had crusted under his nose.
Merritt opened the stasis room door and drifted inside. He frowned at the grated floor in confusion as he tried to figure out what was causing the orange light playing across its surface.
Ivan looked up at the ceiling as he entered the room, and whispered something in Russian.
Merritt followed his gaze. The ceiling crawled with flame. The blanket of fire surrounded the hypergel tubes ascending to the ceiling, causing them to glow like red-hot irons.
“We don’t have much time,” said Merritt.
He gripped the grated floor and propelled himself down the long room, down the row of hypergel tanks. Passengers floated within them, blissfully unaware of the chaos engulfing the ship.
Why haven’t they launched yet? he wondered.
Looking farther down the row of tanks, Merritt saw the main control console sticking up from the grated floor like a black podium, several screens and buttons adorning the square top.
Someone needed to activate the launch sequence manually.
He paused in front of the first empty tank and tapped the control panel nearby.
“This one’s yours,” Merritt told Ivan.
As the tank doors hinged open, he maneuvered to a rack of emergency suits on the opposite wall. He peeled one off its snaps and gave it to Ivan, who tossed it away. He spoke vehemently in Russian, pounding his fist against his palm, then kept repeating, “Nyet! Nyet!”
The orange glow from the ceiling seemed to brighten. Merritt looked up to see a dome of liquid flame bulging from the center, extending down, swelling lower into the room.
“Get inside, then!” Merritt shouted.
Ivan stepped up on the lip of the hypergel tank and put on his oxygen mask. Merritt grabbed a support rung bolted to the side of the tank with one hand and shoved Ivan into the thick pink liquid with the other, cutting off a flood of velvet expletives.
As the doors of Ivan’s tank closed, Merritt grabbed a helmet and emergency suit, then made his way to the main control console halfway down the row of tanks.
He floated before it, twirling in slow motion as he struggled into his emergency suit. Unlike the Constellation and Magellan suits, it had no limb joints; no articulated waist panels. It was simply an insulated one-piece suit with a two-hour air supply, minor radiation protection, and a gold-tinted polycarbonate helmet.
“Emily would hate it,” he said out loud, feeling insane for doing so.
She had always disliked yellow gold, saying white gold was classier. At the beginning of their relationship, Merritt joked that silver looked the same and would save him a few bucks at the jewelry store.
As he worked the controls of the main console, he wondered if he would be seeing her soon.
He navigated to the emergency launch screen for the hypergel tanks, then set the countdown for one minute. After putting on his helmet and clicking the slide-lock under his chin into place, he hit the console’s ACTIVATE button.
A countdown timer flashed on the screen, counting backward from sixty.
The bubble of flame in the ceiling exploded, spraying globes of molten metal in all directions. Before the blanket of fire could close in on itself to seal the gap left by the explosion, the ceiling cracked like a snapped bone. A shockwave of energy shot down from the opening and slammed Merritt to the grated floor. A sphere of molten metal the size of a basketball passed through the grate right in front of his helmet’s face shield, melting through the metal without slowing.
Don’t just lay there, he scolded himself.
Merritt pushed himself off the grated floor, moving toward the nearest empty pod.
WILLIAMS
The captain frowned at a small blinking light on the arm of his command chair. He tapped the light, but it persisted.
“Korinne?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Yes, sir?” said a woman sitting at a workstation near the door. She pulled down her headphones and swiveled in her chair, brushing back her long, brown hair.
“The system is reading a pressure anomaly in Engine 3. Could you pull that information up on screen for me, please?”
“Yes, sir.”
She swiveled back around, fingers flying over her console.
Williams had always been happy with his choice of Korinne as his first officer. She was intelligent, courteous, and quick to action. The only reason she wasn’t already a captain herself was because of her age. At twenty-three, she was still two years shy of taking her captain’s exam. Williams had no doubt she would pass on her first attempt. It had taken him three tries in four years to earn his stripes.
He would have to remember to start drafting her recommendation letter, as she would, no doubt, be asking for it before the exam.
New information scrolled up the center wall screen— lines of dense numbers and corresponding descriptions. A large section of it was surrounded by a thick red line.
“There,” he said, pointing. “Enlarge that section.”
The rest of the text vanished, and the highlighted portion grew to a legible size.
Williams scanned the text as slow, horrific realization dawned on his face.
The mood lighting in the bridge faded to black. Red emergency lights clicked on in the ceiling.
“ATTENTION,” said the ship’s announcer, an artificial female voice Williams had chosen because it sounded the most authentic. “This is an emergency. Please move to the nearest escape pod. Red tickets, Deck 3 forward, Deck 4 forward, Deck 6 forward. Blue tickets, Deck 2 aft. REPEAT, this is an emergency.”
“Sir?” Korinne asked, worry pitching her voice.
He stood and tugged down the hem of his uniform jacket.
“Pull it up on your console,�
�� he said, walking over to her quickly.
Information flooded her screens. A wireframe diagram of the three massive hybrid antimatter drives showed a jagged patch of red on the side of Engine 3, port side. The patch of red was shaped like a radiation deflector panel.
Williams crossed his arms. “Seal the breach,” he said calmly.
Korinne entered the correct command sequence. Three small rectangles in the wireframe diagram blinked green.
“Only three blast shields responding, sir.” She reverse-pinched the diagram screen, enlarging a section of the engine chamber.
“What’s that black spot?” asked the captain.
“The fourth shield is gone, sir.” She zoomed out, then back in on Engine 3. “Something’s lodged in the wall of the antimatter chamber,” she said.
“Why didn’t the system register the damage?”
“It’s an old ship, sir.”
“That’s no excuse,” he said to himself as he studied the screen. “Shut down Engine 3.”
A violent shudder rocked the bridge. Korrine’s chair swiveled and knocked the captain to the floor. She grabbed her console with both hands to keep from falling out of her seat.
“Shut it down!” Williams shouted.
Korinne nodded and tapped her console. “It’s not responding, sir!”
He pulled himself up to his knees and held the edge of the console as the bridge continued to shake.
“The kill signal’s passing through the system,” she said loudly, “but the antimatter isn’t cooling. Sir, it’s heating up.”
Williams considered sending out a patch team, but if that chamber was leaking antimatter, they wouldn’t get within twenty meters of the breach before being ripped apart in their space suits.
The shudder subsided, leaving a soft warning beep from elsewhere on the bridge.
“This is an emergency,” repeated the ship’s announcer. “Please move to the nearest escape pod.”
Captain Williams stood and smoothed down his uniform.
“It’s time for you to leave, Korinne. Grab an emergency suit on your way to a pod.”
She shook her head, frowning. “I’m not leaving.”