Here Be Dragons

by Alan, Craig

  Instead of asking the question he wanted to hear, she rose and floated past him to the miniature galley in the far corner from her desk. It held her pride and joy, a zero gravity coffeemaker. Headquarters had fought like hell to keep it off Gabriel by conjuring, not unreasonably, the image of scalding hot globules of coffee careening throughout the ship, burning all in their path. Elena had won that battle, but it had been a close thing. She made herself a cup, studiously keeping her back turned to Ikenna as she worked the press.

  Ikenna remained silent as the vacuum pump whirred. It sucked the liquid out of the grind chamber and forced it into a plastic squeeze pouch. Two centuries of space travel later, and no one had yet invented a dignified way to have a drink. Elena returned to her desk, hooked her legs under her chair, sipped her coffee, and waited. Ikenna cleared his throat.

  “I’m having a problem with Chief Officer Nishtha.”

  “This should be good.”

  “I’ve been developing new tactics,” Ikenna said. “I wish to research equipping missiles with variable payloads.”

  “EMP?”

  “Or search radar,” Ikenna said.

  “You want to turn our missiles into baby drones,” Elena said.

  It was creative, aggressive, and just like him. Ikenna had been among the first to notice that, while Phobos Academy limited admission to Global citizens, any person with at least four years experience as a licensed astronaut could apply for a commission with the Space Agency—and the Astronautical Union, like the International Olympic Committee, the Society of the Red Cross, and the Alliance for Sovereignty, was open to all people of the world. One favorable World Court ruling later, and Ikenna had been the first and only independent to take advantage of the loophole before it had been closed by the Global Assembly.

  “Cherub and Seraph inspired the idea. And the missile bodies are built to be easily disassembled and the warheads removed.”

  “Bueno, what’s the problem?”

  “I requested permission to take one missile offline and open it up it to study the matter further, but the executive officer has refused me access to the port pod.”

  Her chest began to burn, and not from the coffee.

  “Did Chief Nishtha give you a specific reason?”

  “He believes that we should remain focused on our current mission profile while on the outside, and that I wait to implement my plan upon our return.”

  “And you disagree?”

  “No, Captain, I agree that we are in great danger here. That is all the more reason to use every tactic at our disposal.”

  “We have eight missiles on this ship,” Elena said, “and if we go down to seven it’s going to be because we blew someone up with the other one. You and I will go down to the missile pod together. You may visually inspect one while it remains on the rails, and when you are finished we will go from there. How about it?”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  They exited into the port corridor together and headed aft—the missile pod was one compartment back.

  “I apologize in advance if this matter brings you difficulty with Chief Nishtha, ma’am.”

  “Just know that if something blows up while we’re in there, I’m blaming you.”

  Elena felt it before she heard it. The outer walls vibrated, and the hairs on her neck tingled. She turned just in time to see a column of black smoke shoot up the corridor. The shock and the noise hit her at the same time, and a wall of hot air wrapped itself around her body and threw her, choking, through the hatch.

  She tumbled along the corridor and struck a wall, and careened into the deck. Elena reached out blindly and caught a pipe. She held tight. Her eyes and throat burned, and her head ached from whatever it had struck. The exposed skin of her face and neck felt singed. Smoke swirled before her eyes, and Elena could barely see the pipe she was holding onto, but she knew exactly where she was—halfway down compartment P-12, along the inner bulkhead, her head pointed topside. The emergency helmets were two meters to her left.

  Elena shut her eyes tightly and held her breath, and pulled herself along the pipe to grab one. She put it on, and the magnetic latches tugged at her uniform collar as it automatically sealed and locked itself. Cool oxygen flooded her nose and mouth, and she pulled the second helmet from its hook before she turned to search for Ikenna.

