Over his helmet speakers, Devlin heard Archaimbault March's voice, although he could not make out the words.
Shizuko bent to consult the instrument module at her belt. “It seems to be the remains of a shuttle. There are shreds of carbon-based material. Water—ice, that is. Traces of organic iron compounds."
Myoglobin? Hemoglobin?
"Hold on,” Devlin said. “I want a sample.” No one said anything as he scooped up a portion of the debris cloud.
Keeping close to the station, they proceeded to the next airlock. This time, both Verity and Devlin tried the release lever. Long heartbeats later, it still hadn't budged.
"What the hell?” Verity muttered. “One airlock might malfunction....” She didn't finish the thought.
As far as Devlin could tell, the station had been sealed from the inside. But why would anyone lock himself inside a space station, orbiting a dying planet? Why put himself beyond the reach of help?
He thought of an alien satellite spinning its lonely orbit in the far reaches of December's system. Space, so distant from his own personal nightmares, no longer felt safe.
* * * *
The next module they reached contained arched docking bays, wide enough to accommodate a ship the size of Juno. The arms looked fragile, like fairy wings. Again, there was no response from the airlock controls.
"Do you want us to keep trying?” said Shizuko.
"Don't give up!” Archaimbault March's voice sounded ghostly, distant. “You've got to find out—"
"Keep at it for a while longer,” Fidelio cut him off.
Shizuko began cutting through to the airlock hatch controls with the laser. Incisions appeared in the outer skin, accompanied by eye-searing light and off-gassing, gaping wider and deeper with every passing moment. Working cautiously to avoid damage to their gauntlets, Verity and Shizuko pulled a flap of the outer skin free, folded it back and secured it to the hull with magnetic clamps.
"I'll try the manual lock from here.” Shizuko's head and shoulders disappeared into the rectangular opening.
There was no visible movement in the airlock hatch.
"Doesn't anything work on this station?” Verity floated closer and shone her helmet lamp into the opening, over the curve of Shizuko's shoulder.
"It's not the relays.” Shizuko sighed audibly. “We'll have to cut through to the lock itself."
"Give me the laser and I'll do it,” Verity said. “There's about enough room to spit in there."
"Verity, please. We both know this has to be done right.” Without waiting for a reply, Shizuko dove with slow motion grace into the opening.
"You're going to get yourself killed one of these times."
"Is that a threat or a promise?"
A few minutes later, Shizuko's voice came from the opening. “I'm through and into the lock. You'll need light."
"Let's go,” said Verity.
Devlin followed her through the jagged opening into the airlock. In the light of their helmet lanterns, the airlock looked gloomy, a cavern that had never known sun or wind. The walls had been painted a cross between teal and gray.
Verity and Shizuko used the patch kit to seal the opening. Then they pressurized the lock. The seal flexed, gleaming like a living membrane, and held.
At a touch of the controls, the inner hatches whispered open. A short passageway, this one a slightly lighter shade of gray, led inward to a second lock.
After the condensed, meticulous order of Juno, the station seemed expansive, almost luxurious. Rotation created a gentle approximation of gravity in the circular corridor. A short walk brought them to the broad passageway. Colored bands, corresponding to the various sections, ran along the walls.
Verity consulted a map and traced out their route to Operations. It was coded blue, which Devlin thought macabre. They followed it to a blue-circled portal. This door, like the airlocks, refused to open manually. Shizuko cut through it with the laser.
Inside, bathed in pale light, cold and indirect, lay a wide sweep of a room with banks of work consoles, instruments and control panels, darkened screens. That, combined with its emptiness, gave the place a mournful quality, a tomb built for an entire dynasty and never used. But it was not empty.
Shizuko, first through the gap, let out a sharp cry. A clump of bodies, seven or eight, lay just inside the door. Some of them bore hand lasers, made for fine work and too low-powered to affect even an interior wall. More mummified skeletons made a tangled heap beside one of the work stations.
