Space Fright
The explosion that rocked Jon Mercer out of his bunk only confirmed what he'd known all along: somehow, someway, by book or crook, space was going to kill him.
It had simply taken longer than the launch pad explosion he'd sweated over for years, allowing him the luxury of actually getting into space. But now, rubbing his bumped buttocks, he felt its uneven hand reaching to destroy him.
Emergency lights flashed from the bulk head over the hatch, spraying the sleeping quarters with red panic, its insistent eye echoing what the speakers screamed.
"Emergency! Emergency! All personnel to station."
It was planned murder by inanimate beast, empty space scratching at hull. He could feel the metal giving way.
"Shut up!" he shouted but the system could not be over-ridden by voice command. A bad sign. It meant something truly serious and he moaned as he rolled up into a sitting position. The ship shook. Some sort of after-shocks, rocking it back and forth in a space version of an earthquake. His stomach turned. Fear and motion sickness.
You won't get sick, the recruiters had told him. You don't feel motion in space.
Hogwash! He felt it worse here. Motion was everywhere in every muscle and every breath. He couldn't even blink his eyes without some part of his anatomy reacting. And each minute motion made the illness rise. He had lost a third of his body weight from refusing to eat. Why bother? It only came back up again at inopportune moments.
If he was going to die anyway, why move? So he eased back down into the bunk, letting the soft fabric swallow him again, hoping maybe sleep could silence the alarms outside and inside his skull. He pressed the pillow to his ears and though he could still hear the sound, it always seemed better, more distant, as if the space ship had moved beyond him, leaving him in some quieter limo where even space couldn't hurt him.
But there was motion. Figures of other crew members swimming passed him for their bunks, plunging through the portal to the corridor beyond, few looking anywhere but at the alarm light or their watches. None noticed this particular lump in this particular bunk.
At which point the second explosion hit.
Everything jerked one way, then back again, ties holding unused cots came undone, sending bed and bedding to the air in a floating array that in other circumstances would have reminded him of clouds, white and fluffy and... and he fell out into the air, too, shaken by an aftershock. His arms flailed attempting to grab hold of the metal bar, but missed, and the motion sent him floating towards the exit despite himself.
Space waited. Open. Uncluttered. Huge. Space. Where he was less than a dot. Just some mindless bit of matter that lacked any significant gravity. He could see it. He could feel the sides of the world opening up around him.
Even on relatively small planets, he'd felt the sweats coming on over panoramic views.
Video opportunity ahead signs gave him the willies.
Death. Smallness. Non-existence.
It wasn't fair!
How can it bother you in space? the recruiters asked. You never really look at anything but the inside of a tin tub .
They were right. That was the attraction. Live contained within narrowed walled confines of a ship. No signs along the road to remind him of the world beyond the metal.
Space? Only a concept. A non-reality broadcast by view screens and digital readouts. Nothing real. Certainly nothing to worry over. And even after the first scare of blast-off, he had enjoyed space for a time, roving through the corridors, one handhold after another, everything narrow and quaint and save, like mother's womb all over again, though made of the hardest steel. Then, two weeks after jump, he accidently wandered up to the observation deck. He nearly vomited out his heart as the sight-- a billion stars greeting him with all the utter horror of unimaginable distance. Worse than looking up into the sky at night as kid. None of these stars blinked. Gone was even the last assurance of an atmosphere enclosing him. It was only glass and steel that kept him contained, while outside all hell waited to suck him into its vastness.
He retched now floating in the air above his bunk, but nothing came out of him. He had long since passed anything solid from his body and had wisely kept from ingesting anything that could come up. He retched and grabbed the metal, pulling himself back towards the soft wrapping of his bed.
Sleep, he thought, that was the key. No one would miss him. No one cared for a fourth-level engineer when there were better and brighter and less frightened people more willing to do the job. People generally looked through him when they weren't asking him to do odd jobs, like swabbing decks-- yet even that had ended when he had gone into hiding, as if only the sight of him inspired any thought. Without him in front of people, they forgot him completely, and would perhaps until the ship came back into a habitable region, where he could sneak out and find land. Perhaps the caves of Hybraloh would suit him better. A small space where he could remain fixed forever.
WILL ENGINEER 3RD CLASS MERCER, PLEASE REPORT TO THE BRIDGE.
"Engineer Fourth class," Mercer shouted, glaring at the speaker grill out of which the words had come. "I haven't passed my space suit drills yet."
And never would.
But then, this was another bit of short-sightedness on his part, the recruiter emphasizing how comfortable and close the space suit was and how much it was more a second skin than protection against harsh elements.
A breeze, Mercer, the man had said. Get through that and you'll never set foot off terra firma again.
The liar!
If he had stayed planet-side he could have gotten himself a job repairing ground cars, with only occasional visits outside in the sunlight. Not bad work considering where he was now. But at the time, he had thought of the space suit and how comfortable a space it would be. Like a cave. Like some personal embryonic state out of which he would never have to emerge.
But after the observation deck, he knew the truth, and just how frail his existence was with mere fabric around him instead of steel.
"Out there? In space?" he'd told the testing officer. "Are you crazy?"
The officer might have filed charges for insubordination. But Mercer's fainting saved him, and Mercer never rescheduled the test. Fourth class Engineer was not a bad career planet-side. All he had to do was stall for time.
WILL ENGINEER 3RD CLASS MERCER, PLEASE REPORT TO THE BRIDGE--NOW!
He made no move towards the door, watching instead, bits of paper and dust rising up from the floor. Where was the artificial gravity anyway? There was always some flux, especially before and after a jump, but during straight space movement, 1/4 gravity usually prevailed. One of the explosions must have caused more havoc than he'd imagined at first. Yet if so, why hadn't the engineers repaired it. The ship had a full complement even without Mercer, first and second and third level people who could complete repairs within minutes.
Behind him and through the door from the corridor swam two men, both dressed in the silver and black uniforms of the imperial guard, their expressions grim.
"You were summoned to the bridge, Mister Mercer," a third man said, floating in behind the others, smaller, but with wide shoulder and a gnarled face, his red and silver uniform part of the ship's staff. The three stripes on his lower sleeve marked him as chief petty officer.
"Me?" Mercer said, acting surprised.
