Here Be Dragons (7 page)

Ikenna lurched into her and knocked her grip away. The two of them bounced across the corridor into the opposite wall. She shot one leg through the ladder on the fly and wrapped it around the rung. She needed both hands to catch Ikenna and hold him still.

His face turned to her, and she could see that his eyes were bloodshot and watering. He had shut his mouth tightly against the smoke. Elena thrust the helmet over his head and latched it for him, and watched him gasp for air on the other side of the faceplate. The rebreathers inside their helmets could keep them supplied with oxygen for hours, if necessary.

She took Ikenna by the shoulder and tapped the side of his head three times. He focused on her.

“The emergency locker. Go!”

Ikenna nodded. She didn’t know if he was even capable of speech right now. He took off down the corridor, and the sea of black smoke closed up around him.

The forward bulkhead was locked shut when she got there. Elena blinked to shake the last of the tears from her eyes, and pushed her helmet close to the atmospheric monitor. The ammonium levels in the air were dangerously high and the temperature had shot up to over three hundred degrees Kelvin. But there was no breach on the other side of the bulkhead, none that she could see.

Elena had been inside this hatchway when the explosion had struck, when it had slammed shut. It had probably come close to cutting her in half.

She felt for the panel beneath the monitor, and ripped it open to reveal a bright yellow circular handle. Elena grabbed it and twisted it to one side. There was a hiss as the bulkhead unsealed, and a thump as Ikenna landed on top of it. His arms were filled with firefighting gear and medical kits. He handed the extinguisher to Elena without a word.

Elena knew better than to contact the bridge and demand a status report in the middle of a crisis. They were all highly trained officers up there, and didn’t need distractions. Until she was in that seat, it was Vijay in command. She would just have to help wherever she could.

They opened the door together.

She felt a wind at her back as the atmosphere rushed from one compartment to the next. The smoky air swirled into ribbons and cyclones, twisted by the currents. There was a hull breach somewhere ahead that had blown part of the atmosphere into space.

Elena and Ikenna plunged into the corridor. They stuck to the ladder—there was no shame in it now. Here the smoke was even thicker, like swimming down into an oil well, but the damage was still visible. Her faceplate briefly fogged with moisture from a burst water pipe. Between the tendrils of smoke she could see an eerie flickering light up ahead from a torn electric cable. The sparks fanned out in every direction, like tiny fireworks in the middle of the corridor.

She toggled her intercom circuit.

“Engine room, Captain speaking. Cut power to Compartment P-11, but keep the bulkhead circuits running.”

Chief Officer Gupta answered.

“Aye, Captain. One second.”

A few moments later the sparks from the cable died along with the main lights. Elena and Ikenna were bathed in a ghostly green glow. Each compartment was lined with tubes of luminous tritium gas. Otherwise a power outage would have plunged them into perfect darkness.

“Cap—” Gupta hesitated on the line, then returned. “Engine room out.”

“She wants to know what the fuck’s going on,” Elena said. There was no need to manually transmit. Their suit radios automatically activated in the presence of another crew member.

Ikenna nodded. She heard him cough over the intercom, bent at the waist.

They continued forward, towards P-10. She could see the next atmo panel now—its edges were lined with a bright, pulsating red. The safety systems had automatically locked down the compartments on either side as a precaution, meaning that at least five had been sealed. The breach had to be right outside her bridge—or inside it.

Elena reached out to grip the next rung of the ladder, and grabbed someone’s hand. The stranger began to float away into the smoke, and Elena had to lock her own arm behind the elbow to keep it still. Elena pulled the body up alongside her and motioned to Ikenna, who cracked the medical kit open.

It was Third Officer Makarim. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her pale bloodless face was smudged black by smoke and water. Ikenna shoved an oxygen mask onto her face and wrapped it around the back of her head while Elena pressed two fingers to Makarim’s neck, just under her jaw. Her bloodied eyes were half shut and staring at something that wasn’t there.

Elena could feel a faint pulsing beneath the fabric of her glove. The inside of the oxygen mask fogged slightly.

