Seeds of Gaia

by Rick Partlow

  “What’s the situation?” He tried to make the words a demand, delivered in his command tone, but they came out a rasp of sandpaper across broken glass.

  He rolled over to see who he was talking to and was surprised when it didn’t hurt more. Propanca was one of them, alive and seemingly unharmed and cranky as ever, standing over him with her hands on her hips and a scowl across her face. The other was Grant, one of the reactor crew who’d been off-shift, he recalled. Grant was wearing a smart bandage on his left arm and a nasty bruise on the left side of his face to match it, and looked about as happy as Propanca.

  “Be careful, sir,” a voice said from behind him. Belden, he realized, one of the station’s two medics. “You’re pretty banged up.”

  Sam looked down at himself, remembering what he’d been fairly sure was a broken clavicle, and saw what he hadn’t been able to feel, a medical harness fitted across his shoulder where his utility fatigue top had been cut away, immobilizing his right arm while it anesthetized the area and began the process of knitting the bone. They had medical supplies in the shelter, he thought.

  But he wasn’t in the shelter; none of them were. He was sitting against a bulkhead in the passageway just outside the hatch to the shelter…except no, he was sitting on a bulkhead, leaning against the deck, and the shelter hatchway was set in what was now the floor. He got his feet underneath him and tried to push himself up, sliding his good shoulder against what had been the deck. Belden rushed up beside him, concern on her long, straight-boned face as she tried to steady him.

  “Would somebody care to tell me what happened?” he asked, resting a hand on Belden’s shoulder to catch his balance. “If any of you actually know.”

  Propanca and Grant exchanged a grim look before the Communications officer hissed out a breath and squared her shoulders.

  “We can’t be sure what happened out there,” she told him, “but in here…” She trailed off and waved at the hatch to the shelter. “You should see for yourself, sir.”

  Belden walked with him; she was short and she got underneath his shoulder and stayed there. He knew medics and he could tell she wanted to keep nagging him not to move; that she wasn’t had to be some indication of how bad things were.

  “Oh yeah,” he murmured softly when he stared down into the hatchway. “It’s bad, all right.”

  Half the emergency shelter just wasn’t there anymore. The compartment was bisected, sliced through from bulkhead to bulkhead by something that shed his eye, something that seemed to glow in some spectrum just outside his vision and yet was simultaneously an absence of anything. He’d seen it before, but never unshielded, never face to face. It seemed to hurt to look at, or to try and look at, but when he averted his eyes from it, he saw the bodies and pieces of bodies littering what had once been a wall.

  There was surprisingly little blood; where arms or legs or torsos lay obscenely atop the debris, they seemed to have been cauterized cleanly, as if by a surgical laser.

  I sent them here, he thought, the guilt crashing down on him.

  He shrugged that burden off, saving it for later, for when there was time. For now, he could see exactly what Grant and Propanca had been discussing. The hull was as cleanly cut and cauterized as the bodies had been, but the nothingness of Transition Space wasn’t static, it was, ever-so-slowly, pulling back. And where it did, in those millimeter-wide gaps, air was leaking out.

  “There are suits in the shelter,” he said, flogging his brain into action. “In the lockers…”

  Then he stopped. The lockers were gone, along with the whole side of the compartment.

  “The corridor is blocked off that way by the…stuff,” Propanca said, waving to her right.

  “Damn.” He was forgetting something, he could feel it nagging at him, pounding at the back of his brain, trying to be heard. And then he knew.

  “Where’s Danabri?” he wanted to know, swinging his head around. “This can’t be everybody…where is he?”

  “He’s…over here, sir.” Propanca motioned behind her.

  Sam pushed away from Belden and stepped past the Communications officer, into the shadows near the end of the passageway. There were three bodies lined up there, stretched lengthwise down the corridor, covered with foil blankets they’d probably salvaged from inside the shelter. He couldn’t see their faces, but he saw the slippers, the pink ones Danabri had been wearing, sticking just past the end of the blanket.