  The corridor around her was a tunnel of oily black smoke. It had spread free of gravity to every corner of the compartment, and the light panels had been enveloped in darkness. Elena squinted in the dusk, and tears squirted from beneath her eyelids and spilled into the helmet. She waved her hands in front of her face, and the smoke coiled around them and flowed back and forth across her vision. Her right hand struck a tiny shard of twisted black metal. It was hot beneath her glove.

  Ikenna lurched into her and knocked her grip away. The two of them bounced across the corridor into the opposite wall. She shot one leg through the ladder on the fly and wrapped it around the rung. She needed both hands to catch Ikenna and hold him still.

  His face turned to her, and she could see that his eyes were bloodshot and watering. He had shut his mouth tightly against the smoke. Elena thrust the helmet over his head and latched it for him, and watched him gasp for air on the other side of the faceplate. The rebreathers inside their helmets could keep them supplied with oxygen for hours, if necessary.

  She took Ikenna by the shoulder and tapped the side of his head three times. He focused on her.

  “The emergency locker. Go!”

  Ikenna nodded. She didn’t know if he was even capable of speech right now. He took off down the corridor, and the sea of black smoke closed up around him.

  The forward bulkhead was locked shut when she got there. Elena blinked to shake the last of the tears from her eyes, and pushed her helmet close to the atmospheric monitor. The ammonium levels in the air were dangerously high and the temperature had shot up to over three hundred degrees Kelvin. But there was no breach on the other side of the bulkhead, none that she could see.

  Elena had been inside this hatchway when the explosion had struck, when it had slammed shut. It had probably come close to cutting her in half.

  She felt for the panel beneath the monitor, and ripped it open to reveal a bright yellow circular handle. Elena grabbed it and twisted it to one side. There was a hiss as the bulkhead unsealed, and a thump as Ikenna landed on top of it. His arms were filled with firefighting gear and medical kits. He handed the extinguisher to Elena without a word.

  Elena knew better than to contact the bridge and demand a status report in the middle of a crisis. They were all highly trained officers up there, and didn’t need distractions. Until she was in that seat, it was Vijay in command. She would just have to help wherever she could.

  They opened the door together.

  She felt a wind at her back as the atmosphere rushed from one compartment to the next. The smoky air swirled into ribbons and cyclones, twisted by the currents. There was a hull breach somewhere ahead that had blown part of the atmosphere into space.

  Elena and Ikenna plunged into the corridor. They stuck to the ladder—there was no shame in it now. Here the smoke was even thicker, like swimming down into an oil well, but the damage was still visible. Her faceplate briefly fogged with moisture from a burst water pipe. Between the tendrils of smoke she could see an eerie flickering light up ahead from a torn electric cable. The sparks fanned out in every direction, like tiny fireworks in the middle of the corridor.

  She toggled her intercom circuit.

  “Engine room, Captain speaking. Cut power to Compartment P-11, but keep the bulkhead circuits running.”

  Chief Officer Gupta answered.

  “Aye, Captain. One second.”

  A few moments later the sparks from the cable died along with the main lights. Elena and Ikenna were bathed in a ghostly green glow. Each compartment
was lined with tubes of luminous tritium gas. Otherwise a power outage would have plunged them into perfect darkness.

  “Cap—” Gupta hesitated on the line, then returned. “Engine room out.”

  “She wants to know what the fuck’s going on,” Elena said. There was no need to manually transmit. Their suit radios automatically activated in the presence of another crew member.

  Ikenna nodded. She heard him cough over the intercom, bent at the waist.

  They continued forward, towards P-10. She could see the next atmo panel now—its edges were lined with a bright, pulsating red. The safety systems had automatically locked down the compartments on either side as a precaution, meaning that at least five had been sealed. The breach had to be right outside her bridge—or inside it.

  Elena reached out to grip the next rung of the ladder, and grabbed someone’s hand. The stranger began to float away into the smoke, and Elena had to lock her own arm behind the elbow to keep it still. Elena pulled the body up alongside her and motioned to Ikenna, who cracked the medical kit open.

