A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence)

by Robert Taylor

  Unlike Tantalus Station, the carrier was not equipped with the fibergrip matting that enabled people to get around easily on its surface. The carrier was too big for that and, being unmanned, there was no need for it. Any repair or maintenance on the vessel would be carried out by people in small repair pods, essentially miniature spacecraft.

  So Hamilton, Klane and LeGault were left to shepherd the others carefully as they made their way from one point to another on the giant hull. Hamilton went first, trailing a monofilament fiber from a spool at his belt. When he reached a point where he could attach it, he did so using an instant set glue from a small dispensing gun. The rest then clipped on to the incredibly strong fiber and pulled themselves along, guided by LeGault and Klane.

  It was a slow and painstaking business for those not used to a zero-gee environment. Jones, in particular, not being very fit, suffered. Carl, with his Enjun physiology, was not too badly off and Johnson commented that it was a lot easier than using the fibergrip mats and socks.

  By repeating the technique they slowly made their way to the port side of the vessel where the loading locks were located. The journey took them the best part of an hour. The carrier, though huge, hadn’t seemed quite so enormous from inside a spacecraft. The reality of its bulk, on a human scale, was staggering.

  If the carrier seemed endless to them, the freight terminal might as well have been a planet in its own right. The carrier seemed to have a dedicated series of loading locks on the terminal, but as it closed in on the terminal they could see countless other vessels docked and either loading or unloading cargo. The terminal was a vast hub of activity, with ships coming and going constantly. All docking and undocking was done remotely, by the terminals computers. All scheduled approaches and departures likewise maintained automatically. Even the cargo vessels that had crews had to surrender control of their vessel to the terminal at some point. It was a triumph of engineering and automation.

  Hamilton hoped that the automation would mean few, if any, actual people aboard the terminal. As with the refinery, he hoped that a skeleton staff would be present mostly to coordinate maintenance and resolve glitches. If so, he and the others could slip aboard, find a ship bound for the Martian surface and get aboard that. If that ship itself was automated, then so much the better.

  The reality was not quite so simple, of course.

  Firstly, their slow progress across the outer hull of the carrier put paid to any thought of entering via the loading locks. By the time they reached it, the carrier had completed its docking procedures and the loading locks were sealed to the terminal’s own loading arms. Hamilton and Klane scouted around, but there was no sign of any human scale airlocks on either the carrier or the terminal’s loading arms. They were simply not designed for human access.

  Which meant further travel, this time along the terminal arms to the terminal itself. The terminal arms were a good two hundred meters long with few convenient handholds. Without the spool of monofiber and the glue gun, it would have been an almost impossible journey even for the three of them that were experienced in zero-gee activities. As it was, by the time they reached the bulk of the terminal proper, Hamilton had gone through his spool, Klane’s and was working on LeGault’s.

  The biometric readouts in his helmet told Hamilton that Jones was especially the worse for wear. Breathing, heart-rate and temperature were all up. Jones was definitely not a natural spacer. His suit was doing its best to keep his environment pleasant for him, but even it was beginning to struggle against the load he was placing on it. He was using his supply of oxygen at an increased rate, too. Carl and Johnson, by contrast, were coping far better, though it looked like they were beginning to feel the effort as well.

  Hamilton called a break at the juncture of the arm and the terminal and went to see how Jones was. Klane had already commented, on a private channel, to him about the black man’s worsening condition. They all had the same information available to them, so Jones’ state was visible to anyone that cared to call up the biometric display.

  Jones had slumped in the angle between the arm and terminal hull, holding on with one hand to a reinforcing stanchion that was bigger than he was. Hamilton crouched down beside him and called him up on Jones’ private suit channel.

  “How are you doing, buddy?” Hamilton asked, keeping his tone light.

  It was a few moments before Jones answered, probably trying to figure out the comms system properly. “Not so good. I didn’t realize I was this unfit.”

  “Hmm.” Hamilton murmured. “I don’t think fitness is the issue here, is it?”

  “Well,” Jones replied. “I’m not enjoying being out here, that’s for sure.”

  There was a forced levity in Jones’ tone that Hamilton had heard before, in similar circumstances.

  “You seemed okay in the ship, looking out into space.” Hamilton noted.

  Jones nodded, the motion barely perceptible in the suit. “Yeah. It just feels different. More personal, now that I’m out here. I’m not sure what to make of it. But I’ll be glad when we’re inside somewhere, anywhere, again.”

  “You managing to hold it together? Not going to do anything stupid?” Hamilton asked.

  Jones let out a chuckle. “You mean like take my helmet off for a breath of fresh air? I may be stressed, but I’m not irrational! However, I would appreciate this space-walk to end soon, if you can possibly manage that.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Hamilton promised. “You and the others stay here, whilst LeGault and I look for a way in. Think you can handle that?”

  Jones nodded. “Yeah, I’m good. Go do what you gotta.”

  Hamilton got up and switched to Klane’s channel, apprising her of Jones’ situation.

  “I’ll keep an eye on him.” She promised.

  “No stories about explosive decompression, okay?” Hamilton warned her.

