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It took fifteen seconds for my flash shields to readjust and restore vision. That was fifteen seconds of eternity while debris rattled off the station's outer shell less than a meter in front of my nose. The sound of those muted strikes was horrifying.
The shields cleared onto a scene of devastation. The shattered remains of the umbilical swung by a single top support cable amid a wildly spinning, expanding field of debris. The shuttle was gone. The passengers were gone. All blasted into oblivion by the ghost.
I hadn't thought the inside of the ring could get noisier, but the Proambu message system added another layer of stridency, probably calling for an emergency crew that would never come.
I peered into the airlock. The outer doors were sealed and the environment status lights inside the chamber and out, were red, telling me it was in vacuum state.
Getting down on my hands and knees, I looked through the lower section.
My chest tightened. Lying hauntingly beyond my grasp through at least twenty centimeters of pressure glass lay a small booted foot. The kid must have gotten the doors open just before the blast struck. I didn't want to think on how hard that small body would have hit the stationside wall, but I didn't see any blood, in floating droplets or pooling on the floor. Of course, with a suit, that didn't mean much.
The only way I could open the chamber was by restoring atmospheric balance with the station interior.
Scrambling to my feet, I went to the control panel.
There were parts of a ship my chips let me repair because they gave me access to technology Whooex members shared. It did not include Idwal. These controls were exclusively alien technology and beyond me.
Saura and her limited Proambu might have helped, but I rejected the idea of using my comm. We had a freaking aggressive ship outside the station. If they observed our earlier activity, they knew where the Hand was nestled. If not, I didn't want to draw attention there with a detectable signal.
I could go up, make sure everything was all right with the Hand, and bring Saurubi back to help me, but the little form in the airlock held me back. The transition suit the kid wore was little more than a precaution in the event something minor went wrong between the ship and station. It didn't have a large air reserve. No more than an hour. Possibly less. A trip up the fall, across the gigantic bay, and back would take too long—if the fall was even working now.
The thought nearly squeezed the air out of me.
If these people were our cargo, I had to salvage what remained.
Was the reeling devastation outside enough to satisfy the ghost's murderous intent, or did it want to wipe out any witnesses to its crime, too? We might be facing a seek-and-destroy excursion inside the lower ring. Or—my heart tripped in dismay—they might take a more direct approach by putting a plasma blast into the dock area around the Thief's Hand and another one into Section Ten. That was the quickest, most efficient way to end things.
It was also extremely destructive.
Tactics came down to how worried the ghost was about offending the Proambu with more property damage.
Obviously, it hadn't been a big concern so far.
Who the heck were the people in the shuttle? Why would a MoMo and Frairy arrange their transportation at this remote point in space? And why would someone want to kill them? I knew it was wrong to transfer anthropomorphic behaviors onto them, but they had appeared to be a family unit to me.
I had to get the kid out and keep it alive if I wanted answers.
I punched every lighted button on the panel. The airlock refused to cycle out of vacuum state. Either something was broken or it required action from inside the lock, which wasn't going to happen anytime soon. I pressed my forehead against the door, staring into the chamber beyond. Small bits of trash were starting to float into my field of vision. None of it was blood droplets. I'd seen enough of those rounded, dark globules in zero gravity to recognize them.
Jacking one of the most critically sensitive mechanical systems in a space facility was not going to be easy. By its nature, an airlock is a big, controlled hole in a structural wall with endless vacuum on the other side. Nothing that breathed anything or depended on equalized internal/external pressure wanted to meet vacuum unprepared. I had some experience forcing airlocks during boarding missions in the Marines, but only as an observer while one of the specialists in my squad did his or her magic. Watching is not the same as doing.
Pulling a multi-tool from my suit's kit, I pried the cover off the control panel. Great. No wires. Just a thin, concentrated stream of blue light with little runnels branching off to the sides, some lit up blue, some white, to feed the currently inoperative buttons.
Reason told me if the stream broke, the doors had to do something.
I searched the section for an object I could use to hold them open. The Proambu had shut the place down clean and tight. I finally resorted to prying a tabletop loose from its base with another tool from my kit. Then I half-dragged, half-shoved the thing over to the hatch and propped it at an angle, with one corner resting on the seam of the doors. If they sprang open, the top would fall inward and block them from closing. Then I could force the opening wide enough to pull the body out. The dangerous part would be how the station systems reacted to the inner doors opening onto a vac'd airlock. Hopefully, it would recognize the scale of the event as minor and not trigger the closing of the massive section walls. If that happened, I would have no way to reset them to open: stations always secured those controls safely away, with access restricted to maintenance and management. I—we—would be trapped in Section Ten with the damaged airlock as our only escape route.