  It was Third Officer Makarim. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her pale bloodless face was smudged black by smoke and water. Ikenna shoved an oxygen mask onto her face and wrapped it around the back of her head while Elena pressed two fingers to Makarim’s neck, just under her jaw. Her bloodied eyes were half shut and staring at something that wasn’t there.

  Elena could feel a faint pulsing beneath the fabric of her glove. The inside of the oxygen mask fogged slightly.

  “She’s alive,” Elena said.

  She patted the other woman down quickly, searching for tears in her suit, or other obvious signs of injury, and found nothing. It must have been a concussion, or smoke inhalation. Makarim hadn’t been able to find the emergency helmets in the darkness.

  Elena handed Makarim off to Ikenna. Even as small as the two of them were, they could handle the woman’s dead mass easily.

  “Get her to medical, I’m going forward.”

  Ikenna hesitated, then caught Elena’s eyes inside her helmet.

  “Come back as soon as you drop her off,” she said. “If you don’t see me, go straight to the bridge.”

  He passed the equipment forward, and she secured the kits to her suit as best as she could. His voice was harsh and scratched, and each word sounded like it had been ground out between metal.

  “Good luck.”

  Ikenna sketched a salute, and then turned and kicked off back up the corridor towards Rivkah’s office, holding Makarim tightly to his body.

  “And shut the door on your way out!”

  She turned back to the atmospheric readout. The meters were blank and ringed with warning lights—there was a vacuum of the other side of this bulkhead. Nearly five minutes had passed, and there had been no other signs of combat—no impacts, nothing from their own weapons, and no further alerts from the bridge. Elena could have gone around the breach, and headed straight there. The compartment on the other side of this hatch was the most dangerous place on the ship, and it wasn’t her place to act as a one-woman search and rescue.

  Elena positioned herself next to the hatch and peered through the thick porthole set into the metal. For the first time, she saw the tiny smear of blood on the glass.

  She tore a panel from the wall again, and rotated the handle. The warning lights were now overlaid with a soft amber—a quarantined bulkhead couldn’t be unsealed that easily. She took one more glance back to ensure that the compartment behind her was empty, then activated the intercom once more.

  “Override, compartment P-10. Authorization, Gonzales.”

  The computers analyzed her voiceprint and confirmed her identity—no part of the ship was deliberately exposed to the vacuum except by order of the flight officer. The override request was relayed up to the bridge, and the answer came back immediately.

  Confirmed.

  There was a sudden wind in the air as the vents began to suck the atmosphere out of the compartment. The smoke twisted into long, thin cables and wisped out of sight. The life support system needed a full minute to purge the corridor of breathable air, to match the emptiness on the other side.

  Everyone in the Agency went through the vacuum test at Phobos. The door locked behind you, and the slit windows opened before you. It had to be a surprise, lest the instinctive response to hold one’s breath forced the vacuum to rip the air from the lungs. Elena would never forget the wailing of the breach, and the way its shriek had slowly died and left nothing but dead quiet. It had lasted half a minute, and she had awoken two hours later, silently screaming.

  Elena opened the hatch and dived through. The black smoke was gone, blown out by the breach, but a white mist had taken its place. Liquid water from the radiation shield had seeped into the compartment and formed a raincloud that had quickly chilled and frozen Every surface glistened brightly. A layer of frost had settled on her suit already, and Elena ran a hand across her faceplate and peered into the depths.

  She could see in a glance that the vast majority of the hull was still intact, and there was no more blood that she could find—but that meant nothing if it had been blown outside. The walls were blackened in places, and the outer bulkhead was warped from the force of the shock wave that had run through it. Elena took a breath and slowly launched herself down the middle of the compartment, without touching the walls. It was standard protocol to shut down power to a breached compartment, but destruction of this sort could flummox the wiring—and without air to produce a spark, she would never realize a circuit was live until she touched it.

