by G J Ogden
“Hal, are you okay?!” Dakota called out from the pilot’s seat. She was strapped in, but her shoulder-length chestnut hair was flowing out perpendicular to her body, as if it had been fixed there by an industrial-strength hairspray.
“I’m a bit battered, but I’ll be fine,” Hallam answered as he pulled himself up across the back of Dakota’s seat, managing to grab the arm of his own chair. “What the hell is going on?” he added after perching himself on the inner armrest and peering at the various consoles and status panels. The he saw the normally smooth and opaque wall of bridge space outside the ship was turbulent, like white water on a breaking wave. Through the chaos of color and light, he was sure he could see stars.
“We have a malfunction in the Randenite fueling system,” Dakota answered. She was trying desperately to haul the tanker away from the edge of bridge space, but it seemed to be caught there, like a wheel stuck in a groove. “It hit without warning. The fuel pressure status indicator was reading a little high, but still within norms. Then all hell broke loose.”
“Have you tried throttling back or running a diagnostic on the fuel control system?”
Dakota shot him a dirty look. “Of course I have, but none of my inputs are having any effect.”
Hallam struggled to reach his computer terminal, then cycled through the menus until he reached the operational readout for the Shelby Drive. He assimilated the data as rapidly as he could and spotted the problem, swearing for the second time that day.
“Our link to the control unit has been cut off somehow,” Hallam called back to Dakota. “The drive is being injected with too much Randenite, but the sensors are reading it as normal.”
“Tell me what to do!” Dakota cried back, glancing over at Hallam, imploring him for an answer.
“We have to drop out of bridge space, right now,” Hallam called back. “Cut all power to the Shelby Drive.”
Dakota’s eyes now grew wide with fear. “But the stresses will tear the ship apart,” she answered. “That’s like curing the patient by killing him!”
“Not if we control the shut-down,” said Hallam, but then the breath was stolen from him as another series of brutal shimmies hammered through the deck, shaking Hallam off his perch. He reached out and caught the headrest, sparing himself from another hard fall, which would most likely have sent him crashing into Dakota. He then felt something pushing against his feet and saw Dakota twisting toward him, hands grasped around the soles of his boots.
“Push against me!” Dakota called out as Hallam felt her take up some of his weight.
Hallam pressed down, feeling Dakota’s hands push against his legs, until he managed to haul himself back onto his perch. He then made a series of rapid calculations and adjustments, as Dakota shook the pain and numbness from her fingers.
“I’ve sent you the shut-down sequence,” Hallam called back. “Run it now!”
Dakota pulled up the data that Hallam had just sent to her console and initiated the process as he’d laid it out.
“How do you know so much about Shelby Drives?” Dakota wondered as she worked. Hallam remembered that she talked a lot when she was nervous. “I thought they were a dark art known only to a seldom few.”
Hallam adjusted his position on the arm of the chair, trying to get more comfortable, but his backside was already going numb.
“I just sort of get how they work, at least a little,” Hallam answered, remembering his time in the CSF advanced training center. “The other CSF students used to call me Randy Knight. Get it?”
Dakota shook her head but managed a smile. “That’s a terrible joke, which could also mean something else entirely...”
Hallam nodded and laughed. “Yeah, I guess it was pretty bad.” He hadn’t thought about that time of his life for years and found it strange that it would come to him now. Then Dakota cursed and thumped her fist on the arm of her chair, and Hallam felt his stomach turn over. “What’s wrong?”
“The ECU glitch has locked me out of the Shelby Drive throttle control too,” Dakota answered as another wicked shimmy rocked the cockpit. “No matter what I do, the drive just keeps being fed with more Randenite. I can’t slow down, shut down, or anything in between!”
More alarms sounded and Hallam saw that their port-side armor was being stripped away, like a car continuously scraping an alloy wheel against the curb.
Hallam stretched over to read the information on his panel, but the sensors were still showing the levels as within norms. He racked his brains for a solution, but all he had were suppositions. “If it’s a fault in the Shelby Drive unit itself, maybe a fried or faulty component, then it can’t be fixed from here.”
Dakota pounded her fist on the arm of her chair again. “Damn it, the Consortium engineers are supposed to check and test the Shelby Drive system before each departure.” Then she turned to Hallam, looking lost and desperate. “What do we do, Hal? I’m all out of ideas…”
Hallam hadn’t yet reached the same level of despair as Dakota; he knew there was one option left, but he also knew she wouldn’t like it. He didn’t like it himself.
“I can maybe bypass the fault from inside the engineering section,” said Hallam, fixing Dakota’s anxious eyes, which only grew more fearful as Hallam spoke the words.
“Hal, you can’t go in there!” Dakota hit back. “The reactor shielding is cracked, and the drive is already running hot. The radiation will kill you!”
Hallam already knew this, but it didn’t change what he had to do, and why he had to be the one to do it. “It’s the only way, Dak. If I don’t, then we both die.”
Dakota shook her head. “Then we draw straws or toss a coin to see who goes,” she argued, but Hallam held firm.
