Arrival: Chapter 32

  Wiremu cautiously tried to open the airlock door.  “She did it,” he reported after discovering it to be unlocked.  He then slowly proceeded through. 

  “You smell that?” Neil asked from behind him as the air of the shuttle and the ship began intermingling.

  “Yeah… hard not to.” Wiremu replied as he pulled and pushed himself through the circular portal.  Once through he held a railing with his right hand and wedged his right foot between another railing and the wall.  In the absence of gravity this allowed him a stable enough position to help the others through, or if necessary to shoot his weapon.  He helped Neil through the airlock who then took up an equivalent position himself on the other side of the door.  The grip points they were using were located all around the circular tube like structure they were in since in this part of the ship there had never been, and would never be, any kind of gravity at all whether genuine or simulated.

  “Smells like burning,” In-Su remarked as he emerged from the shuttle a little too eagerly and nearly floated past the other two sims.  Before he could though, they both grabbed him and arrested his forward motion.

  “Gunpowder and burned insulation off of the wires in the walls…” Armina offered in explanation as she exited from the shuttle behind them.  “There’s been a firefight here.”

  “So… do we uh… need to worry about being um… you know, engulphed in flames or anything?” In-Su asked, trying to sound nonchalant.  He was self-conscious over how the other three around him seemed to be remarkably calm and restrained in the extreme and dangerous situation.  As soon as he finished speaking he realized that he’d significantly overcompensated and felt rather like an ass for it.

  “No, no fire risk In-Su, not in this part of the ship anyways,” Neil answered.  “Fire can’t really persist in micrograv.  In a gravity environment the hot air of a fire rises and pulls in fresh cool air at its base which further fuels it.  In the absence of gravity, fire just burns in a ball until it’s finished consuming whatever fuel it had around to begin with.   After that there’s no convection to keep it oxygenated so it’s impossible for it to sustain itself or to grow larger.”

  “Shh.” Wiremu ordered and the other three quieted down to listen along with him.   They were at the end of a narrower six meter tube which intersected the much longer and wider access tube laying along most of the engineering section, and providing access to the fuel and cargo pods, as well as the shuttle ports.

  Most of the habitat ring where people lived was quite beautified with every effort taken to make it as pleasant and liveable as possible.  In somewhat stark contrast however, the zero gravity engineering section was entirely Spartan and had a certain brutal architecture to it, with bare metal grates, dull silver foot and hand holds, and only the most basic and functional lighting.  On the opposite side of the tube they were currently in, which led from this main corridor to the shuttle’s docking port, was an identical mirrored airlock for the other shuttle which they could clearly see from where they were floating.   

  “Stay behind me, and stay quiet,” Wiremu ordered.  “Armina you take the rear.  We’re going to go investigate the other airlock and assess the other shuttle.  If it’s still operational we need to send it down to Sadhika while we still can, just… just in case.”  He thought about it, and then surmised that it really wasn’t necessary to finish his thought.  They all knew what possible outcomes he was referring to.  Holding up his shotgun in front of him with his right hand, Wiremu progressed forward with his left hand and both feet, moving from one gripping point to the next.  He reached the intersection with the main engineering access tube, and cautiously peered up towards the nearer forward end where the fusion core and recreational zero gravity bubble was located, and then back down the long corridor to the far rear of the ship where there was engineering access to the ion engines.

  “Smoke.” he said.  “More smoke.”   Over the length of the corridor he could see a haze which he couldn’t see before with a restricted field of view.   It was thick enough that he couldn’t quite make out the far end of the corridor.  One by one they crossed the intersection, first Wiremu, then Neil behind him, In-Su, and then finally Armina.

  They could all feel an oppression of danger.  The last time they’d spoken to Aset, she’d reported that Halley was still trying to cut his way through the airlock.  He’d clearly already made it through, but it could have been the very minute before they opened their own airlock, or he could be long gone up to the habitat ring.  If he was still around, they had no way to know how he would react to seeing them there.   They had no way to know what state he’d be in; he might just ignore them, or he might be so far gone that he’d shoot at them as soon as he saw them.  There was just no way to know.

  As they got closer to the other airlock, it became increasingly apparent that it was badly damaged.  There was a crescent cut out of the side of the airlock door that intersected the mechanism which locked it closed.  This meant that it was impossible to lock and seal the airlock door in order to launch the shuttle.

  “Well I guess that would in part explain the smoke…” Neil observed as he touched the damaged airlock.

  “Yeah…” Wiremu added, “it also means that we can’t launch the shuttle down to Sadhika.   There’s no way to seal this airlock after it disengages.  The shuttle itself is the only think keeping an atmospheric seal.  If it were to disengage this whole section would vent out into space.”

  “Well then let’s hope nobody remotely issues that command.” In-Su plainly remarked.

  “We should evacuate this area immediately if that’s a risk,” Armina advised.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Neil offered, “though I wish Sadhika were here to help.   There’s got to be a way to manually destroy or otherwise physically disable the mechanisms that would disengage the shuttle.  I mean it’s securely winched down, it would require a mechanical process to release the tension…” He waved open his wrist scroll and looked intently at it for a few moments as he investigated how to do such a thing.  “Mmkay… it doesn’t look like it should be too hard.”

  Neil removed a wall panel beside the airlock and looked back and forth between what he saw in the wall and the schematic on his scroll.

  “It would be best I think,” In-Su offered, “not to make a mistake Neil.  Could you not easily vent us into space if you’re wrong?”

