Courier... The last airlock

You weren't supposed to be on the ship, a fact that seems increasingly important to establish, although you are having difficulty finding anyone alive to appreciate it.

Your instructions were to deliver six crates of medical supplies, get a signature, and return the trolley. They fitted on a single screen, which you had taken as an encouraging sign. In your experience, anything requiring you to scroll usually concealed a staircase, an additional recipient, or a customer's deeply personal interpretation of the word nearby.

Now a bead of blood hangs a few centimeters from your left eye. You watch it drift across your vision, almost perfectly spherical, carrying a tiny reflection of the emergency light. For a moment its neatness holds your attention. You slowly turn your head and discover where the blood came from.

The ensign floats beside the supply cupboard with one sleeve caught on its handle. He is young enough that earlier you wondered whether this was his first posting. He had apologized for the delay, taken your scanner, and begun signing for the crates with the careful concentration of somebody determined to get a small responsibility right. You remember being impatient with him.

The memory arrives with a force that seems wildly disproportionate to its usefulness. You had said nothing unkind, merely shifted your weight and checked the time, yet you find yourself examining those gestures as though there might still be an opportunity to perform them differently.

“Hello?” you say.

His sleeve slides along the handle. You wait for a response until the movement completes itself and leaves him facing you. There is a terrible intimacy in being looked at by eyes that have ceased to see, and you turn away with the feeling that you have intruded.

Your left wrist is tangled in a chair restraint. When you free it and push against the cupboard, you rise too quickly and strike your forehead on the ceiling. The impact restores several memories with regrettable efficiency, including the shooting and the voice from the bridge, and gives you a fresh injury with which to organize them.

You catch a pipe to stop yourself turning. Heat burns your palm, and you snatch it away, drifting between surfaces while your body insists that the floor ought to take some responsibility. Sweat has gathered along your eyebrows in warm beads that refuse to run anywhere convenient. You wipe them with your sleeve and feel how hot the air has become.

The wall display wakes as you pass.

SHIELD INTEGRITY 19 PERCENT

ESTIMATED THERMAL FAILURE 14 MINUTES

Beneath the figures, a smaller notice advises you to contact a member of the crew. You glance toward the ensign, then look back at the screen, unwilling to give the instruction the answer it deserves.

The fans labor behind the wall. Without gravity to organize warm air into rising currents, the ventilation must carry it past the cooling coils, and the breath reaching your face suggests that several parts of this arrangement have lost interest. Somewhere beneath the fan noise, metal makes a slow ticking sound that reminds you of a cooker cooling after dinner.

You pull yourself toward the hatch and stop when you hear voices outside. Through the small window passes a white armband, followed by a pistol held close against a man's chest.

“Bay Three,” someone says. “The other lockers are empty.”

“Then keep moving.”

You fold yourself behind the cupboard door, drawing your knees in until the position hurts. Your burned palm throbs against your shirt. You become acutely aware of your breathing, convinced that it is loud enough to carry through steel, and try to reduce it to something a person with a gun might reasonably overlook.

Their shadows pass, but you stay where you are until the rattling handholds fade into the larger noises of the ship.

Two hours ago, the Valiant had been described to you as the most secure vessel at the orbital dock, a sprawling space station following its orbital path between Earth and the Moon. From Mabel’s cockpit, the warship had looked reassuringly expensive, all armored hull and weapons whose maintenance budgets could have supported you comfortable until the sun exhausts its fuel. You had assumed that anything so thoroughly equipped to discourage trouble would have firm arrangements for keeping it outside.

The officer making this claim confiscated your folding knife, scanned both hands, and questioned the contents of your sandwich with a seriousness you had previously associated with football hoodlums. You left your jacket and lunch at dispatch, collected your trolley, and followed a yellow line onto one of the most formidable warships ever commissioned. The pirates arrived in fuel technicians' overalls. Their paperwork were good enough to fool someone to let them onto the ship.

You were waiting for the loading officer when the first shot sounded. Your initial thought was that somebody had dropped a steel plate, and for several seconds you continued believing this despite the engineer falling beside your trolley. Even now you can remember the relief of that first explanation, the brief additional interval during which the world remained a place where people dropped sometimes things.

Then the dock officer raised his hands and was shot before he finished speaking. Someone shouted about liberation while another man dragged the ramp controls down, sealing the ship with you inside it.

You took a small, automatic step to avoid the spreading blood. The precision of that movement troubles you. You had understood so little about what was happening, yet you had found time to protect your boots.