“Dak, I saw that the fuel system was out of whack as soon as we departed the Centrum,” said Hallam with a regretful tone. “I saw it and I did nothing.” Then his head dropped low. “No, it was worse than that. I saw it, and I just skulked off to my bunk without saying a word.”
“Hal, this isn’t your fault…” Dakota began, but Hallam had made up his mind.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Hallam answered. “It has to be done. And since we don’t have any straws or coins, and you don’t know one end of a Shelby Drive from another, I get the duty.”
Dakota was about to argue back again, but Hallam had already launched himself from the arm of the seat toward the cockpit door. He caught the frame, barely, and felt his knees slam into the metal wall. He bit down against the shooting agony rushing through his body and began climbing.
He heard Dakota shouting after him to stop but continued on, dragging his body up and into the corridor. It was still tilted by ninety degrees, due to the distorted gravity well caused by the malfunctioning Shelby Drive. With his knees stinging, Hallam then ran along the corridor, stumbling every few meters as the tanker continued to shudder and twist under the strain, until he reached the door to the engineering section.
The door was locked, and Hallam reached for the emergency release lever. He swallowed hard as he saw the bright red ring of light surrounding it – a light that meant the compartment was flooded with dangerous levels of Randenite radiation. Hallam looked back, seeing Dakota calling out to him from inside the cockpit, but her words were consumed by the noise of the ship being torn apart. He tried to put her out of his mind, just as he tried to put the red ring of light out of his mind, but there was no escaping the consequences of what he had to do. Hallam closed his eyes and yanked down hard on the release handle.
The door slid open and Hallam was assaulted by yet more alarms, on top of the calamitous racket from the Shelby Drive, which was on the verge of melting down. He darted inside and slammed the button to close the door before turning the manual locking ring to ensure it couldn’t be opened again. Through the porthole window, he could see the door to the cockpit also closing – an emergency protocol when radiation was detected in the central corridor. Like it or not, there was no going back now, Hallam realized.
Running over to the main Shelby Drive assembly, Hallam activated the internal comm and patched himself through to Dakota in the cockpit.
“Dak, I’m inside,” he called out, having to shout nearly at the top of his voice to be heard over the din. “I’m going to access the Shelby Drive and try to manually cut the fuel supply.”
“Hal, get out of there!” he heard Dakota cry back, though her voice was crackly and muted. “We’ll find another way.”
“There’s no time; just sit tight and you’ll get out of this alive,” Hallam shouted back, working furiously to remove an access panel to the fueling system.
His idea was to manually activate the fuel shut-off valve, in the hope that starving the Shelby Drive of Randenite would cause it to stall and kick them back into normal space. In truth, he had no idea if it would work, or even if such a valve existed in the tanker’s fuel system. All he had were some vague memories of Shelby Drive operation lectures he’d sat in at the CSF training academy. It was thin, but it was all he had to go on.
Hallam tossed the access panel to the deck as the ship was rocked by another series of hard shocks. He grabbed on to the drive housing to steady himself as the sound of bulkheads and armor plates creaking and buckling echoed around the room. He heard Dakota’s voice again over the comm, but the words were distorted and indistinct. Pulling himself back toward the drive assembly, he dove inside, looking for something he might be able to recognize, but the internals of the tanker’s Shelby Drive were a million light years away from anything he’d studied.
With desperation taking hold, Hallam was about to start grabbing at random wires and pulling, but then he noticed something that looked out of place. It was a small black box, attached to one of the control boards, but stuck on at an angle that made it look foreign to Hallam’s eyes. Instinctively, he reached in and closed his fingers around it, yanking the device away from the board. Immediately, the strained pitch of the Shelby Drive altered and he could feel the vibrations through the deck lessening, if only by a fraction.
“You did it!” Hallam heard Dakota yell over the comm. “I have control again. Stand by…”
Hallam waited and the rapid pulse of the Shelby Drive abruptly stopped and he was thrown to the front of the compartment like a rag doll. When he came to his senses again, more alarms were ringing out, and there was a heavy thumping reverberating through his back. Then he thought he heard voices and called out to Dakota, but the muffled cry he heard in reply didn’t sound like it had come through over the comm.
The thumping came again, and Hallam managed to push himself back to his feet, clawing against the wall for support. Then he realized what the cause of the banging was; Dakota Wulfrun was outside the door of the engineering compartment, hammering against the thick porthole window.
“Hal, it worked, we’re back in normal space!” Dakota yelled, though her words barely carried into the compartment. “But the ship is crippled, and the hull is buckling. We have to jettison before there’s a breach.”
Hallam looked down at the door release lever; the surrounding panel of lights was still bright red. He knew that if he opened the door, all it would do was condemn Dakota to death too.
“Dak, you have to go without me,” Hallam shouted, though his throat felt sore and his head was still pounding despite Dakota having stopped thumping the door. “If I leave this compartment, you’ll be exposed too.”
“We can get you help,” Dakota yelled back. Hallam could see her trying to haul back on the door release lever on the opposite side, but with the manual locking ring activated, it was impossible to open the door. “We can get you to a hospital!”
Hallam shook his head, “Dak, we don’t even know where the hell we are. Our Shelby Drive is busted, and even if our escort fighter managed to drop out of bridge space close by, it will be hours before we’re picked up and flown back to the Centrum. We both know I’ll be dead long before then.”
