Dark Vengeance (14 page)

At the elevator to the grand gallery’s air lock, I was halted by an eyeball scanner. As I wondered how to get past it, a blue beam scanned my eye and the elevator doors popped open. R.J. ran in ahead of me.

On the airlock level the doors took forever to open. We found the suit ready room off to the left open, a variety of hanging suits waiting.

“One will have to be fit,” yelled R.J. too loudly.

“No. I’ll jam into one,” I replied, as I stripped off my clothes and found a suit undergarment that looked like it might fit.

R.J. pulled the first pair of white and red-lined bottoms off of the wall rack and threw them at me. They lengthened as I forced my feet and legs into them. Two tubes that matched the ones from the undergarment were hanging out. They plugged in nicely. R.J. found the matching torso, stood waiting for me to stoop over, then jammed it over my head as soon as I did.

“It’ll take twenty minutes to depressurize you, Adrian. That may be too late!”

“Forget it. We won’t wait. I’ll go out stiff.”

“You’re nuts!”

“You see anything around here that looks like a maneuvering unit?”

“It’s built into the suit. I see the jets.”

I snapped the torso in place and looked up just in time to watch the helmet slam down over my head. Suddenly R.J. pulled it back off.

“What are you doing?”

“Problem, Adrian. There can’t be any English translation available in this thing!”

“I’ll go without it. We’ll guess our way through.”

“Wait!” declared R.J. He began fishing around in his coverall pockets. A look of delight came over his face. He pulled out his pink tourist glasses and positioned them onto my face. The helmet came over a second later and latched tight.

The suit knew what to do. It began to pressurize immediately. The readouts appeared directly on the visor. To my surprise, the glasses translated most of them. I twisted around to tell him and found him pushing at me to get in the airlock. As soon as we were there, he disappeared back toward the elevator, fooled with a wall panel until the inner airlock door snapped shut and suddenly I was alone.

There were buttons on my left sleeve showing little jet symbols with directions. On the right sleeve standard keys and a mouse pad. I glanced up to see a pressure readout panel on the airlock wall counting down. At the same time suit pressure was coming up. I fumbled around trying to assign an initial suit pressure and as I did the visor lit up asking me for that exact number. The suit stopped inflating at twelve pounds. At that setting I could barely bend my arms. The outer door snapped open so much faster than expected it scared the hell out of me.

I had to waddle to the door. At twelve pounds per square inch, there would be no bending of the legs. The suit was even more rigid than I expected, though many years earlier I had trained for exactly this kind of emergency. The outer door was open to black star-speckled space. I made a solemn promise to myself that somehow I would return and fly this spacesuit back through that door and into ship’s gravity. Suit air was clean and cool. With a big gulp of it, I leaned out the door and fell into space.

For a moment there was the inevitable grand elation, so strong it interrupted the panic. Perhaps I had made so many walks within Godness this way I’d gained a false sense of security. The blanket of stars was so dense they almost looked like silver sand on a beach, except that there was beach in every direction. Somehow, each of those grains of light gives an imprint of pleasure. It is possible that dying in a spacesuit in open space may possibly be one of the most wonderful of ways to go, and only the primordial instinct to survive stops us from considering that choosing.

I snapped back to reality and quickly realized I had failed to bring along any type of rescue harness. But, if he was still alive at this point, Engineer Azur would be more than cooperative.

Tapping the correct jet keys on the sleeve keypad was a challenge, but the system’s built-in comprehension was admirable. The suit itself kept me from bumping the ship. I tried to orient upward with reference to Star Seven, but quickly gave up and decided just getting my body up to the top would be enough. I managed to pulse myself up along the dark green surface and emerged above with my feet sticking straight up. Upside down, the ship’s body looked like a long, dark, inverted metallic football field with a hump of windows in the distance. I could not make out Azur’s body, but I knew the direction needed to get to him. On my visor, the suit was asking for a target decompression setting but I was too busy to bother.

To my good fortune, at that point the suit’s A.I. decided I was either a student spacewalker or just an idiot. Jets began firing by themselves, turning me in a slow motion cartwheel until I was upright. I struggled to tap the forward thruster button, made it, and began gliding across the surface of Star Seven like an overstuffed doughboy in space.

A few trillion lifetimes away, far beyond Star Seven, there was an orange gas cloud with eddies that ended in new starlight. It was difficult to look away from. I scanned ahead hoping to see Azur waving at me, but there was nothing. Not far ahead, the first faint beams of Star Seven window light were streaming upward from the concourse. Finally, midway to the ship’s aft end, I spotted the desperate figure still stretched out over the windows as he hugged the ship for dear life. Lucky again, I managed to change direction correctly and head that way.

As I approached, it became obvious Azur’s suit had insufficient heating. He was frost covered and partially frozen to a window. I was able to stop my forward motion and hover above him, but dared not grab the O2 hose running from the suit to his helmet, the only fixture suitable for grabbing.

Rotating to try to place a gloved hand on him presented a new challenge. Every overshoot meant a new series of mini thrusts to rotate back into position. I ended up with my face almost touching a window and my left hand holding Azur’s left arm. For a moment, I thought I sensed a spark of life in the suit. It drove me to hurry even more. Struggling into position to push myself away from the ship, I abruptly found myself staring through the window into the concourse. A sizable crowd of staff and guests were staring up at us. One of the onlookers happened to be Captain Mars. Even through my pink glasses, visor, and the ship’s observation window our eyes met, and in that split second somehow he conveyed to me that our troubles were far greater than rescuing one man trapped outside the ship.

