Limbo System

by Rick Cook

  “These walls are full of stuff,” he explained to no one in particular as he released the fasteners. He grunted as a particularly stiff one refused to loosen. “The panels aren’t really part of the structure. They just cover things.” Another grunt and the last fastener came loose. Clancy lifted the panel out of the way and peered into the narrow space behind. Several pipes ran through the center of the closet, but nothing else showed.

  As Carmella and Martin watched, he crawled in, eeled his way around the pipes and attacked the fasteners at the bottom of the closet. “There,” he sighed as he backed out and wiggled the panel free.

  The opening was perhaps two feet square and pitch dark. “It’s a tight squeeze, but I think we can all make it,” the engineer told the other two. He reached into a breast pocket and handed a penlight flashlight to Carmella. “You’re the smallest so you go first.”

  Hesitantly, Carmella took the flashlight and wiggled through the opening.

  There were a dozen men waiting for Kirchoff in the corridor just beneath Shuttle Bay One. Quickly, they filled the engineering officer in on the situation. The obvious thing to do was to get the shuttle out of the hangar. But the mechanisms in the bay were not responding. The bay itself was a raging inferno and open to vacuum besides.

  Worse, Kirchoff knew they didn’t have a lot of time. So far the fuel feeding the fire was only coming out of the ruptured line. But if the tanks themselves leaked, the shuttle would turn into a bomb that could set off the Maxwell’s adjacent tanks and destroy the ship.

  Meanwhile, the fire from the shuttle’s stern was licking against the rear bulkhead of the shuttle bay, heating it and threatening to warp and broach the bulkhead.

  “What’s in the storeroom behind the shuttle?” Kirchoff demanded.

  “That’s Hold 48. General cargo, sir.”

  “What kind of general cargo, dammit? Is it going to blow or just burn?” The man turned back to the screen.

  “Listed as dry stores, sir. Nothing hazardous or flammable.”

  “All right,” he ordered, “open that hold to vacuum.” One of the men moved off down the corridor to the nearest set of manual controls.

  Kirchoff looked at the other men. “Okay,” he told them, “the doors are already open. We have to free the shuttle and get it out of the bay.”

  He turned to an engineering crewman who had a compad plugged into an access panel. “What’s the status of the release mechanism?” Kirchoff asked.

  The crewman consulted his compad. “I’m not getting any readings,” he said. “At the very least the controls and sensors are out and the shackles are probably damaged as well.”

  The engineering officer nodded. “Someone’s going to have to go in there to assess the damage to the shackles.” And we all know who that someone is going to be, Barry Kirchoff thought bleakly.

  “Hell, we know the damn shackles are munged,” one of the vacuum jacks said.

  “Perhaps and perhaps not. The first thing to do is check them to make sure they can’t be released manually.”

  “That’s going to take time, sir,” one of the engineering crew pointed out in a neutral voice. “Do we really have the time?”

  “The first thing to do in a situation like this is get a precise assessment of the damage. Once we have that we can formulate an action plan.”

  Someone snorted. Kirchoff decided to ignore it. “All right, I’m going outside to find out what’s happening in the bay,” he said, hoping his nervousness didn’t show. “You men move down the corridor and wait for me around the corner. You’ll be less exposed there.”

  As if that’s going to help if the damn shuttle blows.

  “How are we coming on clearing the Central Corridor?” Jenkins asked the soot-streaked runner who had just reached the bridge.

  “Making progress,” the man gasped. He had come forward at top speed and even in zero-G moving fast takes energy. “We’re having to force the doors as we move through, but we’re about a third of the way back. Fire’s confined to a wedge about two hundred fifty to two hundred seventy degrees from the corridor proper to about halfway out.” The man coughed and shook his head. “If we had communications and control to the systems in there we would have had it out a long time ago.”

  “But now?”

  The man grinned and even under the red gloom of the bridge lights his teeth gleamed in contrast to his smoke-stained face. “We’re getting it, sir. It’s just taking a little longer.”

