“Hold. Docking, boarding party—stand by.” The ancient, analog speakers fizzed and spat at the crew waiting in the airlock for the procedures to complete. No sound came from outside the doorway to the void, but the groans and scrapes reverberated down the inside of the hull, shaking the five-man crew. After a moment, the abrasions stopped, and with it the lights in the room. The red-light alarm began to flash, illuminating their surroundings. Shortly after the claxons sounded.
“Don helmets, boarding crew. Captain Barr, you have lead.” The speaker pulsed and barely managed to cut through the dying whir of the alarms. “Understood, Command, what’s our ETA for rendezvous?” The five men put on and clicked their helmets into place, checking their seals.
“Approximately fifty-eight minutes, call it an hour at the most. Nav crew will be on standby to guide you through to your objective.”
The boarding crew approached the edge of the airlock and attached their line-hooks to the clips to prevent them from drifting away. More alarms blared. The room voided itself of air; they now floated in vacuum. “All good, team?” Captain Barr’s helmet buzzed with clear affirmatives. “Solid copy, Command, clear to open airlock door.” As his words finished, the door opened in a spiral pattern. All members of the crew pushed out and began to drift towards the derelict hold that their ship had parked next to.
They used momentum and their back-mounted gas jets to land on the closest wall. “Davison, cutter.” The man smacked into the wall, impacting harder than he had expected. Recovering his bearings, he pulled out his plasma cutter, and burned a square in the hull. “Large enough to fit a bull through, sir. After you.” Barr stayed outside the hole, clutching the edge and motioning in his crew. “Owen, cut on your lamp-pack. Niall, get in touch with Nav. Muldoon, attach those stick glow-sticks as we go, we’re not losing our way back.” Two affirmatives rang back to him.
After the other four had entered, he followed suit. The inside was cramped. This derelict was made of several vessels that had smashed together, causing a critical reactor incident. The blast had welded them into a winding mess of corridors and shafts. “In touch with Nav team, sir, course charted.”
“Solid copy, Owen, lead the way.” The going was slow, a mix of swimming and crawling. Many times Davison had to be brought forward to burn a path large enough to fit them in their spacesuits. Part of the structure shifted slightly as they formed a line to push the free floating space debris out of the way into passageways that were not on their route. Despite the freezing cold around them, their suits filled with sweat. Seven meters up, they spilled into what had once been a hangar. Each member of the team turned to help the next up into the room, until all of them stood staring into infinite blackness that encased them. “Which way, Niall?”
Niall was hovering slightly above the deck, twisting knobs and dials on his comms-set. “Can’t get them on the horn right now, last transmission was that we were to move into a hallway that lies towards the west—at forty-five degrees horizontal, eighteen degrees vertical.” He turned, his light swinging to the coordinates—pitch black. He upped the power from two-hundred thousand to three-hundred thousand lumens, and then four-hundred thousand—the inner hull saw light for the first time in an inconceivable time. Doors and openings jutted out at wrong angles. “It was to be one in that group over there, two options. What say you, Captain?”
Captain Barr bounced to the side of Owen and Niall, pulling out an old paper map that looked like it was drawn by an army of engineers hopped up on stimulants. The overlapping layers of detail made it hard to read for anyone but a member of the drafter’s craft. “I believe it is the right one, keep trying Nav, but we’ll try that one until we hear back from them.”
Barr stowed his map, and Owen led the way. They bound in long, bouncing strides while being pushed back to the floor with small retro gas jets. While on the bounce, signals from the Nav crew broke through intermittently and punctured the noiseless dash through the hangar. The insertion team struggled to the other end, thrown off course by steel protrusions and drifting debris.
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“Head count, who’s left?” He received a full assent, though each member sounded worse for wear. “Niall, has the Nav crew confirmed our route?” The lamp pack gave enough light to see him using his nausea pouch and giving a weak thumbs-up. After Owen recovered, he shined his light on the doorway above them, five meters. “Muldoon, jet up there with a line—Davison, anchor yourself and secure the other end.”
“Aye, jetting.” Muldoon disappeared into the light. Minutes passed with no response, the line remained slack. “Want me to check it out?” Niall was preparing to unyoke his radio pack to scale the wall himself. “No, give him another minute. After that, we’ll have to continue, can’t wait for anyone on this one.” They all gazed into the barely lit hole for another moment. The line went taut. The three men clambered up the line as Davison kept it anchored, and then pulled him up as they made it to the top.
“Sparse transmission from Nav, sir. Roughly five meters down this corridor, and then left into what they say is a ‘control room.’ Captain Barr motioned Owen to the front, and they swam down the corridor. The walls around them shifted and twisted into tighter and more fragile panels. “Just up ahead, sir. What are we looking for exactly?”
“Small black box, roughly twenty centimeters in length, ten in width. Matte finish, with a spiral logo on it. I don’t know what’s in it, on a need to know basis.” Owen groaned. “It always is—” They filed into the room on the left, fanning out to find the object. It was not hard to find—being just inside one of the drawers in the room. “Got it, Captain.”
“Good work, Muldoon. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” Niall brought up that the shifting and swaying scrap around them was making him nervous. “Just a bit of aluminum, Niall.” The giant Davison patted him rough enough to push Niall into the floor and himself into the ceiling. They all took a moment to laugh and regain themselves.
Their way out was far more uncertain. More cables, panels, and large pieces of machinery littered the hallways. “Word from the ship, Captain. They’re almost in position, what’s our ETA to the rendezvous point?” He paused and checked his chronometer. “Roughly five minutes? Hard to say until we see how bad that last stretch is.”
The shaft that had been their original entrance to the drifting hulk was now sealed shut, covered by a fallen wall like a blast door. “Davison, cut it open, moving it would take too long.” Davison saluted and bounced over to it, swinging his cutting torch to the front and blasting a two meter circle. After the final centimeter, the metal went flying, knocking Davison off balance. He was barely able to anchor himself. “Close one, eh?”
A pocket of trapped atmosphere had survived deeper in the wreck, and was now trapped in their previous entrance. The moment Davison’s cutter finished its circle, it came screaming through the opening. “No time like the present!” Muldoon shouted and bounced into the hole and caught himself on a pipe—using his tether hook to keep himself anchored. “We ain’t got the time to wait for this place to finish depressurizing. It’s only a few meters, let’s climb down the side.” Not to be outdone, Davison followed him. Soon all five were making their way down. Forcing their way past the immense pressure wave, pipe-by-pipe, meter-by-meter.
The pressure was hard enough to deal with, but the debris was worse. While stopping to hail the ship crew, Niall took a shard of tumbling metal full across the helmet. His tether snapped taut as the pressure wave tore him backward into the dark.
The crew did not stop. Niall’s telemetry went flat. Five, six, seven meters. They reached the end of the shaft, and cut a new hole out to be met with the airlock of their ship. Captain Barr turned on his short-wave, “We’re here. Down one. Open locks.” The ship did as ordered and the crew entered the ship and took off their suits after the chamber depressurized. The object they recovered was handed off to a smartly dressed man in a slick, black suit who thanked them and gave consultations for Niall.
Then the agreed-upon payment of twenty-eight thousand HKL Dollars.