"Yes, you," Petty officer Leek said. "Don't tell me you can't hear now? The bridge called you twice. The captain wants you up top on the double."
A bead of sweat formed on Mercer's brow, then slowly floated up into the air in a little round bubble of moisture. "The captain?" he said horrified. How had the captain even come to know of Mercer's existence. Such a small and lowly officer in a ship filled with much more important people. "Why in heaven's name does he want me?"
"You'll find out soon enough," Leek said, then motioned for the guard to seize him. "Bring the fool along. I don't have any more time for his games."
Two sets of strong hands closed around Mercer's wrists and ankles and lifted him out of the bunk like a sack of Akorkorian wheat.
"But what happened?" Mercer said when he floated in space beside Leek, head suddenly filled with visions of execution, as if he had committed some capital crime in his sleep.
"You mean to tell me you didn't hear the explosions?" the elder man said, specks of grey showing in his black hair and moustache, part of the old school of space sailors before the empire had taken everything into its one large fleet.
"I heard them," Mercer said, moving out into the corridor, where the red triangle lights flashed emergency at intervals.
"Well, my boy," Leek said, poised at the first of the handholds that protruded from walls, ceilings and floors for just such an emergency. "What you heard was engineering going up in smoke."
"You mean the whole section?"
"Like one big bite out of the side of the ship," Leek said. "The bridge still doesn't know exactly what happened, but we know nobody down there is answering. If anyone's still alive, they're isolated in some small pocket of air somewhere."
Mercer's first reaction was relief. He had moved out of the engineering section early on when he couldn't take the tension anymore, abuse and silence from fellow engineers who saw him as a discredit to the profession..
His second reaction was horror. If they were all dead, then he, Jon Mercer, was the one and only engineer left on board. Leek read his face, a cruel grin drawing up his lips to reveal a line of yellowed teeth.
"Congratulations, boy. You're now chief engineer and bottle washer," he said.
"But I don't want to be chief engineer!" Mercer protested and tried to turn away, but the two grim guard blocked his retreat.
"Tell that to the captain," Leek said. "He seems to think you're something special, but only God knows why."
Mercer knew. He had seen the glint in the captains' eyes when Mercer had come aboard.
"Jon Mercer?" the captain had asked. "Any relation to Red Mercer?"
"He was my father," Mercer said.
"You're Red Mercer's boy?" the Captain exploded, the joy unmistakable now. "Well, I'll be a son of a..."
Mercer had made a point of avoiding the man since, knowing the captain wanted to hear news and later tales of what happened since old Red retired. Mixed with those tales were horror stories, of Mercer's inability to live up to his father's dreams. And the slow decay of a true-hearted spacer who'd come to understand that his son would never follow in his footsteps.
"I'm not going," Mercer said, drawing the Chief Petty Officer to a stop mid-reach.
"It's that or the brig, boy," he said softly.
"But I haven't done anything wrong! I just want to be left alone. That's all."
"Disobeying orders in a disaster situation is a capital offense," Leek said. "You could find yourself floating in space without a suit."
"The captain wouldn't do that!" Mercer growled.
"Wouldn't he? He'd cast you off in a minute if he thought in endangered his ship. "
"But my father..."
"Ah! Don't rely on that to protect you, boy. As fond as he was of old Red, the captain loves this ship more and right now it's wounded needs you to fix it."
"But I can't," Mercer said. "I'm not qualified."
"You know more than anybody else," Leek said. "And if you had any guts, you'd grab the opportunity. It could mean big things for you later on."
"I'm no coward!" Mercer bristled. "I just don't like..."
How did Mercer go about explaining it-- the way he had come so far without letting on to his flaw. All through training he had managed to avoid the watchful eye of his superiors, taking pains to make things appear as if he was someone else.
Once in space everything will be fine, he'd told himself. All he needed to wait for the comfort of a steel shell and narrow walls.
"Like what, Mr. Mercer?" Leek asked, leering at him.
"S-Space," he whispered.
Leek's expression eased a little. Something less hostile came into his eyes. Not friendliness so much as a sense of understanding.
"And what spacer in his right mind doesn't?" he asked.
Mercer started. "You mean you're afraid, too?"
"Look, friend," Leek said, leaning closer with a slight scent of alcohol on his breath. "Anyone here to admire the scenery is crazy. We're here to do a job. And we do. Now on with you, the captain's waiting."
He motioned towards the dimly lit corridor and the blinking emergency lights. Mercer sagged. He'd used his best argument and it had twisted out from under him. He moved on, grabbing the next hand-hold, then the next, like some exotic space monkey swinging from vine to vine.
***********
Captain J.P. Garret was a chunk of unsmiling stone who Mercer had seen only twice since his initial meeting coming on board. Social visits, others called them-- part of some military ritual Mercer never understood, always visiting the children of men he had served with in the past. This trip, Mercer was the only child. Perhaps there were never many. Children of Spacers were rare. The radiation saw to that. So did the life style. Too many years in space for any serious relationship. Mercer had heard of a few in-space romances, but what had happened to them, he didn't know.
But social event or not, the captain had treated them formally, coming in class a uniform complete with metals and ribbons, as if he needed to show the history through which men like him and Mercer's father had had together.
Now, there were none. Not even the insignia of rank. As if the man speaking to Mercer in the bunk rooms was another man entirely, a more simple twin who needed nothing but his grim expression to say who and what he was, sitting in his command chair, arms on its arm, fingers fitting into the grooved slots from which he dictated his decisions. His gaze rose as Mercer entered. A heated gaze that seared Mercer with its rage.
"You were paged three times, mr...."
"Mercer," Mercer said.
"I know what your goddamn name is!" the captain exploded. "The problem is, Mister. You haven't done anything to earn it!"
Mercer wanted to respond, but his head swam from the movement through the corridor and the sudden emergence into the wider space. The large screen flicker with bits of shimmering white-- while not quite the effect of the observation deck, it brought back the feelings of full space around him. Even the ceiling was too high. And his breath came in quick and shallow gasps.
"I'm not like my father, sir," Mercer managed to say.
Something dark stirred in the captain's eyes and his glare at Mercer was as empty and hard as space itself. "Don't talk to me about your father," he growled. "Just tell me where you were when engineering blew up?"
