Derelict

[Sarah McFarlen]

12th July 822 – Interplanetary Space, Coronado

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The Galley’s airlocks felt smaller from the inside. Sarah rolled her shoulder, felt the slight rubbery resistance of the suit pushing against the movement. The Galley’s suits would have probably been obsolete on any corporate merchant, but they were solid enough for her tastes. Oxygen cylinders and proper radiation shielding, not the cloth-thin vacc suits the inner systems were pushing these days. The specs might have said they were safe, but there was something comforting in the weight of the old suits.

A tool tray was strapped across the suit’s stomach, and a helmet floated loose in one hand. She gave a long suffering sigh and turned to face the figure hovering still stubbornly in the serenity’s cargo bay. ”It’s just a routine check, skipper.”

Leslie shook her head. ”If it’s that routine, you can take care of it. Why do you need me?”

”I haven’t seen you outside of your room or the bridge in three days. Being cooped up like that’s not healthy.” Sarah raised a frustrated hand to her forehead. ”James, tell her it’s not healthy. Besides, someone’s got to cycle air through that thing. The Galley’s a big girl. She can fly herself for half an hour without you mothering her, Skip.”

Leslie folded her arms, looking distinctly put out. ”I’ll remind you that being on the bridge is my job. Floating dangerously in the vacuum of space looking for dents is yours.” She pointed a finger imperiously at James. ”If you need an assistant, take him. He’s just a waste of space right now.” The last remark was softened with a smile.

James was wearing his sealed hardsuit, sans combat rigging, plus an extra oxygen tank - and would have looked distinctly intimidating if he didn’t have to crane his head to fit in the airlock. ”Whatever,” he said, a little sourly. ”At least I’m not averse to, you know, going outside. I swear, why are all my female friends such homebodies?”

Sarah gave a pointed cough.

”I might forget to open the airlock for you on the way in, James,” Leslie said sweetly. ”Anyways, Sarah. What else do you need to get this inspection done?”

Sarah tapped her chest rig proudly, nodded towards the spool of wire running from the back of the suit to the airlock wall. ”I’m all set. If you’d rather stay in tonight then, you know, go outside, we should be okay. James can run second, and you just come out if something jumps out and eats both of us.” She glanced at James’ suit, all camouflage and materials she hadn’t seen before outside of a lab. ”How long does the air supply on that thing last anyway?”

”Onboard scrubbers are pretty high tech, with no external supply I can last for about ten hours. From there, it’s all tanks like this one,” he said, and patted the tank on his back. He also had a cable fitted to his harness to prevent him from floating away in zero-gravity.

”How much time are you intending to take, Sarah?” Leslie asked.


”Er.” Sarah glanced at the datapad fixed to her wrist. ”I couldn’t get replacement scrubbers for these on the Barrier, and I’m saving what we’ve got for Chardon. So, I’m on tanks. Should be good for about eight. Six if I have to run anywhere.” She grinned. ”It’ll be fine. If nothing’s broken, we shouldn’t be more than an hour, max.”

Leslie responded with a giant shrug. ”I’ll keep an eye on systems, make sure the ship doesn’t make any sudden movements.” She slapped James on an armoured shoulder, withdrawing her hand with a wince. ”Nasty bit of work, that.” Sighing, she shuffled over to the extra spacesuit they had, going through the motions of putting it on. ”This’ll be annoying to wear and sit on the bridge. But I do this for you.” She did not specify.

”Just try not to break a nail or something putting the gloves on, yeah?” James deadpanned from behind his visor.

Leslie muttered something inaudible, but which might have been ‘asshole.’

The valves in Sarah’s suit hissed as she locked the helmet into place. She raised a gloved hand in a cheerful wave. ”One hour. If you swat me with a spaceship, haunting doesn’t even begin to describe what my ghost’ll do to the bookshelf.”

Leslie shrugged, now mostly in her spacesuit, only the helmet remained. ”That’s a threat and a half, Sarah. I’ll try not to.” She put her helmet on, nodded briefly. ”Get moving, you two.”

James nodded. ”Sure thing, don’t fall asleep.”

Sarah slapped the airlock control before Leslie could respond. The effect was only slightly spoiled by the wailing siren. She eyed the door. Oh, and the fact that the airlock doors shut at a rate usually applied to continents. A tap on her datapad and the suit’s radio flickered to life. ”I’d check your suit, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Does that thing even use regular seals?”