Of course, it was also possible a safety mechanism on the lock doors might trigger enough force to shear the tabletop—and me—in half.
Positive thoughts, Vivi. I needed to find something to interrupt the blue stream without frying myself in the process. Experimenting with my multi-tool was not a preferred option; shoving non-conductive ceramic material into an unknown power source might make the tool explode.
A second search of the area turned up a small lid that I wrenched off a trash chute and some metal tags I pried off several storage crates stacked along the inside wall. I had just finished peeling off the third one when I glimpsed a vanishing patch of stars outside the plasglass wall.
The ghost was circling again, likely scanning for signs of life in the debris of their handiwork.
The distance to either of the section doors, to put a massive bulk between me and the ship's sensors was too far to cross. Besides, my movement might trip any sensors directed this way. So I did the only thing possible: I dropped right where I stood, sprawled loosely, my face shield turned away from the glass and the ship. The awaysuit should block my body heat from scans, but who knew what type of life sensors the murderers had. If they noted my presence the first time, they might see I had moved. Maybe they'd attribute that to the explosion.
Or, maybe they weren't looking for me at all. There was that little body lying inside the airlock. I had a gut feeling if they detected it was alive, whatever crewed the ghost would try to change that.
Frustration gripped me. With the debris of their handiwork spreading outside the station, the ghost's path would swing farther out this time, taking longer for it to move past.
It would also take longer for it to return a third time. If it returned that third time, most likely its occupants were planning some action.
I finally gave up and turned my head just in time to see the jagged tail of darkness pass beyond the section wall and the stars ripple back into view.
Swiftly I climbed to my feet and stared at the blue light in the open panel beside the lock. Since I didn't know how anything worked, it hardly mattered that it was also alien tech. I was floundering in the dark already.
The stream cut through my plastic piece without a puff of smoke. Pitching it away, I took up one of the metal tags. It was smaller than the opening, so no need to fold or break the material. I only hoped it didn't explode and destroy the door system, and me, when it contacted the power flow.
Another clean slice.
I folded one of the strips into four layers. Same result. Cursing, I flung it aside and stared at the blue stream. I needed something special. Something built to block and reflect an energy stream more powerful than forces normally found on a station.
Something similar to the material in my awaysuit.
Something like...my glove.
I had the left one off before I even thought things through. I folded the forefinger into a compressed length. The gloves were made of the same material as my awaysuit, but they were more flexible. In an overall assessment of the suit, they were the weakest point. They had to be if you wanted to crook a finger around a firing mechanism or press a button.
The bare fingers of my left hand felt stiff without my glove. I hadn't noticed the temperature in the ring earlier when I took my helmet off, but the place was chilly. The air wasn't freezing, but I hoped the glove stayed intact so I could put it back on.
There was no point in overthinking things. Any delay only brought the ghost closer in its next circle to Section Ten. I wanted the kid out and us both up the fall before that happened.
Grasping the glove in my right hand, I turned the thickest edge of the material to the blue stream and slid it in.
The flow erupted outward. Blue fire danced over the surface of my suit and a searing pain engulfed my bare left hand. The power lanced off my fingertips, striking the floor with a blast that threw me back into a row of stationary chairs. The airlock slammed open. The blast of station air that rushed to fill the vacuum blew the tabletop inward, while all the debris inside blasted outward into the station. The doors rammed closed against the plate and stopped. Lights on the lock flashed red.
My suit protected me from broken bones. I stumbled back to the airlock.
The rush of air had moved the body. The boot I'd seen in the glass was attached to a little, limp form lying facedown on the lock plate. I bent to inspect the gray, nondescript suit for tears. The material was old, similar to early, primitive stuff we often saw on the frontier, but it was intact, and that was what mattered. I reached out to turn the body.
Saw my left hand was a charred, cracked mess leaking blood and plasma, the ends of my fingers split and shattered where the energy from the lock had blasted out through them.
Shit! I was hurt bad.
With the sight of the damage, pain struck. I fell back to sit on the airlock floor while nausea and agony rolled over me. I nearly blacked out, but a strange vibration at the base of my spine forced into my attention. The station floor was shaking.
Idwal was isolating Section Ten!
I grabbed the back of the kid's suit with my right hand—a spinal injury, like the damage to my hand, was repairable, but first we had to survive this—and tried to lunge back inside the station.
My grip slipped and darkness closed in on me.