"In bunk room," Mercer said softly.
"You mean the enlisted men's bunk room?"
"Yes."
"But you were assigned to engineering."
"Unofficially, sir."
"Unofficially, be damned!" the captain scowled.
"But that's what I was told when I came on," Mercer protested. "They said I could sleep where they wanted. And I've never felt comfortable among those..."
"Speak well of the dead, Mr. Mercer!" the captain barked. "You may have to live with their ghosts." But the man's anger had abated some. Perhaps he understood the nature of engineers and the in-club mentality they had in their world, hating new-comers, making them go through hell like some boyish fraternity. He stared away towards the screen for a moment, then slowly worked his way back toward's Mercer, pausing at the slightly soured smile of Chief Petty Officer Leek.
"Is there something funny, Mister Leek?"
Leek jumped and swallowed and nearly floated off into the bulk head above him. "N-No sir!"
"Then take that smirk off your face. I asked you to look out for Mercer when he first came on board and you obviously did one hell of a job."
"Me, sir?"
"Yeah, you! Those louts in engineering, no doubt took particular pleasure in torturing him because he's the son of my friend."
"Sir, that's not my department."
"It's no one's department any more, Mister Leek. It's no department at all. And unless we do something, there won't be anything for the rest of us either."
The captain glanced to Mercer again.
"And we're going to need you, son," he said softly. "You're all we have us and disaster."
"But I'm really not qualified, sir," Mercer protested.
"Bull! I've seen your test scores. You rate as high as anyone in the department."
"In everything but experience."
"Ah, your space thing."
Mercer blinked. The man would have gotten less of a reaction, shooting Mercer in the foot with a blaster. "You know about that?"
"Aye!" the captain said. "It's hard to hide from a spacer. Most of us have had to work with people like you. Frankly, I think you should never have come. But there's space in your blood as much as you deny or fear it. You have your father in you and that makes a big difference. Any other time, I wouldn't trust you to tie my shoes."
"And what did you have in mind, sir?" Mercer said, feeling more miserable for the complement, and more scared. He could feel the cold breath of space breathing in on him, and its fingers scratching at the hull to steal him away.
"You have to see what went wrong out there and fix it if you can."
"Me?"
"Yes, you," the captain said. "But you'll have Mister Leek to help you."
"WHAT?" Leek exploded. "There's got to be some kind of mistake. I don't know anything about engineering."
"What you don't know, Mercer can teach you," the Captain said. "I need people down there I can rely on. And you've got experience Mercer lacks."
Leek's dark glance pierced Mercer. Experience, bull, the glance said. It was Red Mercer's ghost floating between them, and captain's need to not have Mercer die on his watch. Indeed there was pain in the captain's gaze when it turned back onto Mercer, as if it all was a pointless gesture. There was death in that gaze. And the slow acceptance of a dead ship.
"What exactly happened down there?" Mercer asked.
The captain's stare refocused on Mercer. A slow, hopeful smile touched the corners of his lips. He motioned towards his stiff-backed first officer.
"Tell him," the captain said.
The officer eyed Mercer indignantly, his smooth face crinkling slightly at the edges with distaste. Like Leek, there was a certain resentment over being detoured around. Family ties had no business in the military where chain of command was God. The man's slitting eyes coolly moved up and down Mercer as if gauging him for a fist fight.
"There's a power surge moving slowly through the system," the man said.
"A power surge?" Mercer said, suddenly intrigued despite himself. "This long after the explosion?"
Electricity moved at the speed of light. Whatever had happened should have happened already.
"We don't know if it was caused by the explosion or the cause of it," the first officer said. "But it's moving through our systems one after another."
"How? What damage is it doing? Just data or physical damage?"
"It's like a virus," the first officer said. "It moves through our computers and data banks and electrical circuits like something blind. We've slowed it down, blocking direct access, but it worms through into the systems using back up connections we didn't even know existed. Sooner or later it'll get into everything."
"Did you try looping it?" Mercer asked, noticing surprise in both the first officer and the captain.
"Yes," the first officer finally. "It's one of the delaying tactics."
"Delay? It should stop the damned thing cold," Mercer said.
"It leaps out from the loop after a while, as if..." the first officer glanced at the captain.
"Go head," the captain said. "Tell Mercer what you think."
"..as if it had some form of intelligence."
"Intelligence? An electrical surge?" Mercer said. "That's crazy."
"We don't know what kind of surge it is, Mr. Mercer," the captain said. "Which is why we're sending you don't to engineering. To see if you can stop this thing before the whole system goes down."
Mercer stared. Something in the captain's expression told him not to protest just then, as if one wrong word would have the captain commit him to space without a space suit. There was death in the man's eyes. The kind of death Mercer had seen among planet side victims of radiation sickness. People too poor to pay the cure, knowing they would die from it.
"Life support is our primary concern," the first officer ranted on. "But we're worried about the drive circuit, too. If it gets into that there's no telling what might happen. It might even set off some sort of chain reaction. Or send us into an unregulated jump."
Mercer felt his stomach tighten. An unregulated jump was as bad as death. Even if they didn't land in the middle of some distant star, they could wind up in space for which there were no charts, without coordinates to jump back with.
"But I thought you said engineering had been wiped out in the explosion," Mercer said with a lump as big a moon in his throat.
"It took two explosions," the captain said. "But that's what happened."
"But that means the hull's been punctured?"
"Ripped open is more precise," the first officer said. "Survey probes show much of the outer skin pealed back. Most of the engineering compartments are literally in outer space."
Mercer felt his head spin and the bridge slowly faded into a whitish haze. He retched. Nothing came up from his stomach but a bitter, acidity taste that burned the back of his throat. He felt Leek move close to him, the chief petty officer's hard hands closing around his upper arm, holding him in place.
"You can't say no, pal," Leek whispered, sounding more and more like the dream-devils Mercer saw as a kid, visions of creatures drawn up from his father's tales of space exploration. Nothing real. Nothing to worry about. Except for deep down in himself where they waited to rise again.
"But I can't go out there!" Mercer protested, drawing down the heavy brows of the captain and a contemptuous look to his gaze.
"What was that, Mr. Mercer?"
"I'm not qualified," Mercer said.