  “Fuck.” The word gushed out of him along with all the wind in his lungs and he nearly keeled over, had to catch himself against the wall.

  “The hit,” Belden was saying, though the words didn’t seem to register at first. “The hit at the beginning, it threw him against the bulkhead and he…he broke his neck.”

  Sam’s breath came in long, shuddering gasps. Danabri hadn’t exactly been a friend, had never let any of them close enough to call him that. But for all his abrasiveness, for all the attempts he’d made to alienate everyone around him, it could never disguise the truth: he’d been a good man, a fearless man.

  Gaia, he prayed silently, take his soul into your arms and help him find peace.

  The prayer was automatic, a product of his youth. He hadn’t thought about what he believed in a long time. He doubted Danabri believed in anything.

  “We have to head for the hub,” he decided, dragging his thoughts away from Danabri’s death and to their own survival. “We have to get to the docking ports, if they’re intact.”

  “I went up the emergency access tubes,” Grant said, eyes downcast, voice full of bitter dejection. “They’re blocked by the…whatever.”

  “And when it pulls out,” Propanca interjected sharply, “we’re fucked, because the automatic pressure barriers aren’t going to close with all the power down.”

  He stalked down the corridor towards the lift bank, staring down at it since it was now mounted in the floor.

  “Do we have anything that can pry this door open?” he wondered. “We’re only one level up from the hub. The lift car is probably on the other side, toward the outer levels.”

  The three crewmembers stared back at him dumbly, glancing at each other and then around them as if wondering where to start looking. Sam hissed out a sigh.

  “Start checking every compartment we can get to,” he barked, trying to snap them out of their fugue. “Fast, before that air leak turns into a giant fucking vacuum!”

  It was probably a waste of time, he had to admit. He knew this station and aside from the shelter, there were no compartments with tool kits, and the tool kit for the shelter had been in the emergency vacuum suit locker, which was now nonexistent. But it was better than sitting around waiting to get sucked into space and die of asphyxiation.

  The three of them scattered, Grant dropping into the shelter while Propanca and Belden started pulling open hatches to other compartments. Sam tried to make himself move to join them, fighting against a weariness dragging at him like an anchor. The medical harness was draining his blood sugar to repair his shoulder, which would be all well and good if he had the time to sit down or grab a quick snack.

  He’d made it two steps away from the lift door when he heard the banging. He froze, fear crystallizing in his veins at the thought the station was being ripped apart by the wormhole. But the banging was coming from the lift door, and it was too regular to be anything natural.

  Was someone trapped inside the lift? Banging on the door, waiting for help? He leaned over the lift, but flinched back when the inner edge of the door tented upward with a ringing impact.

  “What the hell?” he muttered, taking a step away.

  He had images of monsters emerging from Transition Space like in the bad horror movies he’d watched as a kid and began looking around for something to use as a weapon. The edge of the lift door came away from the frame with the next blow and black-gloved fingers wrapped around the jagged edge, yanking downward to make enough room for the other hand. Another, more violent wrench, and metal bent
and ripped and shredded and the door was pulled down into the lift tube.

  Telia Proctor emerged through the wreckage of the hatch, her short hair matted with sweat, dirt and grease and perhaps a splash of blood smeared across her face.

  “Come with me,” she told him, her expression grim, “if you want to live.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The starboard maneuvering jets gave one last, shuddering effort and then fell silent, exhausted. The polished surface of the docking port already filled the field of view in the main display, and even after exhausting all their fuel in the deceleration, it was still coming way too fast.

  “This is gonna hurt,” Sully warned, tucking his chin down onto his chest and cinching his flight helmet tighter.

  He was right.

  Metal and carbon-fiber and boron honeycomb composite screamed in a chorus of agony as they scraped across each other, the screech cut short by a brutal collision. Priscilla’s head snapped sideways and her seat restraints cut into her shoulders, first one way and then back the other as the docking magnets grabbed desperately at the lock, yanking them to a sudden, violent halt.

