by Jamie Sawyer
“Then that will have to do. I’ll take the Edison’s crew with me, and that intel.”
She unplugged the data-clip and thrust it into my hand. I wasn’t sure that I really wanted it, but I didn’t have the strength to argue.
“It’s suicide,” the captain muttered. “Not to mention insubordination.”
“Then shoot me.”
“I might, if it would make any difference.”
My mother and Moledina stepped away from the table, left the rest of the officers bickering. She tossed me the gun that I’d found outside the District.
“Keep your weapon handy. Don’t shoot unless you really have to. Stay away from windows and view-ports.”
“Okay,” I said, breathing out slowly. I was still having issues considering the weapon as my gun.
I pushed it into the waistband of my jumpsuit. I’d seen guns worn like that in tri-Ds, but the barrel pressed against my thigh uncomfortably. My mother watched on, unimpressed at my attempt at bravado.
“But this is far more important than the gun,” she said, passing me a headset.
I clipped it over my head, pulled back my hair so that it would fit.
“The link is secure,” she said, her voice tinny in my ear over the bead. She turned to the rest of the group. “Moledina, you take up the rear and stay with the captain. I’ll take point and we move on my mark.”
No one tried to stop us, not even the young captain. The gathered personnel divided to let us pass through. I even noticed a few smiles among the group; near-admiration that someone was doing something, even if it was just bailing out.
The station had become strangely quiet, save for that distant creak and yaw of the superstructure. Expansion and contraction, the engineer in me explained. Heat, exposure to vacuum: support beams breaking up. That’s the sound of the station dying. The air tasted of burnt plastic and smoke. It had also taken on a frosty quality and I was glad of my crew jacket. That confirmed it for me: the station was losing atmosphere. Maybe not in the dramatic and immediate sense, but it wouldn’t be long before the remaining modules became compromised. Life support systems would soon be dropping offline.
“Stay quiet and calm,” my mother said over the comm.
The break of her voice in my ear was reassuring.
“Just don’t leave me alone out here,” I said.
“I’ll try not to.”
“Did you know that they were coming?” I whispered. “The Directorate, I mean.”
She kept moving as she answered. “There was some noisy chatter going around. But I hear a lot, and usually it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Was that why you didn’t want me here?”
“I didn’t think that it was a good time,” she said, her voice deadpan. Ever the soldier. But it seemed to crack again, just a little, when she added, “I didn’t want you to be put in danger, Taniya. Not after what happened.”
The comment felt like a concession, made me feel ever so slightly closer to her. I switched on my torch and lit up the path ahead.
“Keep that out of my way,” my mother barked. We were suddenly back to our old relationship. “We’re using night vision on these helmets. It’ll blind us.”
“Sorry. I’ll be more careful.”
Daryl nudged my arm. “Better to see where we’re going though, eh?”
Lucina said, “I’d rather know if I’m about to die.”
That was the first time I’d heard her speak since the Officers’ Lounge. I was too tired to reply.
Something popped in the distance and the deck reverberated. I unconsciously hesitated: hunched my shoulders, tried to make myself a smaller target. I watched my mother panning her rifle. She was checking the next junction.
As we turned the corner, I could feel the heat. The corridor ended in a wall of flame; a fire throwing out a yellowed light that caused dancing shadows. It looked like support beams had come down from above, completely blocking the corridor. No way through.
“We’ll go around this mess,” my mother said. Her image wavered in the heat. “Moledina, you getting any movement back there…?”
The corridor flared with activity before she could finish the sentence.
A clutch of Krell bolted toward us, through the fiery obstruction. Where the others back in the Officers’ Lounge had squealed and jabbered as they attacked, these were disarmingly silent. They slinked from the darkness – wet bodies mirroring the shifting light cast by the fire, clawed feet like dropping needles on the metal-plate floor.
“Contact!” someone yelled.
Moledina and my mother blocked the corridor; both rifles firing in unison. The sounds of battle in such a closed environment were overwhelming, instantly too much for my panicked brain to compute.
“Get inside there!” my mother yelled over the comm-link.
She pointed with one hand into a service tunnel set into the wall of the corridor. An open hatchway that led into pitch blackness.
“I can’t!” I shouted.
“We’ve got to!” Daryl said. He grabbed my arm and pulled hard.
The tunnel was darker than the main corridor. So tight, not much bigger than me.
The closed doors: that cell, no light at all.
No stars.
Nothing.
“Snap out of it!” Artemis shouted at me. “We’ll hold them!”
A Krell broke the line. It had a long, wicked-looking device that sprouted from its forearms: literally weaponising its body. The contraption was undeniably a rifle of some sort, and as it aimed in our direction, it peppered the corridor with bright shells. When it fired, the xeno’s facial features broke – as though the act of firing the thing grafted to its arm caused it pain. The noise produced by the bio-gun was like a child’s scream: high-pitched and agonised. Rounds pinged across the area, shredded the ceiling and floor tiles.
“Get inside with the captain. Now!”