"you're a third class engineer," the first officer said. "Therefore you have space experience."
Mercer shook his head, more in an attempt to clear the dust out than reply to the officer. "But I'm not," he said. "I'm still a fourth class officer. I haven't taken my tests yet."
A profound silence filled the bridge. Even the officers seated around the console up front, leaned back, their faces awash in shock and pain, as if a lingering hope had just been extinguished. Leek coughed uncomfortably. The First Officer started, his face unusually pale as he hard gaze attempted to poke through the haze between Mercer himself. The captain himself showed no sign of shock, except perhaps for the slightly elevated brows. The eyes themselves actually looked amused. He seemed to recall something from his own past, or more likely from Mercer's father to which all this related.
"Well then," the captain said, his voice as steady as the ship was not. "I guess you'll have to learn as you go along. Get him dress, Mr. Leek."
"Aye, sir!" Leek said, the words breaking up in his throat. "Come on, Mercer. We've got to get you ready."
***********
"I'm not going to do it!" Mercer said, his arms and legs already enclosed with Leek pushing the helmet down over his head, snapping the magnetic clamps shut one after another, each less loud than the previous one as the suit's seal took hold. The fabric seemed too thin. Like human skin. Not even meant for the extremes of space. More for the tubes through which men swished along the outside fabric of the ship itself. Worm holes through the metal by which men fixed the mechanisms. Air-tight, but not space proof. Meteorites had been known to kill men, punching pin holes in their suits and chests.
"I've already made it clear what your options are," Leek said, his voice punctuating Mercer's suit through the internal speaker system."No one disobeys orders in a crisis situation."
"But if I go out there I'll die anyway! At least if I'm executed, it'll be painless and quick."
"Shut your trap, Mercer. You're going out there and you're coming back."
"How do you know?"
"Because I'm going with you, remember! And I'm going to make sure we both make it back, and that you fix whatever it is that's broken so the ship can get back to port. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you but I'm not convinced," Mercer mumbled. "Maybe I should have died in the explosion with the rest of them, then it would have been easier on us all."
"You still have your chance at that," Leek said, adjusting his own suit, clamping the seals on his arms and legs, his helmet fitting over his squat face. The face through the plastic of both helmets looked bloated and wrong. Like a different person. Only the voice remained Leeks, goading Mercer on. "From what I've heard we could get more explosions anytime."
"Stop trying to cheer me up, Leek. I told you, I'm not going."
Leek leaned close, the plastic of his helmet making contact with Mercer's. The eyes behind it were angry and annoyed. The words, however, vibrated into the suit by both speakers and the plastic itself, a minor earthquake warning him. "You're going out there all right, Mr Engineer. Or I'll have you apart piece by bloody piece-- and I'll make it go real slow. You hear me?"
Mercer swallowed with great difficulty. He had no doubt that Leek meant what he said. Death waited the whole crew if Mercer failed. Bleak, black death that would leave little trace for anyone to find. No memory of these last moments, only some log entry from their last port of call saying they had existed at all.
"Look, pal," Leek said in a more confidential tone. "It ain't half as bad as you think it is out there."
Mercer stared into the squat face, but the narrow eyes said he was lying. That it was far worse than any one could ever imagine and that he himself was scared out of his wits, too, the way any sane man would be. Humans weren't supposed to comprehend sizes like those, unlimited space in which he wasn't even a dot. The mind just didn't handle that kind of ego insult. Mercer was nothing to it. Leek was nothing. Even the captain was nothing. The whole ship, navy or civilization meant nothing to its vastness.
"No," Mercer said.
"Come on. You're just being stubborn now," Leek said, the other more normal kind of fright coming into his face and eyes, the kind which said he wouldn't see home again without Mercer's help, and wouldn't breathe much longer either. "All you got to do is go out and make a few leaps and pull a few switches. Nothing to it."
"I can't."
"You gotta!"
"Why don't you? Then you can be the hero."
"If I knew which ones to pull I would, but I don't. You do."
Mercer floated free of the chief petty officer, echoes of his father's voice filling his head. The voice of those last days when the man had been most discouraged with Mercer and with himself, space finally catching up to him. The blood infections. The weakening bones. The loss of memory. The man melting out from behind the medals in slow painful degrees, hoping his son would take his place among the stars, knowing-- or at least reasonably certain-- Mercer would not.
Maybe it didn't matter how Mercer had gotten here. Maybe it mattered only that fate had given him the chance his father always wanted him to have, pushing him out to the literal brink of heroism for him to prove himself. The idea was repulsive. But so was the idea of doing nothing, of allowing space to squash him in its unthinking way, slowly, steadily robbing him of those things like air and water by which he lived. Something sparked deep inside him. Anger. Rage. The idea of being an unimportant speck the most repulsive thing of all!
"All right!" Mercer growled. "Let's do it!"
**********
The old Mercer reemerged the minute he slipped into the tube, the cowardly voice rising above the voices of his father and his anger to ask just what Mercer thought he was doing.
Why die like this? the voice asked. You don't see the captain out here. Or that smug first officer?
He grit his teeth and tried to ignore the voice. But it remained, nagging him as he slid forward, pulled along by the press of air as his suit expanded out to meet the walls. He was nothing but a living bullet now, firing through the tube towards emptiness with no one but Leek behind him. Why couldn't he die with dignity like the others, in the comfort of his bunk, waiting for the air to give out? Why did he have to go out and greet it like some grinning fool?
He came to the first junction and stopped, waiting in the small connecting chamber for Leek to appear, the smaller, stockier man tumbling out feet first to the floor. The thick brows descended upon seeing Mercer.
"What's the trouble now?" Leek asked.
"Look, Leek. Why can't we just let the robots do this?" The sudden revelation came to him precisely at the nick of time.
"Because the radiation is blowing out of that hole screws up everything we send down there. You don't think the captain want to depend on your to save his ship. He's just go no choice."
"Shielded robots can't get through?" Mercer said stunned. "The radiation is that high?"
"Will you just shut up and get going? It's a long crawl to engineering."
"Crawl? What's wrong with the blow tube?"
"From this point it doesn't work and the rest of the systems about to go down, too. It's manual labor until we get there."