  As he made his way along the hull to the shuttle bay, Kirchoff looked up. There, laying a few hundred meters off the Maxwell, was a Colonial ship.

  What the hell? Kirchoff thought. But he had his own troubles.

  With the penlight clenched in her teeth, Carmella O’Hara led the small party down the crawl space. It was dank, musty and every motion stirred so much dust Carmella was afraid she would sneeze and lose the light. Her nose tickled unbearably, but she restrained herself and every so often pressed her nose into her shoulder.

  Without a word, Carmella stopped so suddenly that Clancy nearly ran his head into her butt.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  Carmella took the flashlight out of her mouth. “There’s a wall here.” She groped ahead. “It fits right down on the pipe and it fills the whole tunnel.”

  “Shit! It’s a goddamn firebreak.” Clancy realized his imperfect knowledge of this part of the ship had betrayed him. Of course, they’d have firebreaks across spaces like this, you shithead! And naturally they match up with the fire doors. This crawlway was only intended to give repair crews access to patch leaks in the water pipe. There was no need to go all the way along the Central Corridor in it.

  “What do we do now?” Carmella couldn’t keep a quiver out of her voice.

  “We back up and we look for an access panel on the other side of the crawlway,” Clancy said with a lot more confidence than he felt.

  “We can’t turn around in here,” Martin protested.

  “That’s why we back up,” Clancy told him. “And we don’t bother about turning around when we get to the place we came in. Give me the flashlight.” Wordlessly, Carmella handed it to him.

  “All right, ass-end first. Let’s go.”

  And the three crawled back down the tunnel.

  Shuttle Bay One was, to put it mildly, a mess. Part of the cradle was provided by the bay doors themselves. Opening them had half-freed the shuttle, but the rest of the mechanism was on the other side, toward the center of the ship. That part was hung up.

  The rear end of the bay was glowing dull red from the hydrox fire spewing out of the damaged rear of the shuttle. The hydrogen-oxygen flame itself was colorless, but flakes of paint and other debris caught in the torch flared, sparked and smoked. Even from where he stood, Kirchoff could feel the heat radiating off the hot metal.

  Dear Lord, the young engineer thought, staring down into the pit. Then he began to work his way down the handholds on the front wall of the bay, headed for the deck and the shackles that were clasping a bomb to the Maxwell’s breast.

  Ludenemeyer flitted back and forth among several stations nervously.

  He wanted all his top people on duty, but everything seemed to have gone wrong. Clancy was somewhere forward and Kirchoff was fighting the fire in Bay One. That left him and one engineering technician, young Carson, plus the man the captain had sent down to help guard the engine room.

  A cook! The captain had sent a goddamn cook to engineering!

  And now communication with the bridge had gone completely out. It was too much.

  “This is ridiculous,” Ludenemeyer said at last. “I’m going forward to try to establish communication.”

  “Orders were to wait here, sir,” the cook said neutrally.

  “My orders are to run this department as efficiently as I can and I can’t do anything until I know what’s happening elsewhere.”

  The man only looked at him.

  “Look Mr.—what did you say your name was?”
/>   “Francis, sir. Joe Francis.”

  “Very well, Mr. Francis,” Ludenemeyer said patiently, “there is an emergency comm on a different circuit a hundred meters down this corridor. It will take me less than five minutes to reach it.”

  He turned to the younger man. “Carson, you’re in charge.” With that he twisted and flicked off through the door.

  The engineer eyed the older man suspiciously. Not only wasn’t he an engineer, he wasn’t a technician of any kind and to Carson’s way of thinking he had no business at all in the engineering spaces. When he had been dishing up food on the serving line he had been completely unremarkable. Now he had an air of easy superiority that the young engineer found both irritating and a little unsettling.

  Besides, he wore the pistol on his hip with suspicious ease. The younger man was acutely conscious of the pistol flapping at his own side, not to mention how completely ludicrous he looked with a gunbelt strapped over his spacesuit.

