His boots hit the hull with a solid clank, about a dozen metres off from the hatch and a little downward. Ocean water swirled around his feet, ankle deep, then sucked back. He sighed and unclipped from the cable.
‘Understood, command. Off descender.’
Will maintain.
He crouched a little and worked his way up the shallow slope towards the hatch, peered down into it. Water had sloshed into the opening. He could see it glistening wetly on the rungs of a ladder that led down to a second, inner hatch which he assumed had to be the end of an airlock. As he watched, a fresh surge washed over the hatch coaming and rinsed down onto the ladder, dripping and splashing to the bottom of the lock. He peered a bit more, then shrugged and clambered down the ladder until he was hanging off the lower rungs just above the inner hatch. The water down there was about three fingers deep, slopping back and forth with the tilt of the vessel in the waves. Just below the surface, the mouldings of the hatch looked unnaturally clean, like something seen at the bottom of a rock-pool. There was a warning: caution; pressure must equalise before hatch will open.
Joe figured whatever pressure there was inside the hull must be pretty close to Earth standard then, because someone or something had already unsealed the inner hatch and it was hanging open just enough to let the water drain very slowly through the crack. He grunted.
Weren’t for that, fucking airlock’d be a quarter full already from the slop.
He tapped his mike.
‘Command? I’ve got a cracked inner hatch here. Don’t know if that’s the systems or, uh, human agency.’
Noted. Proceed with caution.
He grimaced. He’d been hoping for a withdraw call.
Yeah, or failing that, some fucking back-up, command. This baby’s come from space, right, from Mars most likely. No fucking telling what kind of bugs might be loose in there. That’s what nanorack quarantine’s for, right?
For a moment, he thought about backing up anyway.
But–
You’re equipped, he could already hear the patient voice explaining to him. You’re masked and gelled against biothreat, which we don’t in any case anticipate. You have no valid reason to query your orders.
And Zdena’s voice: why they pay us, cowboy.
And from the others, jeers.
He shook off a tiny shudder, moved down a couple of rungs and put a boot through the water to press gingerly on the hatch. It gave, fractionally.
‘Great.’
Point?
‘Nothing,’ he said sourly. ‘Just proceeding with extreme fucking caution.’
He braced one hand flat on the wall of the airlock, stamped harder on the hatch, impatient now and–
–it caved in under his foot.
Hinged heavily down to the side, dumping the water through into a darkened interior with a long, hollow splash. The sudden drop caught him unawares, he lost his grip on the rung above. Fell, grabbed clumsily, with one flailing gloved hand, missed and clouted the side of his head on the ladder as he tumbled. He went right through the opened inner hatch, had time for one garbled yell–
‘Fuuuuuuahhhh—’
–and fetched up in a heap on what must be the side wall of the corridor below.
Shock of impact, his teeth clipped the edge of his tongue. Sharp bang in his shoulder, gouge in the ribs where one end of the XM jabbed him on the way down. He hissed the pain out through gritted teeth.
For the rest, he seemed to have landed on something soft. He lay still for a moment, checking for damage reports from his tangled limbs.
Total body awareness, right sarge.
He summoned a grin. Didn’t think he’d broken anything. Looking up, he figured it for not much more than a three-metre drop.
He blew a hard, chuckled breath of relief into the mask filter. Completed his expletive quietly.
‘Fuck.’
Point? Command came through, yeah, finally fucking concerned now. Report your status. Are you injured?
‘I’m fine.’ He propped himself up on one arm, squinted around in the gloom and snapped on the helmet light. ‘Just took a fall. Nothing to—’
The edge of the torch beam clipped something that didn’t make any sense. His head jerked around, the beam hit full on what he’d seen–
‘Ah, fuck man, you gotta be—’
And suddenly, with the flood of disbelieving comprehension, he gagged, vomit flooding up and into the mask, burning his nose and throat, as he saw for the first time exactly what the soft thing was that had broken his fall.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sevgi Ertekin awoke to the curious conviction that it was raining in dirty grey sheets, all over the city.
In June?
She blinked. Somewhere outside the open window of the apartment, she heard a siren calling her. Intimate and nostalgic as the sound of the ezan she still missed from the old neighbourhood, but freighted with an adrenalin significance the prayer call would never match. Rusted professional reflex surfaced in her, then rolled over and sank as memory came aboard. Not her call any more. In any case, the melancholy caught-breath cry of the cop car, wherever it was, was distant. Noises of commerce from the street-market six floors below almost drowned it out. There was shouting, mostly good-humoured, and music from stall-mounted sound systems, frenetic neo-arabesque that she was in no mood for currently. The day had started without her.
Against her own better judgement, she turned over to face the window. Glare from the sun hit her in the face and drove her to squinting. The varipolara drapes billowed in the breeze from outside, incandescent with morning light. It appeared she’d forgotten to remote them down to opaque again. An empty bottle of Jameson’s was partly hidden where the curtain hem brushed the floor. Someone – someone, yeah, right, Sev, who’d that be, then? – had rolled it away across the polished wooden boards of the living room when it had nothing left to offer. The same living room where she’d apparently slept fully clothed on the couch. A moment’s groggy reflection brought in corroborative memory. She’d sat there after the party broke up, and she’d killed the rest of the bottle. Vague recollection of talking quietly to herself, the smoky warmth of the whisky as it went down. She’d been thinking all the time, she’d just have one more, she’d just have one more, then she’d get up and–
She hadn’t got up. She’d passed out.
This is new, Sev. Usually, you make it to a bed.
She made a convulsive effort and heaved herself fully into a sitting position, then wished she hadn’t moved quite so rapidly. The contents of her head seemed to shift on some kind of internal stalk. A long wave of nausea rolled through her, and her clothing felt suddenly like restraints. She’d lost her boots at some point – they were keeled over on opposite sides of the living room, about as far apart as the dimensions of said room allowed – but shirt and slacks remained. She had a vague memory of rolling hilariously about on her back after everyone was gone, trying to tug off the boots and then the socks. In this at least, it seemed she’d succeeded, but obviously the rest had defeated her.
And now the shirt was rucked up and bunched under her arms, and her profiler cups had peeled and worked loose from her breasts as she tossed and turned. One seemed to have ended up in her armpit, the other was gone altogether. Some way below her waist, her slacks had somehow twisted about until they were no longer loose, and her guts were similarly tight. Her bladder was uncomfortably full and her head was settling to a steady throb.