The ensign caught your arm and pulled you into the supply office. He was breathing hard, apologizing again, although you could never work out what he thought he had done. He pushed you behind the cupboard as shots struck the open hatch, and afterward you heard him moving around the room with increasing difficulty.

You stayed hidden. It had seemed essential that you obey the last clear instruction anyone had given you.

For a while you tried to cancel the delivery. Your scanner asked whether the recipient was unavailable and offered a list of common reasons. You pressed YES until your thumbnail whitened, working through screens designed by people whose professional imagination had stopped at an unanswered doorbell.

The Valiant's regular crew was ashore during the refit. The few officers aboard fought through compartments that the pirates had entered under maintenance clearance, while the ship left dock carrying weapons powerful enough to turn much of the planet to glass. Through the office wall, you heard orders overlapping with gunfire and the occasional scream. Then the captain's voice came through every speaker at once.

“Navigation locked. Lunar impact. Far side.”

He took a breath that seemed to catch on something inside his chest.

“You will never fire her weapons.”

You waited beneath the vent for him to say something about evacuation. On the open channel, an alarm sounded behind the scrape of an object moving across the bridge floor. You kept waiting even after you understood that he had finished.

His decision had a logic you could follow from a safe distance. There were cities beneath those guns, billions of people who would never know how close their lives had come to depending on a dying man's reach. You understood this while crouching beside a cupboard, and still some frightened part of you wanted to tell him that he had forgotten a courier.

On the office monitor, the moon grew larger. The pirates shouted over one another as the captain's locked course resisted them, and eventually someone forced an emergency jump through the damaged drive. A warning filled the screen. You remember seeing a confirmation request and wondering who, under the circumstances, was qualified to confirm damn anything.

The ship lurched. The gravity failed, the cupboard struck your head, and your last coherent thought concerned the trolley deposit.

You have no idea how much time passed before you woke. Now you ease out of the office, keeping close to the wall, and wake a corridor terminal with the knuckle of your uninjured hand. It takes two attempts to register the touch. The delay produces a familiar little surge of annoyance, absurdly welcome because you know exactly what to do with it.

The navigation display places the Valiant deep inside Mercury's orbit. Her jump drive is destroyed, her steering system is unresponsive, and her remaining course draws a thin red arc into the Sun. You touch the destination symbol.

COMMAND AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED

You stare at the yellow circle representing the Sun. For most of your life it has been a prominent feature of the sol system, arriving through windows, fading curtains, and occasionally making it difficult to read a screen. You have complained about it often enough aboard Mabel, whose window filters respond to direct sunlight by tinting the glass just enough to suggest that your complaint has been received.

Your mother keeps a particular chair out of its afternoon glare because the fabric was expensive.

Somewhere ahead, hydrogen is becoming helium and releasing the energy that warms her kitchen. The same process is now overwhelming the shielding around you, and you find yourself struggling with the intimacy of it. You have come too close to something that has always been part of home.

The hull need never reach the visible surface. That much you understand from the temperature warnings spreading across the schematic. The ship will fail here, in the light, long before its course reaches the neat end of the red line.

You switch to the deck plan before your imagination can complete the journey. Bay Three lies aft and one deck below your present position, a loading space with emergency equipment lockers and an auxiliary airlock in its outer wall. A maintenance route runs down toward it from the laundry shaft. You trace the route twice, making yourself remember the junctions.

The personnel panel reports three living bodies aboard. You open the roster and scroll through grey names, waiting for one to turn green while you watch. Your emergency call reaches no one. According to the delivery manifest, Chriselle remains at the dock, where she has exceeded her allotted unloading time and may be subject to a surcharge. You would like to join her. You would even consider paying it.

At that dock, Mabel waits with her final installment coming due. Four years of payments have nearly made the little courier ship yours, and this morning you touched the dashboard after shutting her down, enjoying the private foolishness of telling her that you were almost there.

You think of the bunk you failed to make and the spoon through the cupboard handles. There is a message from your mother on the console, waiting beside a reminder to purchase coolant. These unfinished things exert an extraordinary pull. You cannot accept that a person might leave so much in progress and simply fail to come back. The timer changes to twelve minutes and you close the roster and begin moving.

A wrench rotates in the corridor ahead, accompanied by insulation fibers that catch the red emergency light. With the drive dead, you and the ship are falling together toward the Sun. The deck offers nothing for your boots to press against until you catch a rail, and even then every movement requires a small negotiation between where you intend to go and where your last push has already sent you.

You push too hard from the hatch that causes your shoulder to clip a panel, turning you sideways, and you miss the next handhold by less than a finger's width. When your hip strikes the opposite wall, the pain brings tears to your eyes, which cling there and blur the rail you are trying to catch.

