Belters

Chapter 08:

Chapter 08:AD 2100 Inner Belt – Daniel Frazier

“The seals are blown, bulkheads breached… The internal atmosphere had to go somewhere… The O2 tanks held during the attack.” Ava stood at the aux-control panel in the cargo hold. “If we can repair the hull, we can pressurize the ship. The reactor is dead, so we only have battery power, for now. First order of business is the air leaks…”

“It could be worse…”

“I don’t see how. We are f****d. Those corporate bastards… they didn’t even stop to see if we were dead.”

Jacob tried not to worry, but they were both rock pickers, not rocket jockeys. “At least we have some air.” His tone didn’t sound at all upbeat.

“That won’t last forever if we don’t get s**t working…”

“You know… we aren’t sure it was an attack…” Jacob worked to chain up the corporate hitman he had towed into the hold. He didn’t know if the person inside the tin can was alive or dead, but it seemed prudent to secure the body in case it came back to life and wanted a scrape. He knew the power armor would tear through the ship if it wanted to.

“You call it what you want. I don’t need a written report to know what happened. We got proper fucked.”

Rather than argue a moot point, Jacob asked, “How long do we have?” Air, heat, water, food, the necessities in that order.

Ava stood there, two hands gripping the console, staring at the screen. If the woman wanted to, she could rip the stand from the deck mounts.

Jacob tired once more. “If you're saying something, you need to say it out loud so I can hear you.”

She cleared her throat. “Without some systems working… A day, maybe two…” Ava pushed off from the deck, floating to the hatch leading to the crew quarters.

“What of the other ship?”

“Not on the screens… I don’t know.” Ava disappeared toward the bridge.

Jacob knew if the Frazier’s crew didn’t have a suit on when the bulkheads failed, the chances they survived were slim. He also believed those trapped outside when the burst hit probably suffered the same fate as Allen. Body cooked in a blast of strange radiation. “I’ll check on the others outside.” He wasn’t ready to give up on extra hands to help fix the broken ship. Anyone had to have a better skillset for this situation than he had.

Ava remained in a foul mood, and Jacob understood why. She wanted to blame someone for what happened, and the corporate ship and security personnel that bore down on them provided a handy target. Hell, Jacob was tempted to blame them too.

However, as far as Jacob knew, no human had a beam weapon that destroyed ships so effectively. If one of the corporations were conducting live-fire exercises on miners, or worse yet other corps ships, all hell was about to break loose.

The other options were just as terrifying. Space was, for all intents and purposes, an unknown frontier. Each week, some new property or unknown quality was being discovered out on the black fringe. If some yet undiscovered celestial event caused the damage, other ships might be in danger. The last option needed to stay in the late-night science fiction videos—aliens, Foo Fighters, other-than-Sol-based ships.

The expected bad news came quickly. Jacob’s darkest fears proved true. Ava confirmed everyone on the ship was gone. The crew that remained onboard never stood a chance. They suffocated when the hull breached. Expecting a peaceful boarding, they never took the opportunity to suit up.

It took Jacob longer to discover the fate of the other two miners who worked on the surface of the asteroid. The first he found under the sweeper, the body melted from the exposure. If not for the stenciled name on the suit, Jacob wouldn’t have been able to ID the dead woman.

She worked third shift. He only knew her as Taylor, but it still hurt. Jacob didn’t even know if Taylor was her first or last name.

Not much of the surface mining equipment had been stowed on the Frazier before the event struck. If Jacob was correct on his assumption about the burst, chances were high it no longer functioned. Any event large enough to create the wave of energy that flowed down the mine had to project a massive electromagnetic pulse of equally dangerous proportions. If the radiation didn’t damage the electrical components, the EMP surely did.

