Long Shot

by David Mack

  Nasutas retrieved tools from her work pouch to open the electrical panel beside the airlock’s controls. “Who won the pool?”

  “Specialist Heelar.”

  “Heelar? The one who doesn’t know the difference between a round and a form?” Nasutas puffed her vocal sac in irritation. “Beginner’s luck.”

  “Either that or the greatest swindle ever perpetrated in low orbit.”

  “Let’s not give her that much credit.” The cover came off the electrical panel, revealing the tangle of wires inside the bulkhead. Nasutas pocketed the cover plate and studied the electrical knot. “Doc, I’m looking at a real mess in this junction. Who built this thing?”

  “An army of private contractors, every one of them the lowest bidder.”

  “Exactly the answer I didn’t want to hear, thank you.”

  A heavy thud behind her made her pivot in alarm. The airlock door had closed, seemingly on its own. “Doc? I have a problem. The inner door just shut by itself.” She reached for its release lever. It refused to budge. “And now it’s locked.”

  Fear put a tremor in Pylus’s voice. “That shouldn’t happen.”

  “Yes, I know that. Tell Nelonnuk to get over here, now.”

  Lights flickered on the control panels inside the airlock. Moments later, all the command interfaces went dark. Nasutas told herself to stay calm, to resist the tendency to panic—and then she heard the soft hiss of air being extracted from the airlock.

  She checked the air gauge on the belt of her duty uniform. It registered the rapid decrease in the airlock’s atmospheric pressure. No! This can’t happen! There are triple safeguards!

  Focus and consciousness became tenuousness and impossible to muster. Her hands found the latch for the inner door, but the locks refused to release, despite the multiplicity of fail safes built into the system to prevent an accident such as this.

  Her head swam, and spots of light danced in her vision. Panic made her thrash like a wild animal for a few seconds, and then the last of her strength ebbed. She lost hold of the hatch’s handle and floated free inside the depressurizing airlock. Devoid of air, it became a silent tomb.

  Light-headed, barely awake, she thought she saw her fellow engineer, Nelonnuk, looking through the hatch’s circular window at her. Brilliant flashes of light pierced the gloom, one at a time, and a cool caress of air swept across her face. Greedily she inhaled, filling her vocal sac before pushing the bounty of air into her lungs. Hovering lights faded to sickly violet spots in her vision. Buzzing, grinding, clanging noises assaulted her as sound returned to the airlock.

  The door was pulled open. Air flooded in. Nelonnuk reached inside, seized Nasutas by her foot, and towed her out of the airlock, back to the outer ring. “Are you all right? Talk to me!”

  “I’m okay, it was just a few seconds.”

  “No, you lost consciousness. You were in there for almost a minute.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. “You sure?”

  “Positive.” He closed the airlock hatch, through which he had hastily drilled three large holes with his plasma torch. As Nasutas’s faculties sharpened, she realized he’d had no choice—he had needed to give her air to breathe, and to at least partially pressurize the airlock before he could pull open the inner door, which would otherwise have been sealed by the grip of vacuum. Now, for the safety of the rest of the station, he worked feverishly to close up those holes with injections of emergency sealant, a carbon nanofiber foam designed to adhere to all non­organic matter and harden within seconds to a solid brick free of air bubbles.

  As soon as he had secured the airlock’s hatch, he tucked his tool back into its holster on his thigh. Then he turned to Nasutas and took her by one arm. “Come on. Let’s get back to the hub and have Doctor Kaolula check you out, just to be sure you’re all right.”

  “Fine.” She let Nelonnuk tow her back down Spoke Three to the hub, the core module of Space Station Xenopus that contained the crew’s quarters, the galley, the head, and the docking ports for the station’s supply and transport vehicles.

  Along the way, Nasutas saw one error after another cascade through the station’s interconnected data and electrical systems. What had seemed to be an isolated fault in the airlock’s secondary bus was now propagating throughout the station, and it was doing so in a manner that suggested it was following her. She slapped Nelonnuk’s shoulder. “Stop!”

