Chapter 53
The dark did not scream at me, but the ship did.
Hull alarms and electrical failures and system warnings and containment breaches and alert, alert, alert, alert…
I think we were only in arcspace for a few moments.
I dragged us out of the black, trailing debris like the tail of a comet, a savage yanking that tumbled us back into…
I didn’t know where.
Somewhere in the deepest dark, where suns were merely stars, far, far away.
Drifting in the void, a short but not exhaustive list of problems:
Gravity has failed.
Internal pressure is falling.
Temperature is falling.
Arcspace drives are unresponsive.
Inspace drives are unresponsive.
Comms are unresponsive.
There are hull breaches in at least five places, but internal sensors are struggling; there may be more. Containment doors have dropped, sealing off access to, among other areas, the engine room, the sick bay, crew quarters.
An automatic shutdown has locked internal power to emergency backup, until safe restart of the reactor can be confirmed. This requires access to the engine room. I cannot get to the engine room.
Maolcas is unconscious, bleeding, at the back of the cockpit.
An electrical fire has been reported in the secondary storage bay, but that area is already in the process of venting and the circuit has been automatically isolated, so let’s just hope that sorts itself out.
Water tanks are leaking.
Hydrogen tanks are leaking.
Internal bows are fractured.
We are lost, and will not be found.
When your ship is in distress, there is a standard protocol that must be followed.
First: oxygen.
Every chair in the cockpit had an oxygen canister behind it, and though I didn’t know whether ship oxygen was failing entirely, there were enough flashing lights and warning alarms that I didn’t take the risk.
I put on my mask.
Then I put on Maolcas’.
They still lay where they’d fallen, at the very back of the cockpit. With gravity failing, the most I could do was drag them to a chair, strap them in, hope they weren’t bleeding internally. I pocketed the kitchen knife, just in case.
Second: comms.
There are several flavours of broken one may encounter with any ship.
A minor broken that the system can diagnose and is easily repaired; a rather more complex broken that you may fault-find by slow elimination of likely causes; and the absolute broken whereby the diagnostics system doesn’t even want to boot up and it is not one spare part but a complete refit that is required.
I spent a few minutes examining comms, and concluded it was the last.
The interior of the ship was dark, blinking soft red, all but backup chemical lighting extinguished.
The air was growing cold, my breath beginning to huff in small white clouds as I pulled myself along, nausea swelling in the shift from all the gravity to none at all.
A med kit under a console provided a shot of anti-sickness meds and a thermal blanket, which I twined around Maolcas as tight as I could, tucking the ends into cuffs and trousers like a shroud.
There was also a torch; I tried turning it on and it hurt my eyes, so I left it.
Still Maolcas did not move.
I pulled myself hand-over-hand to the cockpit door.
It had sealed at the first hull breach. The automatic locks were unresponsive, but the manual lock had a test mode that opened it just enough to unseal a little pouch of sapphire-hued fluids against the tiny gap created: watch and wait to see whether the liquid was sucked through into a harsh vacuum beyond.
It was not, merely drifting in a jewelled ball before me, so cautiously I opened the door all the way.
Beyond, the corridor, sealed compartment after sealed compartment.
I dragged myself along, handholds above every door, embedded across ceiling and floor.
I was shivering by the time I made it to the suit locker.
The units inside were oversized, flapping and flopping in my grasp as I tried to wriggle into one.
It hissed with a satisfying whisper as I pulled the helmet down, began to compress to my form.
Its internal air supply smelled old, synthetic; a monitor on my wrist gave levels for power, oxygen, heat.
I dialled all down to their minimum operational range, pushed back off towards the engine room.
I didn’t need to test for a vacuum behind the sealed compartment dividing engineering from the ship.
I could feel it when I pressed my hand against the frame, sense it in the slow, angry creaking all around me.
I pushed back down the hall to the next compartment door, cranked it shut, sealed myself into the gap between.
My suit had a tether, which I strapped to a handhold on the wall.
Even so, when I began to crank open the door to engineering, the tug of nothingness snapped me up and forward, bashing my head against the inside of my helmet, cracking my teeth together as the sudden rush of air tossed against me.
Then it passed; now the ship creaked around me and I could no longer hear it.
Only my breath, slow and tight inside the helmet.
I unhitched myself, cautiously pushed on through.
The hull breach in engineering was not a small hole.
I looked up through a gash torn in the left-hand side of the vessel and saw the endless dark pinpointed with impossibly distant stars.
The vacuum had sucked away the most dangerous chemicals and components; only a few floating globules of leaking coolant remained, drifting in the black; only a few razored clouds of sheared-off, frozen metal.
I looked for a while.
Then returned to the compartment door.
Resealed it behind me.
Drifted back to the cockpit to die.