“She’s alive,” Elena said.

She patted the other woman down quickly, searching for tears in her suit, or other obvious signs of injury, and found nothing. It must have been a concussion, or smoke inhalation. Makarim hadn’t been able to find the emergency helmets in the darkness.

Elena handed Makarim off to Ikenna. Even as small as the two of them were, they could handle the woman’s dead mass easily.

“Get her to medical, I’m going forward.”

Ikenna hesitated, then caught Elena’s eyes inside her helmet.

“Come back as soon as you drop her off,” she said. “If you don’t see me, go straight to the bridge.”

He passed the equipment forward, and she secured the kits to her suit as best as she could. His voice was harsh and scratched, and each word sounded like it had been ground out between metal.

“Good luck.”

Ikenna sketched a salute, and then turned and kicked off back up the corridor towards Rivkah’s office, holding Makarim tightly to his body.

“And shut the door on your way out!”

She turned back to the atmospheric readout. The meters were blank and ringed with warning lights—there was a vacuum of the other side of this bulkhead. Nearly five minutes had passed, and there had been no other signs of combat—no impacts, nothing from their own weapons, and no further alerts from the bridge. Elena could have gone around the breach, and headed straight there. The compartment on the other side of this hatch was the most dangerous place on the ship, and it wasn’t her place to act as a one-woman search and rescue.

Elena positioned herself next to the hatch and peered through the thick porthole set into the metal. For the first time, she saw the tiny smear of blood on the glass.

She tore a panel from the wall again, and rotated the handle. The warning lights were now overlaid with a soft amber—a quarantined bulkhead couldn’t be unsealed that easily. She took one more glance back to ensure that the compartment behind her was empty, then activated the intercom once more.

“Override, compartment P-10. Authorization, Gonzales.”

The computers analyzed her voiceprint and confirmed her identity—no part of the ship was deliberately exposed to the vacuum except by order of the flight officer. The override request was relayed up to the bridge, and the answer came back immediately.

Confirmed
.

There was a sudden wind in the air as the vents began to suck the atmosphere out of the compartment. The smoke twisted into long, thin cables and wisped out of sight. The life support system needed a full minute to purge the corridor of breathable air, to match the emptiness on the other side.

Everyone in the Agency went through the vacuum test at Phobos. The door locked behind you, and the slit windows opened before you. It had to be a surprise, lest the instinctive response to hold one’s breath forced the vacuum to rip the air from the lungs. Elena would never forget the wailing of the breach, and the way its shriek had slowly died and left nothing but dead quiet. It had lasted half a minute, and she had awoken two hours later, silently screaming.

Elena opened the hatch and dived through. The black smoke was gone, blown out by the breach, but a white mist had taken its place. Liquid water from the radiation shield had seeped into the compartment and formed a raincloud that had quickly chilled and frozen Every surface glistened brightly. A layer of frost had settled on her suit already, and Elena ran a hand across her faceplate and peered into the depths.

She could see in a glance that the vast majority of the hull was still intact, and there was no more blood that she could find—but that meant nothing if it had been blown outside. The walls were blackened in places, and the outer bulkhead was warped from the force of the shock wave that had run through it. Elena took a breath and slowly launched herself down the middle of the compartment, without touching the walls. It was standard protocol to shut down power to a breached compartment, but destruction of this sort could flummox the wiring—and without air to produce a spark, she would never realize a circuit was live until she touched it.

The breach was less than halfway down the corridor—a bulging crater over a meter across. Water poured from the edges of the exit wound and crystallized before her eyes. The inner bulkhead on the opposite of the crater was scorched black. The hole itself, at the center of the wound, was big enough for her to crawl through. Elena glanced at it as she floated past, and tasted the burning bile that rose in her throat. She continued on.

At first Elena could see only the faint outlines of two dark bodies beneath the mist. She found them on the opposite side of the corridor, huddled against the sealed hatchway. One was wearing a helmet, and the other was not.

