Arrival (7 page)

Jack pulled the release handle on the third drop pod. Time was critical, so Jack didn’t watch the pod drop away. He immediately moved back across the corridor to the fourth pod’s control panel, holding up his data pad again to watch the timer.

Will entered the access tube carefully to avoid jamming the top of his life-support pack in the hatch frame. He always felt so fragile inside his pressure suit. Only a layer of fabric encased him in his private little atmosphere. His very life was dependent upon a few high-tech machines on his back and the strength of the fabric around him. He drifted out of the tube and across the floor of the pod bay. Stopping his forward momentum, he righted himself and looked down the corridor. This place was unfamiliar to him. In the limited amount of time the science team had available for training aboard the Icarus, prior to the start of this mission, he had never actually been inside this part of the ship. He knew where it was located, how to get to it, and what it was for. But only from the plans, not from actual experience.

It was dark inside. Apart from the glowing control lights on the walls, there was only the light on Jack’s helmet, halfway down the corridor. Will reached up and turned on his helmet lamp and headed off down the corridor. It was cold in here. He could feel his suit temperature dropping, and his faceplate was already fogging up.

Jack was positioning himself in front of the fourth pod’s control panel. For some reason that Will didn’t understand, Jack was upside down, floating in front of the control panel. It was funny to Will how the flight crew seemed to pay little attention to the orientations of up and down, while the rest of them needed to do so half the time just to avoid getting sick. Will assumed that it must’ve been from spending far more time in zero gravity than most people back on the Daedalus.

Will rotated to his right and saw the green light on the compartment’s status panel. The compartment was still pressurized with breathable air. He unlocked and swung up his faceplate to call out to Jack. “Jack!” he hollered. But Jack didn’t react. “Jack!” he said even louder.

Jack flipped open the clear plastic plate covering the control box. He was getting cold, even after being in the pod bay for only a few minutes. At least he wasn’t sweating. In zero gravity, the sweat didn’t drip off of you or run down your body like it did in normal gravity. It just sort of clung there, which was a very uncomfortable feeling if you couldn’t dry yourself off with a towel.

Sequestered in his own little world within his pressure suit and unable to communicate with the others, Jack felt very isolated. All he had to listen to was the sound of his own breathing, and
that
was fogging up his faceplate. In a few more minutes, he wouldn’t be able to see anything. And although he didn’t want to open his faceplate and let even more cold air inside his self-contained world, he had no choice; he had to be able to see.

Jack unlocked and slid open his faceplate just in time to hear Will shouting from the forward end of the bay. He turned in midair to look at Will, who was motioning for him to come toward him. But Jack still had work to do. He turned back around to drop the fourth pod, which he did with a quick pull of the manual override handle.

What the hell is he doing?
Will thought.
He must see me.
“Jack! Let’s go! We’ve got to leave, now!” Jack still didn’t react. Will had no desire to go any deeper into the dark bay. This place was more than alien to him. It was frightening. But Jack wasn’t coming toward him like he requested. In fact, he appeared to be moving away from him, toward the next pod.

Against his better judgment, Will pushed off the forward bulkhead with his feet and launched himself down the long drop pod bay corridor, in the same fashion as he had seen Mac and Tony do many times before. He sailed down the corridor, and as he neared Jack, he reached out and grabbed one of the structural members to stop his momentum. His hands caught hold, and his feet passed under him, twisting his torso until he was facing the opposite direction from where he came.

Another explosion inside the port wall of the galley blew half the interior wall away, sending pieces of sheared metal and flames spewing across the cabin. Mac took the fire bottle he was about to hand Tony and sprayed it around them, repelling the streams of fire and the razor-like shards of metal away from them before they could damage their pressure suits.

“It’s no use!” Tony yelled. “We’re not going to stop this thing with fire bottles!”

Mac changed his comm-set to the primary frequency. “Frank, this is Mac! You gotta decompress this section and suck all the air out! This fire is outta control and there’s no way we can stop it!”

“
I can’t do it from here, the system is down!
” Frank’s voice came back. “
You’ll have to do it manually!
”

Mac spun around to face the bulkhead between the galley and the wardroom. The climate and life-support interface panel for the entire compartment was there by the doorway. But there were no lights showing at all, not even red ones. He moved over for a closer look and found a large shard of metal embedded in the face of the control panel. The entire control panel was dead.

