Void Walkers

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Unfortunately for Dolores Tan all she could hear when the airlock opened without warning was her own scream. It was pure luck that she was fastening her helmet when it did, but she couldn't find the silver lining in that as the stars pinwheeled around her in a nausea-inducing light show. Whatever she had grabbed in a vain attempt to save herself was hooked to a fold of the thick orange suit. She pulled it close as the Eternal Hope flashed by again and again. Hard, elongated, shining - instead of grabbing one of the rails she had torn a spare oxygen canister from its place in the case. This could work. The colossal form of the ship was now in darkness. Something was wrong, terribly wrong,

Dolores Tam was not a risk taker. It's why she was in engineering, why she had volunteered for the spacewalk; if something was wrong with her ship, yes her ship, she wanted to fix it. She wanted to know it was done right. But in the vacuum of space, there are no safe options and with every moment she was sliding further from the Eternal Hope and its cargo of sleeping human life. All that hope, all those families on backup power, soon to be jettisoned from hypersleep 200 years too early... The hopes of a colony, or the species if you consider the very real chance the other ark ships would not make it to their destination.

No, Dolores Tam was not a risk-taker and that's why she took the risk of voiding her oxygen tank as the Eternal Hope came into view once more.

The hulking shell was like a corpse in the starlight, dark and drifting without purpose it would stray into the orbit of the nearby red giant in less than a day without a course correction, and that was allowing for the lack of thrust from the engines. The oxygen sputtered, coughed, and cut, her breath misted in the viewing panel of the helmet. Cold started to cut into her like a knife. Reaching a hand out she prayed for the first time in thirty years, and as if in answer to that foible, she overshot the mark and had to scramble to grip the first jutting piece of metal she could. The antenna bent but did not break. She was safe. Ish.

Hooking an emergency strap to the ship, Dolores worked with surprisingly calm movements, taking a deep breath before she unhooked the dead canister and pulled the new one from its canvas casing. It was leaking, a slow mist that set a definite limit on her re-entry attempts. Dolores Tam cursed God and took her second risk of the day; pouncing from handle to handle she traversed the outer hull with grace and the impending need for new underwear until the still open airlock door opened like the maw of a great animal and swallowed her whole. Beyond the viewing port, the ship was dark, illuminated only by flashes of red from the emergency lighting. Like great gashes in the air, those red streaks seemed to be threats. Come no closer, they said, liberate tutume, do not enter. She could, of course, enter an escape pod from the exterior and send herself hurtling back the way they had come, emergency radio screaming as the grav-pod held her in helpless indifference. But why take the risk when some green as grass child from the third shift skeleton crew had probably cut a wire and sent them into the emergency protocol?

Why take the risk, she asked herself, as she turned the manual entry hatch and grit her teeth against the short gust of the decompression. Risk of shame, of career suicide - why risk being the woman who fled the Eden project for all time? A shadow flickered across the viewing port - something was amiss in the room beyond. Dolores stared for countless moments, cataloguing the familiar features with the hair-raising feeling that something was amiss. Then a solid shape, a mass of shadow, slipped away from the viewing window and a chill ran through her body. For the first time, she engaged her radio,

"Kenny, Ajax, was one of you at the window just now?" Static. "Kenny? Ajax?" Still no reply - she switched channels. "Bridge come in. Crocker?" Low whispering echoed back before the feed cut. "What the fuck," Dolores grumbled and pulled herself into the manual entry chute with a sigh, closing the thick door behind her. Hiss and click, the internal door opened smoothly because Dolores kept on top of the maintenance team like it was her job. Gravity gripped her like a vengeful hand and she felt the weariness of terror settle onto her body. The hiss of the radio was loud in the cacophonous silence of the ship. Absent the hum of the engines, it creaked and groaned as it drifted through the emptiness of space. Sirens wailed in the distance, yet it was dead silent of every sound that mattered.

No shouts, no calls, no laughter. No radios, no footfall. Just the creak, groan, crack of a dead vessel with no one to guide it,

"Bridge, come in! Crocker where the fuck are you?" And still, there was no living sound. Dolores swallowed and felt the first real susurrus of fear slither through her body. The hiss of the compromised gas canister filled the room, her head felt light and exposed without the helmet.

Dolores Tam was not, as she often said, a risk taker, but she knew how to assess the risks in almost any situation. It was her job. Unfortunately, in order to assess the risks, you had to know them and in that regard, she had to admit that she was fucked. The metal door with its blinking light, the gateway between this antechamber and the locker room beyond... it seemed to pose a threat rather than hold promise. Now she was really looking at it, it was an ugly, utilitarian thing. Perhaps that was why she took her time stripping the suit and stepping out into the locker room.

In the insulated inner rooms of the ship, even the creaking had ceased. Only the distant shrieking of the cryo room with its sleeping cargo. She resisted the urge to creep; the skeleton crew were on the bridge, she told herself, or else in the engine room fixing the mess. But it was like striding confidently around a corpse. There was the sense of being watched as she scaled the ladders and stairs to the bridge. Stopping halfway, Dolores wiped the sweat from her forehead,

"Got to get the elevator fixed," she chirped in an attempt to lift the prickling from the back of her neck. The words melted into the gloom as if they had been swallowed and suddenly she felt that she had been swallowed. Eaten alive by a great, horrible creature that could feel her tickling it from the inside. She took the rest of the steps two at a time and entered her manual override code into the bridge door,

"What the hell happened, I nearly got blown to kingdom come when the... power..." Dolores blinked at the empty bridge. Lights flashed dully in the inky darkness, "went out." With a sigh, she approached the panel and flicked a few switches - holographic projectors opened, displaying camera feeds. In the bottom right of the nearest screen, Crocker and Kenny cowered behind a crate, huddled together in the lower cargo hold then suddenly made a break for the closest door. They hit its surface as if they had forgotten it would need to be opened manually and pounded on it, throwing panicked looks over their shoulders. With a shaking finger, Dolores flicked a switch and diverted power to the cargo hold and watched with something like relief as they fell through. What made her disengage the diversion, she couldn't say, but when a uniformed figure approached the door and stood, staring a chill ran through her body.

The other camera feeds were devoid of interest, but the cryo room... the cryo room looked like a forest. A crowd of bodies staring up at the camera, or perhaps the flashing light on it, and not a single face between them.