Terms of Enlistment (32 page)

The air outside smells toxic and acrid, like smoldering insulation. My eyes start burning as soon as we step out into the dark corridor. There’s no light anywhere, not even the emergency strobes that should be running until the ship’s battery banks are depleted. I stretch out my right arm and use the walls of the passageway to guide myself along. In front of me, Halley lets out a series of rasping coughs, and after a few moments, I follow suit. The air out here burns in my lungs, and I have no doubt that we’ll be dead soon if we don’t find the NIFTI lockers.

The distance from the NNC hatch to the nearest row of NIFTI lockers is only twenty-five yards, but in the smoke-filled darkness, it feels like much more. I’m holding my breath to keep the toxic-smelling fumes out of my lungs, and by the time we reach the lockers, my system is screaming for fresh air. Halley pulls the locker doors open, and fumbles around in the dark before handing me one of the NIFTIs. I put the mask on in a hurry, and bite down on the mouthpiece to activate the unit. A moment later, I have clean, oxygen-infused air streaming into my lungs. The air in the little NIFTI tank tastes like old socks, but it beats the hell out of the noxious blend of fumes that’s now permeating this section of the Versailles. The goggles of the NIFTI turn on automatically, and I can once again see my surroundings, albeit in the alien red tinge of the infrared imager.

Halley takes the lead as we take the staircase down to the lower decks. When she reaches the landing of Deck Seven, she puts her hand on the access hatch to the corridor, and I reach out and tap her shoulder. She turns around, and I point to the admin deck over my shoulder, and then to the hatch in turn. Halley nods, and I take the bag off my shoulder to pull out the deck and turn it on to check what’s in store for us on the other side.

There’s no fire in the passageway beyond, but there’s no breathable air, either. I wave Halley closer and type a message to that effect. She looks at the screen and nods, giving me a thumbs-up for good measure. Then she flips the latch and throws open the hatch.

There are a few bodies in this section of corridors. Somebody in enlisted work blues lies crumpled up against a bulkhead, a dark pool of blood spread underneath his head. Halley turns him on his back, but even through the fuzzy, red-tinged image of the NIFTI goggles, it’s pretty clear that this sailor is beyond help. There’s blood all over his face, thick streams of it coagulating underneath his nostrils and around his mouth, and his eyes are half open. Halley lowers his upper body back to the deck.

The next section of the ship has emergency power. The red ceiling lights are on, and the orange floor markers designating the escape pod hatches are blinking in an urgent rhythm. Every time we pass a pod hatch, I check it just to make sure the computer didn’t feed me any misinformation, but every single pod on the deck is gone, and its hatch sealed.

The flight deck is in the center of Deck Seven. It takes up the middle of the deck between the main port and starboard passageways. Halley walks up to the control box for the hatch and enters her credentials. The light on the panel flicks from amber to green, the locking bolts of the hatch retract obediently, and the hatch opens with a sigh of expelled air.

Inside, in the darkness, the drop ship is still in its berth by the wall, with the refueling hose still pumping fuel into the tanks. The only light in here is the flashing warning beacon on the ceiling that’s painting the inside of the hangar in dim, orange light. Halley closes the flight deck hatch behind us, and the little air safety indicator on the lower edge of my NIFTI’s thermal imager goes from red to orange, and then green. There’s still breathable air in the hangar bay. I pull the NIFTI off my head and take a very small breath to test the computer’s assessment. The air in here smells like fuel, but it’s fine otherwise. I give Halley a thumbs-up, and she follows my example.

“I wish those things had voice comms built in,” she says as she pulls the NIFTI’s hood off her head.

“Yeah, I know. Shouldn’t that bird be fueled up by now?” I nod at the drop ship, still secure in its berth.

“It should,” Halley says. “Go and grab a flight helmet out of that locker over there. I’ll go check on the ship.”