Will pushed off from the support and caught Jack’s shoulder, coming to rest next to him. “Jack! Frank says we have to go now!”

Jack spun around to face him. “My comm’s busted, give me yours!”

Will reached down and removed the small comm-set control pack from his utility belt on his pressure suit. After unplugging his own comm-set line, he handed it over to Jack.

Jack plugged his comm-set into Will’s control pack and switched to the primary channel.

“The control panel here is dead! It got clobbered by flying debris during the last explosion,” Mac explained.

“
You’re gonna have to get to the manual override unit inside the bulkhead to purge the compartment!
” Frank advised him.

Another explosion rocked the ship as blue-white flames lashed out at Tony, instantly super-heating the skin of his pressure suit, transferring tremendous amounts of heat through the suit and onto Tony’s skin.

Tony screamed in pain. “My arms!” Mac instinctively spun around and launched himself across the compartment toward Tony.

The azure flames continued to whip toward Tony. He could feel the hairs on his arms singe inside his suit as he instinctively held them out in front of his face. He was hit hard on his left side by something big and bulky flying across the room. He thought he was dead until he realized it was Mac knocking him out of the path of the flames. They both flew across the room, striking the forward bulkhead.

Mac grabbed the open hatchway ring to keep them from bouncing off the wall and back into the flames. Regaining control of his body in the freedom of zero gravity, he maneuvered himself through the hatchway and into the midship airlock, dragging Tony along behind him.

“The fire has ruptured the secondary fuel transfer lines!” Frank exclaimed. “We’ll lose our main engines in two minutes, max!” Frank immediately tried to shut down the entire fuel transfer system—valves, pumps, the works. But nothing worked. “The main control umbilical must be damaged!” he added. “I’m still getting data, but nothing in the Icarus is responding to my commands! All we’ve got are the flight controls!”

“
Frank, this is Jack! Can you hear me?
”

“Jack!” Frank responded, relieved to hear his friend’s voice again.

Mac secured himself to one of the vertical handrails with the large carabiner on his utility belt. “I’m gonna blow the airlock before the whole damn ship goes up!” Mac announced as he attached Tony’s carabiner to the same handrail.

“
Wait! Don’t do it!
” Jack cried over the comm-set.

“
Mac! Don’t blow the hatch! If you do, all the compartment doors will automatically seal and they won’t be able to return to the LRV in time!
” 

Flames surged through the hatchway from the galley into the midship airlock. In seconds, the fire devoured most of the oxygen in the galley and was now searching for more in neighboring compartments. In a few more seconds, it would find Mac and Tony, and consume them as well.

Mac reached out and slapped the emergency hatch-blow button. The lights in the midship airlock compartment instantly turned red, and small warning strobe lights flashed, warning them of the impending decompression. In each adjoining compartment with open hatches, the lights turned red and
their
strobes began to flash as well.

There was a five-second delay built into the system to allow the person activating it to brace themselves. Mac reached up and pulled the pin out of the automatic hatch closure mechanism on the galley hatch to prevent it from closing automatically. He had heard Frank warning him not to do it but Frank wasn’t down here amongst the flames, about to be burned alive. It was decompression or death. They could deal with getting back to the LRV after they survived decompression. Through the roar of the fire, Mac and Tony couldn’t hear the sound of hatches closing in the distance.

Jack and Will heard a loud clang from the access tube at the forward end of the pod bay.

“What was that?” Will wondered, turning clumsily to look forward in the direction of the sound.

“Shit!” Jack cursed. “Will, get to the escape pod!”

“The what?” Will asked, turning back toward Jack.

“The emergency escape pod!” Jack reminded him as he grabbed his shoulder and turned Will to face forward. “At the head of the bay! Get inside and get it fired up and ready to eject! I’ll join you in a moment!” Jack gave him a push and then returned to his business.

