Fatal Boarding (3 page)

I jetted over to the dark tabletop at the
center of the room. Its surface was so perfect it looked like a
reflective black hole. It cast the eerie image of my wrinkled
spacesuit as I floated over. The oval slab was so deep, rich, and
glassy, I was tempted to see if my hand would penetrate it, but
something held me back. As I hovered above it, a sudden jolt of
fear arced through me, that unexplainable little panic that awakens
within you when your subconscious has become aware of something
frightening, though your conscious mind has not yet noticed.

Faces. Hundreds of them. Staring up from
deep below the blackness. Mournful faces. My heart skipped a beat.
My breathing choked off. I strained to see down into the ink,
looking for what I thought had been there.

There was nothing, just the queer sight of
the wrinkled, canvas, balloon-man drifting above the black mirrored
slab. I took a deep breath and assured myself it had been nothing
more than overactive imagination.

Excited voices began to break in over the
intercom as the others continued to explore and record. Erin's had
digressed into a repetitious whine about darkened consoles with
dead memory. She had the wistful tone of an excited child who had
accidentally found her way into a candy store, but the candy had
turned out to be wax. Because her scanner was sucking up almost
nothing, she had begun hounding Pete for photography faster than he
could take it.

Everything was proceeding as planned, but I
had a persistent feeling of wrongness, an uncomfortable, nagging
sensation that we did not belong there, that we should not have
come. There was no way to know if the others were feeling the same,
but behind the veil of professionalism, they seemed to be hiding
uneasiness. It was as though an unseen horror loomed nearby,
waiting like an animal in the wild. Sensing a predator, my
instincts were awake and alert. But, one hundred and fifty people
on board Electra were watching and listening. The fear had to be
tucked aside, and the assignment continued.

I coasted ahead until I had reached the
frosty, semitransparent, tubular framework of the elevator shaft.
Just inside the arched-shaped entrance, the hole in the floor
dropped down into a deep recess. A triangular-shaped doorway of
white light was visible at the next lower level. Repetitive,
patchwork gratings with strips of dull, purple light followed the
shaft down. Far down, I could make out the lift, a simple platform
with small, round, ash-red lamps embedded into its base forming a
circle of dull light. A low handrail glowed soft-yellow
fluorescence.

The chatter on the intercom had stopped. I
looked up to find the other four team members hovering around the
opening, staring down into the hole with me. Electra, this is Tarn.
We have access to a lower level. What are your instructions,
Captain?"

There was an unusually long pause before the
answer came. I had started to repeat myself when Grey's reply
finally squelched-in. "Boarding party, you are cleared to continue.
You have ten minutes to RTV."

"Tarn to Electra, Understand, Captain. Ten
minutes to return."

The latitude they were giving us was
surprising. It was one thing to look beyond an open door, and quite
another to venture down into the holds of an abandoned starship. In
silence, we lingered above the open shaft. The feeling of
foreboding persisted. I brought myself to the vertical, pulled
myself into the tube, and with a last check around tapped in enough
Z thrust to slowly start down, feet first. The others followed in
pairs. The ugly feeling seemed to grow with the descent. The sides
of the dark, grooved shaft looked scarred and well-used. The lift
had left worn and pitted places in the black metal ribs.

At the base of the tunnel the open portal
lead to a second chamber, one even less pleasant than above.
Everything was sterile silver. It was much smaller than the control
room we had just seen, but no less arcane. A silver table was
attached to the silver floor in the center, like an operating table
only with pointed ends, slightly inclined at the head, slightly
declined at the foot. Silver cabinets attached to silver walls,
silver tools in silver trays on silver countertops, low, flat,
silver ceiling with unrecognizable silver attachments hanging from
it, six low, silver-framed, triangular doors, including the one
through which we had entered, evenly spaced around the oval room. A
heavy darkness lay within them.

They say it is very cold in space, but in
all the time I've spent outside I've never felt it. So thick and
heavily insulated are the Bell Standard Spacesuits that the
suit-liner heating and cooling makes you immune to almost any
environment. But even through the dense layers of
thermopolyurethane and environmesh I could still sense it. A
feeling of doom that was almost unbearable. I wanted nothing but to
leave there. It was a graveyard of nightmares. There was a subtle
howling in the silence and coldness from the outside. Suit air
seemed to have taken on a stale, sterile smell. The room's pressure
differential felt unstable, as though the suit had to vary to
compensate. I looked at the data screen on the back of my left
forearm. It showed no changes in suit pressure. Chilling static
electricity bristled on my arms and the back of my neck.