I turned about-face and shone my torch back the way that we had come – desperate for some other way out of the situation than through those tunnels. I could retreat, backtrack, and perhaps the others would follow me. I paused at the entrance to the service tunnel. Maybe make a run back to the command centre, get some back-up…
Something wet and big was moving on us from that direction as well—
“Mom! They’re behind us!”
Artemis pivoted on the spot. Nodded. Fired.
“Go.”
Obey or die.
Those were my choices.
CHAPTER NINE
BRACE FOR IMPACT
I broke for the tunnel.
My torch jittered all over the place as I ran. The strangest things dominated my perceptions – the little things, the things that would surely not have any pressing relevance. Ash motes in the air. Smoke particulate drifting through the beam of the torch. I had to focus on those details, because otherwise the rest would overwhelm me.
– the inside of the air-car as it went down –
“Keep up!” Daryl shouted. “Only a few more metres.”
He couldn’t know that but the false assurance that we were almost at our destination was better than the reality.
An explosion sounded behind us. I steadied myself against the walls. That has to be my mother, I thought. She’s gone, and I’m left here, alone in the dark…
A voice came from back down the tunnel: “What the fuck are you waiting for?”
“Mom? Thank Christo!”
“Who else would it be? Keep moving.”
The clatter of armour against the tunnel walls was heartening. I half turned – that was all I could manage given the tightness of the confines – and was glad to see my mother’s bulk behind Daryl and Lucina.
“Go, go!” she shouted. “Moledina’s dead.”
Just like that. Gone. No grief in her voice, no resentment. That was what my mother was now: a machine, a woman who laid down her life to protect the rest of us. I felt a ridiculous pride as I shuffled further down the corridor.
> She started to fire again, her plasma rifle chugging out pulses.
“You’re almost there! You can’t give up now!”
There were more explosions and the world around me shook.
The decision was made for me as the tunnel collapsed.
“We thought it was the apocalypse. That those were the endtimes.”
My grandmama was a great one for talking about the apocalypse. She’d been on Old Earth during the Great Riots of Johannesburg. Seen the aftermath of the Indo-Pakistan War; then lost her sight during the bombing of the Cape District. She used to tell me stories about the evil that men did. She was old and my time in the Pen seemed to have aged her as though I’d been away on a space journey, and time for her had flowed at some advanced rate. She liked to talk about the events of the past as exactly that: as though the present was an age of enlightenment. As though man had grown out of that evil.
I didn’t feel that way as I fell through the service tunnel. The shaft must’ve been suspended above another level, and the surrounding structure gave way. It was probably inevitable given the fire and venting atmosphere: the station would simply break up as it was exposed to extremes of hot and cold. I grabbed at the tunnel sides as I went down, then quickly withdrew my hands as I sensed the metal heating up. My torch bounced away from me through the air, disappeared into smoke and fire –
– through the water –
I grasped for it, but suddenly there was far more to worry about than being in the dark. The rest of the structure was collapsing as well; metal grinding hard against metal, causing an agonised shriek. The station itself cried out in pain.
I hit the floor on my back and the impact was jarring. I think that I screamed. The structure around me was making so much noise that it was difficult to tell.
Kendra was shouting at me, screaming to be let out – her fingers hooking into my sweater, dragging me down with her –
I knew that if I dwelt on this – if I lay there in the comforting dark – this would become my only reality.
So I scrambled to my knees. That I could still move, that I could feel pain in my hip and my legs – those things told me that I hadn’t suffered any serious injury. Or at least nothing so serious that I couldn’t go on.
“Mom!” I shouted.
There was scattered light around me, burning electrics, but I couldn’t see anyone else.
“Mom!” I screamed, louder now, my voice hoarse.
“We’re in the underbelly…” a voice whispered in the dark.
“Daryl?” I called back.
“We’re here,” Lucina said. “We’re still here.”
“Where’s my mother?” I asked. “Mom!”
“I’m here as well,” she said over the comm-link. I’d completely forgotten about the bead in my ear. As I heard my mother’s voice, I desperately jammed it back into place, terrified that I would lose contact with her.
“Are you okay?” I babbled. “Where are you?”
“I’m making my way down to you. This sector is collapsing.”
I laughed. The sound turned into a sob. I put a cap on that: I knew that if I didn’t, I’d dissolve into tears. “Is the command centre gone?”
“I think so.”
“All those people…”
“Don’t think about them now.”
“Hurry. Please.”
“I’m seconds away.”
I turned to Daryl and Lucina. My eyes had adapted in the low light now, and I could make out their ragged shapes.
We eventually emerged into a series of rooms with bunks in them. All unoccupied, all long abandoned.
“The gravity well is failing,” I said. “I feel lighter.”
I mentioned it first, although I suspected that my mother had already noticed it. Such a detail would surely have been immediately identified by her military mind. Maybe she had chosen not to raise it, for fear of spreading panic among the rest of us.
Daryl and Lucina grimaced. Daryl was still in a terrible way – no doubt about that – but he was walking on his own now. His ruined leg sort of dragged behind him, and he’d started to use handholds on the walls to move about, half floating.
“That’s a good thing,” my mother insisted. “It means that we’re heading in the right direction.”