  “Relax, we’re almost there.” He ignored her panicked flailing and towed her the rest of the way into the heart of Xenopus Station.

  As they floated into the center node, Doctor Pylus shot forth from the engineering control room to meet them. “Is she all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Nasutas said. She refused to let Nelonnuk—or anyone else—speak for her. “Just a bit woozy. But we have bigger problems. Those electrical faults? They followed us, from the airlock to here. Something weird is going on.”

  As if she had invoked a curse, the station’s omnipresent interior lights stuttered out, and the readouts on the control panels in the center node went haywire. The voice of Commander Beiana roared down from the command node. “What in blazes is going on?” Seconds later, Beiana and his second-in-command, Major Septen, emerged from the command node, both angrier than Nasutas had ever seen them. “Someone start talking,” the commander said.

  “Cascade malfunctions,” Doctor Pylus said. “All over the station, all systems.”

  “We can see that,” Septen snapped. “Why is it happening?”

  The senior engineer rolled his shoulders and puffed his vocal sac. “Probably the same reason why everything is going upside-down on Anura right now.”

  “That’s not helpful, Doctor.”

  “Unfortunately, Commander, it’s all I have to offer at the moment.”

  The station’s other two current residents, astrophysics specialist Professor Mufungo and chemistry specialist Heelar, scrambled hand over hand out of Spoke One and tumbled into the middle of the impromptu crew meeting. Mufungo, being the elder and more accomplished of the two, spoke first. “The entire station’s gone crazy! What’s happening?”

  “We don’t know,” Beiana said. “And that’s what troubles me.” He addressed Pylus. “I need a precise answer, Doctor. Are there any systems on this station right now that aren’t compromised? Any that we can put our trust in?”

  “Not as far as I can determine, no. Primary systems are offline, and most of our backup systems appear to be experiencing cascade failures. The entire station will go dark in two hours.”

  “Then I’m making a command decision to evacuate this station, effective immediately.” Looking from one crew member to another, he doled out orders with speed and certainty. “I’ll fly Pod One. Major, you’ll fly Pod Two. I’ll take Doctor Pylus, Professor Mufungo, and Specialist Heelar. You’ll take the others.” He asked the group, “Any questions?” No one had any. “Good.”

  The commander started toward Pod One—and then a thunderous rumbling shook the station, followed by another. Emergency sirens wailed, warning lights turned the center node green, and vapors hissed from rupturing valves in every direction Nasutas looked. Over the din, Beiana yelled, “Pylus! Septen! Report! What just happened?”

  The second-in-command and the senior engineer struggled to coax accurate information from the station’s failing data network. It was Pylus who delivered the bad news.

  “Sir . . . both escape pods have defied our overrides and launched themselves from the station. Which means we now have no means of escape.”

  Beiana muttered vile curses under his breath for a moment before he marshaled himself back into a semblance of composure. Doing his best to project professionalism, he drew a deep breath and then spoke his mind in a tone so calm it had to be a sham.

  “I think this might be a good time for us to transmit a distress call.”

  • • •<
br />
  The first warning of bad news was Razka’s change in posture. He had spent more than two hours hunched over the communications panel on the bridge when he straightened his back with an abrupt shift and a swivel of his chair in Theriault’s direction. She watched him press one scaly hand to the headset earpiece that covered his tympanic membrane. In a matter of seconds, his half-lidded bulbous eyes opened wide, a prelude to several quick blinks.

  He looked at Theriault. “Commander, I think you should hear this.”

  “Patch it through, Chief.” Nizsk, Dastin, and Sorak all turned away from their consoles to listen as the intercepted radio transmissions scratched from the overhead speakers.

  “—repeat, total failure of main bus. Major errors in the secondary bus and emergency backups. Crew evacuation pods self-ejected empty. Please advise, Murçao.”

  Half a second of static, then: “Xenopus, did you say both pods self-ejected?”

