by Tim Lebbon
“Can you hail them?” Hoop asked.
Baxter tried several times, but was greeted only by static.
“Cameras,” Sneddon said.
“I’ve got no contact with them at all.”
“No, switch to the cameras in Bay Three,” Sneddon replied. “If they’re still coming in, and Jones sees the damage, he’ll aim for there.”
Baxter nodded, his hands drifting across the control panels.
A screen flickered into life. The picture jumped, but it showed a clear view out from the end of Bay Three’s docking arm.
“Shit” Hoop muttered.
The Samson was less than a minute away.
“But those things...” Sneddon said.
I wish you were still here, Lucy, Hoop thought. But Lucy and Cornell had to be dead. He was in charge. And now, with the Marion fatally damaged, an even more pressing danger was manifesting.
“We’ve got to get down there,” Hoop said. “Sneddon, Welford, with me. Let’s suit up.”
As Welford broke out the emergency space suits from units at the rear of the bridge, Hoop and Lachance exchanged glances. If anything happened to Hoop, Lachance was next in charge. But if it got to that stage, there’d be very little left for him to command.
“We’ll stay in contact all the time,” Hoop said.
“Great, that’ll help.” Lachance smiled and nodded.
As the three of them pulled on the atmosphere suits, the Marion shuddered one more time.
“Samson is docking,” Baxter said.
“Keep everything locked,” Hoop said. “Everything. Docking arm, airlock, inner vestibule.”
“Tight as a shark’s arse,” Lachance said.
We should be assessing damage, Hoop thought. Making sure the distress signal has transmitted, getting down to med bay, doing any emergency repairs that might give us more time.
But the Samson held dangers that were still very much a threat.
That was priority one.
* * *
Though he was now in command, Hoop couldn’t help viewing things through the eyes of chief engineer. Lights flickered on and off, indicating damaged ducting and cabling on several of the electrical loops. Suit sensors showed that atmosphere was relatively stable, though he had already told Sneddon and Welford that they were to keep their helmets locked on. Damage to the Marion might well be an ongoing process.
They eschewed the elevator to climb down two levels via the large central staircase. The ship still juddered, and now and then a deeper, heavier thud rattled in from somewhere far away. Hoop didn’t have a clue what it might be. The huge engines were isolated for now, never in use while they were in orbit. The life support generators were situated far toward the rear of the ship, close to the recreation rooms. All he could think was that the superstructure had been weakened so much in the crash that damage was spreading. Cracks forming. Airtight compartments being compromised and venting explosively to space.
If that was the case, they needn’t worry about their decaying orbit.
“Samson’s initiating the automatic docking sequence,” Baxter said through their suits’ comm link.
“Can you view on board?” Hoop asked.
“Negative. I’m still trying to get contact back online. Samson has gone quiet.”
“Keep us informed,” Hoop said. “We’ll be there soon.”
“What do we do when we get there?” Welford asked from behind him.
“Make sure everything’s locked up tight,” Sneddon said.
“Right,” Hoop agreed. “Sneddon, did you recognize those things we saw on the Delilah?” He said no more, and his companions’ breathing rattled in his headset.
“No,” Sneddon said. Her voice was low, quiet. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like them.”
“It’s like they were hatching from inside the miners’ chests.”
“I’ve read everything I can about alien life-forms,” Sneddon said. “The first was discovered more than eighty years ago, and since then everything discovered through official missions has been reported, categorized wherever possible, captured, and analyzed. Nothing like this. Just... nothing. The closest analogy I can offer is a parasitic insect.”
“So if they hatched from the miners, what laid the eggs?” Welford asked. But Sneddon didn’t answer, and it was a question that didn’t bear thinking about right then.
“Whatever it was, we can’t let them on board,” Hoop said, more determined than ever. “They’re not that big— we lose one on the Marion, and we’ll never find it again.”
“Until it gets hungry,” Welford said.
“Is that what they were doing?” Hoop asked. “Eating?”
“Not sure,” Sneddon said.
They moved on silently, as if wrestling with thoughts about those strange, horrific alien creatures. Finally Hoop broke the silence.
“Well, Karen, if we get out of this, you’ll have something to report,” he said.
“I’ve already started making notes.” Sneddon’s voice sounded suddenly distant and strange, and Hoop thought there might be something wrong with his suit’s intercom.
“You’re just spooky,” Welford said, and the science officer chuckled.
“Come on,” Hoop said. “We’re getting close to the docking level. Keep your eyes open.” Another thud shook through the ship. If it really was an explosive decompression—one in a series—then keeping their eyes open would merely enable them to witness their doom as a bulkhead exploded, they were sucked out into space, and the force of the vented air shoved them away from the Marion.
He’d read about astronauts being blasted into space. Given a shove, they’d keep moving away from their ship, drifting until their air ran out and they suffocated. But worse were the cases of people who, for some reason—a badly connected tether, a stumble—drifted only slowly, so slowly, away from their craft, unable to return, dying while home was still within sight.
Sometimes a spacesuit’s air could last for up to two days.