  Priscilla tasted blood and felt a sharp spear of pain in her tongue; she wanted to spit it out, but in zero gravity, it would have just floated around the cockpit with the air currents. She swallowed the blood along with any complaints she had about Sully’s flying, and pulled loose her restraints.

  Sully was already out of his seat, grabbing vacuum helmets for the both of them from the shuttle’s locker. They’d suited up on the flight back to the station, but he hadn’t wanted to give up his flight helmet’s HUD until he had to, and she…

  I’ve never worn a spacesuit before, she realized as she sealed the helmet to the neck yoke.

  She knew how, of course, knew every detail of the suit’s operation. But that wasn’t the same as the experience, hadn’t prepared her for the claustrophobic sensation of her breath reflecting back into her face, for the chill of the air flow washing over her cheeks, for the subtle distraction of the instrument lights just out of her line of sight.

  Just like knowing every point of data about the human reproductive system didn’t prepare me for sex. Or love, for that matter.

  Sully had the inner lock open and was working the manual hand-crank for the outer lock; the station was dead, the reactor lost somewhere in Transition Space. She hung over his shoulder, waiting with thinning patience as the dark gap between the halves of the outer lock grew larger with excruciating listlessness.

  “You go prep one of the other shuttles,” she told him, knowing she was repeating herself but needing to be doing something. “They may be damaged so make sure you run an external diagnostic…”

  “With all due respect,” Sully grunted with effort, bracing himself against either side of the lock to get leverage to turn the crank, “teach your grandma to suck eggs, ma’am.”

  Priscilla blinked, staring at him.

  “Why would my grandmother want to suck eggs?”

  “Jesus,” Sully breathed, and she thought he sounded exasperated but she didn’t know why.

  Finally, the gap widened enough for her to squeeze through and she pushed him aside, squirting out into the docking bay. Her suit’s helmet light cut through the stygian blackness, turning dust and floating debris into a glittering starfield and sending shadows dancing through cargo loading arms and freight conveyors. A body drifted through the cone of light, black elongations of its askew arms and legs stretching for meters through the bay, and she nearly jerked away from it by instinct, the tensing of her muscles sending her floating back towards the airlock.

  The light on her helmet bobbed up and down with her own movement, but it settled when Sully grabbed her arm to anchor her. The body was a man, an Earther, one of the few on their crew. Johan his name was, she remembered, one of the dock workers. He was older, his face worn to leather by wind and sun from a life lived outside on a living world. He wore his long, greying hair in a pony-tail, and it bobbed loosely behind him now, swatting like its namesake at an orbiting cloud of crimson globules. The blood had coursed from a deep wound in his forehead and for a long moment she thought he was dead…until she realized dead people didn’t bleed.

  “He’s alive!” she blurted, pushing out of Sully’s grasp and catching the man’s arm.

  She might have simply gone drifting off with him, but Sully was more used to zero-g work and he’d attached his magnetic boots to the deck, anchoring himself before he reached up and grabbed her ankle, pulling her back down.

  She had to remind herself to engage her own magnets when she touched the deck, too used to the Resolution sticky plates by now; the suit she was wearing was from the Consensus shuttle, and was bulkier and less fitted, and lacked the nanotechnological niceties of a Resolution version. With her feet secured, she pulled Johan down to her; there was still air in the bay and he seemed to be breathing steadily. She tried to pat at the suit’s exterior pockets for the medical kit, but Sully was ahead of her, wrapping a bandage around the wound and securing it in place.

  Not a smart bandage, she thought, clucking to herself. No nanotech in her boots, none in the bandage; just some quick-clotting powder and antiseptic chemicals. She looked at Johan’s face, so pale and slack, and hoped that would be enough.

  “Get him to the shuttle with you,” she told Sully, letting loose of the unconscious man, “while the atmosphere in here is still holding out. I’m going to head in and try to find them.”

