“Bridge is built. Pumping air into it now. Keep it steady, Dalton.” I put my helmet on and seated it. While the suit prepped for vacuum and linked the helmet to my comms, I moved over to the door.
“Why do you need your helmet if you have air in the tunnel?” Fiori asked.
“She doesn’t trust molecular barriers,” Dalton replied.
Both their voices were soft and distant, filtering through my suit’s comms.
Fiori tilted her head, considering me. “Have you ever seen one break and expose someone to vacuum?”
“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” I growled. It was no answer at all, but I wasn’t in the mood for intellectual debate. I checked the shriver’s charge and shoved it back on the clip on my hip, then picked up the torrent shriver from the far side bench and hefted it.
“Ready.”
“Be careful,” Dalton told me.
The door opened and a soft breeze tugged at me as the atmosphere inside the tunnel and the one inside the ship equalized. Ten meters of space separated me from the scratched, pitted and dented hull of the Ige Ibas. Dalton had lined up with the man-sized hatch on the side, which was likely the primary boarding port. A ship like this wouldn’t run to a full sized freight bay and ramp. It was a personnel carrier, and by its size, I judged it would be a cramped berth for anyone aboard her.
“Lyssa?”
“Here,” she whispered in my ear.
“Can you open the Ige Ibas’s primary hatch from there?”
“I’ll have to connect with the ship’s AI.”
“No,” I said quickly. “If the AI didn’t answer your hails, then I don’t want to stir it until I know what happened over there. Slide in under the AI and manipulate the hatch algorithms yourself.”
After a pause of several seconds, Lyssa said, “Let me see what I can do.” She didn’t sound upset, but I knew I had surprised her. And perhaps I had just challenged her, too. She might have orange hair and a temper, but she was still a conservative youngster. It wouldn’t occur to her to by-pass the shipmind because that was rude.
I had no problem being rude when it was required and, often, when it was not.
“No resistance at all…” Lyssa murmured.
I got the torrent shriver up as the hatch on the Ige Ibas slid open and revealed a dark airlock chamber. My heart slammed around, and I cursed silently. Fiori would read too much into that spiking beat.
I waited, my gaze not shifting away from that black hatch.
Nothing moved.
“Going in,” I warned. I said to Fiori, “Shut the door as soon as I move beyond it.” I didn’t look at her.
“Yes, Colonel.” Her tone was close to Lyssa’s meek one and it didn’t fool me any more than Lyssa’s did.
I moved to the very edge of the open door, then pushed myself off into the weightless ether between me and the yawning mystery of the Ige Ibas.
—9—
The airlock chamber was a standard two-man lock with controls both inside and out. The inner door was cranked shut, which was normal.
I glanced through the porthole of the lock’s inner door. The arrival foyer had once been pristine white, but now was a stained and dirty yellow, barely bigger than the lock itself.
The ship still had lights and gravity. It was possible it still had breathable atmosphere, too. I wouldn’t know until I got inside, but the closed inner lock was a good sign.
I punched the oversized keypad carefully with my gloved finger, picking my way through the interstellar-standard controls to close the outer door and move through a purge-or-pump cycle. Without the cycle, the inner door wouldn’t open. It didn’t know there was already air in the chamber. It didn’t care, either. It was kept dumb so it couldn’t be reasoned into opening upon a vacuum. It obeyed the rules. And the rules said pump, first.
The lock switched to green. I hit the key to unseal the inner door, then brought the torrent shriver up once more. It was highly likely the opening of the inner airlock door would trip off a dozen different alerts and alarms. At least one of them would sound on the bridge—or the flight control module, which was all this ship most likely ran to.
The lock door drifted open. It operated on hinges, rather than sliders, and would slam shut again if a vacuum formed on this side. I pushed it fully open with my other hand and stepped over the high sill into the foyer beyond, then pushed the door closed again.
“I’m in,” I murmured. “Running air diagnostics.” I punched the panel on my forearm and watched the bars dance and shift in colors. The display at the bottom ran through digits, then flashed green. “Normal,” I added.
I moved over to the chamber door, which was open, and peered out into the corridor beyond. Dirty carbonfiber floor, worn down to the metal in places. Scratched walls, also once white. Doors along either side, all of them closed.
While switching my gaze from one end of the corridor to the other direction, I leaned the shriver muzzle-down against my thigh, took off my helmet and clipped it to the belt against the small of my back.
I sniffed.
The old, faded sweat smell of people living in close quarters for years was distinct and familiar. Over the top of it, I caught the fizzing sharpness of ozone in the air.
Shriver bolts left trails of ozone behind them.
I lifted the torrent shriver up once more and leaned out the door. “Hello!” I bellowed, then listened.
Nothing.
I shouted again and again, keeping it up for long minutes, and listened hard in