They reached the end of the entry corridor leading down into the docking level. A bulkhead door had closed, and Hoop took a moment to check sensors. The atmosphere beyond seemed normal, so he input the override code and the locking mechanism whispered open.
A soft hiss, and the door slid into the wall.
The left branch led to Bays One and Two, the right to Three and Four. Ten yards along the left corridor, Hoop saw the blood.
“Oh, shit,” Welford said.
The wet splash on the wall spur beside the blast door was the size of a dinner plate. The blood had run, forming spidery lines toward the floor. It glistened, still wet.
“Let’s check,” Hoop said, but he was already quite certain what they would find. The door sensors had been damaged, but a quick look through the spy hole confirmed his suspicions. Beyond the door was vacuum. Wall paneling and systems ducting had been stripped away by the storm of air being sucked out. If the person who had left that blood spatter had been able to hang on until the blast doors automatically slammed shut...
But they were out there now, beyond the Marion, lost.
“One and Two definitely out of action,” Hoop said. “Blast doors seem to be holding well. Powell, don’t budge from that panel, and make sure all the doors behind us are locked up tight.”
“You’re sure?” Powell said in their headsets. “You’ll be trapped down there.”
“If compartments are still failing, it could fuck the whole ship,” Hoop said. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
He turned to the others. Sneddon was looking past him at the blood spatter, her eyes wide behind the suit glass.
“Hey,” Hoop said.
“Yeah.” She looked at him. Glanced away again. “I’m sorry, Hoop.”
“We’ve all lost friends. Let’s make sure we don’t lose any more.” They headed back along the opposite corridor, toward Bays Three and Four.
“Samson has docked,” Baxter said through the comm.
“On auto
matic?”
“Affirmative.” Most docking procedures were performed automatically, but Hoop knew that Vic Jones occasionally liked to fly manually. Not this time.
“Any contact?”
“Nothing. But I think I just saw a flicker on the screen. I’m working to get visual back, if nothing else.”
“Keep me posted. We need to know what’s going on inside that ship.” Hoop led the way. The blast door leading to Bays One and Two was still open, and they moved quickly through toward the undamaged docking areas.
Another vibration rumbled through the ship, transmitted up through the floor. Hoop pressed his gloved hand hard against the wall, leaning in, trying to feel the echoes of the mysterious impact. But they had already faded.
“Lachance, any idea what’s causing those impacts?”
“Negative. The ship seems steady.”
“Compartments failing, you think?”
“I don’t think so. If that was happening we’d be venting air to space, and that would act as thrust. I’d see movement in the Marion. As it is, her flight pattern seems to have stabilized into the slowly decaying orbit we talked about. We’re no longer geo-stationary, but we’re moving very slowly in comparison with the surface. Maybe ten miles per hour.”
“Okay. Something else, then. Something loose.”
“Take care down there,” Lachance said. He wasn’t usually one to offer platitudes.
They passed through two more bulkhead doors, checking the sensors both times to ensure that the compartments on the other side were still pressurized. As they neared bays Three and Four, Hoop knew they’d have a visual on the damage.
The docking bays were contained in two projections from the underside of the Marion. One and Two were contained in the port projection, Three and Four in the starboard. As they neared the corridor leading into bays Three and Four, there were viewing windows on both sides.
“Oh, hell,” Hoop muttered. He was the first to see, and he heard shocked gasps from Sneddon and Welford.
The front third of the port projection, including the docking arms and parts of the airlock structures, had been swept away as if by a giant hand. Bay One was completely gone, torn aside to leave a ragged wound behind. Parts of Bay Two were still intact, including one long shred of the docking arm which was the source of the intermittent impacts—snagged on the end of the loose reach of torn metal and sparking cables was a chunk of the Delilah. The size of several people, weighing maybe ten tons, the unidentifiable mass of metal, paneling, and electrics bounced from the underside of the Marion, swept down, ricocheted from the ruined superstructure of Bay Two, then bounced back up again.
Each strike gave it the momentum to return. It moved slowly, but such was its weight that the impact when it came was still enough to send vibrations through the entire belly of the ship.
The Delilah had all but disintegrated when it hit. Detritus from the crash still drifted with the Marion, and in the distance, silhouetted against the planet’s stormy surface, Hoop could see larger chunks slowly moving away from them.
“That’s a person out there,” Welford said quietly, pointing. Hoop saw the shape pressed against the remains of Bay Two, impaled on some of the torn metal superstructure. He couldn’t tell the sex. The body was badly mutilated, naked, and most of its head was missing.
“I hope they all died quickly,” Sneddon said.
“They were already dead!” Hoop snapped. He sighed, and raised a hand in apology. His heart was racing. Seventeen years in space and he’d never seen anything like this. People died all the time, of course, because space was such an inimical environment. Accidents were common, and it was the larger disasters that gained notoriety. The passenger ship Archimedes, struck by a hail of micro meteors on its way to Alpha Centurai, with the loss of seven hundred passengers and crew. The Colonial Marine base on a large moon in the Outer Rim, its environmental systems sabotaged, resulting in the loss of over a thousand personnel.