Shreds of skin, dark and wrinkled, clung to the clean curves of skulls and intricately shaped cervical vertebrae. Standard issue jumpsuits draped loosely around the bones, giving the eerie suggestion of flesh.
Devlin touched Shizuko's shoulder, felt the atavistic tremor even through the insulating layers of her suit, thought of the legends of plague ships and crews gone mad. He bent to study the bodies, reaching inside for clinical detachment.
"It must have happened quickly,” Shizuko murmured, “and there was no one to help."
"Or no one tried to,” Devlin said, his jaw tight. The bodies beside the door touched long-buried memories. “I've seen sick people charge an aid station. Some of them were walking corpses, just enough holding them together to keep them moving on, infecting everyone they touched. The militia gunned them down."
"Norton's plague? The one that wiped out half of Old Jarkata?” Shizuko's brows drew together behind the crystal curve of her helmet. “But you would have been a child—"
"So what killed these people?” Verity said, too stridently. “Vacuum, vented monoxide, voltage through the door's electrics?"
Devlin brushed the fingers of his glove over one slender radius, laying alongside the ulna like lovers in death. He pointed to the fracture lines, the splintering of bone that indicated a struggle.
Dimly, as if from a far distance, he heard voices over his helmet speakers. Fidelio was asking questions, Shizuko answering in a low, tense voice, and Archaimbault March was saying something about mutiny. Devlin straightened up from his examination of the corpses.
"Be careful,” he told Shizuko and Verity. “Keep your suits intact.” Carefully, they proceeded into the room.
"Look at this.” Verity rushed to the communications bay. She pointed to what was left of the control systems, a swathe of blackened metal and plastic. Intersecting jagged lines gleamed like fused glass, while other areas had been sliced and torn, and shards of unrecognizable parts lay scattered everywhere.
Shizuko let out a long breath. For a long moment, no one said anything.
"Devlin and Verity, keep searching.” Fidelio's voice came over the helmet speakers. “Shizuko, we need to know what's in the computer core. Can you handle it?"
Shizuko lifted her head. “I'm all right,” she said, but whether those words were meant for the captain or for herself, Devlin could not tell. She left Operations, following the color-coded guides.
Devlin and Verity proceeded on a systematic route through the various areas, Engineering, Life Support, Officers’ Quarters, galley and storage areas. They passed through the medical area, a suite of rooms as well equipped as any TerraBase hospital, including emergency medical cryounits for critically ill crew who could not be treated with local facilities.
They found several more bodies, singly or in groups. One pair appeared to be trying to cut off power to Operations when they died. There were no other signs of damage, no indication of what had happened.
From time to time, Verity reported back to Juno. The initial shock had worn off; the depressing sameness created the sense of drifting through a tomb. Time took on an eerie, distorted quality. Devlin could not have told how long they had been wandering.
"Have you heard from Shizuko?” Fidelio asked. “She's not answering."
"Interference from the station?” Verity asked.
"No, we've been following you two loud and clear."
Devlin and Verity exchanged white-eyed glances. Before either could say more,
Shizuko's voice came through.
"I'm here, just busy. Data transfer is complete. What there is of it, that is. Someone's tried a memory wipe. It's an unheavenly mess. I'm not sure this computer remembers how to add two and two."
...the station's computer disabled ... crew cut off and unable to effect repairs ... while down below, on the planet's surface, thousands of colonists helpless while temperatures soared and clouds of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acids rolled across the once pristine skies....
They met Shizuko back at the airlock. Plum blossoms glimmered, eternally fresh, across her space suit. The memory capture unit swung from her belt. She would not meet Devlin's gaze. There was something wrong with her eyes, some hidden darkness.
She turned as they approached, moving with deliberation. She'd managed to get the airlock hatch open. As one small blessing, the temporary seals held up through decompression.
Shizuko was first through the hatch. Her smooth, slow glide halted. She swore, too soft for the words to be understood. Devlin saw her face, perfectly lit through her helmet. In all his years, through D'al-Jarkata and everything beyond, he had never seen an expression so bleak, so determined.
"What is it?” he asked.