The tubes had been an innovation the designers had put in for such occasions, though men were never supposed to crawl as they did now, weaving deep into the guts of the machinery where few humans had been before. But in these mole tunnels, Mercer felt comfortable, and he wondered how life would be if he could remain in them. Maybe he should have selected some more physical profession that would have allowed him access to them rather than the high fluting life of a starship engineer. Yet even then, he would be dying now-- and without even the slimmest hope that the captain and others had in him.
Leek moved behind him, strangely more as guard than companion, making sure Mercer went. Finally, they came to the closed sections, and across the width of the narrow tunnel, metal doors had closed like jaws, sealing the ship from the deadly vacuum beyond.
Mercer stopped. Leek slid beside him.
"This is where it gets hairy," the chief said. Mercer recalled the man being an ex-fighter pilot from the war, even through the thick plastic the fear showed, the mouth and eyes set in the grim expression of expected death. Mercer felt for the electronic switch that released the gates. But the panel was dead and the code did not respond to his touch.
"What the...?"
"No power," Leek said. "The panel won't activate until we close the other seal."
He pointed towards the next panel in the series of safety sections that ribbed the inside of the tube. Of course, Mercer thought, mentality kicking himself. It was part of the design. But it made him feel worse for the knowledge, as if he was stepping beyond the bounds of civilization where space could get at him. He thought to turn back. To refuse and let them do what they wanted with him. But it seemed as frightening now behind him as forward, as if there was a clock ticking towards all their deaths.
Leek fiddled with the panel in the wall behind them, a red light turning green as a new set of doors began to move in, closing Mercer and the chief in a small section of tube. And strangely, it made Mercer feel even better, as if now he was finally reaching the point where he was truly safe.
"Hit it now," Leek said.
"What?"
"The panel. It should work now."
He pointed towards the board at Mercer's fingertips which had suddenly come to life. The red light waiting for its command to go green. Mercer's fingers flinched, punching out the proper sequence. The doors before them gaped, jagged edges spreading like a set of jaws, revealing what had once been Engineering. Purple, blue, white and orange. Flares of color leaping up in mad sparks from those chambers.
"There's still air," Mercer said.
"Not much," Leek responded with a tremble of awe in his voice. "Not enough for anyone to have survived-- even if the radiation hadn't killed them."
But Mercer's gaze fell upon the empty space between those chambers and where he sat, the utter blackness of space itself intruding in on the ship, as if some alien giant had come and taken a bite out of the hull. He whistled slowly in astonishment, then the fear crashed in.
"Okay, Mercer," Leek whispered, sounding afraid to speak loudly here. As if there was something holy in the lack of air, some greater being to which they owned reverence. "Do your thing."
But what was he supposed to do? The fear gripped his throat, making him feel like a stage-shy actor preparing to step into some utterly impossible role. The whole universe of stars was his audience. He couldn't move. Space was a single jump away and he couldn't force his body to make the leap. He felt so utterly small. Not even the old metaphor of being an insect fit. He would have murdered for the glory of being that big here. He was nothing-- the human race was nothing. And never would be.
"Mercer!"
Mercer turned. Leek loomed over him like a bat, angry face trapped behind a plastic bubble.
"I can check everything from here," Mercer said, yanking instruments loose from his utility belt. But even for that he had to edge out from the tube onto the ragged ledge that had once been the bulkhead. The act was the bravest he'd ever undertaken-- a jump into darkness that shook him to the soul. He was shocked when he magnetic boots struck something solid. He could hear only his breathing and the uneven beat of his heart.
Yet he head swayed with the lack of gravity. Which way was up? Which way down? Things here made no sense. Everything lacked meaning, especially the spray of sparks. It was power draining out from the ship. It was the ship's life blood. It was his survival dying in one great light show.
Calm yourself, boy! his father's voice said from somewhere deep inside his head. His father was in his blood, the captain said. All you got to do is your job.
He adjusted the scanner and panned, its tiny screen flickering with changing colors as it took up messages from the other side. Red, blue, green, yellow, like some counteracting alien code to the sparks. Then, the readings went crazy!
"God!" Mercer yelped.
"What is it?" Leek asked, leaning over the edge, both hands gripping the jagged metal. "What's wrong, boy?"
"It's the power pile," Mercer said, trying to hold his hands steady and keep himself from screaming again. He needed an accurate reading despite his panic. He needed to know the truth.
"What about the pile?" Leek asked, easing closer, his helmet inches from Mercer's, his eyes filling slowly with the dread Mercer felt.
"I'm not sure," Mercer said. "We're not close enough for an accurate reading. But something's out there, sitting on top of it, sucking power out of it like blood."
"What?" Leek roared, his frightened gaze looking across the gap at the world of sparks, narrowing as if to see the beast among them. "What kind of something?"
"Nothing I've ever see before," Mercer said.
Leek glanced back, a bit of relief washing into his eyes. "But then, you're only a third class engineer."
"Fourth class," Mercer said. "But I've done my homework and this isn't something I've read about in books. But I can tell you one thing. It's building up and there's going to be another explosion if we don't stop it."
"How big?"
"Enough to take apart the ship if the readings are to be believed. It's overheating the pile."
Leek said nothing for a long time, staring out across the gap again, not at the sparks or the shape of some being neither man could see, but into something that had nothing to do with space or Mercer. The thoughts were not hard to read. To die in space was not an easy matter for any soul, fear of the open or not, and there were many kinds of fear and many limits against which a man might be pushed. Space-- for all men-- was death. Men resisted it, fighting it with technology and courage, but in the end, space always won, or forced a aging soul down from its realm.
"Let me look at that thing," Leek demanded.
Mercer handed over the instrument and the chief studied the small screen, repeating the sweep that had brought in the details of the disaster a moment before. Leek's hard face and his plastic mask shimmered with the multitude of colors, but the gaze did not comprehend. The man understood the figures nearly as well as Mercer did. He was trained well enough in such things to know what they meant. It was the deeper unnatural pattern they formed that he didn't seem to garner.
"Could it be something caused by the accident?" Leek asked. "A black hole maybe?"
Mercer shook his head, the action incomprehensible in the suit. "The ship's sensors would have detected a black hole from well off," he said. "Even if they hadn't, there wouldn't be a ship left for us to be standing on. Everything would have been sucked into it."