Just as I take a helmet out of the locker she pointed out, the ceiling lights all come alive, bathing the flight deck in bright light that hurts my eyes after stumbling through NIFTI-enhanced darkness for ten minutes. I open my mouth to say something to Halley, but then the lights go out again, and this time the orange warning strobe on the ceiling goes out with them, leaving the hangar in complete darkness. The low droning sound from the refueling unit stops as well.

“Shit,” Halley says into the darkness. “There goes the battery power.”

I pull the NIFTI over my head again to turn on the infrared imager. Over by the drop ship, Halley opens an access hatch. She waves me over with a hurried gesture, and then climbs into the Wasp. As I follow her into the drop ship, the interior lights turn on, and I can once again see without the infared goggles.

“Ship’s got its own power cell,” Halley says. “That won’t get us over to the drop hatch, though.”

“So no what?”

“Open up your handy little toy there, and see if you can kick loose some power for the flight deck, or we’re stuck for good. I have no clue whether we slowed down enough to make proper orbit, and I’d rather not burn up in atmo with this shit bucket.”

I sit down on the non-slip flooring and open my admin deck. The local network is completely dead--I can’t even connect to the wireless cloud. I scan through all the local nodes, and none of them are transmitting or receiving.

“Nothing,” I shout into the cockpit, where Halley is strapping herself into the right-hand seat. “Network’s down. I can’t see shit.”

The lights in the hangar come on again suddenly. I hear the soft whirring of the refueling module as it resumes its task. I look at my admin deck’s screen, and see that the local network is once again coming to life.

“What’d you do?” Halley shouts.

“Not a damn thing. It came back on all by itself.”

“Can you get into the refueling subsystem?”

“Hang on, I’m already on it,” I reply.

I go back down the menu tree from memory to get to the hangar bay systems. The access is mercifully quick, since I am directly at the destination node without having to go through a quarter mile of damaged neural pathways. The active menu still says READY FIVE LAUNCH PREP, and the progress bar underneath is only three quarters complete.

“System says five more minutes,” I tell Halley.

“Cut it short,” she says. “Power goes out again before we’re clamped and ready to drop, and we’re fucked.”

“I’ll try.”

Thankfully, the fuel systems are labeled very predictably, presumably simple enough for enlisted personnel to figure out. I delete the fueling process from the task queue, and tell the system to shift the Wasp to READY/LAUNCH status. A moment later, the noise from the refueler stops, and the fuel hose retracts away from the ship. Then a warning klaxon blares, and there’s a low rumbling sound overhead as the docking clamps roll into position above the Wasp.

“Outstanding,” Halley says, relief in her voice. “Now get your ass into the chair over here, and strap in.”

I feel out of place in the left seat of a drop ship. The automatic clamp lowers itself onto the Wasp, locks onto the hardpoints, and then lifts the ship off its landing skids. Next to me, Halley is powering up avionics and going through on-screen checklists at a rapid, focused pace, her fingers doing a quick dance on the various screens. I strap myself in with shaky hands and watch as the docking clamp moves the drop ship across the hangar bay at infuriatingly slow speed.

“Plug in your helmet,” Halley says. “If we get a hull breach out there, you’ll want to be hooked up to the oxygen feed.”

I slip the flight helmet over my head and attach the hose coming from the mask to its receptacle on the side of the cockpit wall. The helmet is made for someone with a smaller head than mine, and the helmet liner squeezes my head uncomfortably. I connect the voice circuit and toggle the intercom channel.

“If there’s a Chinese destroyer out there, this will be a short flight,” I say.

“If there’s a Chinese destroyer out there, they would have boarded us already or blown us into tiny little bits,” Halley answers without taking her gaze off her screens. “Besides, there’s precisely fuck-all we can do about that, unless you want to wait for the rescue ship on this busted tub.”

“No, thank you,” I say. “I’m not a huge fan of suffocation.”

The lateral movement of the docking clamp stops, and then the ship moves down into the drop hatch. We’re just a few moments from getting off this ship, and I hold my breath and pray to the entire Terran pantheon of deities for the ship’s power to stay on until we release from the docking clamp.