  She was uncharacteristically serious in her reply. “I’ve only seen that once and, trust me, it’s not something I want to talk about.”

  Hamilton had no reply to that, so he simply switched back to the general channel and told everyone what was happening, leaving out Jones’ condition, of course.

  It took Hamilton and LeGault about twenty minutes to locate a suitable entry point. It was another loading lock, this one much more modest in scale than the ones the carrier was connected to but still five meters across. It was about two hundred meters ‘above’ the carrier, though obviously, up and down were relative in space and mostly meaningless.

  Once they had located it, it took a further forty minutes to get the others there after laying in a length of monofilament. Jones was struggling badly by the time they reached it, but the thought of being inside a structure once more kept him going. His heart rate and breathing, however, were telling indicators of how close to the edge he had gotten.

  At the lock, they forced Jones to relax before he got to work on bypassing the alarms. The black man seemed much calmer once he had plugged in his suit’s optical datalink cable and got to work. Working seemed to keep his mind occupied and off the thought of how vast space seemed to him. All of the electronic equipment and tools he would have normally used to perform his security work had been duplicated in the suit’s software. Much of it was already present in the software suite available to the Marines, who occasionally had need to force entry through an airlock. Jones’ more sophisticated tools were easy to replicate and add to the software.

  It took him longer than normal, of course. Working in a suit, even with the digital tools available to him, took longer than doing everything physically. The suit’s projected display worked well, responding to eye movements and blinks to make selections and move between screens, but it was not Jones’ natural way of working and he didn’t want to blink at the wrong moment and pick the wrong option. So he took his time.

  Twenty minutes after he had started, however, the airlock door slid open obediently whilst the activity lights within remained dark, the monitoring equ
ipment still convinced the lock was closed and sealed. Without waiting for the others, Jones unplugged himself and piled in.

  Hamilton and the rest followed, the lock more than big enough for the six of them at once. Hamilton had assumed Jones had rushed within in order to get away from his space-fever, but the black man was already plugged into the inner door’s datalink and was waiting for them to get safely inside.

  As they did so, the outer door slid shut and air began to fill the lock. The lights remained off, comfortingly reminding them that nobody was aware of their presence.

  Hamilton’s suit registered the rising pressure outside and adjusted itself accordingly, making his movements easier.

  “Gravity’s coming on in a few seconds.” Jones warned them.

  Sure enough, the familiar pull of standard gravity reasserted itself moments later as the gravity plating activated.

  At almost one atmosphere Hamilton removed his helmet. The suit complained about it, but it let him do it anyway. It was a piece of military equipment, after all, and its users frequently had to do things that were not safe under normal circumstances. He felt his ears pop as the helmet seal relinquished its hold on the suit.

  The air was cold, of course. It would have been held in a pressurized tank someplace near to the lock. Expansion from that compressed state was always accompanied by a cooling effect. It was one of the first things you noticed during zero-gee training of any kind but it surprised most people unfamiliar with the principles.

  The chilly air was also one of the things you grew to love about the end of a zero gee excursion. The air was probably manufactured and had never even been on a planet, but the crispness to that first breath always put Hamilton in mind of frosty mountain air. It was that invigorating, especially after a sweaty time in a suit.

  The others began removing their helmets, enjoying the frostiness as much has he did, but none more so than Jones, who, his work completed for the moment, had slumped against the inner door of the lock.

  The man’s face was covered in sweat. It looked like he’d just run a marathon.

  “I’ll be alright.” He muttered in response to Hamilton’s unspoken question. “Just let me rest a while.”

  Hamilton nodded. “Any chance you can get that inner door open without setting off any alarms? I can scout around whilst the rest of you relax.”

  Jones nodded and pulled his helmet back on long enough to eyeball the relevant controls. The door opened obediently.

  Beyond, a long corridor vanished into the depths of the terminal. As before, lighting was non-existent.

  “I guess they only put the lights on when it’s being used.” Klane observed, coming up to stand alongside Hamilton.

  “I guess.” He agreed. “At least we know we haven’t been detected.”

  “Not yet, anyway.” She nodded. “Shall we?”

  He nodded. “Let’s take a look around.” Turning to the rest of the group he said. “Klane and I are going to look around. The rest of you stay here and recover. Don’t do anything to attract attention. We’ll be back shortly.”

  Klane was already walking into the darkness, her prosthetic eye allowing her to see perfectly well. Hamilton hurried to catch up, replacing his helmet and activating the suit’s infra-red illuminator in order to see his way.

  Almost immediately beyond the lock, a wide slideway filled the corridor.

  “This is a bit old hat.” Klane remarked as she walked along it. “I thought everyone used grav pallets these days to move goods?”

  Hamilton nodded. “They do. This place was probably built before that became commonplace, though. Odd, really. They built the place to mimic a planetside operation, with grav plating, slideways and so on.”

  “Not everyone is trained in zero-gee activities.” Klane stated. “I suppose it was easier to do it this way than train people to work in a gravity-free environment.”

  The corridor gave onto a large marshalling chamber. A number of robotic cargo loaders lay idle there, of differing sizes. Another three corridors like the one they had emerged from led off towards the outer hull. A single, larger corridor led deeper into the station.