Even further back, in the fledgling days of space travel, the research station Nephilim orbiting Ganymede suffered stabilizer malfunction and spun down onto the moon’s surface. That one was still taught to anyone planning a career in space exploration, because every one of the three hundred people on board had continued with their experiments, transmitting data and messages of hope until the very last moment. It had been a symbol of humankind’s determination to edge out past the confines of their own planet, and eventually their own system.
In the scheme of things, this tragedy was small. But Hoop had known every one of those people on board the Delilah. And even though he couldn’t identify the frozen, ruined body stuck against the wrecked docking bay structure, he knew that he had spoken, joked, and laughed with them.
“We’ll have to cut that free,” Welford said, and at first Hoop thought he was talking about the corpse. But the engineer was watching the slowly drifting mass of metal as it moved back toward the shattered docking bays.
“We’ve got to do that and a lot more,” Hoop said. If they were to survive—if they got past this initial chaos, secured the Samson, figured out what the fuck was going on—he, Welford, and Powell needed to pull some miracles out of somewhere. “Gonna earn our pay now, guys.”
“Hoop, the Samson,” Baxter muttered in his ear.
“What is it?” They couldn’t yet see the ship where it was now static on the other side of the starboard docking arm.
“I’ve got it... a picture, up on screen.” His voice sounded hollow, empty.
“And?” Sneddon asked.
“And you don’t want to open it up. Ever. Don’t even go near it.”
Hoop wished he could see, though part of him was glad that he couldn’t.
“What’s happening in there?” Sneddon asked.
“They’ve... they’ve hatched,” Baxter said. “And they’re just... waiting. Those things, just sort of crouched there beside the bodies.”
“What about Jones and Sticky?”
“Sticky’s dead. Jones isn’t.” That flat tone again, so that Hoop didn’t really want to ask any more. But Sneddon did. Maybe it was her science officer’s curiosity.
“What’s happening to Jones?” she asked.
“Nothing. He’s... I can see him, just at the bottom of the picture. He’s just sitting there, seat turned around, back against the control panel. Shaking and crying.”
They haven’t killed him yet, Hoop thought.
“We have to seal this up,” he said. “All the doors are locked down anyway, but we have to disable all of the manual controls.”
“You think those things can open doors?” Welford asked.
“Hoop’s right,” Sneddon said. “We must assume the worst.”
“Can’t we just cut the Samson loose?”
Hoop had already thought of that. But despite the danger, they might still need the dropship. The Marion’s orbit was still decaying. There were escape pods, but their targeting was uncertain. If they used them, they’d end up scattered across the surface of the planet.
The Samson might be their only hope of survival.
“We do that and it might drift with us for days,” Lachance said, his voice coming through a hail of static. “Impact the Marion, cause more damage. We’re in bad enough shape as it is.”
“Baxter, we’re losing you,” Hoop said.
“...damaged,” Baxter said. “Lachance?”
“He’s right,” Lachance responded. “Indicators are flagging up more damage every minute that goes by. Comms, environmental, remote system. We need to start fixing things.”
“Got to fix this first,” Hoop said. “We go through the vestibule, into the docking arm for Bay Three, then into the airlock. Then from there we work back out, disabling manual controls and shutting everything down.”
“We could purge the airlock, too,” Welford said.
“Good idea. If anything does escape from the Samson, it won’t be able to breathe.”
“Who’s to say that they breathe at a
ll?” Sneddon said. “We don’t know what they are, where they come from. Mammal, insectile, reptilian, something else. Don’t know anything!” Her voice was tinged with panic.
“And it’s going to stay that way,” Hoop said. “First chance we get, we kill them. All of them.”
He wanted support from someone, but no one replied. He expected disagreement from Sneddon—as science officer, she’d see past the chaos and death to what these creatures might mean for science. But she said nothing, just stared at him, her eyes bruised, cut nose swelling.
I really am in charge now, he thought. It weighed heavy.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”
* * *
They followed Hoop’s plan.
In through the vestibule that served bays Three and Four, through the docking arm, then through the airlock to the outer hatch. Hoop and Welford went ahead, leaving Sneddon to close the doors behind them, and at the end of the docking arm the two men paused. Beyond the closed hatch lay a narrow gap, and then the Samson’s outer airlock door. There was a small viewing window in both hatch and door.
The inside of the Samson’s window was steamed up.
Hoop wondered whether the things knew they were there, so close. He thought of asking Baxter, but silence seemed wisest. Silence, and speed.
They quickly dismantled the hatch’s locking mechanism and disabled it, disconnecting the power source. It would need to be repaired before the hatch could be opened again. Much stronger than the bathroom door on the Delilah. The thought didn’t comfort Hoop as much as it should have.
They worked backward, and when they’d disabled the door mechanism between docking arm and vestibule, Welford purged the atmosphere. The doors creaked slightly under the altered pressures.
Outside the vestibule, Sneddon waited.
“Done?” she asked.
“Just this last door,” Hoop said. Welford went to work.
Five minutes later they were making their way back toward the bridge. There were now four sealed and locked doors standing between the Samson and the Marion, as well as a vacuum in the airlock.
He should have felt safer.
“Baxter, you still got a feed from the Samson?” he asked.