by David Mack
“The station’s crew is pinned down by centripetal force. I need you to project a narrow extension of our inertial dampening field inside the station’s airlock so they can keep moving.”
Two seconds of muffled chatter among the engineers was followed by Threx’s confident declaration: “We’re on it. Give us thirty seconds.”
Another large asteroid punched through the station’s core module, which exploded into countless shards thrown in all directions. Without the center section, the rest of the station began to twist and deform under the stress of its chaotic rolls and turns.
“Threx! I don’t think we have thirty seconds!”
“Cahow’s running a patch to the deflector dish now. Ten seconds!”
It was the worst feeling Theriault knew—the helplessness of being forced to stand and wait. There was nothing she or anyone else could do to make the engineers’ task any easier, or compel them to work any faster. All she or any command officer could do was hope that the situation didn’t deteriorate any further in the precious moments it took to enact a desperate plan.
A sharp bang and a violent lurch up and to port nearly threw her from the command chair. Razka tumbled out of his seat, and Dastin was thrown face-first against the port bulkhead.
Over the shrilling of alert signals, the groaning of the hull, and the moaning of Dastin, Threx’s voice crackled down from the overhead speaker, along with a sparse shower of sparks. “Inertial dampening field extended! They should be good to go—but tell ’em to move fast. We can’t hold this long without burning out the forward emitter. If that goes, we’re all in trouble!”
“Roger that,” Theriault said. She flipped the channel to the cargo deck. “Sorak! Are the rest of the evacuees moving yet?”
“Affirmative. They appear to be exiting en masse, single file.”
“Good! Do what you can to speed them up. We can’t hold this position much longer.”
“Understood. Stand by—the first of them is coming over now.”
Dastin picked himself up off the deck and massaged the bruise that dominated the right side of his face. “About time something went right around here.” No sooner had he spoken than a new alarm beeped on the tactical panel.
Theriault glared at Dastin. “I really wish you hadn’t said that.” She turned toward Razka. “Chief? What’s our next disaster?”
Razka threw some switches and superimposed a long-range sensor image over the left half of the main viewscreen. It was an enormous hunk of brownish-gray rock tumbling through space. “Approximate mass, two hundred twenty-nine point six million metric tons. Composed of iron, silicon, nickel, and trace elements. On a heading that’ll hit us and the station in two minutes and forty-eight seconds.”
There was no reason to ask about the potential threat it posed. Theriault knew the asteroid was massive enough to reduce the Sagittarius and the station to dust. She had to think past that, to the potentially greater danger it presented. “Will it hit the planet?”
“Negative—but a large number of smaller bodies behind it will.”
“Noted.” She reopened the channel to the cargo deck. “Sorak, you have two minutes to get the evacuees on board, because we need to fall back before two hundred million tons of rock turns that station to confetti. Is that clear?”
“I will do what I can to expedite their transfer. Sorak out.”
Theriault watched the incoming asteroid loom larger on the left side of the main viewscreen, while the broken remains of the station flailed through vacuum on the right. Once more she felt helpless in the command chair. She tried to tell herself that she and her shipmates had beaten longer odds than this, then realized that only meant they were overdue for a brutal defeat, and that they might have finally come to the one place in the universe ideally suited to hand it to them—along with their heads.
• • •
Sorak fixed the anchor line’s carabiner-style clasp onto a sturdy-looking protrusion along the waist of another alien astronaut’s space suit. That made four evacuees secured against sudden shifts in direction and momentum. He turned and hurried back to the open ramp in time to help the third pair of evacuees over its threshold, into the Sagittarius’s cargo hold. Both seized his outstretched arms and allowed themselves to be pulled farther inside and pushed through the gravity-free vacuum to the waiting embraces of their already tethered colleagues.
A tap on his suit’s forearm controls let Sorak open a comm channel to the astronauts via the Sagittarius’s computer, which provided real-time two-way translation. “Those of you who I’ve already tethered, grab two of the free lines and secure your crewmates.”
To their credit, they reacted like professionals. All four of them did what needed to be done, to keep themselves calm and to make certain that their teammates were anchored as safely as they were, using more of the tether lines Sorak had set up in advance for them.
Outside the ventral rampway, the stars continued their frantic spinning, and the backlit orb of the planet’s night-side surface whipped past every few seconds in a vertiginous blur. Faced with such a dizzying tableau, Sorak appreciated anew the value of having purged himself of emotions by means of the Kolinahr ritual on Vulcan many years earlier. Armed with the stoic perspective of pure logic, he overruled the unreliable evidence of his eyes and ignored the confusion of his inner ear. He knew that despite the relative and absolute velocities of the fracturing station and the overtaxed Sagittarius, he himself was securely inside the envelope of its extended inertial dampening field. There was no reason for him to be concerned for his safety as he moved down the ramp to meet the last two evacuees from the station.
Unlike the other evacuees, the final two displayed more control over their movements in zero gravity. Their economy of movement suggested they understood that even small actions could affect one’s stability and trajectory while weightless. The first of them floated toward Sorak, who reached out, caught the Austaran by his forearms, and with a graceful pivot redirected the astronaut to a direct heading for his waiting crewmates.