  “Affirmative, Murçao. All eight of us are stuck here, and the electrics are scrambled. Even the batteries are malfunctioning. Unless you know something we don’t, this whole station’s going dark in about two hours. After that, it’ll get cold real quick up here.”

  “Stand by, Xenopus. We’re running a simulation to see what we can do.”

  The station officer was getting angry. “A sim? How about a ride off this thing?”

  “Negative, Xenopus. No flights right now. The situation down here is muddy—but even if it were perfect, the soonest we could send up a recovery boat would be nine days.”

  “Nine days? We’ll be frozen solid in nine hours!”

  “Not if we can reboot your electrics. Hang tight while we finish running the sims.”

  “Acknowledged, Murçao. Standing by.”

  The channel went quiet, so Theriault signaled Razka to mute it. She looked to Sorak. “That didn’t sound good, did it?”

  “No. But I suspect the situation is about to become worse than they realize.” He beckoned her with a tilt of his head and relayed a new set of tactical scans to the screen above his console. Theriault got up and moved to stand behind Sorak’s chair as he described his findings. “My latest sweep for incoming threat vessels has detected a tight swarm of several hundred small asteroids, inbound on a trajectory that was previously obscured by Anura’s moons.” He updated the sensor readout with a chart showing a complex pattern of orbital paths above the planet. “The asteroids will pass remarkably close to the planet. Some will likely be caught by the atmosphere and make planetfall. I predict most of the remaining asteroids will collide with various satellites and other artificial structures in low orbit. Those that don’t hit the space station directly pose a high risk for initiating a chain reaction that will deflect a storm of debris into its path.”

  Dastin looked up from the sensor hood. “Maybe they’ve already detected the asteroids.”

  “Unlikely,” Sorak said. “Their detection systems are not as sophisticated as ours. By the time they recognize this danger, it will already be on top of them.”

  Dismayed, Theriault shook her head at the images on Sorak’s screen. “Damn it. Chalk up another point for the improbability field.”

  Her remark drew a puzzled look from Dastin. “How are we blaming this on the dark energy generator? Those asteroids must have been inbound for years, maybe even centuries—long before the Austarans dreamed up their doomsday in a can.”

  Once again, Theriault found herself slipping back into her old role as a science officer. “Quantum variance fields, like those produced by the dark energy generator, cause improbability effects to propagate both forward and backward in time. In other words, they can trigger events in the past as well as in the present and the future. Mysterious events that seem to have no rational cause in the present might be the effects of future improbability generators.”

  Dastin pinched the bridge of his nose. “Now I have a headache.”

  “Tell me about it. Temporal mechanics can get pretty trippy.” She turned back toward Sorak. “How long until the asteroids start making impact?”

  Sorak answered with classic Vulcan precision. “Twenty-­one minutes, forty seconds.” He superimposed another sensor readout over the first as he added, “At precisely the moment the next major intersection of wave fronts from the dark energy generator causes an expansion of its area of effect that will encompass the station.”

  “And how significant a threat do the asteroids pose to the station?”

  “I predict a ninety-eight percent likelihood of its total destruction.”

  She absorbed the grim news. “We need to get those people out of there.”

  “We can’t use the transporter,” Dastin said. “Not with all this random weirdness.”

  Sorak lifted one eyebrow. “I concur. The risk is far too great.”

  Theriault’s imagination raced to conjure other possibilities. “What about extending our shields around the station? Or part of it?”

  A subtle head shake conveyed Sorak’s disapproval. “The Sagittarius has insufficient power to enclose a structure that size inside its shield bubble. If we were to shield only part of the station—its core module, for instance—the stresses on the other sections of the station would cause it to shear itself apart, due to its lack of a structural integrity field.”

  “We can reconfigure the shields to deflect some of the asteroids and debris without putting stress on the station,” Dastin said. “But there’s another issue: The shields might not work the way we expect while we’re in range of the improbability field. For all we know, they might stop working at any time, or they might even act as force multipliers.”