The creaks and groans emanating from the tanker’s battered hull grew louder, then another alarm blared out in the cabin. Hallam knew by its pitch and pattern that it signified a hull breach. They were out of time. He knew it, and as he met Dakota’s eyes for the final time, he knew that she did too.
“Dak, you have to go, please,” Hallam called out, though his voice was giving up, along with his body. “If you don’t make it out, then I did this for nothing.” Hallam managed a weak smile and slipped back down to the deck with his back pressed against the metal.
Hallam could no longer hear Dakota’s cries, but the thuds resonating through his bones told him she was still hammering against the door.
“Go!” Hallam called out, but his cry was nothing more than a croak. He drifted in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of the alarms still blaring out around him. Then the thump of fists pounding against metal finally stopped, and Hallam smiled. Thank you, Dak, he said to himself, grateful that at least one of them would live.
Hallam sighed and closed his eyes. All he could do now was wait for the tanker to finally collapse, and for the emptiness of Darkspace to consume him.
10
The alarms inside the engineering section of Hallam’s stricken armored tanker continued to blare out, but the sounds were now merging into one long drone that his mind had filtered out. The aches and pains in his body had also grown more acute, but compared to the agony of waiting for the ship to implode and expel his lifeless body into the void, his physical injuries were inconsequential. Soon he would be dead, and suddenly, the stark realization of this fact hit him like an uppercut.
Hallam had never contemplated his death before, but now that it waited for him only a short time in the future, he felt no sense of comfort or relief. All he felt was disillusionment, not at his failures and mistakes, but at the fact that he’d not pulled his thumb out of his ass and done more with his potential. He knew he could have done so much more with his life, but now he would never have the chance to prove himself. Even when it came to dying, Hallam was a disappointment, he realized.
For a time, Hallam simply drifted in and out of consciousness, slipping between absurd dreams and his even more absurd reality. He dreamed of being back in his apartment in the Consortium residential block on Vesta. He was hiding under a table as the building was rocked by a mighty earthquake, so powerful that the walls began to fold in around him. It was strange, not only because there was no seismic activity on the continent where he lived, but also because, for reasons unknown, there was a large Shelby Drive installed where his TV used to be.
Over the next few minutes or hours – time had become a blur, along with everything else – Hallam continued to drift in and out of consciousness. Yet, even during his periods of wakefulness, he was plagued with feverish hallucinations, so that soon Hallam was unable to tell the difference between being awake and dreaming. One moment he was in the engineering section of the tanker, and the next he was floating along the central corridor, as if carried on a cloud. He looked up and saw Dakota Wulfrun staring back at him, smiling, as if nothing was wrong. Then the image of her changed and he was instead confronted with a faceless figure in a dark, black helmet. He screamed, but like the blare of the alarms, his frightened shouts just merged into the background drone that his mind had already blocked out.
Hallam struggled, fighting against the invisible forces that seemed to be pressing down on his shoulders and legs before a sudden sharp pain in his neck paralyzed him. The helmeted black figure appeared above him again, dark and threatening, and continued to stare down at Hallam as his breath gave way and the corridor around him faded to nothing.
11
Hallam opened his eyes and found himself lying in a bed and staring up at a corrugated metal ceiling. There were no violent rumbles or shimmies shaking the room, and there was no sound, besides the regular bleep, bleep, bleep of a machine he could see to his side. He raised his arm and saw that there was an IV line inserted into it, with the tubes snaking off into the machine, plus a dozen or so wire
s connected to various parts of his head and chest. He should have felt relieved to be alive, assuming he wasn’t already in some bizarre version of an afterlife, but something about the situation felt off.
Sitting up in the bed, he discovered he was wearing a medical gown and that he was in what appeared to be a small hospital ward, though it didn’t look like any hospital he’d ever seen before. The equipment looked new and sophisticated, but the room itself was rudimentary, almost like the inside of an industrial unit or freighter. Even more curiously, he was the only one there.
The strange, almost eerie location, plus the unexplained nature of how he had got there, continued to fuel a sense of uneasiness. Hallam’s instincts told him to leave, but as he reached down to remove the numerous pads connected to his skin, a woman dressed in blue medical scrubs walked in through an open door opposite his bed. She stopped abruptly and her eyes widened, either in shock or fear, then she darted back outside again without uttering a word.
Hallam had only spent time in hospital once in his life, after a Darkspace Renegade attack three years ago left him with a collapsed lung. He didn’t remember too much about his stay, other than the crushing boredom of waiting to be discharged. However, one thing he did know for sure was that no doctor or nurse he’d encountered then had ever run away immediately after seeing him sitting upright in bed.
Hallam’s fight or flight response had now fully kicked in, and he tore out the IV and ripped away the wires before sliding off the bed. The metal floor was ice cold, and the sudden chill stole the breath from his lungs. He looked around for his boots, or any kind of footwear, but there was nothing in sight. With panic starting to take over, he ran to a nearby cupboard, though his legs almost gave way underneath him, and flung open the doors, before rifling through the contents, looking for something more substantial to wear.