I became aware of the rest of the team
hanging behind me. Normally, they would have dispersed around the
area to investigate. Their reluctance told me they were
experiencing the same unexplained dread.

I turned in place and found Langly. "Pete,
switch on your camera's spot. Let’s take a look through one of
these other doorways. Erin, let me have your scanner."

We floated to the nearest door and took
positions on either side of it. I scanned the darkness while Pete
set up. He twisted open the light on the top of his camera and
switched it on. We hung side by side as he pointed the light into
the blanket of blackness beyond the open door. The more we saw the
less we understood. The bright beam from the camera's light became
a narrow tunnel disappearing down a corridor that went on forever,
a corridor that looked like a giant intestinal track. It seemed to
be constructed from some sort of gray-brown jelly substance that
climbed upward in some places and oozed out from openings in
others. It absorbed light. It seemed almost ...alive. I jumped when
the Captain's voice cut in over the intercom.

"Grey to boarding party. One minute to
RTV."

"Tarn here. We're starting back."

I rotated to face the exit. Just inside the
low V-cut of the elevator door, Erin was holding to Nira's right
arm. They were floating no more than a meter above the floor, as
though they were ready to leave quickly. Frank had remained outside
in the shaft, bracing himself against the weightlessness by keeping
one gloved-hand clutching the top of the open entranceway.

Pete killed the spotlight and we gathered
near the exit. I bent over backwards and looked up in time to see
Frank crossing over and out. I shook my head and motioned the
others to ascend. They were eager to go.

I sometimes have this sixth-sense when
things are about to go to hell. It is a talent more conditioned
than instinctive. It is a by-product of the tears and punctures of
the flesh that have resulted from taking too much for granted. Over
the years I have come to trust it.

As I approached the top of the shaft, that
familiar little misgiving crept over me. At first I guessed it to
be part of the unpleasant influence of the place, part of the sick
little feeling that had been bouncing around in the pit of my
stomach. Then I heard Nira, above me, in an unusually strict tone
say "Frank, what are you doing?" I pushed off of the hard wall and
hurried up.

He was upright with his back to us, floating
in a kneeling position near the floor on the opposite side of the
room. He had found some kind of luggage-sized, heavily-engraved,
copper box attached to the wall near a bulkhead. It had not been
there on the way in. It glimmered almost like gold in the odd,
fluctuating light. As I tapped at my suit controls to halt my
ascent, a small gold handle deployed from the box in response to
something Frank had done. I called out quickly as he gripped it in
his right hand. "Hey Frank, you scan that thing yet?"

With a quick sideward twist of his wrist,
the box blew open explosively, as though a bomb had gone off. A
blast of high intensity light erupted from the container and
engulfed Frank. At the same instant the concussion from the blast
hit us. It flattened my suit against my chest. My ears popped and
began to ring. The suit pumps wined as they struggled to
compensate. In vacuum there was no sound to it, but Frank's cry
echoed in over the intercom in a stifled, distorted scream that
lasted only a fraction of a second and then squelched off. He
plunged over backward, his arms and legs kicking and flailing
frantically. Halfway across the room he crashed hard into Nira who
had been on her way to stop him. The impact slammed her aside and
sent her tumbling over backwards toward me. I was driven back
toward a bulkhead, groping at the suit thruster controls. As the
concussion passed, the torso of my suit popped back out and over
inflated slightly. Whatever mass had been ejected from Pandora's
Box, had quickly lost most of its intensity. Nira's camera, taken
by the collision, was spinning away toward the big, oval table at
the chamber's center. Instead of glancing off its glossy, black
surface, it smoothly disappeared into the tabletop, as though it
were an open portal. As I struggled to regain control, I caught
sight of Frank in his burned-out suit racing by me on the right. He
was face down, limp, coasting backwards in a slow turn. I lunged
and managed to catch him under the left arm and together we locked
into a slow vertical turn. A second later someone began grappling
with my legs to help us. Pete quickly pulled up beside me, still
tangled in his camera's safety line, and together the two of us
held Frank's motionless figure steady. Erin jetted over and grabbed
Frank’s backpack to help.

I called to Nira and craned my neck inside
my helmet to find her. In a breathless but reassuring tone, she
replied, "I'm okay. I'm just caught on something. Take care of
Frank."