  Razka let out a few clicking sounds to snare the others’ attention before he spoke. “What about the tractor beam? We could tow the station out of the asteroids’ path.”

  His suggestion compelled Nizsk to swivel away from the helm. “That would be inadvisable, Chief. As Commander Sorak noted, the station lacks the structural integrity field that we take for granted. The localized stress caused by our tractor beam would break it apart the moment we tried to take it in tow—and if we widen the beam to the point where that concern is obviated, we will not have enough of a hold on the station to move it.”

  “Besides,” Dastin said, “we don’t have the power to tow something that big, anyway.”

  Theriault had heard enough doom and gloom. She returned to the command chair and sat down. “Okay, folks. We’re doing this the old-fashioned way. Dastin, find a working airlock on that station and send its coordinates to the helm. Nizsk, take us in. We need to get within five meters of that airlock. We’ll open our ramp and have them spacewalk over to us. Razka, get on the horn and let the station’s crew know that help’s on the way.”

  Sorak got up and moved to Theriault’s side. “Sir, I feel duty-bound to remind you of Captain Terrell’s orders. He directed us expressly to remain clear of the improbability field.”

  “I’m aware of the captain’s orders, Sorak. I also know that if he were here, he wouldn’t just stand aside and let those people die—and neither will we. Now go below and put on a pressure suit. You’re the welcoming committee.”

  11

  Shoulder to shoulder, the crew of Space Station Xenopus floated into one another, tumbling and caroming in slow motion off the bulkheads as they all struggled to pull on space suits in zero gravity. Commander Beiana was the first one suited up. As soon as he fitted his helmet into place, he turned his eyestalks in different directions to assess his crew’s progress.

  Major Septen was almost done fastening his suit’s air seals. Doctor Pylus and his two junior engineers were close to ready but expending precious seconds double-checking one another’s redundant safeties. As usual, the mission specialists—the least experienced members of the crew, since they and their ilk tended to rotate up and out every sixty days—were all barely half-dressed in the puffy gray protectiv
e gear.

  Beiana clapped his gloved hands twice. “Quickly! We need to go!”

  Septen secured his helmet. “Are we sure about this, Commander?” The second-in-command sounded skeptical. “There’s an uncharted asteroid storm headed for the station? And we’re being rescued by an alien space ship? Is it possible we’re being hoaxed?”

  “I wish we were. But we’re already getting reports of medium-orbit satellites going offline in record numbers, and the failures are moving in our direction. Whatever’s coming, I’d rather not be here when it arrives.” Beiana floated over to Specialist Heelar and started pulling the parts of her suit into place. “I don’t mean to be brusque, Specialist, but we need to go.” He secured the body of Heelar’s suit and snapped orders over his shoulder. “Pylus! Septen! Help the professor and Doctor Kaolula get dressed. We’re running out of time.”

  The team worked together to get everyone prepped for vacuum. Less than a minute later, everyone’s suit checks came up amber, which meant it was time to go. Beiana pushed off from a bulkhead and soared away down the middle of Spoke Six. “This way, folks. Let’s be quick.”

  In accordance with protocol, Septen ushered the rest of the crew into the spoke behind Beiana, then the major brought up the back of the single-file formation to make sure no one was left behind. Beiana pulled himself along by means of the spoke’s regularly spaced handholds. He moved with a steady surety that belied his growing anxiety. Something was critically wrong with the station; he could feel it. A catastrophe was on its way, and he meant to stay ahead of it.

  Straight ahead, at the end of the spoke, the door to Airlock Two glowed like a sea beacon piercing a storm cloud. The status lights that ringed the hatch glowed amber, indicating it was still secure, but Beiana fixated on Nasutas’s report of the spontaneous malfunction in Airlock One. If the station’s last working airlock went haywire in the midst of the evacuation . . .

  Don’t obsess over that. Focus on the variables you control. Stay on point.