  The breach was less than halfway down the corridor—a bulging crater over a meter across. Water poured from the edges of the exit wound and crystallized before her eyes. The inner bulkhead on the opposite of the crater was scorched black. The hole itself, at the center of the wound, was big enough for her to crawl through. Elena glanced at it as she floated past, and tasted the burning bile that rose in her throat. She continued on.

  At first Elena could see only the faint outlines of two dark bodies beneath the mist. She found them on the opposite side of the corridor, huddled against the sealed hatchway. One was wearing a helmet, and the other was not.

  Elena touched down next to them and shrugged off her medical kit. She couldn’t see who they were. In the dim light and the mist, that frosted face could have belonged to anyone. She spoke repeatedly on the intercom, but no one answered. Elena grabbed the helmeted one by the shoulders, and found another tiny red blot on the inside of the faceplate. She checked the helmet readout and confirmed that it was sealed, and that oxygen was being supplied. The rebreather was humming beneath her touch, and there was carbon dioxide inside the suit atmosphere. Whoever was in there was still alive, but unconscious.

  Elena shifted the officer to one side, and turned to the second body. She would have to get her injured crewman to the medical office as soon as possible, but she would never be able to live with herself if she didn’t check first.

  The frozen water had wrapped the head in a dull white sheen. Elena couldn’t make out any facial features, but there were twenty women aboard Gabriel, and none had hair cropped as closely as this. She reached out and gently wiped the frost from the face, and streaks of brown skin appeared among the white.

  Elena Gonzales and Pascal Arnaud had begun this journey together, six months ago. She had wanted them to finish it together.

  The panel beneath the atmospheric readout was open, but the safety systems had locked him in and, without command authorization, refused to unseal the bulkhead. Arnaud had died with his hand wrapped around the door handle, unable to escape or even to scream. His open eyes were deeply bloodshot from the decompression. Elena placed two fingers on his lids and closed them, and his frozen lashes broke beneath her touch.

  Elena rose and glanced at the bulkhead beside her. Both helmet hooks next to the hatchway were bare. The unconscious
survivor was wearing one, and Arnaud held the other in his left hand. He hadn’t even bothered to put it on. She took it from him and glanced at it. A single piece of shrapnel had smashed a tiny hole in the faceplate.

  “It could have been worse.”

  Elena hovered near the center the bridge. With Hassoun at the watch station, Ikenna had temporarily relieved the backup communications officer, while Vijay remained in her chair, beside her. Now that the crisis appeared to be over there was no reason for her to kick him out, and a lot of reasons not to.

  “I know you don’t want to hear that. You probably feel like an asshole even thinking it to yourself. That’s why you need to hear it from me. Three casualties, one fatal. Makarim and Suarez will live. And if you hadn’t shot down that missile as quickly as you did, it would have been a lot worse.”

  Demyan was at his helmsman’s post as usual, and as usual she could not read his body language at all. Hassoun was much easier. He slumped in his chair, and hadn’t looked any of them in the eye since they had entered the room. His hair was matted to his forehead with dried sweat.

  “Arnaud was a good man.” She could say that now and know without a doubt that it was true. “There are a lot of other good men and women on this ship, and they’re all alive thanks to you.”

  She looked directly at Hassoun. He did not look back. With Elena absent from the bridge, Hassoun had been serving as officer of the watch when the missile had ignited and made a run for Gabriel. It had closed to nearly point-blank range before the ship’s guns had cut it down, but the damned thing had been too big and heavy to destroy completely. The fuselage had continued flying even after the explosion and rammed Gabriel in her port flank, and punched straight through a dozen layers of titanium, lead, and carbon. Bits and pieces of shrapnel appeared to have nicked the ship in other places, but that damage was minor.

  “We won this round. They took their best shot and missed. We’re still fighting, and we’re going to give it back ten times.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Demyan said. Hassoun remained silent, and she looked at Vijay from the corner of her eye.