  Klane glanced around with her cybernetic eye. “Doesn’t look like any cameras or other sensing equipment in here. We might be lucky and traverse the whole station without being seen.”

  “I’d be happier traversing the outside of the station.” Hamilton muttered.

  She nodded. “Me too, but Jones would never make it. Did you know he would react that way?”

  Hamilton shook his head. “No. I recruited him planetside, remember. I didn’t exactly have a full psych workup on him.”

  Klane shrugged. “Well, what’s that old adage about the best laid plans..?”

  Hamilton agreed. “Yeah, they often go awry.”

  “How are we going to find a ship bound for the surface in all this?” She demanded.

  “We’ll have to get Jones to call up a schematic of this place, along with vessel movements. We should be able to put the two together and find us a nice freighter heading down to the surface.”

  She frowned. “It’ll probably be manned. At least a pilot and a couple of cargo handlers.”

  Hamilton grinned up at her. “That’s what we brought the stunners for.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In the end it was easier for Jones to find the information than they realized. The terminal’s core computer was happy to provide the layout and shipping schedules to them.

  Getting to their chosen cargo vessel, the Seraphim, was a lot harder.

  Although the interior of most of the terminal was camera and sensor free, the main freight sorting area was heavily covered by such devices. The various cargos that were unloaded all ended up there, before being routed to their vessels for onward shipment. The place was a fine example of seeming chaos. No human could have coordinated the constant shuffling and moving of freight with even a fraction of the efficiency that the terminal’s computer managed. However, even here there were occasional mishaps as loads fell over or robots got themselves jammed trying to load a six foot wide pallet into a five foot wide space.

  So the entire area was covered in cameras so that the maintenance staff could manually take over and fix things. Going through it was an impossibility without being discovered. So instead, they had to endure a long crawl through a series of emergency access conduits in order to bypass the area entirely. Even then, they made a wrong turn someplace and came out in the wrong corridor, requiring a backtrack for some distance.

  By the time they emerged into the correct corridor they were all dirty, sweaty and in varying degrees of bad temper with the situation and each other.

  But they had little time to waste. The Seraphim was loading cargo by the time they emerged from the conduits, the corridor’s slideway carrying the grav-palleted goods along to their right. Down that way, perhaps another hundred and fifty meters, was the loading lock the Seraphim was attached to.

  Hamilton divided them into two groups. Himself, Klane and Carl in the first group, the rest in the second. Hamilton’s group had removed their suits and now clutched their stun pistols as they crouched down behind one of the six foot square pallets as it rumbled serenely along the slideway. The second group crouched behind a pallet three places back, clutching the suits that the first three had removed.

  As their pallet moved towards the Seraphim, Klane leaned across Carl to mutter to Hamilton. “Just like old times, huh?”

  “I bloody well hope not!” He murmured back, then to both of them. “Wait for my signal and remember to be sure and shoot first and ask questions later, the pair of you!”

  They nodded and waited, clinging precariously to the back of the pallet. As each pallet reached the end of the slideway, a sensor caused it to stop. A few seconds later, once the cargo handlers had attached the pallet claw and removed it, the slideway started up again. It took the pallet less than two minutes to go the hundred odd meters to the end of the slideway and the loading
lock. Clearly the freight handlers knew their stuff. Equally clearly, there had to be more than one of them.

  At the end of the slideway the pallet hiding them stopped. There was a moment when nothing happened, then the pallet claw slid down either side of the pallet and clamped itself to the grav-pallet. There was a hum as the claw, a small vehicle really, powered up the grav-pallet, then the whole thing rose a few inches and began to move onwards, towards the lock and the ship.

  Hamilton and his cohorts waited, watching the ceiling overhead change from corridor, to lock then to the interior of the Seraphim’s cargo bay.

  “Now!” Hamilton called.

  He and Klane went either side of the pallet, guns drawn, searching for targets. Karl heaved himself up on top of the pallet and similarly looked around for someone to stun.

  There were three cargo handlers, each piloting a ride-on pallet claw vehicle. The one to Klane’s side was waiting on their pallet driver to get clear of the lock. His look of surprise changed to one of intense confusion and pain as she shot him from only a few feet away. He slumped over his control, twitching spastically.

  The other one, on Hamilton’s side, never saw what happened, as he was still parking the pallet previous to theirs. Hamilton’s blast took him in the back and he actually threw himself off his pallet claw in his violent, uncontrolled thrashing.

  Their own driver, seeing the flashes of the energy weapons, looked around in panic and then he too was flopping about like a fish as Carl’s shot caught him in the top of the head.

  For a moment there was silence, then the three of them were heading towards the obvious exits to the cargo bay, metal stairways at either end that led up to a central catwalk that ran the length of the bay, suspended some thirty feet up.

  Klane headed aft and Hamilton forward , whilst Carl remained in the bay to quickly hide the bodies and make it look like nothing had happened. The interruption to the steady loading progress was bound to be noticed soon.

  “Bay secure.” Carl’s deep voice rumbled over the comms gear they were wearing. A moment later Klane’s added. “Aft section secure.”