Hennessey and Barclay were running for the dock. There were people everywhere, moving between the various command centres dotted along the main hall to the hangar. The mass of bodies was moving away from the dock area and into the path of the two women.
They battled through the crowd, desperately hunting down their quarry. Amanda’s comms sounded.
“Gemma?”
“Amanda, Amy Cooper has disconnected or removed her bio-band. Last pinged location was as before; the main dock at the rear of Globe 11, twenty minutes ago.”
“Understood. What about Libby Baxendale?”
“I’m unable to get her location, but her vitals are still recording. She has an elevated heart rate, but that’s all I can tell you from here.”
She clicked off and the two women continued down the hall as fast as they could, making little headway through the crowd. Amanda’s comms sounded again. She looked at her bio-monitor and back at Hennessey, her eyes wide in surprise. “It’s Jaxon.”
* * *
“Libby!” I tried to run, ignoring the protests and the slight dizziness that threatened to engulf me. The major reached her first. She was in a shit state, half tangled in the off-white fabric of the pallets, leaning strangely downwards to one side. Her right arm was tethered at the wrist to something inside the pallet, awkwardly warping her body, like she’d fallen out of the stack of corpses.
She had something tied around her head, gagging her, which the major removed before gently lifting her and turning her round, releasing her painfully distorted arm.
She locked eyes on me through the helmet. “Jaxon?”
“You know this woman?” asked the major.
“Libby, I’m here,” I said, ignoring the major. “Who did this to you?” The other two medics were busy trying to free Libby’s arm from the pallet.
She looked at me with a mixture of relief and fear, and clearly wondering why I was inside a full space suit. “That woman from Compression – can’t remember her name. She was ICP. After the gravity system failed. I’m so sorry Jaxon, I should have told you but she said they were listening to everything.”
Whilst I had suspected Amy after the last few days of revelations, the words still shocked me. I looked down at Libby, her face swimming in tears, her eyes pleading with me.
“Don’t worry about that now, Lib. We need to get you out of here ASAP.” I took a step back whilst the major and the two medics fussed about freeing Libby from her bondage. I tapped my comms panel and put a call through to Amanda.
“Jaxon?”
“Mand, we need to find Amy now.”
“Are you okay? Grealish told us you’d crashed your Sigma inside the dock.”
“No time right now. I’ve found Libby tied to a pallet of corpses in the bay. She said Amy took her.”
“We already know, Jaxon. We’re in pursuit now. Did she say anything about the bomb?”
“Bomb? What bomb?”
“Amy had a backpack with her, and we think it’s carrying another device. She’s with the two marines that we tracked to Emily Latimer’s house. They’re armed with Scorpions.”
Jesus fucking Christ. I gingerly walked back to Libby. “Lib, Amanda’s asking me about a bomb. Do you know anything about it?”
“A bomb?” asked the major, alarmed.
I ignored him again and implored Libby to respond. She looked terrified. “It’s here, Jaxon.”
“It’s where, Libby?”
“Somewhere in here. I didn’t see her place it. She just told me there’d be an explosion so big that the body count in the bay would seem irrelevant, compared to the damage she was about to do.”
“Amanda, did you hear that?”
“We heard,” she replied.
“How big is the device, Libby?” asked Hennessey.
“She said it was inside the backpack,” replied Libby. “I never actually saw it.”
“How can a device as small as a backpack cause that kind of body count?” asked Amanda.
“There’s nothing down here. Even if she blows the main entry doors to the dock,” I said. “The fleet is deployed, and this whole dock is full of corpses. She can’t kill them twice.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Hennessey. “The armoury.”
“Yes!” said Libby. “She mentioned the armoury before.”
“Jaxon, you need to find that device,” insisted Hennessey, a note of urgency in her tone. “She doesn’t need a large bomb because her plan is to detonate the explosives and combustibles in the armoury.”
“Where is it?”
“The armoury is on the south wall of the dock. If that bomb goes off, it’ll start a chain reaction that’ll destroy this globe and every person inside.”
For fuck’s sake. I turned to the major. “Major, I need you to get Libby and your medics out of here.”