Momentum was covered during your license training. You had preferred the diagrams, whose little arrows rarely appeared to be in any personal difficulty.

At the junction, voices stop you. The pirates are bent over another terminal, one broad and bald, the other younger, with a bloodied towel wrapped around his forearm. The broad man keeps his pistol angled across his body while the younger one examines the screen.

“What about the skiff?” the younger man asks.

“Gone when we jumped.”

“You said you could fly this thing.”

You draw back behind a ventilation housing. Your scanner swings from its wrist strap and taps the casing with a small, clear, spiteful sound.

Both men turn. You press against the wall, willing your limbs to remain inside its shallow shelter, and watch your knee begin drifting past the edge. The indignity is so specific that for a moment you feel personally betrayed by the joint.

“Who's there?” the broad man calls.

You consider answering. Perhaps a courier would seem harmless enough to leave alone. Perhaps they would want someone who knew the service routes. You are still trying to construct a version of yourself worth sparing when the first shot tears through the housing beside your ear.

Fragments sting your neck. You kick away, catch a yellow rail, and haul yourself through the laundry hatch as a second shot strikes its frame. A canvas bag catches your shoulder and turns with you, spilling a length of white sheet into the cramped passage.

You wedge yourself behind the bag, using your feet to hold it across the opening. A pistol appears through the hatch, followed by a thick wrist. The sheet drifts over the barrel, and the man jerks it aside with a brisk irritation that frightens you almost as much as the weapon.

Through a fold in the linen, you can see his finger resting against the trigger. You fix on the nail, a dark crescent beneath it, and find yourself wondering what ordinary work left that dirt there. Your mind seems determined to furnish the person about to kill you with a life beyond this moment.

“Leave it,” the younger man says from the corridor. “Eleven minutes.”

The pistol remains in the hatch long enough for your chest to begin hurting. Then the wrist withdraws and the handholds rattle again, carrying the men toward Bay Three.

You stay still until you cannot hold your breath any longer. Air enters your lungs in an ugly little gasp, and you bury your mouth in your sleeve as though the sound might call them back.

You want to remain behind the laundry bag. It has protected you once, which gives it an authority far beyond its design. Leaving feels like discarding the only useful discovery you have made all day. The heat makes the decision for you.

The yellow rails continue down the service shaft. You have followed their equivalents through passenger liners and research stations, usually carrying linen for people who were expected to appreciate the view from somewhere more agreeable. Once you delivered tablecloths through a maintenance duct to a wedding venue whose manager described the broken lift as a temporary inconvenience. He said this with the ease of someone who had never carried an inconvenience up three decks.

You follow the rails now, drawing yourself hand over hand through warm darkness. Each controlled movement becomes a small success. You begin silently naming the next thing you need to touch, giving your mind work to finish before it wanders toward the Sun.

Halfway down, the lights fail, so you stop, and press your cheek against a cable bundle, listening to a crackling sound ahead. A draft passes your face with the dry heat of an opened oven, and the next hatch burns your fingertips when you reach for it.

You pull back too sharply and strike your elbow. For several seconds all you can do is cling to the rail, furious with the hatch, your hands, and the unbearable persistence of obstacles. You are following the route. You have done what the diagram required. Some childish part of you feels that this should entitle you to arrive.

The metal around you has been absorbing heat faster than the damaged systems can remove it. Compartments that seemed separate on the plan are conducting the same disaster into one another, and you picture the yellow circle on the navigation screen again. Its designer has a great deal to answer for.

You feel along the wall until you find the branch rail leading around the blocked hatch. The passage is narrower, crowded with cables that brush your neck as you turn sideways and work between them. Something catches your belt. You struggle against it until panic begins converting effort into exhaustion, then force yourself to stop and reach back. A loose cable has hooked through the buckle. It takes two fingers to free it. The simplicity almost makes you chuckle.

Your mother will be finishing work soon. She calls while walking to the Magrail, describing her day and complaining about the stairs while you pretend to be doing fewer things at once than you are. Yesterday you let the call ring because you were tired. You meant to send a message afterward, but now you cannot remember whether you did.

You try to reconstruct the movement of your thumb across the screen, the little confirmation beside the text, but there is only the memory of intending it.

A rectangle of red light appears beyond the next turn. You work toward it and find yourself above Bay Three, looking through a service grill into the cargo space below.

Your trolley is secured beneath the suit lockers. Six blue medical crates remain strapped to it, exactly where the ensign had asked you to leave them before taking you to the office for the paperwork. The sight brings an unreasonable surge of relief. Here is something you delivered to the correct place. Under the circumstances, you are prepared to attach considerable significance to that.