  The other man ignored Carson and made himself comfortable for the wait.

  It seemed as if they had been crawling forever. Carmella’s knees were raw and sore and several times already she had planted a booted foot on one of Mike Clancy’s hands as they crawled backwards down the tiny access space. Unlike Martin, Clancy didn’t complain when a foot landed on his fingers.

  The tunnel seemed to squeeze in around Carmella and the dank, musty air was becoming harder and harder to breathe. Her breathing was becoming ragged and she was hoarse from coughing due to the dust everyone was kicking up. Are we going to die like this? she wondered. On our hands and knees crawling backwards into a fire? There was a part of her that wanted to scream and flail against the tunnel walls and that part was getting bigger and bigger the further they crawled in the darkness.

  Suddenly, Clancy stopped and Carmella nearly rammed her butt into his nose.

  “Access panel,” the engineer said. Carmella twisted her head around and in the flash of the pen light she saw him running his hands around the edges. “This one wasn’t designed to be opened from this side,” he said conversationally, “but . . . give me some room will you?”

  Carmella crawled forward and Martin crawled back. Then Clancy writhed around in the narrow tunnel until his back and shoulders were against one wall. Then he lashed out with both feet.

  On the second kick, the panel began to tear loose. On the fourth, it floated free and all three of them tumbled out into a small compartment lit only by a single emergency lamp. While Carmella rubbed her knees and sucked in great lungfuls of the dry, dust-free air, Clancy opened the door and played his light on the numbers stenciled on it.

  “Not bad. We can’t get out of this section unless we can get one of the fire doors open, but we should be safe here.”

  “Thank God,” Carmella said.

  “There’s another scuttle down that corridor, but it leads up to the service corridor forward—the part that’s on fire.”

  Clancy came back into the room. “Wait a minute,” he said as his light played on the wall behind the other two. “That’s firefighting equipment!”

  Carmella turned and saw the familiar red symbol and the word “fire” stenciled on the door.

  “I’ll bet there’s a fire riser coming off that main above us and down through that closet,” the engineer said. He paused, thinking.

  “Wait here just a second,” he said and dashed out into the corridor.

  The inside of the bay was even worse. By the time he reached the deck, Kirchoff could hear the fire. The sound was conducted by the deck and came up through his boots, a low rumbling roar that rattled his teeth.

  Doing his best to ignore the inferno raging at his back, Kirchoff took the tester from his belt and clipped it to the test point on the shackle. The controls were stone dead.

  He looked at the clamps skeptically. They were basically hydraulic and without power they couldn’t be moved. They would have to be cut, but that was going to be a major job, especially so close to a loaded shuttle.

  Although tiny compared to the Maxwell, the shuttle was massive. It would take a lot of energy carefully applied to get her moving out of the bay. It couldn’t be just any push either, Kirchoff realized bleakly. The shuttle was essentially a light shell. It was fairly strong along the line of thrust, but it was much less strong laterally. Too much pressure against the already weakened shell and it would rupture, guaranteeing an explosion.

  Whatever they did they were going to have to do fast. By rights the shuttle should have exploded long ago and Kirchoff doubted their luck would hold much longer.

  Ludenemeyer pulled himself down the corridor keeping close to the right-hand wall. Ahead was a cross corridor leading to one of the stores sections that lay along the central tube beneath the enormous fuel tanks that made up most of the rear two-thirds of the Maxwell. It was on the logistics circuit, not engineering, so there was a chance it would still be working.

  Not much of a chance, Ludenemeyer admitted to himself. The engineering comm circuits had more redundancy than the logistics circuits, but it was an excuse to move around, to do something. He would probably end up having to pass the word forward using spacesuits’ radio sets, but he didn’t like that at all. Too insecure.

  He reached the cross corridor and turned the corner with a quick kick. He only vaguely saw the mass of grayish shapes before a dozen clawed hands grasped him.

