Orange strobe lights blazed all around Jaqueline Dorsett, casting perverse, elongated shadow puppets onto the corridor. She ignored them.
“Jackie.” Allison’s voice burst into Jackie’s mind through her internal com.
“Ahhh, yes. I’m here, ma’am.” Apprehension resonated from the young woman’s voice like a plucked violin string. “I’m standing outside Shuttle Bay Two. It’s a complete mess.”
“Stay calm, Jackie. I need you right now. Chief Billings is in there somewhere, but he’s unresponsive. What can you see?”
“Okay.” Jackie took a deep breath and exhaled through her nostrils. “I’m by the gallery windows. The artifact is pressed up against the aft bulkhead. I can see fog forming in the air around it. I think that’s the hull breach.”
“Good, Jackie. Keep going. Do you see Steven?”
Jacqueline scanned the room for her crewmate. She tried to fight back the fear of finding Billings wounded, or worse. He had a famously short temper for faulty equipment, and the man had an aficionado’s flair for stringing together obscure curses. But Billings had always been kind and patient with her. Jacqueline looked up to him like an older, stronger brother. She feared losing him, too. She forced her eyes back to the task at hand.
“I don’t see the chief. The entire center of the bay is clear. Shuttle A2 has been shoved all the way to the forward bulkhead. So have all of the tables that we set up around the artifact, and, um, tools, maybe?”
“Cleared by an explosion?” Allison inquired.
“I don’t think so. There are no scorch marks or smoke.”
Something crumpled caught her eye. It took a moment to click, because the orientation wasn’t what she had been looking for.
“I see the chief!” Jacqueline was relieved. “He’s fine. He’s leaning against the back of the shuttle.”
“That’s great, Jackie. Can you get his attention?”
“No, he’s facing away from me.”
“That’s all right. Can you open the door?”
Something about the chief nagged at her brain. His posture? It could wait.
“Just a second.” Jacqueline reached over to the control pad and keyed the door. It flashed a red screen with the outline of a man being forcibly inverted. “No. The door’s locked down from the breach. The fail-safe won’t let me through.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll override it from here.”
As Allison spoke, a hand appeared on Jacqueline’s shoulder. She jumped and let out a startled scream.
“It’s just me, Dorsett,” said the sturdy baritone of the XO. “Captain, I’ve reached Shuttle Bay Two. Lieutenant Dorsett is here with me.”
Jacqueline looked on while the conversation continued in Commander Gruber’s ear. She stole a look back to Chief Billings. He was still upright, but leaning very awkwardly. His knees were bent, and he held his arms at odd angles against the side of the shuttle. Furthermore, he didn’t seem to be moving. Something was very wrong. Gruber’s voice brought her to attention.
“Dorsett?”
“Sir.”
“We need to get the chief. Where is he?”
Jacqueline pointed.
Gruber followed her finger until he, too, spotted the engineer. “Good. The airlock is being overridden right now. Captain says there’s at least one radiation hazard in there with him, so keep an eye on the rad alarm on the wall.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Follow me through.”
The inner door to the airlock opened remotely. Gruber stepped into the chamber. Jacqueline followed. The door closed and air cycled to equalize the pressure.
Gruber consulted the door display. “Looks like the breach is pretty slow. There’s still over 70 percent pressure in there, but we need to be quick. Your ears will pop, and you might get light-headed, so watch for blackout.”
“Okay.” Jacqueline’s anxiety rose rapidly. She hadn’t had time to get into a vacuum suit, nor had the XO. Stepping into a room open to deep space in your pajamas didn’t make many top-ten lists.
The outer door opened. Her ears were buffeted by the intense whistling of atmosphere as it raced through the tear in the hull. The center of the room looked swept clean. Everything was piled against the far wall. Not the smallest washer or nut lay in the middle. Everything except the artifact, which had fit itself neatly into an artifact-shaped dent in the far wall.
Something was terribly wrong. Jacqueline’s mind struggled at the answer. “Wait a minute.”
“No time, Lieutenant,” replied Gruber. “Come help me with Billings.” He started walking toward the chief.
Jacqueline’s perception shifted. The scene reoriented in front of her. Everything fell into place.
“Marcel, freeze!”
The XO’s muscles obeyed the order without consulting him. Jacqueline’s voice unwittingly carried a maternal quality selected by evolution to reach into the brain stems of young boys and shut down their motor control.
Jacqueline took a tentative step forward and pulled an eight-millimeter wrench out of her pocket and lobbed it into the air. It sailed in the expected parabola for a bit, then it took a sharp turn in midair and rocketed straight and level toward the far wall at an impressive speed. It hit the bulkhead and stuck like well-cooked pasta.