It felt to Mercer as if this thing had snuck up on the ship, somehow disguising itself in the darkness. A vulture or a vampire, waiting to suck the life blood of power.
"So what do we do?" Leek asked, handing the instrument back.
Mercer studied the readings again, almost unaware of space around him, one horror chasing another from his brain. He felt numb to everything and fascinated, watching the machine's calculation slowly mounting up their doom. He remembered text books always talking about such figures as examples of extremes, the way early spacemen spoke of the speed of light. One managed to approach these things but never really achieved it. Not without turning into some form of energy. What he saw was nearly impossible in terms of his books. And there was no cure in those early lessons.
And yet, there were conflicting signs. The sense that nothing had snuck up on the ship at all, that whatever had come about here had been the result of some cosmic accident.
A form of creation?
"It's the loop," Mercer said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean it's feeding on itself somehow. The more it circulates, the smarter it gets."
"Smarter? Are you crazy?" Leek howled.
"Maybe," Mercer said. "But the first officer felt it, too."
"Then both of you are crazy," Leek yelled.
"Maybe. But it's the only thing that explains what's happening here."
"All right, suppose it is true. What then?"
"Then we have to kill it."
"Kill it?"
"There has to be a way to deactivate the juice," Mercer said.
"Not here. Or in the control room," Leek said.
"But maybe over there. That was engineering. There were a lot of the master controls in that section."
"Fine. How do we get there? Jump?"
Mercer felt the tightness grow in his chest and throat again as he stared across the gap of space, knowing that it could suck him up as easily as the beast in the power system did the life of the ship. But what other way was there? They could go back and get one of the small scout craft from the other side of the ship, but that would take time, and there was no guarantee they would work any better than the robots close up near the power drain.
"I don't want to," Mercer said finally. "But I don't want to die here either waiting for that thing to blow up the ship."
"You really haven't done any space at all," Leek said, growing more horrified as the truth seeped into his brain. "Not even the basics?"
Mercer shook his head.
"God! This is no place for a rooky," he mumbled.
"You could teach me," Mercer said, his brain disbelieving what his mouth had produced.
"Teach you? Here? This ain't no place for lessons either."
"But we have to do something. If we sit here we'll die and I'm the one whose scared of space, remember?"
"No, we're all scared of space. But some of us know how bad it can be," Leek said, then stared out at the sparks again before letting out a slow and resigned sigh. "All right. It's not that far of a jump. We can swing it with the suit compressors. But damn it, you listen to every word I tell you. Understand?"
"I'm no hero," Mercer said.
Leek nodded and fiddled with his own belt till he came up with two thin plastic lines with hooks attached to either end. He clipped them to eye-hooks on Mercer's suit.
"This is risky," he said. "You go flying off into the wrong direction, you might take us both out into the shit. But it's the routine and safer for both of us. Now, we're going to disconnect from the hull at the same time we push off. It's not complicated. But it normally takes some practices. Do it wrong and we get stuck half way across and we'll have to use the compressors. Do it right, we sail right into the sparks."
Mercer nodded, not totally certain about which fate he preferred. But his father's voice egged him on, the aging voice now, the disappointed voice of the old man who'd given up on dreams.
"Just say the word, Chief," Mercer said. "I'll do it."
"Now!" Leek shouted, taking Mercer off guard.
He'd expected some sort of build up or count down. And didn't jump until well after the line had stretched out with Leek's already leaping body. He pushed, but the effort was ineffectual. With the lack of gravity and the motion of the other man, he seemed to be pushing out into cotton, dragging behind Leek like an anchor.
"Damn it, Mercer!" Leek howled. "I thought you understood!"
"I'm sorry," Mercer said as both men floated in the open space, the hull like a horseshoe around them, with them at its exact center. He couldn't believe it! His limbs had already begun to ache as if the muscles themselves rebelled, wanting to crawl up inside themselves.
"Don't be sorry, just do what your told, Mister!" Leek said. "Mercer! Are you listening to me?"
"Yes," Mercer said through clenched teeth. But his eyes were closed, refusing to admit to himself that he was where he thought he was doing what he was doing.
Men didn't belong out here without support. Without something to contain them. Even worlds with their heavy gravity pull were too big. Man was a cave creature. He belonged there. He should never have climbed out of them or looked to the sky, or lusted after stars he could never truly reach.
But man had reached the stars. That was the ugly point of all this, and Mercer had been dragged out with the rest of humanity, to die here.
"Mercer!" Leek's rough voice shouted over the radio. "Talk to me, Mercer!"
"I-- can't," Mercer said.
"It's not as bad as you think it is. Just breathe deep and talk to me."
"I'm scared, chief."
An audible sigh sounded over the small speakers in Mercer's head set. "I know, Mercer. But you can't let it stop you. We're all scared. I don't want to die out here any more than you do. And I'm going to die unless you help me."
Mercer's eyes fluttered open. He didn't see Leek's face, only the man floating at the end of the now limp line with the reflection of the sparks where his face should have been.
"You need me?"
"The whole ship does, damn it. You've got the knowledge to beat this-- whatever it is. Now get yourself together or we'll all die here."
Mercer nodded-- only vaguely aware that Leek couldn't see his acknowledgement.
"First thing we have to do," Leek mumbled. "Is get ourselves over to the other side. Now you're going to listen to me and obey everything I say. You understand?"
"Yes."
"I mean it this time. No screw ups. I'm going to use my jets to drag you over to the hull. But you've got to be ready to hit. This is no game. We don't want you crushed with the impact."
"Crushed?"
"It's happened with people who don't land right. Just watch me and do what I do. Okay?"
"Yes."
A brief cloud appeared at two points on Leek's suit as gas escaped into the vacuum around them. Immediately, the Leek began to move away and the line tightened. A moment later, Mercer was moving, too, following like a dog behind Leek, floating on towards the sparks and the dark hall beneath them, space loosing its hold on him after all-- on this petty little human being.
Leek shifted around, putting his feet forward towards the hull, then couched. It was simple as that and yet Mercer heard the man grunt over the speakers.
"Turn around!" Leek yelled. "Do what I did!"
Mercer's arms flailed. It was everything wrong any space instructor taught, but it turned Mercer around so that his feet face towards the oncoming metal.