Elena touched down next to them and shrugged off her medical kit. She couldn’t see who they were. In the dim light and the mist, that frosted face could have belonged to anyone. She spoke repeatedly on the intercom, but no one answered. Elena grabbed the helmeted one by the shoulders, and found another tiny red blot on the inside of the faceplate. She checked the helmet readout and confirmed that it was sealed, and that oxygen was being supplied. The rebreather was humming beneath her touch, and there was carbon dioxide inside the suit atmosphere. Whoever was in there was still alive, but unconscious.

Elena shifted the officer to one side, and turned to the second body. She would have to get her injured crewman to the medical office as soon as possible, but she would never be able to live with herself if she didn’t check first.

The frozen water had wrapped the head in a dull white sheen. Elena couldn’t make out any facial features, but there were twenty women aboard
Gabriel
, and none had hair cropped as closely as this. She reached out and gently wiped the frost from the face, and streaks of brown skin appeared among the white.

Elena Gonzales and Pascal Arnaud had begun this journey together, six months ago. She had wanted them to finish it together.

The panel beneath the atmospheric readout was open, but the safety systems had locked him in and, without command authorization, refused to unseal the bulkhead. Arnaud had died with his hand wrapped around the door handle, unable to escape or even to scream. His open eyes were deeply bloodshot from the decompression. Elena placed two fingers on his lids and closed them, and his frozen lashes broke beneath her touch.

Elena rose and glanced at the bulkhead beside her. Both helmet hooks next to the hatchway were bare. The unconscious survivor was wearing one, and Arnaud held the other in his left hand. He hadn’t even bothered to put it on. She took it from him and glanced at it. A single piece of shrapnel had smashed a tiny hole in the faceplate.

“It could have been worse.”

Elena hovered near the center the bridge. With Hassoun at the watch station, Ikenna had temporarily relieved the backup communications officer, while Vijay remained in her chair, beside her. Now that the crisis appeared to be over there was no reason for her to kick him out, and a lot of reasons not to.

“I know you don’t want to hear that. You probably feel like an asshole even thinking it to yourself. That’s why you need to hear it from me. Three casualties, one fatal. Makarim and Suarez will live. And if you hadn’t shot down that missile as quickly as you did, it would have been a lot worse.”

Demyan was at his helmsman’s post as usual, and as usual she could not read his body language at all. Hassoun was much easier. He slumped in his chair, and hadn’t looked any of them in the eye since they had entered the room. His hair was matted to his forehead with dried sweat.

“Arnaud was a good man.” She could say that now and know without a doubt that it was true. “There are a lot of other good men and women on this ship, and they’re all alive thanks to you.”

She looked directly at Hassoun. He did not look back. With Elena absent from the bridge, Hassoun had been serving as officer of the watch when the missile had ignited and made a run for
Gabriel
. It had closed to nearly point-blank range before the ship’s guns had cut it down, but the damned thing had been too big and heavy to destroy completely. The fuselage had continued flying even after the explosion and rammed
Gabriel
in her port flank, and punched straight through a dozen layers of titanium, lead, and carbon. Bits and pieces of shrapnel appeared to have nicked the ship in other places, but that damage was minor.

“We won this round. They took their best shot and missed. We’re still fighting, and we’re going to give it back ten times.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Demyan said. Hassoun remained silent, and she looked at Vijay from the corner of her eye.

“Questions?”

Demyan spoke again.

“Have we been compromised?”

Gabriel’s
approach had been timed so that the Galilean moons—fiery Io, icy Europa, pockmarked Callisto, and gigantic Ganymede, the solar system’s largest—would be on the other side of the Jupiter. The gas giant itself was uninhabitable, and the rest of its moons were oversized boulders in space. The outsiders had almost certainly colonized at least one of these four worlds, probably deep underground. The battle at the border had been fought behind Jupiter, entirely out of their sight—but that didn’t mean that no one else had been watching.

“Hassoun, bring up the record again.”

The tiny holographic
Gabriel
hovered serenely between the four stations. A red line appeared from nowhere and lanced it, and Elena nearly winced.