Not far away from the sweeper, he found Adisa—he was just as dead as Taylor, flesh melted, from the looks of the goop covering the faceplate. Jacob understood melted was the incorrect term, but taking the time to describe the damage to the epidermis in minute detail wasn’t his idea of fun. The radiation blistered the soft tissue of the flesh, boiled the moisture in the cells, bursting when the skin could no longer hold back the pressure, spraying the bloody contents in the near-absent gravity. The only consolation, from the looks of the remains, none of the dead survived the first few seconds of the exposure.

After he found each body, he brought the remains back into the lifeless ship hold. That was two trips crawling up the guide wires. Not the safest way onto the ship, but it beat making a jump for it.

There should have been three bodies outside, but he only found two. Smith remained missing. The rock wasn’t that large. He should be able to find him, despite the darkness.

Chances were high the event blasted Smitty off the rock and out into space. Still, Jacob needed to check. “Hey, Ava… You got eyes on Smitty? I can’t find him out here.”

A hollow voice came back over the radio. “Sorry, no. I only found Boffin and the first officer. Both dead.”

That meant they were missing two crew. Candor, the deck-ape was missing. “I’m coming back. We will figure this out.”

Next of kin notification would need to wait until they had the coms working.

If they couldn’t get the reactor working… and fly out of this mess, rescue would depend on the coms.

Jacob hated returning to the hold empty-handed, but they needed to start work on the ship if they were going to survive.

His head crested the rim of the airlock, and there stood an unmoving Ava, a power drill attached to her left second arm. Jacob didn’t like the way his friend stood over the bound security suit. “Ava… everything all right?”

“This is all their fault.”

“We don’t know that.”

She tested the drill, which spun silently in the airless space. “I know if this person is still alive, they will take up a third of our oxygen. If we crack the suit open now, it will be one less person…”

“And you will be a murderer. Listen, there are some things a person can’t come back from.” Jacob slowly worked his way to stand next to Ava.

“I don’t care.”

“Sure you do… I know I do… Listen, I would never make friends with a murderer… Don’t prove me wrong…”

She risked a sideways glance out of her helmet. “You really don’t think I will kill them?”

“I know you can, but right now… they are helpless. I don’t think you would kill a person in their sleep.”

Tears collected on her eyelashes, flinging away with each blink. “Before this is over, someone will answer for what happened.”

“You know what, we find out the truth, I will help you.” He reached out his hands for the drill.

“I’m goin’ to hold you to that.” She placed the unit in his hands.

One crisis averted, Jacob asked, “You got a reading on the ruptures?”

“Yes… we will start with the bridge and the crew’s quarters, suiting out areas. We get air and power back there, we will figure out what is going on with the rest of the ship.” Ava kicked the foot of the body at her feet. “Cargo hold will be last.”

“We need to hurry. If what I think happened, we need the med bay up and running.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. It has a battery backup, but we need these suits off to work on us… Why do we need the med unit?”

“I think we both received a lethal dose of radiation. If we don’t get some treatment soon, it will probably kill us…”

“Wonderful, ‘cause freezing to death or suffocation isn’t gruesome enough.”

“I’m just telling you what I think… I hope I’m wrong.”

“How long do you think we can survive?”

“Hard to tell, we don’t know how much exposure we received…” Jacob cleared his throat. “We need the med unit to be sure.”

Everyone who toiled in space knew the greatest danger to them was the constant threat of radiation. Without the Earth’s magnetic fields and atmosphere, there was little spacefarers could do to protect themselves. Nausea caused the bile to build in the rear of his throat. It might be the situation or the next symptom of the dose they received.

“s**t,” Ava grunted.

He added, “The others… they might have gotten off easy. At least they went quickly.”

If the exposure the pair experienced was high enough, their last few hours or days would be miserable as they succumbed to the radiation poisoning. The med unit could only do so much. If there was no hope, the work to save the ship might be in vain. If there was no treatment, Jacob would hook a slow drip of morphine to the both of them, anything to make the last few moments less painful.

“You go outside. I will work from in here.”