He protested. “Lieutenant, you’re in no condition to—”
“Major, I don’t have time to argue. I need to find that device. If the bay depressurises, I’ll be fine.” Fine was relative, I thought. I was still a fucking mess under this suit, but the bomb was more pressing than my recovery. “I’m in a pressure suit and my oxygen is still ninety-seven percent. Get them out of here.”
I turned left and hobbled along another pallet-corridor, loosely scouring the pallets for any odd protrusions. As I neared the end of the corridor, the amber lights changed to red.
“Sixty seconds to depressurising,” came the announcement, and a siren sound.
“Jaxon, you need to hurry,” said Hennessey.
The depressurisation didn’t worry me. The crash had banged me up pretty badly and my head was still fuzzy, but I was upright and mobile and my eyes were working. I was in a full pressure suit, with comms, so if the bay opened my biggest concern was drifting out of the gigantic doors in the weightless cavity. If that happened, I’d get dragged down into the atmosphere by Earth’s gravity, where I’d burn up like a human burrito with the rest of the bodies. At least it won’t be cold, I thought.
I worked my way through the pallet maze until I hit the south wall. I was only two-hundred metres from the internal hangar, so I looked left to the bay doors, a kilometre away. The armoury was only fifty metres along, on the right side, so I gritted my teeth and tried to jog.
“I’ve found the armoury,” I said, through my comms.
“Can you see a backpack, Jaxon?” replied Amanda.
“Negative.” The armoury front was a metal grill which could retract into the ceiling, enabling pallet trucks and forklifts to access the special weapons visible through the mesh. The surrounding wall was smooth, with no place to hide anything, so I checkout the pallets opposite. They were only three metres away from the armoury door. I probed them one by one, running my hand between the corpse stacks to see if the bag was hidden in the gaps. As I reached the third pallet I noticed a step down on the opposite wall, into a door to the left of the metal grill.
I cursed myself for wasting time on the pallets. Of course, she wouldn’t plant it there. If the depressurisation occurred before the bomb detonated, it would just get sucked out of the doors, exploding uselessly in the vacuum of space. I crossed to the step and reached into the shadowed channel under it. There was a handle sticking out from under the aluminium standoffs. I yanked it and extracted a black nylon backpack with the BRMC Insignia stitched to the top.
“I have the bag,” I said, through my comms.
“Careful opening it, Jaxon,” said Amanda.
“Can you get it to the bay doors?” asked Hennessey.
I unzipped the main compartment and opened the bag fully. Inside was a device that looked identical to the bomb that Brian Latimer had detonated in Compression, except this one had a timer in place of the dead-man’s switch.
“No can do,” I replied, as the realisation swept over me. “There’s nineteen seconds left on the clock.”
“Jaxon, get out of there!” screamed Amanda.
“I can’t outrun this,” I replied.
“Jaxon, throw it away from the south wall and run back to the armoury. There’s a panel on the right side of the doors.”
As I launched it sideways and watched it sail through the air, I glimpsed the timer. Fifteen seconds.
Moving as quickly as my broken body would allow, I backtracked along the armoury shutter to the flat wall with a holloscreen and a console. “Found it!” Twelve, eleven, ten…
“Jaxon, press and hold the right side of the console. It has a failsafe in case of an accident at the armoury,” said Hennessey, with even more urgency.
I pressed my gloved hand to the panel and held it there. Eight, seven, six…
The panel glowed red, and a question flashed up on the screen. Five, four…
Emergency decompression:
ACTIVATE / ABORT
Three, two… I just prayed the Major Nishimura and the medics had got Libby out of the dock, and hit the ACTIVATE button as hard as I could.
There was an explosion and a huge sucking noise, like a giant plug hole in a bath. Fire ripped through the pallets, and, for a moment, I felt it envelop me. The blast catapulted bodies and body parts across the bay and sent me careening towards the inner hangar. There was a rush of air, and I was lifted off the ground and struck by a pallet which propelled me back towards the outer doors. The collision knocked the wind out of me, and in my disorientation I tried to grab something, but the wall was flat and I was moving too fast. I bounced off the steel panelling into the back of another pallet, which slowed me down but did nothing for my ability to breathe.