  She didn’t wait for his acknowledgement; she freed her magnetic soles from the deck and kicked off toward the equipment lockers. They were built into the bulkhead next to the lift banks, and she glanced towards the lifts, but the controls were dead, the doors sealed shut. She was about two meters from the lockers when the micro-gravity turned not-so-micro; without a bit of warning, she was falling, and not free-falling either, falling with at least a standard gravity, toward what had been the bulkhead.

  “Shit!” she blurted, pinwheeling her arms and twisting her body in mid-air with the grace and agility designed into her, trading her feet for her head.

  Her knees bent as she hit, and she could feel the twinge of all her weight and the suit’s mass as well pounding against the bulkhead with a thud of metal boot soles on metal walls. She stayed where she was, crouched in place, sucking in breaths that didn’t seem to come deep enough, the gasping gulps of air deafening inside her helmet.

  What the hell? Where was the gravity coming from? The station wasn’t rotating… Could it be the ingress of the wormhole? Starships could generate artificial gravity in Transition Space because of the differing physical laws there, but she’d never heard of anything like this.

  Doesn’t matter, woman, she snapped at herself. Move.

  The equipment lockers were in the floor and the doors hadn’t been built to stay open when sideways was down; she had to wedge herself halfway into one of the lockers, then she had to figure out how to turn down the brightness of her headlamp because it was washing out everything inside the cabinet.

  There they were, the emergency ventilators. Small air tanks attached to regulators, they were meant for emergency air during an atmosphere leak; they’d be useless out in space since they’d freeze up almost immediately, but they might keep survivors alive long enough to get to a shuttle or an escape pod if the hull was breached. She grabbed an armful of them and pushed herself up from the cabinet, letting it slam closed.

  It took her a second to reorient herself to the new up and down of the bay, and she had to turn her entire upper body to see to the sides with the vacuum helmet on, but finally she spotted the emergency access chutes. This was where she’d have to take a chance and just head straight for the shelter and hope they were still there; with communications inoperable, there wasn’t time for anything else.

  She’d chosen the closest chute and was down on her belly, ready to scuttle into it when the unexpected gravity just as unexpectedly vanished. She yelped wordlessly and grabbed onto o
ne of the ladder rungs inside the chute to keep from floating away. Just the yank towards the bulkhead should have been enough, but it wasn’t…now something was pulling her into the tube. Not gravity this time, not unless the wormhole had formed into a singularity. Debris and dust and bits of loose detritus were streaming around her, into the chute, along with a spiral of frost where the air was chilling on its way out of the station.

  No, she realized, the wormhole hadn’t formed a singularity, it was closing, shrinking, leaving gaps in the hull, and outside was vacuum. Between her and the shelter in the tube was a vacuum, and there was no way she was going to be able to get past it with all the air in this section of the station streaming out of it.

  She stared at the dark emptiness of the access tunnel, frozen with indecision for the space of two heartbeats, before she anchored her magnetic soles to the deck again and took a plodding, awkward step back to the equipment locker. There were tools in there, maybe something she could use to pry the lift doors open. If the elevator shaft wasn’t holed, there might still be some air in there, might still be a way through.

  She still had the ventilators tucked under an arm and she cursed under her breath as she tried to keep them out of the way as she pried open the correctly-labeled cabinet and found the power-spreader attached by a lanyard to the inside of the locker. She ripped it away and lunged back toward the nearest lift door, trying to keep the ventilators clenched under her arm to free both hands for its operation.

  The air outside was thinning, she could see the readout in her peripheral vision, a distracting red blinking indicator, but she had to make herself ignore it. The task was everything; even if it was probably futile, even if everyone was already dead, she had to finish it, had to try. She knew Sam would do it for her.

  She jammed the spreader’s blade in the edge of the lift door and keyed the switch in the handles. She could feel the vibration of the motor, hear the rending of the metal through the twin grips, the sound passing through her body instead of through air, with an odd hollow timbre to it. The tool was primitive, brute-force, typical Consensus technology, but she had to admit to a visceral satisfaction to the raw power of the huge, metal shears spreading outward and peeling the metal door away as if it were paper-thin foil.