“What the hell?” Gruber shouted against the whistling.
“Look,” said Jacqueline. “The chief isn’t leaning against the shuttle, he’s lying on top of it. The far wall is the floor, and everything fell onto it. If you had taken another couple of steps…”
Comprehension dawned on Gruber. “I would have fallen sideways. How, though? There’s no g-deck plating on the wall. And why is that over there?” He pointed to the artifact pressed into the other wall. Jacqueline could only shrug.
Gruber spoke into his com. “Captain, we have a big problem.” He responded to the unheard question. “It’s like the forward wall is producing gravity. Everything, including Chief Billings, has fallen onto it. The effect seems to begin about a meter away from where we’re standing.”
“I think it’s the artifact,” Jacqueline said absently. “It’s pushing against the rest of the bay somehow. That’s why it’s the only thing on the aft wall.”
“Like a kind of propulsion?”
“Yeah, like our gravity drive, except”—she paused to take a heavy breath—“repulsive instead of attractive.”
“Lieutenant Dorsett believes it’s coming from the artifact, some sort of antigrav engine. I concur.”
He listened to the captain’s reply. “I don’t know if we can do anything in time, ma’am. The effect seems to be several g’s. Even if we could climb down there, we wouldn’t be strong enough to climb up again, much less pull Billings out.” He, too, began to feel his lungs pull hard for air.
As the two of them pondered their dwindling options, all the tools that were stuck to the wall shifted and crashed to the floor like a box of cymbals tipped off a table. Billings slumped to the floor in a pile. Across the room, the artifact fell to the deck with a thunderclap. The tear in the aft bulkhead that had been covered by the artifact now lay exposed. The remaining air escaped with a deafening sucking sound.
“We gotta move!” Gruber charged across the deck and skidded to a stop at Billings’s feet.
Hyperventilating, Jaqueline struggled to keep pace. Stars burst forth in her eyes, then whole constellations. She took a knee to avoid falling flat. Through blurred vision, she saw Gruber start to drag Billings by his shoes.
The room spun, and her ears popped painfully. Jacqueline could see Gruber stagger badly, so she called up what little reserves she had and grabbed one of Billings’s legs. The temperature plunged, and a thick fog rolled in from nowhere. They heaved back toward the door. Gruber’s nose bled freely. Jacqueline’s field of vision shrank to a tunnel with the airlock at its center. Just a few more steps.
Then, all sound simply died. Jacqueline opened her mouth to scream, but the vacuum ripped the air out of her lungs. She could see through squinted eyes that they were at the threshold of the airlock. Before she could hit the key, her vision faded to black …
* * *
… then, back into light. Jacqueline lay with her legs in the airlock and torso in the hallway outside. The outer door leading to the bay was sealed. Her skull felt like a road crew were repaving the inside of it.
Gruber and Billings lay next to her. Both looked as bad as she felt, but they were breathing. Breathing had taken on new importance for her. She swore to spend more time in the pool practicing holding her breath. Jacqueline could hear shouting and footsteps coming down the hall from both directions.
“Marcel?” She prodded him. “Marcel, are you awake?”
After a moan, a weak voice from somewhere far in the past replied, “I can’t go to school today, Mom. I have a fever…”
She smirked and rolled her eyes, which hurt. “All right, you’d better stay in bed then.”
Gruber’s inner child grinned victoriously.
Jacqueline looked toward the gallery windows and into the shuttle bay that had almost taken her life.
Thick beads of water had formed on the glass and obstructed the view. They grew until two linked up, merged, and attracted the attention of gravity. As the drops slowly rolled down, they cannibalized the drops ahead and gained momentum, until they sprinted for the floor, leaving a clear streak in their path.
Jacqueline rolled toward the glass, her chest still heaving painfully, and wiped off a wide arch with her hand. The pane was frigid. The condensation distorted her view, but she could still see the artifact lying on the deck by itself.
As she listened to the sounds of people shouting and running, movement in the bay lassoed her focus. On the silver skin of the artifact, one set of engravings began to flash blue. Immediately next to it, a line of white light traced a circle in the skin. Once the circle was complete, the lights faded. The circle moved outward a few centimeters, then pivoted down, and revealed a hole in the hull.
She stared at it in rapt fascination. Lights glided through the interior, pulsing and flowing. It was like looking into a transparent, bioluminescent fish. A chuckle broke her attention before deteriorating into a raspy cough. She turned and saw Chief Billings propped up on an elbow. He smiled and winced simultaneously through a swollen face.
“Ta-da!” Billings said quietly. “And now, fer my next trick…”