I waved myself around and spotted her by the
elevator shaft. She was working at her left sleeve, tangled in the
dirty-brown cables within the shaft.

We turned Frank's lifeless body over and
steadied him to check the damage. Pete broke away and worked to
free himself from his camera.

"Pete, when you get lose, ditch the camera
and go help her."

A harsh and demanding voice came over the
Com. "Boarding Party, this is Grey. Report."

Frank looked very bad. It was the type of
bad that gives you that bottomed out feeling that maybe you should
just go ahead and figure this one's dead so you won't have to be so
flatly disappointed when you find out he is. But you can't do that.
You must hope. You can't risk feeling such utter devastation; on
the outside chance you're wrong. He wasn't moving. His face shield
was melted and shriveled like a dried raisin. It had no
transparency left. I wondered if that was just as well. The front
of his suit was blackened and sticky from the waist up, but still
inflated. The left arm still had the balloon-feel.

As carefully as possible I held his wrist
and wiped the soot-like material from the display screen on his
forearm. I tapped the dingy-bright orange L.S. button and to my
surprise the life support title appeared on the screen. His suit
pressure was holding. Once again the Bell Standard had lived up to
its reputation. But there was a critical problem. O2 was available
but the little blue vertical bar on the graph showed the storage
level slowly bleeding off and approaching the yellow warning line.
The suit silhouette on the right side of the screen was flashing a
red O2 icon, showing a leak within the backpack. It couldn't be
patched. I called up his vital signs. Pulse and respiration were
erratic and the thin little red graph lines for both had hit the
ceiling several times.

Grey's voice came booming back over the Com
as Pete continued to unwind himself. In the melee, his camera had
spun like a propeller blade and wound the harness tight enough to
affect his life support, also.

"Tarn, report, immediately!" It suddenly
dawned on me that Grey was getting my helmet-cam view of Frank. I
wondered how many others were. I opened my mouth to answer but
never got the chance. A desperate cry from Nira made me jump in my
suit.

"Oh god, it's coming up!"

We looked up just in time to see Nira barely
get out of the way as the luminous handrail of the alien elevator
popped up through the shaft, as though it had been called. The
empty car stopped abruptly. Though Nira had avoided being struck by
it, the sleeve of her suit remained caught at a spot where the
car's framework passed very close to the shaft's edge. As the car
came up, a section of the railing hooked her sleeve just behind the
bright red, glove coupling ring. The fabric of the suit did not
slow the platform in the least. The railing ripped through the
material at the forearm as though it were paper. The gapping tear
freed Nira from her entrapment, in the worst possible way.

There is nothing quite like a bad suit tear
in the vacuum of space. It is the ultimate occupational veto.
Whatever you are doing, you will stop. The absolute terror of it is
the way most victims die. No one ever succumbs to suffocation from
a cut suit. It's usually the boiling blood that gets you. You
freeze on the outside while you explode on the inside. Very messy
bodily eruptions mark the end of it. And when it is over the
offending suit has suddenly become more of a bag than a piece of
apparel.

I jerked away from Frank and jetted toward
her. Somehow she managed to push off of the elevator shaft with one
foot, while wrestling frantically with the gaping rip in her suit
sleeve. She met me halfway, clutching the tear with her left hand,
a small stream of vapor spraying from the wound. There was a faint
tinge of red near the base of it. Vaporized blood. Her eyes were
wide and her teeth clenched, like a child who had just been bitten
by something. She was too frightened to speak, but she refused to
scream. I grabbed her left upper arm roughly and pulled her to me.
I wrapped my legs around her waist and together we went into a
slow, frantic turn. Globes of suit glue were escaping from between
her fingers as the Bell Standard tried to seal itself. Little balls
of it formed and floated in my way. With my right hand I reached
behind my waist and yanked out the octopus, and in the same motion
jammed it into the receptacle on her backpack. My suit sagged and
the pumps wined as air rushed to her. I tore open the pocket on my
right thigh and pulled out the flat-pack of suit tape and stuck the
red start line on her forearm just above her death grip. As
terrified as she was, she worked the problem with me. As I wrapped,
she inched her glove away. The suit tape melted into the dwindling
flow of glue. Bubbles formed and popped, but at a much slower rate.
Our suit pressures began to make gains. I realized someone had
taken hold of my left arm and was steadying us. Erin's voice came
in over the Com.