"Flip on your boots!" Leek yelled and Mercer stabbed the gloved button that reinstated the magnetic attraction inside his boots. He hit and couched, feeling the shudder go through his bones, muscle and sinew taking the brunt of the impact. When he straightened, he felt the stain in his legs and thighs. He was alive, damn it, though he knew he would feel it for weeks.
"Good show," Leek said, close again, his face visible despite the waterfall of sparks overhead, a grinning, proud-eyed face that could have been Mercer's father.
"Thanks," Mercer mumbled. "What now?"
"Now it's up to you," Leek said. "How much time do you think we have before the thing blows?"
Mercer tugged his instrument free of his belt and waved it above and around, its multi-colored readings speaking of doom. "Minutes," he said. "If not less."
"Then I guess we'd better hurry, eh? Where now?"
Again, Mercer consulted the scanner, shifting the small screen into a schematic mode. It showed the outline of the original bulk head in faint orange lines. The more ragged shape showed in blue and along these lines of plastic and steel, pulsing red indicating energy. It looked and felt like the breathing of a beast, but Mercer didn't dwell on this.
"That way," he said and pointed. "There's manual cutoffs in that section. But the path towards which he pointed was the very jagged edge and he started off along it with all the precipitous feeling of a man on the edge of a cliff. But there was no gravity to pull him over. Just his the magnetic grip of his boots crunching through the burned metal. He stopped when the path became more solid and above them the inside sections of hull showed like ribs. Men had lived here. Men had died here. And now everything was exposed, the inner workings of people's lives blackened by fire, emptied by the perpetually sucking vacuum. But the walls and walkways and tubes remained as archaeological reminders of the men. He felt himself shiver inside his suit again. He took more readings. He could feel the vibrations of the impending explosions up from the hull. Or was that his beating heart?
"What is it?" Leek asked, catching up to him. But his voice was full of static. The power was creating havoc with their electronics. The way it had with the robots. All the readings were haywire now and couldn't be trusted. The ship could blow in an hour or twenty seconds. Mercer didn't know.
"We crawl through here," Mercer said, pointing to the withered end of another crawl tube. The plastic and metal ribbing had melted and rehardened into a slightly distorted version, more oblong than circular. "Come on."
Mercer slid inside, gloves slipping on the former handholds as his magnetic grip with the deck ceased. His scanner went dark. Burned out by the readings or the radiation, he didn't know. He cast it aside, but it floated beside him until he moved on, down through the widening tube, looking for the panels which would take him into the deeper and more secret part of the hull-- where the real blood and guts of the ship had always been.
Up ahead somewhere, the power panels lined the walls, and as he moved he rehearsed old lessons-- following the pattern of fiber optic circuitry that would help him disconnect the beast from the ship's power source. What was the thing like that bled them like a vampire? Was it young? Or as old as space itself? Did it know that other more fragile lives hung beneath it, threatened by its hunger? He tried to think himself in its place, a squalling infant starved for energy, reaching out and grabbing at what it could as this small silver-sided ship passed it in the vacuum. He felt himself leaping along the natural eddies of current, from one circuit to another, a moving mouth sucking at the teat of energy, frolicking in the shower of sparks and loose ions. Did it comprehend itself as alive?
And suddenly, an overwhelming urge rose up in Mercer-- to reach for it or call to it, to make himself known, as if that in itself would save them from its needs.
We're alive, he thought.
And yet, so were fleas and ticks and humans did not spare them.
He stopped.
"What is it?" Leek asked squeezing up to Mercer's side. Another door stood closed like jaws in front of them.
"It knows we're here," Mercer whispered, the horror thick in his throat. He could barely take air in and saw the lights flash up indicating an increase in output from the mixture module.
"What?"
"The thing has sensed us."
"Damn it, Mercer. Don't start that stuff again."
"I'm not starting anything. But this door here shouldn't be shut."
Leek blinked at the obstacle. "I'll admit that much is screwy, but then anything could explain it. Like a surge through the switch."
"Or something waiting behind it."
"Mercer, quit it!" Leek said, though lacking his earlier conviction. He drew out a small box from his utility belt and fitted it a section of hull near where the switch had once been. Now, all that remained was a blackened space. He pressed several contact and lights flickered on. The door parted with a reluctant shudder.
"In, quick!" Mercer cried and swam through the opening. Leek followed and the door's jaws shut just short of his heals.
"Now that was queer!" Leek said, glancing back. He had just managed to recover the electronic key and started to fit it in place.
"Don't try," Mercer said. "Later. We're on the side of the door we want to be on."
"All right," Leek mumbled and refit the switch to his belt, though eyed the door with annoyance. "How far now?"
"If I remember right, only about twenty meters more."
"Lead on, Columbus," Leek mumbled as Mercer pulled himself along, the handles in this section of tube once more in tact. They crawled quickly. The inside of the tube smoother, less dented in, hinting of an exterior of stable unexploded hull outside. Vacuum had killed those the explosion had not, sucking out the breath of the men as they struggled for emergency hatches or suits or rescue pods. Yet none had managed to escape space once it came for them.
He came to an upward hatch and stopped again.
"We exit here," he said and yanked the handle aside, feeling the metal on the other side click. Everything on manual now. The designers had been thorough. They'd presumed people could survive an energy failure. Still, the door did not open easily, taking the combined mass of Leek and Mercer to make it rise. Then, it flew from them and crashed against the deck above, sending vibrations through their suits. Neither heard the sound of it striking.
It gave way into darkness-- a complete darkness that stunned Mercer. As if space had eaten itself.
"The power's gone," Leek's staticy voice said.
"Something's sucked it dry," Mercer said.
"What?"
Leek's voice was even more muffled on the second try. Mercer glanced at the readings inside his suit. The small pile in the suit's power unit reported back dead.
Dead.
The power sucked out of them, too.
Leek's helmet touched his. "What's going on?" the vibrating voice asked.
"Trouble. We've lost our suit power."
He saw Leek's eyes dilate. It was the look of a man who had been sentenced to death. No power meant no air and no air meant no getting back to the still-living part of the ship.
"Is there anything we can do?"
"I don't know," Mercer mumbled.
"What?" Leek asked.