Gasping for air and desperately clawing to consciousness, I saw the mammoth bay doors hinged outwards like old-fashion saloon swing doors. The doors usually retracted into the hull, but I stared as they pivoted under the pressure of millions of litres of escaping air, sucking hundreds of pallets of corpses out into space.
Globe 12 was visible through the bay doors, but my view quickly became obscured by the giant pallets and carnage ripped from the floor of the bay.
I tumbled across the dock, unable to control my flight, spinning end over end, which made me nauseous. Every fibre of my body protested at the sudden force exerted upon it. I could hear voices through my comms, but the rushing air and explosions were too loud to decipher them. Objects and pallets flew by and I tried to reach out and grab something, anything, to steady my rotation and arrest my momentum, as the bay doors loomed larger and larger.
I could feel intense heat as flames from a burning pallet licked the edges of my suit, the powerful explosion dragging it beyond my grasp. The whole bay was like an asteroid belt, thick with debris, bathed in a flickering orange glow. For a moment, I saw a flash on the starboard quarter; a reflection of metal amongst the carnage.
And then, just as suddenly, the flames went out and a deathly quiet settled over the massacre around me. I was still inside the dark bay, drifting towards the doors, when I saw her. The Red October loomed out of the shimmering light from the distant globe, between the floating pallets. Still magnetised to the dock, but severely damaged by the escaping pallets, the cockpit appeared crushed and caved in, and the fuselage looked like something had ripped it in half.
I flailed about, uselessly, trying to find some means of thrusting myself towards the stricken aircraft. It was the one thing in the entire dock that was fixed magnetically. She was in tatters. Shot to shit, wrecked by the forced landing and further brutalised by the onslaught of debris and bodies.
The decompression was over now and the rush of air had subsided, but there were thousands of objects floating in the dark void, still on a trajectory into space, exacerbated by the rotation of the Bertram Ramsay. I searched for a handhold, object or surface I could use to change my direction. The remains of the Red October clung to the starboard quarter, right inside the doors, whilst I was drifting hopelessly towards the exit on the opposite side of the dock by the southern wall.
Everything ached. The explosion had been akin to pressing hard on a bruise, if the bruise was the size of my entire body and the pressing finger was a pallet of corpses. The burst of adrenaline was subsiding, and I could feel a tinge of panic creeping in. My stomach lurched and I swallowed, trying not to be sick inside my suit. I was in free-fall now. There was no escape. I imagined this was how Mark Hanson felt as he held tight to the SQIID ports in the upper dome of Globe 10.
I was still half a kilometre from the bay doors, completely out of control and spinning slowly. The dock was almost empty, the bulk of its contents sucked out in the initial decompression. Globe 12 was conspicuous again, between the last bits of debris drifting aimlessly about in the vacuum, in a slow waltz towards the infinite desolation of space.
I’d never been inside most of the globes in my short, seven-week tenure on board the station. The bottom levels of Globe 12 crept into my peripheral vision. The top levels were not visible to me this far from the bay doors. I could see a lot of greenery in the bottom two levels, but very little else, being over eleven kilometres away. It looked peaceful. I wondered if I’d drift out of the doors into the path of 12, hitting the glass at almost four-hundred metres-per-second, and dying like a bug on an AethervoX windscreen. Classic.
Pain was permeating my thoughts. My ribs felt like an advertisement for cushioned dashboards, if I was the crash-test-dummy. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to suppress the nausea as I spun relentlessly, and in the absence of sight I was suddenly aware of how I smelt in the confines of the space-suit. Unsure of what I should have expected, it was mostly sweat, coupled with what I could only describe as aged flatulence. If I lived, which at this juncture seemed unlikely, I just hoped they wouldn’t rescue me near a naked flame.
I was getting closer now. The gaping entrance was looming, huge and formidable in front of me. Earth was visible for the first time, creeping into view at the bottom edge of the doorway. She looked beautiful. I hope she’d be the last thing I saw as the oxygen in my suit expired.
The Red October was over to my left, still magnificent even in death. I’d only flown her a handful of times, yet I felt connected to her in a manner I’d failed to find with most humans. If her injuries were anything to go by, I was fucked anyway. I watched her in the gloom as I drifted past, through the giant bay doors and out into space, until the shadows took her from me.