The outer hatch on the port side opened first. Small explosive bolts inside the hatch frame ignited, causing them to split in half, the charge sending the hatch spinning away from the outer hull of the Icarus. A split second later, the process was repeated and the inner hatch disappeared as well. Flames, smoke, and loose debris flew past Mac and Tony, as they huddled in the corner of the airlock bay, hanging on for dear life, hoping their harnesses would hold as the vacuum of space sucked everything out the wide-open hatch and into the void. The decompression seemed to last forever, although it was only a few seconds before most of the air pressure was gone and the suction began to subside.

Frank had his own problems. Systems were failing all over the Icarus, and there was nothing he could do about it. Without the control umbilical that connected the LRV‘s flight controls to the Icarus’ flight systems, all he could do was watch as their ship fell apart under them. “We’ve got to get out of here, now!”

“What about the others?” Lynn asked as she struggled to control the flight path of the Icarus as it threatened to come apart beneath them.

The status light on the fifth drop pod flashed, indicating that it had been jettisoned along with the previous four pods.

“
Frank, get Mac and Tony back inside and get the hell out of there!
” Jack commanded over the comms. “
That’s an order!
”

“Not without you and Will!” Frank insisted.

“
We’ll get out in the pod!
” Jack explained. “
With any luck, we’ll land close enough that you can come pick us up once you’re down and secure!
”

Frank couldn’t believe what was happening. His ship, his world, was falling apart around him, and now his best friend was going to bail out in the emergency escape pod. He wanted someone to stop this simulation, open the door, and let them all out. But that wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t a simulation. This was real.

“Mac! Tony!” Lynn called over the comms. “Get your butts back up here, pronto!”

“
Copy!
”

“Maria!” Lynn continued, “think you can work the airlock controls?”

“
Uh, yes, I think so,
” she answered nervously.

“Then get in there and close the inner hatch and depressurize the airlock so Mac and Tony can get back.”

Will opened the hatch to the escape pod and dove inside headfirst. Sensing that its hatch had been opened, the pod’s interior lighting came to life, and her systems began to spin up in preparation for launch. Will looked about the interior. Along the floor of the six-meter diameter capsule were eight flight couches arranged in a circular fan fashion, the head of each couch near the center of the capsule. Overhead were two more couches, situated behind control consoles and flight sticks. Struggling to remember the procedures he had read about in training, Will pulled himself up into the pilot’s seat and searched for the proper switches to enable the launch sequencer.

Maria moved quickly into the center compartment, positioning herself over the hatch in the floor of the compartment. Remembering the procedures she had read in the training manuals weeks before, she hooked the toes of her boots under the hatch rim, bent over and pulled the hatch up and over. Seating it firmly on the rim, she pushed the latch over and sealed the hatch. Straightening up and twisting to her right, she pushed the depressurize button and waited. She could hear the hissing in the airlock below as internal pumps sucked the air out. Twenty agonizing seconds later, the airlock was decompressed.

“I can’t hold the nose up any longer!” Lynn warned. “She’s dipping down on me!”

“Just keep her up for one more minute!” Frank pleaded. “We’ve got to get them inside the airlock before we separate!”

Lynn pulled the flight control stick back hard and held it there, forcing the Icarus’s attitude thrusters to fire continuously. She looked at the pitch indicator on her flight dynamics display. Their nose was still dropping, but more slowly than before. She glanced at the fuel readout on the systems display. “Forty seconds of fuel left!” she cried. “Then the Icarus becomes a tumbling fireball, and us with it!”

Jack pulled the manual release handle on the sixth pod’s control panel. Nothing happened. He reset it and tried again, but still nothing. There was no power in the system.
The system must be automatically shutting all remaining power to her primary systems!
Jack realized.

Jack quickly opened the cover plate over the pod controls and yanked the power feed wire out of the connector to the ship’s power feed bus. He pulled the comm-unit that Will had given him from his belt and smashed it against the bulkhead, cracking the plastic casing. He quickly pulled it apart and removed the battery, attaching the hot wire to the last pod’s control panel and pinched them together between his gloved fingers.

The control panel lit up, flickered out, and then lit up again. Wasting no time, Jack pulled the release lever one more time. The pod bay shuddered as the explosive bolts fired, and the last pod jettisoned. Jack let go of the wires, allowing the panel to go dead, then headed aft, battery still in hand.

“
Mac! Tony! Get in here!
” Frank ordered over the comms.