“Sure, keep an eye out for… Smitty and Candor. If they are adrift, we should try to pull them back.”

“They’re dead…”

“And I hope they would do the same for us.”

Ava shrugged off the comment, which in a spacesuit proved a small feat in itself.

Jacob knew, being from Earth, he had some long-held notions about how the dead should be treated. It wasn’t too long ago the dead were planted whole in the ground. Only the need for donor organs, rising seas, and rampant pollution changed that ancient notion. Now, most bodies were harvested for much-needed organs, with the leftovers composted, and most countries made it illegal to bury the dead. It was curious how the governments of Earth had inserted themselves into the most basic parts of humans’ lives. However you sliced it, the dead had zero rights now.

Those who grew up in space treated death and the remains of others differently. More of a utility that needed to be managed like any other resource. All resources would be recycled, if possible.

His body running through an organic recycler made his skin crawl. Better to think of something else while outside the skin of the ship. The thought of breaking down his fellow crewmembers into their constituent components turned his stomach.

He grabbed an emergency sealing unit from the locker. A glorified caulking gun filled with a goop that would harden with a flash of ultraviolet light mounted to the head of the unit. He would go out and hit every seam he could find.

“Check the bridge windows first. That seems like a logical place for leaks. Start centerline… We will work outboard and aft from there.”

The Frazier was an old ship, built in an old-fashioned space-based shipyard. Rather than the newer ships with 3D-printed hulls slipping off the modern ways, the old ships were modular in construction. Each section was built and outfitted inside before being towed to a space dock, where the units were all welded together like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Even with robots doing the majority of the work, given the harsh construction conditions, it was a small miracle the ships didn’t rattle themselves into a million parts on the first flight.

Given his perceived handicap, Jacob had never been offered a spot on the newer ships. He wasn’t sure he’d take it if offered. The Frazier and ships like it had soul.

He had always been attracted to the antiques from centuries past. His ship was only the latest example.

The suit still responded to his commands, if sluggish. The software must have been busy seeking out workarounds for the damaged circuits, or Jacob’s control of the glitchy unit was growing more refined. Either way, his hand holding the seal-gun proved steady enough not to smear the crap all over the screen.

“We got a high dose of radiation, right?” Ava’s voice crackled over the intercom.

“I believe so, yes.” There, standing a few centimeters away from him was Ava. Her face easy to see through the two layers of synthetic glass. She looked like s**t. Jacob was afraid to think about how he looked.

“What are the chances we get superpowers from it… the radiation… like the old comics?” He was surprised to see her dried lips crack a smile.

“I would say slim to none and slim just left…” His secondary arms pulled him closer to the screen, the next seal waiting his attention.

“Damn… It would be nice to be superhuman.” She sealed the gaps from her side.

“You’re already flying through space, what more you want?”

“Not sure… maybe reading people’s minds… stopping bullets… hell, turning invisible.”

Jacob snorted, “Pervert.”

“Hey… a girl needs a hobby too.”

“If you say so.” Jacob finished up the seals around the glass.

“What would be your superpower?”

“I’m not sure I need one.”

“Just killing time is all… If you’d rather talk about s*x, we could do that…”

“Tell me, perv, how do we know if this works?”

“Only thing I can think of is a pressure test. We will check back to frame twenty, then seal this section and try a test.”

“That’s twenty-four meters… with a beam of seventeen meters, this is going to take… a long time.”

“You almost said lifetime, didn’t you…? You got somewhere else to be? Every time we pressurize the cabin and it fails, we lose that much more O2… We need to get this right the first time.”

“By my calculations, that will take longer than I have air.” A quick check of the HUD showed he had two hours of air left in this change. What she suggested would take several hours to complete.

“Then come back to the hold and recharge your rebreather… Simple.”

“I know, just complaining while I work.”

“‘Cause a bitching spacer is a happy spacer.”

“Amen, sister.”

