The panel was there. He fumbled at it, pressed on it, first the top, which did nothing, and then the bottom. It popped open.
And there was the handle.
He yanked it down. It went almost halfway and stopped. Another red lamp, at the base of the handle, commenced to blink. He didn’t care about that, but the handle wouldn’t go any farther, and the hatch didn’t move.
You’re supposed to open, you son of a bitch.
The Klaxon died at last.
The problem was that without gravity he couldn’t put any weight behind the effort. He pushed down, and all that happened was he floated up.
He let go and hit his commlink. “Kurt,” he said, “I’ve got a problem down here. Where are you?”
KURT HAD NEGLECTED to close the box. The cover floated off the food tray and the meal that he’d prepared so carefully began to drift away from the plate. The meat loaf came off in a piece and began to fragment. The potato salad formed a single mound in the middle of the corridor, about belt high.
Something moved above him.
He looked up and saw that the overhead was becoming dark. The backup lights were growing dimmer.
He remembered a sim he’d seen years before, Devil in the Dust, in which a character looks up to see a white ceiling growing damp, becoming red. And blood begins to leak out of it.
As he watched, a stain spread across his own overhead, and the metal began to peel away. Small flakes of it drifted down and mixed with the red cabbage and the meat loaf.
“Bill!” he said. “Will you answer up?”
But the AI was gone, disabled, dead, whatever. There was nothing in the overhead that could leak through. So what the goddam is happening?
Whatever it was, he had to get out. He pushed himself along the passageway to the midship airlock. Somewhere, somehow, the ship had been breached. That would take a meteor. But surely he’d have felt a collision. He’d never been in one, during all these years had never banged into a rock, but he assumed it couldn’t happen without your knowing it.
He opened the manual panel on the hatch and pulled the release.
He got a red lamp. That meant air pressure loss on the other side. Maybe vacuum. My God. He was about to call Tor, find out if he was okay, warn him to stay in the shuttle, close the doors and sit tight, but the moment he opened the circuit, he saw that the overhead had begun to bend inward, curving down like a canvas flap full of water. Impossible. Hulls don’t behave that way. They simply don’t. He opened the channel, got Tor’s name out, knew exactly what he had to tell him, Launch the shuttle, go to manual and launch the shuttle, get clear, but going to manual required a few steps, simple enough but he wasn’t going to have time to explain them. “Tor,” he said again. Something was coming through the overhead and his flesh crawled, he half expected to see a pair of devil-eyes looking in at him. A blast of cold hit like a sheet of iron. His lungs exploded and the passageway, the airlock, the commlink, Tor, and the meat loaf, all blinked off.
“HUTCH! SOMETHING’S GONE wrong over here. We need help.” Tor tried to sound calm. Professional. Keep a level voice the way they do in the sims. Tell her what he thought, that this is probably what happened to the Condor, it’s probably going to explode, and it would be helpful if you could pop by and pick us up. “Kurt just tried to call me, I heard his voice on the link but now he doesn’t answer.”
He was trying to keep calm, and the only way he could do that was to refuse to think about his situation, forget that he couldn’t get the door open, that the lights were dim and were probably going to get dimmer, that the captain seemed to have gotten lost. Tor was scared, frightened that he might not be able to get out of the room, that something might have happened to Kurt, that maybe something was about to happen to him. He thought maybe something was loose in the ship, something that was smashing things, that had smashed the power circuits and maybe had smashed the captain. And he was also scared because he knew that Hutch would see his fear.
“Tor.” Her voice broke through the red cloud forming around him. Thank God. “Tor, I hear you. Can you tell me any more?”
What the hell more could he say? “No. I’m locked in here, and they’re losing power. Maybe they’ve lost power. Everything’s on emergency, I think.”
“Okay. Hold on. I’m going to try to raise Kurt. Find out what’s happening. As soon as I do, I’ll let you know, then we’ll be on our way.”
Sweet, wonderful woman, he thought. Please hurry it up.
HUTCH HAD BEEN loading the newly arrived food into the autochef when Tor’s panicky call came. She brought up a picture of the Wendy while he talked, zeroing in on the forward section of the ship, upper decks. The metal seemed to be rippling in the glow of Wendy’s running lights, as if a heat wave were rolling over it. Then, one by one, the lights went out, starting near the prow and moving back until the ship was dark save for the after section.
When Tor signed off, she tried to raise Kurt. That produced no result, and she went to Bill.
“I’ve been trying to communicate with Wendy’s AI, Hutch,” he said. “But he’s not responding either.”
“Can you tell me anything about what’s happening?”
“Something’s eating through their hull.”
“For God’s sake, Bill, what is?”
“Don’t know. I have no visuals. But there’s no question the hull is losing integrity.”
“Where?”
“Amidships. Off A Deck, and the problem appears to extend forward to the bridge.”
“Can you connect with Wendy’s systems at all? We need to know what’s going on over there.”
“Negative. The interface is inoperative. Whatever is happening, the ship has sustained major damage.”
“Okay.” She was headed back to cargo. “Is the lander on board yet?”
“Docked and ready to go.”
George broke on-line, out of breath, running while he talked. “Hutch, I just got a call from Tor. What the hell’s going on?”
“Don’t know yet. Some sort of breakdown over there.”
Bill’s image blinked on. He was standing beside the lander, and he looked worried. “Hutch,” he said, “I think we should withdraw from the area.” Well, she couldn’t very well do that when they had two people on the Wendy. “I still can’t get a picture of what’s doing it, but whatever it is, it’s chomping away. Here’s what I can see.”
The wallscreen lit up. The space just over the main airlock was distorted, disturbed. The Memphis’s running lights played across it. It was another stealth. No question about it. But apparently this one was of a kick-ass variety.
“Tor,” she said, “where are you now?”
“In one of the storage lockers. Hutch, is the ship going to explode?”
“No.”
“Then this isn’t what happened to the Condor?”
“It’s similar. But the situation’s different. It looks as if you’ve been attacked by something. It’s eating through the hull, but it’s up near the bridge, not back by the engines.”
“Which means—”
“Punch a hole in the containment system in the engine compartment and it would give way. That’s what happened to the Condor.”
“Okay.”
“But you don’t have to worry. It’s well away from the engines.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“Now: You say you’re locked in. Do you know how to operate the manual release mechanism?”
“Yes. Open the panel, push down. Right? It won’t work.”
“Some of them pull up. Or pull out. Or—”