  “It’s like I thought,” Clancy said as he came back. “The doors are sealed at each end of the corridor and the scuttle leads back up into the next section of the service corridor.”

  “So we stay here until someone comes to get us,” Martin said.

  “Wrong! The first thing we gotta do is get that fucking fire under control.”

  Carmella bit her lips and nodded. Like Clancy, she had a Spacer’s fear of fire in space.

  Martin was a groundsider and he didn’t. “Fighting that thing’s a job for the fire crews,” he protested.

  “See any fire crews around?” Clancy said with a nasty grin. “Between the damned search the captain ordered and whatever the hell has happened, it’s gonna take a long, long time to get those crews up here. Meanwhile, we’re here and if we don’t get that thing knocked down in a hurry the whole ship’s gonna be in trouble.”

  He rummaged through the locker. There were hoses, extinguishers, and some hand tools. But there were no suits or breathing masks. Of course, Clancy thought savagely, no one but a fucking idiot tries to fight a fire on a spaceship without at least an ordinary spacesuit and more likely a full engineering suit. Normally, he’d be fighting a fire with a trained crew in engineering suits. But his suit was aft with his crew. He’d have to make the best he could of what he had here.

  He began dragging out the fire hose and the fog nozzle.

  “He’s right,” the young woman said. “It’s not standard procedure but he’s right.” The thought of trying to fight a major fire with three people and no suits terrified her, but she knew Clancy was correct.

  This sure as hell ain’t a standard situation, the engineer thought as he broke out the hose and set the nozzle for fog. He reached into the closet and turned on the valve, the hose bucked and fought as it plumped up with water. He flipped the lever on the nozzle and a clammy burst of tiny water droplets blossomed out.

  “Okay,” he told them, “I’ll go up through the scuttle first. You,” he nodded to the astronomer, “come up after me to help me hold the hose.” He looked at Carmella appraisingly.

  He knows I’m scared, she thought. I can see he knows.

  “You stay here and watch the water flow. If that gauge starts to drop, come up after us and let us know immediately. I think there’s a broken oxygen line in there someplace. We’ll try to work back to the manual cutoff for that, shut it off and then damp everything down good.”

  Carmella nodded, glad she was being left behind and ashamed at the same time.

  As Barry Kirchoff made his way forward along the hull, he realized he didn’t have the fai
ntest idea what he was going to do. None of the procedures they had taught him on Luna would work on this one. He had gone through his check list, run off the end and gone through it again and he still didn’t have the faintest idea what to do next.

  The men were waiting for him in a little knot as he came up the corridor.

  Command, he told himself. You’re in command. Whatever you do you can’t let them know how scared you are or that you don’t have any idea what to do.

  The men gathered in front of him, instinctively arranging themselves so they would all be able to pick up the emissions of his short-range infrared communicator.

  Command. Act decisively. A leader always knows what to do. The lessons from the Academy kept running through his head. But he didn’t know what to do, none of what he had learned covered this and there was no higher authority to refer to. As the men looked at him expectantly, Kirchoff felt terribly alone and completely naked. Finally, he nudged the communicator switch with his chin.

  “All right, gentlemen,” Lieutenant Barry Kirchoff said. “If anyone has any suggestions, let’s hear them.”

  “Well,” said one of the vacuum jacks, “we could always knock a hole in the tank.”

  Ridiculous! But for perhaps the first time in his life, Kirchoff bit back his own response. “How would that work?” he asked carefully.

  The raid commander couldn’t believe his luck. Here was one of the three critical ones he had been sent to seize, blundering into his grasp like a light-mazed night flyer. He checked the moments into the raid and already his mission was one-third accomplished. Now, if only the others were so lucky!

  He watched as the enemy’s Master of Engines was trussed and hustled to the rear. A secondary mission was to examine the engine room of the alien ship and if possible sabotage enough equipment so that the vessel could not flee faster than light.