He worked in silence for the longest time. He figured speaking would only waste his precious oxygen. More trips inside risked more deadly mistakes. If his suit lost power during a transition or the clamps lost their grip, he might join Smitty and Candor lost in space. Ava was right, they needed to take their time and complete the repairs correctly the first time.

Jacob’s guesstimation was wrong, back to frame twenty and around the outer skin took six hours. He’d lost track of time spent. His HUD kept track for him. Eight hours, barely a full shift, and he was wrecked. Either the radiation or the lack of sleep sucked every ounce of energy from his body.

The taste of blood filled his mouth. He knew many of the symptoms connected to radiation poisoning to worry about, but his brain wasn’t working as clearly as it should be.

“Okay… let me run a quick check on the bulkhead airlock at frame twenty, and we will give this a shot.”

“How long?”

“Maybe twenty minutes.”

“Mind if I hang out… out here?”

“No problem… just don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep. I need your eyes when we run this.”

“Sure thing, Ava…” He rolled on his back, the clamp at the end of his tail latched on to the hull, emergency brake set. He let his other limbs hang limp. If the tail clamp failed, he was screwed, but he needed to just rest and stare off into space. The stars were beautiful, after all.

It seemed a lifetime.

“JACOB!” Ava’s faceplate was plastered against his. She screamed into the intercom. “Wake up, damn it.”

“What the s**t?” His words came out slurred.

“I thought you left me all alone…”

“You’re lucky I didn’t lash out.”

“I knew you’re a sound sleeper, but that was insane.”

“Ready for the test?”

She nodded. “We will watch from out here, check for puffs of frost as the air escapes. I will bring up the pressure slowly.”

“Affirmative.” Jacob waited before adding, “You can let me go now.” Her suit’s arms had wrapped around his body, pinning him to the outer hull.

She cleared her throat. “I’ll check the far side.” Ava scrambled off him and headed for the far side of the ship. “I’m going to try a few psi first. Far below one bar.”

Given the vacuum outside, any pressure on the inside would find a way out. What they needed to do was find and seal the leaks before their limited O2 escaped into the void.

“Half a bar… You know if we survive this…” Eva stopped talking.

The silence proved more than Jacob’s frazzled nerves could take. “What?”

“It looks like the seals are holding.”

“What if we survive this?”

“Oh, I was just thinking. If we survive this, we will never pay for another drink.”

Jacob couldn’t help but laugh. Impending death had hung over their heads for too many hours in a row. They needed a win. “Like you ever paid for a drink…”

“What can I say? If you had perfect legs, you could say the same.” Ava must be tired as well. The giggle was lightyears out of her normal character.

“I think I would settle for a sacrificial pizza.”

“That could be your superpower, pizza on demand.”

“Wasn’t that a slogan for an early century pizza joint?”

“Not sure… Jacob, all indications are the pressure is holding… taking it up to 1 bar.”

Jacob held his breath, waiting for a seam to burst and blow their short supply of air out to space. “How long should we wait?”

“Not sure. If we have no pressure drop after an hour, we will call it safe.”

“Sounds great. I need to get out of this suit. I stink to high heaven.”

“Not so fast, sweetheart. We will need to keep the suits on until we make sure the life support is working. It’s going to be colder than a well digger’s ass inside. Head to the bay, we will wait inside.”

“At least we can run some tests with the med bay.” Jacob nearly added more but held off.

“Yeah, let’s see if all this work was to give us a place to die.”

His four hands worked in unison, hand over hand, toward the open cargo hold. Ava’s words happened to echo his morbid thoughts. They needed to wait for the longest hour ever, but at least they would be near the med bay when the coast was cleared.

Jacob called to Ava. “You go check out your blood. Just follow the instructions. I got one more thing to do.”

“Sure thing. I’ll get started on the life support as soon as the test starts.”

Jacob was glad his mining partner didn’t ask what he needed to do. There was no reason to lie, but Jacob decided a lie through omission was much better than the truth right now.