”Y’know, if you want to strip him I’d rather you do it when I can’t hear you both,” Leslie’s voice drifted into their ears over radio, slightly tinny and distorted.

James chuckled. The microphone quality was excellent, and would come out on the receiving end like he’d been standing in the same room. ”The seals are reactive, works one layer below the surface armour material. I don’t think a visual check’d have much purpose to begin with,” he said, pointing a finger at a hair-thin seam at his throat.

”Right. Forgot. Military-super tech. Mind checking the seals for the primitive over here?” Sarah flashed a grin. ”And Leslie, I’m shaking my fist at you. I know you can’t see, so just imagine, alright?”

James gestured for Sarah to turn around. He probably would have made a quip, or a playful remark, but training took over, and to his surprise, he found himself not saying a thing as he checked Sarah’s suit seals - worked rapidly as he identified and scrutinized everything important. ”You’re good to go,” he said, patting her shoulder twice. ”Let’s go for a walk, shall we?”

”I thought you’d never ask.” Her fingers skated over the pad, and the indicator light above the door flicked from red to yellow. The low rumble of the Galley’s life support equipment softened and faded to nothing as the room vented air. An eternity passed in half a minute, and the light flashed green. Sarah counted to five and opened the exterior airlock.

The Barrier was waiting for her. Not the station, not a shaded region on a map, not a word dropped in a conversation the same way you might talk about a corner shop. The Barrier, the real Barrier was none of those pale abstractions. Stars hung in the far distance, crisp and clear and steady without the intervening haze of an atmosphere.

The Galley felt tiny and fake beneath her, less than a speck of dust held against the distances unfurling in front of her, and Sarah felt like nothing so much as a cliff diver looking down. She reached down and flicked the locks off her boots, drifted slowly into the center of the airlock. Even that much motion felt like sacrilege. ”You don’t ever really get used to it, do you?”

”The great outdoors doesn’t get much greater than this,” he said after a moment. ”Come on, gawking at space doesn’t get the ship inspected any faster.”

”I’m on the bridge now,” Leslie’s voice drifted in again. ”Things seem to be in order, for now.”

”Thank you for the qualifier, Captain Ominous.” Sarah nodded and thumbed the suit’s jets. She drifted clear of the airlock in a slowly-dispersing cloud of propellent, twisted to face the serenity’s bow. ”We’ll start out with the retrothrusters. Just follow me and keep an eye out for anything that looks out of place, okay James?”

”Gotcha.” James activated his magboots and tentatively took a few disorienting steps out onto the serenity’s hull. He looked up at Sarah, floating above him towards the bow. Their cables trailed behind them, still securely attached. ”You’ll have to tell me what kind of things to look for, though. I could probably identify a sparking mess of cables or a gaping hull breach, but I think the computers would tell us about those, at least.”

”You’d be amazed how often something manages to take out the sensor that was meant to detect it.” Sarah paused, frowning at an antennae extending from a mess of similar structures spiking from the ship’s spine, a forest of steel as tall as a man. ”I like to think it’s nature’s way of keeping me in a job.”

James strolled along, stopped to scrutinize a Dulzian turret housing. By contemporary standards it wasn’t hugely impressive, but it’d ward off the more anaemic pirates in the sector, at least. ”Power plant deal with these turrets okay?”

”Most of the time.” Sarah was wrist-deep in an access panel. She waved the other hand in a spacer’s shrug. ”Don’t tell Leslie, but they’re pretty much dead weight while we’re burning. It’s all going to acceleration for this trip. As it should be.” The engineer smirked into her helmet.

”I know, smartass. At this speed, you’d need something like a Dreadnought to move and fire at the same time. We’re good,” Leslie said, acerbically.

Sarah shot the turret a protective glance. ”Don’t give the bad guys ideas.”

”What, getting a Dreadnought? If they’re that good, I’d rather spend the time thinking of epitaphs for my gravestone,” Leslie shot back.

”Better to have and not need, right?” James continued, careful not to step on anything important.

”Dreadnoughts or epitaphs?” Sarah asked.

”Gun turrets,” James said dryly.

”Dunno.” Sarah stepped back from the comms array, apparently satisfied. ”I think I could do with a dreadnought. A flak cannon or two. Lighten the place up, you know?”