"Something must have caught on my suit leg. I didn't see anything. It felt like a—"
"Spider wire!” Verity shouted. “It's rigged!"
"Get out of there!” Fidelio barked from the ship. “All of you, right now! Scramble!"
"What—” Devlin began.
Shizuko whirled, a movement Devlin would have sworn was impossible in zero-gee, grabbed his arm, and thrust him bodily outside. He caught a glimpse of Shizuko bracing herself, then Verity's jets flaring.
A burst of intense, colorless light erupted from the airlock, momentarily blinding him. His helmet radio blared static. The noise filled his head, rattling the bones of his skull. Then he himself was hurled through empty space, surrounded on three sides by distant stars.
Devlin fumbled for the jets on his suit harness, praying he'd find the right ones. When he'd practiced the drill, he hadn't been half-blind, with adrenaline searing his veins. He blinked and his vision cleared slightly. With a silent prayer, he squeezed the controls. The station's bulk blotted out half the night. He'd managed to reverse his momentum, so that he was no longer speeding away from the station.
The next moment, a second explosion rocked the airlock. This one must have burst the inner hatches, because instead of a colorless flash, yellow-white flames spurted from the gaping maw in the side of the station. Oxygen rushed into space, fueling the blaze.
Fire reached outward, touched the nose of the shuttle. Glowing cracks laced the walls of the tiny craft. In its place, a starburst exploded. Shards of ceramometal scintillated against the black of space.
"Shizuko! Verity!” Devlin couldn't hear his own voice above the deafening blare of his helmet radio.
The blaze in the space station shifted toward orange. That was supposed to mean something about the materials being burned, but Devlin couldn't remember what. He blinked again, praying for clear sight, but the fire was too bright. From farther along the curved dark side of the station came another burst of light.
He spotted a single space suit, arms and legs gently flexed, oddly graceful.
Untethered. Drifting.
The radio channels carried nothing but static. His eyes were still too glare-blind to make out any patterns on the suit. There was no way to tell who it was.
Devlin nudged his jets. The suit hung above him now. Somehow, he thought with a curious numbness, he had to coordinate the path of the other suit with his own movement. He'd had no training in precision maneuvering. If he overshot....
The suit continued to drift. Devlin held his breath. From this angle, he could see that he was going to miss it. What did he have to lose? He curled in tight, rotating around his center of mass, and then swept out his arms. As he spun, he realized the suit was still too far. He flailed wildly, like a drowning swimmer. One gauntlet-encased hand closed around something. By pure luck, he'd grabbed the severed tether.
Devlin pulled the suit closer, winding the tether around his wrist. The suit swung around in response to his jerk. His eyes focused on a pattern of orange thunderbolts. He started to breathe again.
"Verity!” He grabbed one arm, turning her so that he could see her face. He was half afraid he'd find a bubble of coagulating blood or a crazework of fissures in the helmet itself.
Her eyes were closed, her facial muscles soft. Her parted lips held none of her usual tension, the ready answers, the quick retorts. In a moment of stark clarity, he noticed the delicacy of the skin around her eyes, the faint dark smudges as if she had, as a child, cried herself to sleep, and even now her body retained the memory. She would be furious if he ever made such an observation aloud to her.
"Verity...,” he whispered in his mind. “Be alive."
As if in answer to his plea, a mist appeared on the inner surface of the visor in front of her mouth. It was so faint that for a moment, he wasn't sure he had actually seen it, or only wanted it to be true. It was gone in a moment, absorbed by the air circulating system of the suit.
The stars spun by in a disorienting pattern. No, it was he who was spinning. Then he saw how far away they were from the ship.
His radio cleared suddenly and he heard Fidelio's voice, hailing.
"I've got her, I've got her!"
"Hold tight,” said Fidelio. “We're on our way."
The station came into view, slowly rising in his visual field like a massive, metal-white sun. The oxygen-fueled flames at the airlock were almost gone, but new blazes had broken out the entire length. The interior must be an inferno, the splintered bones with their shreds of leathery flesh, the fused radio console, all gone.
