Somehow in the last twenty seconds, the aliens had made up four hundred kilometers. The tension in Velth’s line was drawing him back toward the ship in a gentle arc, but at this rate, they would be right on top of him before Selah could begin reeling him in.
And there wasn’t a damned thing Kim could do about it.
Velth watched as the airlock drifted into view. He understood that he was the object in motion, but his brain insisted that the opposite was true. The illusion was disorienting, so Velth chose to focus on the taut line connecting him to the ship, anchored to his suit like an umbilical cord and in roughly the same position as his original had been. He tried to mentally prepare himself for another jolt when Selah reactivated the rig to bring him home. Best guess, he was forty meters from the airlock. The outer door was open and the tether rig was clearly visible, attached to the airlock’s inner door. Through a small port above the rig, he caught glimpses of Ensign Selah operating the control panel.
Get a move on, he pleaded silently. He hadn’t been able to track the movement of the aliens for what felt like forever but in reality had likely been less than three minutes. In his mind, they were right behind him, moving ever closer. He told himself his fears weren’t real. And even if they were, there was always the chance that they weren’t interested in him at all. Perhaps they had simply returned to check their patch job on Galen’s hull. Maybe they had been waiting to initiate contact until they received confirmation that those on board had survived the trip.
Or maybe they never expected us to survive and have come to finish the job, he thought grimly.
“Hey, Kim, how far are our unexpected guests from the ship now?” Velth asked.
There was a pause that could have indicated Kim was calculating the exact answer to his question, but much darker thoughts reared their heads as the silence grew longer.
Finally Kim said, “I’m not going to lie to you, Velth. They’re a little less than two hundred meters from your position.”
Oh, come on, Velth thought. There was no way they were moving more than three hundred kilometers per minute without a ship. Kim had to be wrong.
Problem was, when it came to math, guys like Kim were very rarely wrong.
“Hold tight, Lieutenant. You’re going to feel a sharp tug on the line.” Ensign Selah sounded every bit as tense as Velth felt. He checked his grip once again, willing himself to hold on, even if the damn thing detached from his suit.
“Just do it, Ensign,” Velth ordered.
He didn’t dare turn his head. He didn’t have to. He could feel them coming now. A slight sense of pressure—impossible to actually feel in the vacuum of space—began to assault him.
A vivid memory quite suddenly asserted itself. It consisted of five-year-old Ranson Velth and a ski slope in the Swiss Alps.
Velth couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t known how to ski. He believed to this day he had been able to ski before he’d been able to walk, although his mother had sworn this wasn’t the case. Both of his parents had been teachers, his mother at Oxford and his father in Okinawa. But their family homes had always been in snow-covered mountains.
The ski run that now rebuilt itself in his imagination wasn’t near his family home. It was part of a resort in Adelboden-Lenk, not far from Zurich. While most of that trip had been devoted to the runs down Engstligenalp, the purpose of that particular family outing had been to visit the Engstligen Falls. One of the longest waterfalls in Switzerland, they never froze, even in the deepest winter, and were stunning to behold, even for a child who would much rather have been flying down a mountain as fast as humanly possible.
Nothing else could touch that feeling: the freedom, the speed, the utter bliss of near weightlessness despite the presence of gravity. More than anything, Velth adored the fearlessness with which he took each run. This was key to the joy of it, until the day he learned that fearlessness was a lie.
The morning after their family hike to the falls, while navigating a relatively gentle intermediate slope alone, young Ranson had found himself overtaken by a pack of older children. He wasn’t even aware of them until they were suddenly swooping by him, much too close for safety, laughing and shouting to one another. It was the first time Ranson could remember feeling insecure on his skis. He wanted to stop and simply allow the group to pass, but was terrified that if he did so, one of them might plow right into him. He settled for screaming at them in quick bursts of incoherent rage as they passed.
He had to keep going, so he did, until one of the boys clipped the back of his ski and sent him tumbling down the slope. Their laughter was carried back to him on the brisk wind.
He had fallen on his skis a hundred times. That was part of learning how to ski. Falling safely was a hard-won skill. What stayed with him long after the day had turned to night and he had been tucked into bed was the speed with which a lovely perfect moment had been transformed into terror. He didn’t know that could happen until the day it did.
He was pulled from the memory by a fierce tug at his waist. Even this momentary distraction had been sufficient to loosen his grip on the tether. It slipped through his fingers and an alarm suddenly began to blare within his helmet.
“Warning, microbreaches detected at tether anchor point,” his suit’s computer reported.
“Activate emergency seals,” Velth said, hoping that the computer was already doing so.
The good news was that even though his suit had torn, he was now moving briskly toward the open airlock. Selah’s face was