I pushed away as gently as possible and after a momentary resistance, his stiff suit escaped the sticky frost and came free. Moments later, with my arm hooked precariously under his, we began our journey back to the ship’s port side. There would be no one waiting outside to help us. To do that, they would have had to close up, re-pressurize, put suited rescue people in the airlock, and depressurize again. That process would take so long it would keep us locked out rather than help us. No rescue personnel could be expected from the aft airlock, either. It had been sealed off by the automatic quarantine.

Over the edge, the dive down to the airlock turned out not to be a problem. As we came down inline with the open hatch I gave a full thrust and let the ship’s gravity suck us the rest of the way in. We crashed in a heap on the floor. The airlock outer door slid shut immediately. I waited face down on the grating, knowing R.J. was pumping air in as fast as it could be pumped.

When the inner door finally opened, I was hurriedly flipped over and found myself surrounded by too many staff people to count with R.J. peering over the top of them. The helmet seal was quickly cracked open and within seconds I was free of it.

“Are you injured?” asked one of the staff.

“No. Is he alive?”

“Yes,” was the reply. “Severe frostbite, but we think he will be saved.”

R.J.’s face came into view again as they jerked me up and pulled the suit’s torso off. “Well, what do you want to do now?” he asked.

Chapter 9

As soon as I was fully dressed, we escaped the frequent looks of adoration from the airlock staff and took the elevator up.

“Apparently something significant occurred while we were resting,” said R.J. in a somber tone.

I tried to unwind by straightening my flight coveralls. “Yeah, something that made Engineer Azur decide flushing himself out a coolant tube was better than being where he was.”

“Doesn’t bode well for the rest of us, does it?”

“At least aft engineering remains sealed, I’m guessing.”

“But you would think lizard man would have thought of that. He seems to have covered everything else quite nicely.”

“Let’s hope he didn’t.”

We went straight to the flight deck lift. The ride up seemed excruciatingly slow. The doors to the flight briefing office were still open and the staff seemed busier than ever. There was no sign of Captain Mars. As we entered the room, a flight deck engineer who seemed to be in charge hurried over.

“Captain Tarn, Commander Smith, Captain Mars was having a dizzy spell. He’s finally resting. I’m engineer Arn. I’ve promised to inform him as soon as we have any new information. Can I help you so that we do not disturb him before it is absolutely necessary?”

“Mr. Arn, why did Engineer Azur take the hard way out of aft engineering?” I asked.

“Sir, we do not know. We lost our surveillance camera in that area just before it happened. Thankfully security was there in time to rescue him.”

“Do you have any idea what happened?” asked R.J.

“Something terrible. The video suddenly dropped out, but the com was left open. There was screaming and shrill sounds, then mostly silence.”

“Mostly silence?” asked R.J.

“Yes, there were sounds we could not make out. Sounds like gurgling or something. We just don’t know.”

“What’s your status right now?”

“We believe we can reactivate the video in aft engineering. They are working on that now. The com line is still open but there hasn’t been any further contact. We are to wake Captain Mars as soon as the video is back online, or as soon as Engineer Azur regains consciousness. We have launched four emergency beacons requesting help from any nearby ships. Subspace communications are still offline.”

I tried to broach the next subject as gently as possible. “Mr. Arn, the information center doesn’t seem to have anything about escape modules. Star Seven does have an escape module system, doesn’t it?”

Arn started to answer, choked on the first word and had to restart. “Yes, Captain Tarn. That information is not normally made available so as not to alarm guests. I will have the file posted on both your stations but the escape system is unavailable at this time.”

“I can guess why,” said R.J.

“Any bio-contamination alarm disables the escape system so those types of threats cannot be spread by the ejection of escape modules.”

“But we just used the main airlock. It was not locked out,” said R.J.

“Yes, sir. But the escape modules release from the sides of the ship and some of those are back along aft engineering, so the system has to lock all of them out as a precaution.”

“Can you bypass the escape system lockouts?” asked R.J.

“The bio hazard containment system is part of the highest security level on the ship. Even the Captain cannot disable it unless the threat is certified as neutralized. There are extensive safeguards to prevent anyone from tampering with the system.”

R.J. looked at me, shaking his head. “What a wonderfully conceived nightmare.”

“I’m starting to think the seals at aft engineering won’t be enough.” I said.

R.J. replied, “I would bet anything that it’s just a matter of time.”

“I think we should go and try to learn something about the enemy.”

“Yes, it would be nice to know something… anything at all.”

R.J. turned to Arn, “Does the Captain have anyone searching database entries for the term Gaglion, Mr. Arn?”

“I am not aware of any requests relating to that term, Sir. But he may well have assigned it to someone else.”

I looked down at the confused engineer and tried my best to sound reassuring, “Would you please notify us also when you call for the Captain?”

“Yes, Sir.”

We left Mr. Arn to his unenviable tasks and headed for Medical. We got as far as the lift before a new sense of trepidation set in. From the balcony we could see the size of the crowd besieging the service desk. Both Fantasia and Elachia were on duty trying to manage the situation. There were numerous staff members along with ambassadors' aides and even one or two genuine ambassadors.

At floor level, the mood of the crowd seemed even more intense. It had become a large, insistent group with that same classic question; “Is it time to panic yet?” There was the obligatory wringing of hands along with whispered inner group agreements that meant absolutely nothing. Both Fantasia and Elachia were talking as fast as they could to too many people at once. As soon as she saw us, Fantasia waved furiously for us to please join in. Thank God I had R.J.

But as we approached, something over by the fireplace area caught my attention. It was a pair of tiny eyes peering over the back of a chair. It stopped me while I tried to reconcile the image. Then, to my surprise, a two foot tall individual came around the chair into full view. She was dressed in the colorful skin tight apparel most other staff wore but rather than working as most staff did she was busy being a child. Her features were so small but well defined they looked unreal. She smiled at us and climbed about the furniture humming a kind of nursery rhyme song.