She pointed ahead. “This corridor leads through to Sector Ten, which is on the outer aspect of the station’s rings. That’s where the escape shuttles are. If the generator is non-functional, the outer rings will be the first to lose gravity. That’s the good news.”
Somewhere during the tunnel collapse, my mother had lost her helmet. Her hair was not as long as mine, but had the same dishevelled look, now drifting around her face in the half-G. She looked even younger than when I had seen her back in the District.
“Then what’s the bad news?” I asked. “I know that there has to be some.”
“The fastest way to the shuttles is through the sewage tanks.”
I swallowed hard. “No way.”
“Like you said, the gravity well is failing,” my mother stated flatly. “The rest of life support will be next. I need to get you off this base.”
“Come on,” Daryl said, putting an arm around me. “We’ll all look after each other.”
A service hatch marked PRIMARY WASTE TANK: CAUTION – CONTAMINATED LIQUIDS sat ahead. My mother set about removing the outer grille by tearing at the metal with her gloved hands. It took her hardly any time to get the covering free. That was the powered gloves in action, I figured.
The chamber inside was circular and very tall, barely lit by flashing amber service lights. It smelled of dirty water. In the floor of the structure sat a hatch, with an old-style manual wheel lock. The hatch was covered in warning stickers: AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, BIO-HAZARD RISK and so on.
I almost drifted into the room on the other side. Gravity seemed to be failing faster now, exponentially evaporating.
“Is there any breather gear?” Lucina asked.
“Someone has already taken it,” Daryl said.
I clocked the empty emergency boxes on the walls, but also noticed that the waste hatch was still closed. Someone had plundered the contents. The masks and ox-bottles would probably make for a vacuum run in a pinch. No one had been crazy enough to try to escape through the sewage tank.
No one except for us, that was.
“It’s not far,” my mother said. “A hundred metres, tops.”
“Without air?” Lucina blasted back. Her face scrunched up as though she was going to cry again. “It’s suicide!”
“It’s our only chance.”
“And what’s on the other side?” I enquired.
“The escape shuttles.”
“Are they definitely still there?” Lucina said. “I mean, if we go inside that tank, do we know that this will be worth it?”
There was another explosion, somewhere else on the station. Lucina’s eyes dropped to the floor: she didn’t need a response. I strongly suspected that my mother had no answer – that she really didn’t know whether this was a way out or not. She cranked the locking wheel and the heavy metal hatch came up with an arthritic groan.
She continued, “I’ll be right behind you, and I’ll open the exit hatch. The tank will be half full. We’re heading straight through it – all the way down. Try not to get disorientated by the zero-G.”
“Will there be lights inside?” I asked.
“Some, but not enough.” She disconnected one of the lamps from the shoulder of her armour and tossed it to Daryl. “The captain goes first, with Lucina. I’ll follow with you.”
“Have you seen his leg?” Lucina pleaded. “Daryl will never make it!”
Fat droplets of liquid started to drift from the open hatch, reflecting light like airborne crystals.
My mother ignored Lucina’s objection. “Daryl, Lucina – get inside.”
Daryl nodded. He clutched the edge of the hatch and pulled himself toward the water. In zero-G, the surface bobbed irregul
arly. I watched Daryl go under; noted the way that his clothes stuck to his body, his shiver as the cold water hit him. Lucina followed him inside, feet first.
“You next,” my mother said.
I looked down into the lapping sea. It was dark, like a living thing – the silver skein shifting and twitching.
Kendra’s face is down there.
“I…I can’t.”
“I know why you’re scared.”
“I just can’t!” I wailed.
“This is different,” my mother said.
We were both anchored to the deck now, gravity so loose that it was almost non-existent. My mother looked at me with those deep, pained eyes: the eyes that she had used when she’d seen me in the Pen, before she’d left for the QZ.
“Do it for me,” she said. Her voice sounded different; sounded like she had regained just a little of her Arc-accent. “Please. I don’t want to lose another daughter.”
I nodded. She always had such a way with me; always knew the buttons to press.
I took a deep breath and dropped into the tank.
It was fetid and dark inside, and I twisted in a downward motion. The water hit my eyes hard. I blinked rapidly to clear my vision.
Shit. Am I really doing this?
I used to swim when I was a child – before the accident. I was never very good at it but I hadn’t forgotten how to do it. That was all that mattered: that my unconscious remembered. I made spades of my hands and pushed off from the tank ceiling, using the momentum generated by zero-G to propel myself on.
Studded emergency lamps lined the inside of the tank but my mother was right: the lighting inside the tank wasn’t enough to see by. Imposing gravity-bound expectations on the chamber, we were travelling downwards – heading towards the base of the tank. It was long – the other end disappearing in darkness – and relatively narrow, and from what my mother had said the exit was down there somewhere. It looked to be a lot further than a hundred metres.
The tank had probably been half filled with liquid before the gravity had failed, but now, in zero-G, the water flowed differently. Fresh-faced space travellers regularly tell you that fire is the biggest concern in deep-space. But while it’ll run rampant through a pressurised environment, it’s hardly the biggest concern. You just vent a compartment and the issue is solved. Loose liquids are far more dangerous, far more difficult to contain.