”I’ll have to tell you if I ever survive long enough to be assigned command of one. Hell, maybe you’ll get to name it.” He stalked up behind Sarah, seeking to get revenge for the time she managed to sneak up on him when he first came aboard. With vacuum not transferring sound so well, it wasn’t exactly difficult. ”Boo.”

Sarah didn’t quite jump, but her legs twitched and she managed a half-spin that would have made an Olympian proud before one flailing arm latched onto the shoulder of Arland’s suit and bought her to a staggering stop, legs floating parallel above the maintenance walkway.

”Shi-” She stopped, heaved a breath, realised what she’d grabbed on to. Then grinned through her visor, reached down and locked her boots to the Galley’s hull. ”Oh, it’s on, Spookshow.” She released the man’s suit, glanced at the panel under him and took a very deliberate step back. ”Leslie, be a pal and fire the number twelve RCS thruster?”

James looked down at the thruster nozzle on the panel under him. For several seconds, nothing happened. ”Well. I guess not, huh?” He took a step back.

Sarah frowned down at her datapad. The microcomputer remained cheerfully unmoved. ”Give me a minute. I swear, this doesn’t normally happen to me.” The nozzle continued to do nothing. She gave a half-shrug, hand bobbing alongside her, and stepped back between the thin red lines that marked the traversable paths across the serenity’s hull. ”Guess you wouldn’t consider doing me a favour and standing behind the primary thrusters?”

”As curious as I am to see how high temperatures this suit can withstand, I’d prefer testing that while I’m not wearing it, yeah?” He said, a bit of laughter at the edge of his voice. ”Come, let’s move on. Maybe pose a little in front of the bridge viewport. Or float past it listlessly.”

”I can do listlessly.” Sarah flashed the bretonian an approving grin, disengaged the locks on her boots, and pushed herself into space above the walkway with a flick of her ankles. The suit resisted the movement, but Sarah had spent all of her adult life sucking air through filters rather than trees, and she drifted into the vacuum like a fish dropping into a stream. Oh, she didn’t have the easy grace of lifelong spacers, of the zoners and their ilk that sat scattered among the stars, for whom a life down a gravity well was nothing but a generation-old memory. But, for a dirtsider, you move pretty good, kid. She smiled at the memory and kicked the suit’s thrusters, caught her shoulder before it could roll her forward, and turned back to face the bretonian still clamped to the Galley’s surface like a statue. ”Come on, Spookshow! The bridge is a long way to walk.”

The operative cocked his head. ”You do realize I sort of don’t have a thruster kit?”

”Really?” Twenty metres above him, Sarah raised an eyebrow. ”You’ve got enough firepower on that thing to punch a mountain into orbit, and you don’t have a thruster?”

”Nope. External kits can be used, but it doesn’t come with thrusters out of the box. I can only jam so much tech into this before it becomes a nightmare to maintain.” He paused. ”I suppose you could drag or push me in the right direction, though.”

”But really, no thrusters? In the Navy?” Sarah thumbed the switch and drifted to a stop a few paces in front of Arland, surprise colouring her voice. A shock ran through her legs as the boots locked back onto the hull. ”That’s information that would have been really good to know a few years back. I could’ve started a recovery company.”

”This isn’t a Navy job,” he replied. ”Everything I’ve brought along is my private property, well, maybe not the carbine laying in the spare cabin, but other than that, all of this is private sector.”

Sarah ran an appreciative eye over the suit. Just the torso segment would have cost more than she was likely to see in a career’s worth of transport hopping. ”I don’t think we shop at the same stores.” She breathed, and extended a gloved hand towards Arland. ”There’s really no way to do this that’s not incredibly awkward. Um. Just stand in front of me, okay? I’ll hook my arms under yours. If you could not cut me to pieces with a concealed bayonet or something, that’d be nice.”

”Huh. Alright. If it’s any consolation, there’s a lot of material layers, as well as the vacuum of space to consider before this gets weird.” Sarah would thankfully not be able to see James trying and failing to suppress a grin under the suit mask.

”James.” Sarah nodded her towards the path, realised Arland couldn’t see her face, and waved at it instead. ”You just made this weird.”

”I agree, and I can’t even see the situation,” Leslie’s voice drifted in after a long while. ”Most romantic thing I’ve heard in ages, James.” Her tone was dry.