  Neil looked back at In-Su in somewhat playful disbelief.  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”  He looked over at Wiremu with a look which asked if he should proceed or not.

  “If you’re confident,” Wiremu answered, “it’s the prudent thing to do.”

  Neil nodded and returned his attention to the wall.  He traced a particular wire with his fingers until it reached the mechanism which if commanded would release the winch that mechanically maintained the seal between the shuttle and the ship.  Checking one last time on his scroll that he was not about to inadvertently release the seal, he then ripped the wire out which supplied power to the unit.   All four looked around, casually waiting to see if they were going to die or not.  It turned out not.

  “Okay then,” Neil said.  “Anyone including us could easily repair that if they came back here to do it, but at least now nobody with an idle thought can vent this whole section and us along with it… not to mention an even larger section of the ship if we don’t seal bulkheads behind us as we make our way up to the habitat ring.”

  “Why didn’t Asari do just that to stop Halley from making it any further?” In-Su asked.

  “Local commands take precedence in the system; it’s a safety feature.” Neil answered.   “As long as Halley was physically here he could prevent him from doing so.  After he was already gone though… I guess there wasn’t any point.  Maybe he even realized that doing so after Halley had already gotten through would mean losing the entire engineering section.”

  “Right.   Ok, now what…” Wiremu asked himself as he flicked open his wrist scroll.  In response to his thoughts, after opening the screen, it displayed a wire mesh diagram of the entire ship, which was then populated by little red dots indicating individual people still left on the ship and what their location was.   The ship could make inferences about the locations of children still too young to have received a Brainchip based on their manual use of the same technologies, but anyone with a Brainchip could be directly tracked in this way.  The display revealed a significant grouping of the dots in the dining hall, three seemingly on approach to the bridge, and four already there.

  “Look,” In-Su said, pointing at the screen over his shoulder, “all of those people in the dining hall, that must be where they’ve had the young and the old hide out.”   In-Su took on a deeply disheartened air when he added, “now they’re the vast majority of all of the people who are left…”

  “It looks like Asari is still on the bridge,” Wiremu observed.  “He must be bunkered there as his last line of defence.  It’s the smart thing to do in his position; after all I did build that bridge like a bunker…”

  “He’s just left the children undefended?” In-Su asked, seemingly quite bothered by the idea.

  “Yes,” Armina affirmed, “well, they’ve got the older crew there looking out for them too.   Either way though I find it hard to believe that either Halley or Asari would do anything to hurt them… that is if they’ve even given it any thought at all.  The people in the dining hall aren’t anybody’s enemy.  Besides, I’m sure both sides figure that if they succeed in defeating the other, everyone left will de facto become their people.”

  “Armina I find it difficult to believe that all of the elderly were neutral in everything that’s gone on.” Neil commented. 

  “You’d be surprised…” she answered.  “They all watched Asari, Aset, and Halley grow up together and were mostly quite disturbed by all of the bad blood between them.”

  “Ok, well that’s good to know,” Neil remarked.  “It’s actually a little reassuring at this point.” 

  “Isn’t it a good thing that Asari has locked himself in the bridge though?” In-Su asked.   “I mean, it’s ultimately a rather temporary solution isn’t it?  There no quick or easy way onto the bridge once it’s sealed, correct?  Like you said, that’s kind of the whole point.”

  “Yes yes…” Wiremu commented, obviously distracted.  “What’s bothering me now though is that I can’t see Aset on here…”   He knew as well as the others did that since the Brainchips were directly powered by electrical activity in the brain, they ceased transmitting quite abruptly upon death, and there was no easy way for one to prevent them from transmitting their location on the ship.

  “We should make our way up to the habitat ring,” Neil suggested.  “We should check on the children and elderly, don’t you think?” he asked Wiremu, choosing not to contemplate what might have happened to Aset.

  “Yeah,” Wiremu confirmed. “Yeah, we definitely need to get moving.”  The four made their way back to the engineering corridor and forward into the smoky haze towards the front end of the ship where the rotational collar was located.  It was just ahead of the fusion core and the zero gravity bubble, and was the structure about which the entire habitat ring rotated.  In this cylindrical area where the two main sections of the ship met, four tubes which were perfectly equidistant from each other (which the crew more commonly referred to as the struts); each extended all the way up to the habitat ring from the engineering section.  The tubes were just the insides of very strong structural supports which firmly grasped the rotating habitat ring while it was rotated about the non-rotating engineering section of the ship.

  Wiremu arrived in the space where the four access tunnels were slowly rotating around him, and Neil asked “Which tube Wii?”  The tubes spun slowly here at the source, but at their furthest projection all the way up at the habitat ring they spun fast enough to simulate the same gravity as on the planet’s surface.

  “Number three.   It’ll take us closest to the dining hall.”

  One by one they entered Tube Three, and began making their way down it.  Quickly into the trip the simulated sensation of gravity became progressively perceptible and it became increasingly necessary to hold onto the ladder to avoid falling all the way down the tube, as opposed to using its rungs merely to propel oneself along.  Wiremu was at the front of them, and when he looked down he was the first to spot the figure which lay motionless at the far end of the tube, and on the floor of the top level of the habitat ring.

  “Oh no…” he uttered as he stopped methodically climbing down the ladder and more liberally slid down with his hand and feet only braking his descent against the posts of the ladder.  It was Aset who lay there, ominously devoid of any signs of life.