Ready to meet the last member of the station’s crew, Sorak turned back toward the open rampway—and beheld a startling vision of silent cataclysm. Enormous hunks of rock and metal debris shredded the remaining segments of the station, sending significant portions of its wreckage racing toward the Sagittarius. Sorak keyed his comm. “Sorak to Bridge. Incoming!”
Theriault’s voice was raised in alarm. “We see it! Hang on!”
Sorak stretched out his hand to the last evacuee.
There was no sound as a twisted slab of metal bashed into the belly of the Sagittarius—just a sudden lurch and the shock of impact as Sorak’s helmet hit the overhead. He fought to reorient himself and looked for the last evacuee.
The station’s commander clung to the hydraulic post at the corner of the Sagittarius’s ramp. Outside, the heavens wheeled, betraying only fleeting glimpses of the station’s silhouetted debris cloud in front of the planet. Every roll and yaw of the ship threw Sorak like a rag doll in a tempest, allowing him to deduce that its inertial dampening field had been seriously weakened.
He fixed his attention on the Austaran clinging to the end of the open ramp. If the stress is this severe inside, it must be worse for that astronaut.
Theriault’s voice squawked over his helmet’s transceiver. “Sorak! Close the ramp!”
“Not yet. The last evacuee is trapped at the end of the ramp.” Fighting the ship’s nauseating swings of centripetal force, Sorak staggered down the ramp toward the last man. “I need to bring him in.”
“Negative! We need to close up and restore the integrity field!”
Sorak found it harder to gain purchase and retain his balance the farther he continued down the ramp. “Just a few more seconds, Commander.” He pushed himself to take another step toward the astronaut, who now dangled from the ramp’s corner by one hand.
“Sorak, this is a direct order: Do not detach! I repeat, do not detach!”
He froze. Logic told him it should be possible to reach the last evacuee using only the magnetic boots. The effort would pose significant risks to Sorak’s safety, but he considered such perils acceptable in the interest of preserving sentient life. However, he was bound by duty and oath to obey the lawful orders of his superiors, even when he disagreed with them. And though he was many decades Theriault’s senior, and they in fact held the same rank, she had the billet of executive officer, which gave her command authority over him.
The rational thing to do was turn back and close the ramp.
The dutiful thing to do was turn back and close the ramp.
Once more, Theriault’s voice filled his helmet. “Sorak. Acknowledge my last order.”
A bright flash of something tore past the open rampway—and ripped the alien commander away from the ramp and sent him tumbling into deep space.
Judging his actions, his inactions, and all their consequences with cold reason, Sorak watched the station’s commander hurtle alone into the endless void.
“Bridge, this is Sorak. Order acknowledged.”
• • •
Home was an ever-shrinking blue-green disk. Alone and wheeling into the void, Beiana caught only fleeting glimpses of Anura. When his chaotic tumbling turned him away from his world, the stars streaked past too quickly for him to pick out familiar constellations.
Every few seconds, his field of vision swept past the broken remains of his station. An unstoppable maelstrom of ancient rock and high-tech debris tore through what was left of his abandoned command and scattered its orphaned fragments in all directions. Faint streaks of fire cut short-lived scars through Anura’s upper atmosphere as space junk and pieces of rock burned up while attempting to pierce that shallow blanket of air that Beiana had taken for granted every day of his life until he went into space.
This isn’t how I thought my career would end, but even if I’d known, I still would have come. Beiana’s mind turned inward, away from the dizzying view of a spinning universe, to take refuge in the deepest waters of his memory.
Beiana remembered stargazing as a pogling. He had dreamed of exploration, of being the first of his people to set foot on a world in another star system. The demands of age and so-called maturity had compelled him to scale back his ambitions as he approached adulthood. Many years had passed since he had come to terms with the fact that his dreams would not be realized in his lifetime. The progress of science had been too slow to speed Austarans to the stars. The costs of moving payloads into orbit was prohibitive, the government had said, never mind the expenses that would be involved in traveling to other star systems.
Profit and loss. Beiana was tired of hearing politicians and pessimists trot out those three little words to justify horrendous budget cuts for nonautomated missions to other worlds and the maintenance of Space Station Xenopus. All his life, he had been vexed by those who protested that they “saw no profit in space exploration.” Where, the naysayers always asked, was its return on investment? It took all of his self-restraint not to bellow in their faces, “The survival of our species! What greater reward is there? And why are you too myopic to see that?”
Still, it was hard to argue in favor of the space program’s short-term costs and risks as he spin-drifted into deep space, tantalized by his ever-shrinking view of his home planet. He would never see his siblings again, or his mate, Pelanon, or their new poglings, Arbos and Bokir. All at once he imagined all the wonderful pieces of music he would never experience, all the stories he wouldn’t be around to hear, all the beautiful works of art he would never get to see.
