Contact. As his knees absorbed the shock, he felt the wreck rotating out from under his feet, trying to shove him away. Caine kept his knees loose instead of bracing them, let his body continue to sink toward the hull, felt it bump his buttocks as he leaned to the right and grabbed.
His hand closed around the protuberance he had spied: a curved bar. Probably a mooring point. He twisted in that direction, threw his left hand over to join his right on the bar. Caine felt pressure mount in his joints as the inertia of his old vector argued with the rotational force, the combined vectors tugging his body away from the wreck and turning it around in space until, finally, it relented. He checked his chrono as he pulled his body back into contact with the wreck and gathered his legs beneath him. Ninety-eight seconds since Trevor had started over. How time flies when you’re having fun.
There was a light bump against his head; Trevor had crawled over and tapped helmets. His voice was quiet, tight. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay now,” Caine answered, pretty sure he was telling the truth. “Let’s get going.”
Trevor nodded, and set out on a drifting crawl to the rear of the wreck’s command section, where he pointed to a small oval recess surrounding a slightly convex section of the hull. Caine felt the edges of the recess, discovered deep, wide grooves. “Airlock?”
Trevor nodded. “Might be. Look for a maintenance plate or manual access cover.”
Caine pushed himself back carefully with his right hand, then his left—and stopped; something was under that palm. It was another, much smaller oval recess with a convex interior, the center of which was pierced in a quatrefoil pattern. Caine grabbed hold, tugged: nothing. He tried turning and then pushing it; there was a moment of resistance, then a short downward release before the cover swung back easily.
Trevor was already beside him. “What have you found?”
A cruciform knob stared up at them. Trevor reached in, turned it, watched the large convex panel that was probably an airlock. No discernible change. He turned the knob again, again, again. Slowly, the airlock door began to slide aside and farther away, deeper into the hull. Trevor braced himself and began cranking the knob rapidly with both hands: the portal widened more rapidly. He nodded for Caine to lean closer; their helmets touched again.
“Take the gun. Safety off. Cover the entry while I finish opening it.”
Caine detached the weapons lanyard from Trevor’s harness, attached it to his own, and slid the gun out of its holster. He crawled to the edge of the opening airlock and aimed the weapon inside. His visor’s red radiation icon began to flash; they had exceeded two minutes of exposure. Not good; not good at all.
The airlock door slid away, apparently retracting along a curved pathway. When it was about half open, the movement stopped. A second later, Trevor was alongside Caine, touching helmets again. “I’m going to shine a light in and take a look. As soon as I do, you lean in with the gun. If you see anything suspicious, nail it. Understood?”
“Understood.” Caine exhaled. After tumbling through endless, enervating space, this activity was reassuringly finite and concrete.
Trevor scuttled around to the other side of the opening, activated his helmet lights, nodded to Caine, and looked over the edge. Caine leaned in with the gun on that cue.
Trevor’s lights illuminated a tiny cubicle, smaller than the airlock on their Auxiliary Command module. At the bottom was another oval portal, flanked by a modest control panel. Small lights, most of which were yellow-green, stared beady-eyed back at them from its surface. The vehicle still had some sort of power, even if it was only emergency batteries. Otherwise, the airlock was empty.
Caine looked up; Trevor pointed at himself, at Caine, and then down into the airlock. Caine nodded.
Like a snake sliding around the corner of a rock, Trevor slipped over the rim of the hatchway and down into the airlock. Caine double-checked that the pistol’s safety was off, and followed.
Chapter Eleven
The airlock was even smaller than it had looked from outside, barely big enough to hold the two of them at the same time. Caine kept the ten-millimeter trained on the squarish doorway that led deeper into the craft, watching for any changes in the lights on the panels that flanked it.
In the meantime, Trevor had found a knob similar to the one on the outside of the hull and was turning it rapidly. As he did, a hard-edged shadow advanced across the door, the floor, and finally, cut off all external light into airlock: the outer hatch was sealed. The red radiation icon on Caine’s HUD flickered into orange and then disappeared. The Arat Kur have pretty damn efficient rad shielding, considering there’s no sign of an operating EM grid. However, there were still radiation worries: Caine’s chronometer read 144 seconds total elapsed mission time. That meant almost seventy-five REM whole body dose for Trevor, about fifty-five for Caine. Plus the thirty REM they had picked up when their own EM grid had to be shut off yesterday, and whatever else they were going to pick up making the jump back to the Auxiliary Command Module. In all probability, they weren’t going to be feeling too well for the next couple of days.
Trevor moved over to the control panel beside the inner door, briefly inspected the lights and the glyphs beneath them. He tapped the bottom half of the panel, exploring.
Caine touched helmets. “What are you looking for?”
“This.” Trevor was now sliding aside the lower half of the panel, revealing three smaller, cruciform knobs. “Manual systems in case the power is out.”
“Won’t they be disabled or locked off?”
“Not unless there was a survivor on board who saw us coming and wanted to keep us out. You have to leave manual overrides functional during routine ops. Otherwise, if your power goes down and you’re unconscious or unable to move, rescuers can’t get to you unless they breach the hull. And I guess our adversary has learned the same lesson.”
“So since they’re not locked off, maybe that indicates there aren’t any survivors to take that precaution. Besides, survivors should have tried to effect repairs and rejoin their own fleet, particularly since this ship doesn’t seem too badly damaged.”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover, Caine, particularly when it comes to sensitive machines like spacecraft. They can look fine on the outside but can be hopelessly fubared inside.”
“I wonder how fubared this craft really is.”
“Why?”
“The rads dropped away completely when you shut the door behind us.”
Trevor shrugged, digging for a small tool kit on his utility harness. “They’re probably way ahead of us in material sciences.”
Caine shook his head. “You’d need tremendous density to stop that much particle radiation.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that this ship might still have enough power to be shielding itself, somehow.”
“Then why didn’t our passive sensors pick up the electromagnetic anomalies?”
“I don’t know. Maybe their EM field effect is not projected, but remains within the matter comprising the hull. Sort of how active electrobonding works, only this version is designed to repel charged particles rather than strengthen the bonds between molecules in hull materials.”
Trevor was silent before replying. “Where would the power come from? Their fusion plant is cold.”
“I don’t know. Batteries, possibly on constant recharge if some part of the hull is sensitized to work like a solar panel.”