“Turning One,” Halley says as she reaches overhead and flips a succession of switches. Behind us, one of the drop ship’s engines comes to life with a loud and steady whine. When the engine has spooled up to Halley’s satisfaction, she moves her hand to a different bank of switches.

“Turning Two.”

The noise outside doubles as the second engine starts up. I feel a low vibration going through the hull.

“I feel like I’m taking my parents’ hydrocar for a joyride without permission,” Halley says. “Never had one of these to myself before.”

“Did we fill up enough to get us down?”

She checks a display with a few taps of her gloved finger, and shrugs.

“We’re half full. Enough to get us to the surface, and then some.”

Underneath us, the floor drops. The drop hatch is a huge airlock in the bottom of the hull. Normally, the ship would be oriented with its belly facing the surface of the planet below, but all I can see outside is the nothingness of space. Despite Halley’s assessment, I imagine a Chinese cruiser right next to the Versailles, point defense armament standing by to shred any escapees that manage to get clear of the hull.

The drop hatch finishes its downward-and-outward travel arc, leaving nothing between us and space but ten feet of drop through a hole in the ship’s armor plating.

“Here goes,” Halley says. “Dropping in three. Two. One.
Drop
.”

She thumbs a button on her throttle lever, and the Wasp drops out of the belly of the ship, sixty tons of spacecraft in freefall. I feel my stomach lurching upward sharply. Then we are clear of the hull, and the artificial gravity field of the Versailles, and the feeling of falling from a great height is replaced by a sudden weightlessness that pulls me out of my seat and against the straps of my harness. The floating feeling doesn’t last long. Halley guns the engines and whips the Wasp into a steep turn as soon as we’re out of the Versailles’ gravity field. She turns left, then right, and the countermeasures dispensers underneath the engine pods kick out a burst of decoy cartridges.

“I think we’re good,” she announces after a few moments of hard turns, and reverts to a less stomach-churning flight profile. She brings the Wasp around to get the Versailles into view.

“Holy fuck,” I say, and Halley merely exhales sharply into her helmet mike.

The Versailles looks like someone blasted her flank with a giant shotgun. Gray smoke is pouring from hundreds of holes in her outer hull. The planet below looks much closer than it should be for a proper orbit, and the battered frigate is drifting without propulsion, pointing nose-first at the green and brown planet surface below.

“I hope we were the last ones on there,” Halley says. “That thing’s going to come down in a million glowing pieces.”

We make a slow pass along the hull. The smooth and streamlined cigar shape of the ship is peppered with holes from bow to stern. Each hole is no bigger than a foot or two across.

“That wasn’t done by anti-ship ordnance,” Halley says. “What the hell kind of weapon makes holes like that?”

“Whatever it was, it did the job,” I reply. “I bet there’s not an airtight compartment left on this side of the hull.”

The Versailles is trailing debris on her aimless trajectory. There are bits of armor plating, frozen bubbles of leaked fluids, and random bits of junk from the compartments that were vented into space. As we make our way along the hull, Halley has to bob and weave to avoid hitting larger chunks of debris head-on. We see a few bodies, too--shipmates, asphyxiated and frozen in an instant, drifting away from the ship in head-over-heel tumbles. There are body parts as well--arms, legs, and heads, torn from the bodies of their owners either by the impact of whatever tore through the hull, or by the shock of the sudden decompression that ejected everything in the compartment into space in the fraction of a second. I recall that the berthing spaces for the enlisted Engineering crew are close to the outer starboard hull, and I wonder whether Halley and I would be floating out there as well if I had left the NNC on time at the end of my watch. Of all the possible ways to die, gasping for air in hard vacuum while being shock-frosted is one of the least pleasant ones I can imagine.

“Let’s see who else made it off this wreck,” Halley says. She toggles the comm channel over to the Navy emergency frequency.

“NACS Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” she says into her helmet mike. “Anyone listening in on shipboard or escape pod comms, please acknowledge.”