The broad pirate aims his pistol at the younger man. Between them floats a silver suit, its legs tangled around a locker handle.

“Give it here,” the broad man says.

You press close to the grill and look along the bay. The auxiliary airlock sits in the outer wall, beyond a row of empty escape pod cradles. Tags hang from the restraints, each explaining that its pod has been removed for scheduled replacement. Earlier, a security officer had spent nearly four minutes establishing that your folding knife represented an unacceptable risk.

The younger man extends the suit with his good hand. As the gunman reaches for it, the younger man's injured arm moves, bringing a small cutter against the inside of the gunman's elbow.

The pistol fires. You recoil against the crawlspace roof while the sound rolls through the bay, enormous in the enclosed air.

The broad man kicks away from the lockers, turning with the movement. His head strikes the sharp edge of a console. The younger man drifts in the opposite direction, carrying the silver suit against his stomach, where blood begins spreading into its folds.

The pistol rotates slowly between them. You watch the broad man's hand, expecting it to reach for the weapon yet his fingers remain loosely curved. Behind him, droplets gather against the console and lift away when the ship shivers.

Nine minutes become eight while you wait for certainty. Eventually you understand that you will have to move with the information you have.

You loosen the grill, guide it aside, and lower yourself into the bay by a rung beneath the opening. The younger man's eyes follow you. You catch the pistol before it reaches the wall and hold it with both hands, remembering the position from films and hoping that whoever advised those productions had taken the work seriously.

“Stay there.”

He looks down at his stomach, then back at you. “All right.”

His voice has become thin. Up close, you can see places he missed while shaving and a pale mark where something once pierced his ear. Until now the white armband has occupied nearly all your attention. You feel unwilling to allow these additional details, as though noticing them might commit you to something you cannot afford.

“The suit,” you say. “Does it work?”

He lifts part of the silver material and shows you a torn torso seal. You want to swear at him for having fought over it, for bringing you here, for continuing to look like a person who might be frightened. Instead, you push toward the lockers and begin searching, pulling aside harnesses and finding a helmet with a crack through its neck ring.

“End cabinet,” he says. “Red catch. Lift it first.”

Your hand closes around the latch. Inside waits a folded solar maintenance suit, its reflective hood wrapped around a rigid cooling pack. You touch the intact helmet seal, feeling the smooth rubber under your thumb, and almost forget the man behind you.

“He shot my brother,” the young pirate says. “Back at the docks.”

You glance toward the broad man, then return your attention to the cabinet. You remember shouting near the fuel hoses, an argument you had ignored while checking the crate numbers. There had been so much happening at the edge of your attention before any of it became your business.

You do not know what he expects you to say. His brother's death opens no simple path through the other deaths, and you are too frightened to sort responsibility into anything that resembles an answer.

“Anything useful in those crates?” he asks.

The timer shows seven minutes. You have the suit within reach, and for a moment you imagine pulling it on while he watches. You could explain about the time. He can see the same display. You could let the clock make the decision and spend whatever life remains telling yourself that it had been unavoidable. You wedge the pistol behind a pipe and open the first crate.

The scanner chirps its usual confirmation, a cheerful little sound that has accompanied thousands of completed tasks. You stare at the neatly packed dressings, at the care taken to keep each sterile pouch flat, and find a strange comfort in the fact that somewhere people had prepared for a stranger to need help.

You bring a pressure dressing back to him. His hands tremble too badly to hold it in place, so you catch a rail with your feet and press it against the wound yourself. He makes a sound low in his throat and closes his eyes.

“Sorry,” you say, automatically, then resent the word for arriving so easily.

You try to remember the first aid module from your courier training. There was a calm instructor, a clean room, a dummy whose injuries remained wherever they were put. Apply firm pressure. Reassure the casualty. Summon assistance. You can manage the first of these, and the effort required to do it gives you something to concentrate on while the others collapse around you.

“Your name?” he asks.

“Chris.”

He repeats it softly, as though checking that he has heard correctly, and you realize how long it has been since anyone used your name without requiring a signature or giving an instruction. His fingers close around your wrist. You are startled by the gentleness of the contact.

He begins to tell you his own name, but the first syllable catches in his breathing. You lean closer, waiting for him to try again. The fans seem very loud. You want them to quieten, and the ordinary irritation of that wish seems almost unbearable.

His grip loosens, but you keep the dressing in place, nonetheless, counting breaths that become farther apart until you begin counting the space where the next one should be. The personnel display changes to one living body.

Because of the challenge’s word limit, I’ve split the story into two parts. Continue the adventure here.