"Maybe!" Mercer shouted back. "If we cut the thing off, it might stop draining us."
It was trying to kill them. It knew what they had come to do. But it didn't know exactly what they were. It had killed the robots this way, by reducing their power. But human's did not die immediately. Mercer felt an odd humor rising from his revelation. So human's were superior to machines in some respects, eh?
"Then do it, damn it!" Leek shouted, his words echoing in Mercer's helmet, relaying a growing panic in the other man, space, not the creature, reaching in and touching him, stripping him of civilization's protections.
There was only their skin now. Raw, soft, vulnerable skin that had been with them since the beginning, protecting them from sun and rain and snow.
"All right," Mercer said, trying to clear his own head of the panic, understanding for the first time that he'd never really been safe, that all his life space had waited, if not here, then down on the surface, sneaking through the atmosphere, killing with cancer and meteors and shifts in planet mass. And the air in his suit had already turned stale. Even without the readout he knew the CO2 count was rising. And it was getting cold. Space's cool fingers seeping through the fabric of his suit.
"Come on," Mercer said, pushing himself through the portal to the eerie formerly human occupied world of hallways and labs and workshops. He tried to stand. But the boots had lost their magnetism and he floated up, his eyes growing used to the darkness. Even here, starlight came, sneaking through the cracks in the hull like winged messengers of hope.
It surprised him. He felt grateful. It was as if space itself had changed its mind, siding with frail humanity, extending some sort of hand. In this, Mercer saw the handholds and grabbed for the first, yanking himself forward, muscles aching with the lack of propulsion, the mass of the suit dragging on him. It was as if he had sunk back into the brine from which Humanity had first crawled, or perhaps only to the level of monkeys, swinging from tree to tree. He could feel Leek behind him, clinging to his heals. He could feel the fright leaping from the man the way the sparks did their creature up above on the hull. He tried to recall his former visits to this place. It seemed strange to him. Even the images from the scanner eluded him. Ahead, somewhere in these corridors. He just needed to keep moving forward.
Then, at an intersection, he stopped. Leek bumped into him. Pressing his helmet to Mercer's, he asked. "What is it?"
"I don't recall this part," Mercer said. In truth everything was foggy. He could barely feel his fingers and toes. And each thought seemed too much an effort.
Which way? It had to be right or left. A huge steel door had closed this section off from the drives and other areas of the ship. Behind it, life went on. Air circulated. People walked around without suits.
But that would end, too, if he didn't find the box.
Right or left? He didn't know. But he felt an urge towards the right. A whisper of a memory that he just couldn't grasp solidly.
"Right," he said. "We turn right."
And he leaped off again, flailing at the vacuum for another hand hold, finding it and yanking himself into another leap. The box wasn't far now, he could almost feel it, as if each meter closer provide energy into his fingers. But he felt the need to touch the metal with his flesh, and resisted the urge to pluck off the gloves.
That's crazy! he told himself. But wasn't it all crazy already? Weren't they going to die anyway?
He kept himself moving ahead.
The box came on suddenly, a looming fixed shape in a world of shadow. He banged into it first without realizing what it was. Leek hit Mercer from behind, already floating with less military acuteness, another punch-happy zombie ready to keel over from bad air. Mercer could smell himself, the fear-sweat creating a thick and dirty perfume in his suit. It made him want to vomit. But his fingers reached ahead and struggled with the buttons to release the box cover. They didn't respond.
"They're electrical," Leek said, pressing his helmet to his. "But there must be a physical release-- everything has one in case of a power failure."
There was. And Mercer's fingers found it, though manipulating it seemed a frightful struggle. Again, he wished to shed his gloves, to touch the metal with his bare skin, to feel the power of the beast....
The cover fell free, floating beside them for a moment until Leek pushed it away.
"Well?" Leek asked after Mercer had studied the dark panel for a moment. "What's the hold up?"
Mercer shook his head. He couldn't clear his thoughts. He kept forgetting what they'd come here for and what this thing was in front of him. He kept forgetting he was supposed to be an engineer. The only engineer. The sole hope of those living beyond the metal doors. Time was rapidly shrinking. He needed to do something.
"I can't see anything," Mercer complained. "I can't trace the lines to see which switch does what."
"Can't you pull them all?"
"Sure, and open something else up in the process. It's no good. I need light-- real light-- to work."
Leek's face was just visible behind the plastic mask. No not the face. Just the eyes. The dim star light managing to reflect off their wet surface. Mercer saw the eyes shift, as if searching the dark walls around them for some secret source of power.
"Wait here," Leek said, then pushed off, weakly, wobbling slightly as he floated up. Mercer watched as the man's fingers closed around a broken piece of hull. Torn metal though which the star light came. He pulled down and more light appeared.
"Be careful, Leek!" Mercer shouted, forgetting the chief could not hear him. "You'll tear your suit..."
But the pieces slowly parted and more light came in. Star light. Unduly bright in this dim place, rising up from creation itself. Space again. Helping in its subtle way. It wasn't a lot of light. But Mercer found that if he bent very close to the panel he could read what he needed to read, following the circuit codes to and from where he wanted. He still forced himself to remember-- things from school books he'd not seen in years, feeling himself slowly giving into the temptation to die.
"There," he said and flicked off one of the manual switches, but hesitated on the second of the series. He was about to kill a life. A power vampire, yes, but a life just the same. And yet, he didn't want to, as if that brief earlier connection had made him partially responsible for the creature.
"Did you do it?" Leek asked, his own dying voice weaker than before.
Mercer yanked the next and the next and the next till the line of switches were done. A great shutter shook the ship. And for a moment, Mercer thought he'd been too later, that the pile had exploded despite his efforts. But the deck beneath him hadn't vanished, nor did the walls suddenly vaporize around him. Instead, he felt himself growing heavier and heavier as he sank towards the deck.
Gravity was returning. As was the weak power pile in his suit. He heard the whir of the air-regeneration unit click on and fresh air struck his face.
Life was returning to the dead.
"You did it!" Leek shouted, voice exploding through Mercer's headset like the voice of God.
"Yeah," Mercer mumbled, his poisoned body sinking deeper into the suit, hearing something beyond Leek and the ship, some distant hum over the speakers that he'd never noticed before. It was the voice of space itself and space was laughing...