Grief and panic tried to invade his thoughts, but he denied them access. He had known the dangers of being the last to evacuate the station, and he had long since accepted that it was his responsibility to shoulder them for the sake of his crew. Home was farther away with each passing second, but Beiana refused to give in to regret or remorse. He had seen all the other members of his crew safely aboard the alien starship before a random collision had condemned him to the endless night. He had fulfilled his duty and upheld his oaths. If it was his time to die, he could meet his end now with pride and dignity. For a commander, there was no shame in dying so long as one’s crew was spared the same fate.
I wonder how long it will take for my air to run out.
He checked his gauges. Driven by fear, he had been breathing too quickly. His air tank was depleting faster than it should have. Try to calm down, he told himself. Shallow breaths. He concentrated on filling his vocal sac gradually, then moderating its contraction so that it forced the air into his lungs more slowly. There you go. Calm down. Relax. Enjoy the ride.
It was hard to be certain as he rolled and tumbled, but he thought he spied a shadow moving against the mad carousel of stars. He glimpsed it only for an instant before it passed from his sight. Seconds later, he thought he noticed it again, but he couldn’t be certain. Was it a ship? A ghost? Or just spots swimming through his darkening vision?
Must be my imagination. It’s cooking up illusions as my air runs low.
He closed his eyes and gave himself to the euphoria of weightlessness. Without a frame of visual reference, he felt no sensation of movement. There was no resistance in space, no tug of gravity, and now that he was traveling based solely on the received momentum of the collision that had knocked him from the ramp, he didn’t even have the pressure of acceleration. Eyes shut, he was just a stray thought in the night. A mote in the eye of creation. Cosmic dust taking a wayward route back to its point of origin.
But curiosity nagged at him. Had he seen something? Or not?
He cracked open his center eye, just in case he hadn’t imagined the shadow on the stars.
The universe was still turning around him, a glittering tableau. It was just as empty as he had feared it would be.
Then something took hold of him. Firm, unyielding pressure clamped down on his right arm, then his left. Jerks of motion became a feeling of resistance, and the mad turning of the cosmos slowed, then stopped, as an external force arrested his triaxial spinning.
Strong hands in thick gray gloves turned him around until he found himself looking into the face of a being unlike any he had ever seen before. It resembled a primate with a naked face, a short shock of white fur atop its head, and oddly pointed ears. Its pair of narrow, dark eyes studied him from beneath steeply arched streaks of fur that covered its upper ocular ridges.
In any other place, at any other time, Beiana would have been terrified of the alien. Now he hung frozen before this odd being, who clipped a safety tether to Beiana’s space suit, linking them. Then the alien gave him a subtle nod and a slap on the shoulder, before turning away and engaging the thrusters on his suit’s back and chest.
Only then, as the line went taut between them and Beiana found himself taken in tow, did he see the elegantly curved alien vessel hovering close by, its underbelly’s ramp still open and angled to receive them. He had no idea what he had done in his life to deserve such a miraculous deliverance, but he was grateful for it just the same.
• • •
The warning light continued to glow red no matter how long Theriault stared at it. She stood at the aft end of the main deck’s elliptical corridor, willing the signal on the bulkhead panel to turn green, to indicate that the Sagittarius’s ventral ramp had closed and that the cargo deck was once again fully pressurized. It remained stubbornly red.
Standing on the other side of the
sealed ladderway hatch, Doctor Babitz and Nurse Tan Bao noted Theriault’s mounting impatience. Babitz suppressed a nervous half-smile and shifted the medical satchel on her hip. “You know what they say about a watched pot, Commander.”
“That it can be used to hit people who spout useless aphorisms?”
If the lithe surgeon had a witty riposte at hand, she kept it to herself.
The signal light switched from red to green. Theriault thumbed the hatch release switch on the control board, and Tan Bao squatted and unlocked the manual levers on the ladderway hatch. He opened the hatch and secured it inside its recessed nook on the core bulkhead.
Doctor Babitz was the first to climb down the ladder to the cargo deck. Theriault went second, and at the bottom of the short ladder she stepped clear to make way for Tan Bao.
The cargo hold was small enough to feel cramped with half a dozen people in it. Now it had eight alien astronauts in bulky EVA gear, plus Sorak in his own pressure suit, as well as Babitz, Tan Bao, and Theriault. There was hardly room to move around without bumping into someone else. Despite the confined conditions, Theriault shouldered through the pack to an empty space. She turned to address everyone—and hoped the worsening spate of malfunctions plaguing the Sagittarius didn’t impair the universal translator and turn her welcome into a mash of gibberish or a declaration of interstellar war.
“Crew members of the space station, welcome aboard the Sagittarius. I’m Lieutenant Commander Vanessa Theriault, executive officer, and currently the acting captain.” She nodded at the other Starfleet personnel in turn. “You’ve all just met Lieutenant Commander Sorak, my acting first officer. This is Doctor Lisa Babitz, our chief medical officer, and Nurse Nguyen Tan Bao. They’re going to conduct brief physical exams to see if any of you have been injured or require immediate medical attention.” She stood with her arms open and palms up, a gesture she hoped the Austarans would see as welcoming. “Any questions?”
One of the Austarans removed his helmet and blinked the lids of his bulbous, stalked eyes. “My name is Commander Beiana. On behalf of all my crew, thank you for saving us.”