”Shut up, Leslie.” If looks could have killed, Sarah would have sent the Galley’s bridge halfway to the next solar system. Or at least scratched the paintwork.

”Shut up, Leslie,” Arland said, pretty much right at the same time.

Leslie roared with laughter, and soon found breathing difficult due to the force of her mirth. ”Oh dear god you two have synced whathaveyoubeendoing?” She said breathlessly, still trying to control her amusement. It gradually subsided, and her voice approached normalcy. ”Sorry for phasing out on you two earlier. I’ve been watching the radar, and there’s a few...uh, inconsistencies.”

James was about to suggest a synchronous flipping of the bird through the bridge viewport, decided there were more important things at hand. ”What inconsistencies?”

”It’s spotting contact almost near the periphery of our vision, but unable to keep them in view. I think the systems are just too old, so it’s not actually working at maximum range properly…” She paused. ”But there’s definitely something on our tail.”

Logically, Sarah knew that looking to the Galley’s rear was a pointless motion. She found herself doing it anyway. A handful of stars and a lot of empty space stared smugly down at her. ”Any idea on the bearing?”

”If I could get a proper bead on them, I’d tell you,” Leslie said, sighing. ”You two finish up outside as soon as you can and meet me on the bridge.” A brief pause on her end. ”It could just be radar malfunctions, or nothing at all.”

”Could be.” Sarah echoed. But the Galley’s radar was her responsibility, and her gear didn’t just start spitting at ghosts. Unless you counted the last week. ”Or it could be that someone up there’s dialling up the creep-o-meter. Unless an engine’s slagged, we should be back inside in maybe forty minutes. That okay?”

”Don’t hurry on my account,” Leslie responded, her tone laced with an uncertain emotion.

James remained quiet, head still craned towards the Galley’s aft. Pursuers… How many would there be? What kind of craft? Disposition, who sent them… Still not enough information. Great. He hoped he’d brought enough ammo. After a moment, he turned back to Sarah. ”Well, so that’s new. How do you want to proceed?”

Sarah was running her own calculations, eyes darting from fore to aft and back again. A dozen manoeuvring thrusters, four vectored engines that had been burning for the best part of a week, and forty minutes for checks on the lot of them. Oh. And there were possibly going to using them to outrun pursuers. In a mid-tonnage transport. No pressure.

”I’m thinking I’d like to proceed by swapping the Galley out for a nice sleek fast escort. Maybe a Defiant, something sharp. But unless you’ve got one tucked away in that suit somewhere, we might have to make do with checking that hardware twice instead.” She flashed a grin that was more nerves than joy, extended her hands, and gave a brisk nod that managed to set the suit helmet rocking for a moment. ”Come on. We didn’t have time to walk before Leslie spooked the radar.”

”Oh, right.” James walked up close to Sarah, extended his arms to his sides. ”Well, grab on.”

Sarah’s hand bobbed in recognition, and she stepped into place behind Arland, reached up to lock her arms under Arland’s, and fired the suit’s thrusters. She was tall, but the Bretonian had an inch on her even without the suit. With it, it was a stretch to see over his shoulders. Agonisingly slowly, the pair drifted up into the space over the Galley.

Locked into place against her chest, Arland’s suit was like nothing so much as a large, camo-green deadweight. A fact she constantly had to remind herself of with each shift in the suit’s thrust that pushed and pulled at the hardsuit. It was only armour. There certainly, definitely, wasn’t a Bretonian commando in it with a physique that some greek gods would have killed for. Absolutely not. Focus, Sarah. ”We’ll check the front thrusters first and swing back to the main nozzles. We haven’t fired the retro’s since we left, so there shouldn’t be anything there, but, better to check, right? There’s a pad in the pocket on my left sleeve. See it?”

”This one?” Arland patted for the pocket, found the pad.

”Uh huh.” Sarah’s voice crackled over the radio. ”Density scanner. I mean, it does other things too, but that’s what it’s set to. When we get to the nozzles, just take it out and point the lens at them until the yellow light turns green. If it doesn’t, let me know.”

”Sounds simple enough. I know I technically didn’t have to come along for this bit, but what’s the engineering life without ‘bring your commando to work’-day?” He inspected the pad, found the indicator light he’d be looking at.

”I know, right?” Sarah might have flushed a little behind her suit visor. ”Okay. Eyes open, we’re coming around now.”

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"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."

- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.

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