Devlin managed to engage his positioning jets again, a short burst that sent the ship spinning away visually in a different plane. He cursed, fumbled, and tried the opposite direction.
Then he saw that something had detached itself from Juno and appeared to be headed his way. It wasn't a shuttle but a frame lorry, that slow old workhorse meant for lunar landings and hauling. Some TerraBase budgeteer had decided the lorry could also serve as a shuttle backup. Its only advantage was that at the moment it was already outside the ship, far faster to launch than the second shuttle.
The lorry matched Devlin's speed and direction. Because he was spinning and it wasn't, it came around again and again in Devlin's visual field. He thought of an old-fashioned carousel and wondered where the brass ring was.
"Devlin!” Fidelio's voice came over his helmet radio. “Can you grab the tool arm?"
Devlin noticed a projection from the front of the lorry. He was holding tight to Verity with one hand. If he stretched out the other....
His fingers missed the tool arm by a good meter.
The lorry inched closer. Each revolution brought Devlin's hand closer to the tool arm. The smoothness of the maneuver astonished him. The thing must weigh tons, built for heavy extravehicular work, and yet it glided closer, centimeter by painstaking centimeter.
The lorry came around one more time. The tool arm smacked into the palm of Devlin's gloved hand. His fingers curled around it. He tightened his grip on Verity. A sudden sensation of weight jerked at his shoulder. Then the stars stopped moving.
Devlin wanted to laugh and cry all at once. Not even space rapture could be this delicious. Arm over arm, terrified of letting go, he worked his way to the lorry's cockpit. The platinum-shaded-bronze of Fidelio's space suit glinted at him. It was all he could do not to wrap the other man in a hug.
Devlin clambered through the lorry's rollbars. He pushed Verity into the seat behind Fidelio and pulled the safety harness over her head, anchoring it between her legs and snug around her chest.
The lorry swung around, heading back toward the station. The starfields looked so deep, so endless. Like death itself.
"Breathe shallowly,” Fidelio said. “It'll help."
&
nbsp; "Shizuko.” Devlin wasn't sure if he'd said the name aloud, or heard it as a cry in the back of his mind. He had seen Verity as dead, called her name, and found her.
He told himself she could still be alive. Out there. Somewhere. The space suits were tough. Even if she'd been caught in the blaze, she could have survived. Or perhaps the first explosion had thrown her free and she was waiting for them to come for her. She'd been behind him....
An image flared up in his mind, Shizuko whirling, bracing herself against the airlock wall, one hand on the frame.
She stayed behind ... carrying the computer core ... with an engineer's knowledge of ship systems....
Fidelio brought them around, back toward the station. The planet hung above them like a dirt-smudged ball. Debris floated everywhere, pieces of ceramometal, hull casings, wires, crystalline silicon, the twisted wreckage of their shuttle. A jagged hole gaped where the airlock had been. The blaze was almost out, its oxygen exhausted.
Fires still raged through the central section, spewed out by the winds of decompression. As Devlin watched, slowly comprehending, the area where the solid rocket fuel was stored came into view.
Fidelio slammed the lorry's braking jets, reversed direction in a gyrojockey's record time, and shoved it into maximum thrust. The lorry's engine vibrated soundlessly with the strain. Devlin felt it through his bones.
Another flash of white erupted behind them like a miniature sun, this one more brilliant and piercing than the first. For a long moment, the station shimmered in Devlin's vision like an orb of silvery gray. Then Devlin's vision cleared and he realized the ghostly shape was only a retinal after-image.
Shards of what had been the massive space station glittered like metallic confetti against the velvet black. Devlin blinked, and saw they were hurling outward in all directions.
Devlin felt as if he too were flying apart, like the station, little bits in all directions. He mustn't start thinking about Shizuko.
There was no ping! as the first shards ricocheted off the lorry's rollbars. Devlin saw rather than heard the impact. Fidelio muttered unintelligible curses under his breath. The lorry, never intended for speed, labored on.
FSF, April-May 2009 Page 19