“So if they hatched from the miners, what laid the eggs?” Welford asked. But Sneddon didn’t answer, and it was a question that didn’t bear thinking about right then.
“Whatever it was, we can’t let them on board,” Hoop said, more determined than ever. “They’re not that big— we lose one on the Marion, and we’ll never find it again.”
“Until it gets hungry,” Welford said.
“Is that what they were doing?” Hoop asked. “Eating?”
“Not sure,” Sneddon said.
They moved on silently, as if wrestling with thoughts about those strange, horrific alien creatures. Finally Hoop broke the silence.
“Well, Karen, if we get out of this, you’ll have something to report,” he said.
“I’ve already started making notes.” Sneddon’s voice sounded suddenly distant and strange, and Hoop thought there might be something wrong with his suit’s intercom.
“You’re just spooky,” Welford said, and the science officer chuckled.
“Come on,” Hoop said. “We’re getting close to the docking level. Keep your eyes open.” Another thud shook through the ship. If it really was an explosive decompression—one in a series—then keeping their eyes open would merely enable them to witness their doom as a bulkhead exploded, they were sucked out into space, and the force of the vented air shoved them away from the Marion.
He’d read about astronauts being blasted into space. Given a shove, they’d keep moving away from their ship, drifting until their air ran out and they suffocated. But worse were the cases of people who, for some reason—a badly connected tether, a stumble—drifted only slowly, so slowly, away from their craft, unable to return, dying while home was still within sight.
Sometimes a spacesuit’s air could last for up to two days.
They reached the end of the entry corridor leading down into the docking level. A bulkhead door had closed, and Hoop took a moment to check sensors. The atmosphere beyond seemed normal, so he input the override code and the locking mechanism whispered open.
A soft hiss, and the door slid into the wall.
The left branch led to Bays One and Two, the right to Three and Four. Ten yards along the left corridor, Hoop saw the blood.
“Oh, shit,” Welford said.
The wet splash on the wall spur beside the blast door was the size of a dinner plate. The blood had run, forming spidery lines toward the floor. It glistened, still wet.
“Let’s check,” Hoop said, but he was already quite certain what they would find. The door sensors had been damaged, but a quick look through the spy hole confirmed his suspicions. Beyond the door was vacuum. Wall paneling and systems ducting had been stripped away by the storm of air being sucked out. If the person who had left that blood spatter had been able to hang on until the blast doors automatically slammed shut…
But they were out there now, beyond the Marion, lost.
“One and Two definitely out of action,” Hoop said. “Blast doors seem to be holding well. Powell, don’t budge from that panel, and make sure all the doors behind us are locked up tight.”
“You’re sure?” Powell said in their headsets. “You’ll be trapped down there.”
“If compartments are still failing, it could fuck the whole ship,” Hoop said. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
He turned to the others. Sneddon was looking past him at the blood spatter, her eyes wide behind the suit glass.
“Hey,” Hoop said.
“Yeah.” She looked at him. Glanced away again. “I’m sorry, Hoop.”
“We’ve all lost friends. Let’s make sure we don’t lose any more.” They headed back along the opposite corridor, toward Bays Three and Four.
“Samson has docked,” Baxter said through the comm.
“On automatic?”
“Affirmative.” Most docking procedures were performed automatically, but Hoop knew that Vic Jones occasionally liked to fly manually. Not this time.
“Any contact?”
“Nothing. But I think I just saw a flicker on the screen. I’m working to get visual back, if nothing else.”
“Keep me posted. We need to know what’s going on inside that ship.” Hoop led the way. The blast door leading to Bays One and Two was still open, and they moved quickly through toward the undamaged docking areas.
Another vibration rumbled through the ship, transmitted up through the floor. Hoop pressed his gloved hand hard against the wall, leaning in, trying to feel the echoes of the mysterious impact. But they had already faded.
“Lachance, any idea what’s causing those impacts?”
“Negative. The ship seems steady.”
“Compartments failing, you think?”
“I don’t think so. If that was happening we’d be venting air to space, and that would act as thrust. I’d see movement in the Marion. As it is, her flight pattern seems to have stabilized into the slowly decaying orbit we talked about. We’re no longer geo-stationary, but we’re moving very slowly in comparison with the surface. Maybe ten miles per hour.”
“Okay. Something else, then. Something loose.”
“Take care down there,” Lachance said. He wasn’t usually one to offer platitudes.
They passed through two more bulkhead doors, checking the sensors both times to ensure that the compartments on the other side were still pressurized. As they neared bays Three and Four, Hoop knew they’d have a visual on the damage.
The docking bays were contained in two projections from the underside of the Marion. One and Two were contained in the port projection, Three and Four in the starboard. As they neared the corridor leading into bays Three and Four, there were viewing windows on both sides.
“Oh, hell,” Hoop muttered. He was the first to see, and he heard shocked gasps from Sneddon and Welford.
The front third of the port projection, including the docking arms and parts of the airlock structures, had been swept away as if by a giant hand. Bay One was completely gone, torn aside to leave a ragged wound behind. Parts of Bay Two were still intact, including one long shred of the docking arm which was the source of the intermittent impacts—snagged on the end of the loose reach of torn metal and sparking cables was a chunk of the Delilah. The size of several people, weighing maybe ten tons, the unidentifiable mass of metal, paneling, and electrics bounced from the underside of the Marion, swept down, ricocheted from the ruined superstructure of Bay Two, then bounced back up again.
Each strike gave it the momentum to return. It moved slowly, but such was its weight that the impact when it came was still enough to send vibrations through the entire belly of the ship.
The Delilah had all but disintegrated when it hit. Detritus from the crash still drifted with the Marion, and in the distance, silhouetted against the planet’s stormy surface, Hoop could see larger chunks slowly moving away from them.
“That’s a person out there,” Welford said quietly, pointing. Hoop saw the shape pressed against the remains of Bay Two, impaled on some of the torn metal superstructure. He couldn’t tell the sex. The body was badly mutilated, naked, and most of its head was missing.
“I hope they all died quickly,” Sneddon said.
“They were already dead!” Hoop snapped. He sighed, and raised a hand in apology. His heart was racing. Seventeen years in space and he’d never seen anything like this. People died all the time, of course, because space was such an inimical environment. Accidents were common, and it was the larger disasters that gained notoriety. The passenger ship Archimedes, struck by a hail of micro meteors on its way to Alpha Centurai, with the loss of seven hundred passengers and crew. The Colonial Marine base on a large moon in the Outer Rim, its environmental systems sabotaged, resulting in the loss of over a thousand personnel.