Atlantia Series 1: Survivor (3 page)

A small box on the wall alongside the door attracted her attention and she reached up for it. It opened and she saw a red lever fixed in the
locked
position.

She grabbed hold of the lever, pinned her knees against the bulkhead and pulled hard.

The lever snapped down and the bulkhead shuddered as its locking mechanism deactivated. She pulled herself down and turned the sealing valve anti–clockwise until it spun freely in her grasp. The bulkhead door hissed and she scrambled to gain purchase on the greasy floor as she leaned her shoulder into the heavy door and pushed against it.

The door inched open and she reached out to grab the edge of the frame and haul herself through.

A hand grasped her ankle like a vice and she turned to see the man gripping her as he dragged himself along the slippery floor, his other hand reaching up instinctively between her legs. She twisted her body as she held onto the edge of the door and raised one foot to smash it down toward the man’s face. Her heel smacked across his nose and crushed it in a spray of blood that splattered across his face and flew upward in shimmering globules between them. The man growled in pain, his thick fist still gripping her ankle as she hauled herself through the doorway, her leg stretched out behind her.

She turned and pushed her free foot against the door as she hauled her other leg through the bulkhead, dragging the bulky man’s arm with her. He reached out for the door to pull himself through, his eyes fixated upon her naked body.

She braced herself, grabbed the side of the bulkhead frame and then pulled his arm through after her and slammed the bulkhead door with all of her might. She heard the man growl in pain as the heavy door crushed his wrist between the door and the jam and his grip on her loosened.

She slammed the door again, the bulky man unable to find purchase on the slippery floor to oppose her. Her ankle, still drenched in per–flourocarbon, slipped free of his grasp as his hand shot out of sight. She heaved the door closed and slammed her arms down on the manual security locks and held them in place with one hand to prevent the convict from opening them again.

The man’s bloodied face appeared at the observation window, poisoned with rage as he slammed his big fists against the glass. She spun the sealing valve back into place and then looked to her right. There, an active computer terminal set into the wall flashed warnings at her:

HULL BREACH: EVACUATION PROCEDURE?

She looked at the man’s twisted, screaming face, and then she reached out and pressed the evacuation button.

A distant alarm sounded as she watched and then the blast door seals inside the storage unit were automatically released. The blast doors hissed open, a whirling cloud of vapour rippling around their edges as the atmosphere was vacuumed from the storage unit.

The man screamed again as he was dragged away from the door, his legs pointed toward the widening vacuum and his eyes wide with horror.

Evelyn watched in silence as the man’s face turned even paler, his eyeballs frosting over and blood spilling from every orifice in his body until he was yanked out of sight by the vacuum.

***

She drifted down onto the floor of the gangway, her legs folding without resistance beneath her as she listened to the sirens fade away and felt warmth slowly creep back into her exhausted limbs. Clearly, this section of the ship had not been breached and the temperature was relatively comfortable. Her breathing echoed against her metal mask, heaving through her throat and rattling in her chest as the last of the per–fluorocarbon was ejected from her lungs.

She pushed her long, damp hair away from her mask once more and peered down the empty gangway. Bare metal walls, no markings, ceiling lights evenly spaced leading into the distance that flickered erratically. The floor felt cold against her skin and she dragged herself up onto her feet once more, her body feeling as light as air and yet still as heavy as all eternity.

She tried to call out, but the mask was preventing her from speaking. She coughed, a tiny sound that seemed to echo away down the gangway into the distance.

And then it drifted back to her, as though the sounds had reached her from afar on an errant wind. A whispering, like voices but too faint to understand. She stared into the distant reaches of the gangway, both afraid and hopeful. The soft whispering haunted the air and then faded like a ghost.

She shivered and hugged her arms about her body.

She was already covered in bruises, and a little blood had trickled down her arms and smeared her skin. Conscious of hurting herself further, she aimed herself down the gangway and pushed off the bulkhead door. She drifted silently along in the zero–gravity, listening intently for the sound of voices but hearing nothing except the low rumbling and creaking of the vessel’s hull around her.

The gangway continued through bulkhead after bulkhead, all of which were open. She recalled the shape of the hull of the vessel that she had seen from the outside when she had first awoken, a bulky cylinder of ugly grey metal, and surmised that she was travelling along the port flank.

The lights continued to flicker and blink erratically around her as the power surged in and out. She sailed on through the groaning, empty vessel, a wake of per–fluorocarbon globules trailing behind her. Her ears twitched of their own accord as she heard again the faint whispering, as though the vessel were haunted. Her skin tingled and a shiver rippled down her spine as she drifted through the silence and looked behind her.

The gangway was empty.

Finally she reached another bulkhead, this one turning right. She reached out to stop herself from banging into the metal wall as she sailed through the bulkhead, and looked to her right.

A narrow passage opened out before her onto what looked like some kind of vast chamber. She edged forward and reached a gantry that looked down upon a broad hall lined with tiered ranks of heavily barred cells, all of which were open. All were filled with debris and slick with foam and water where fire had ripped through them.

The prison had been scoured of life, left filled with a silently floating miasma of debris like dirty clouds drifting in a metal sky, and amid the debris floated the bodies of the condemned men who had once suffered here.

She could see that few of them had burned. Most, judging by the colour of their lips and the grotesque expressions on their faces, had suffocated. They drifted like ghosts through the prison, many of them surrounded by a halo of their own stomach contents that had voided in undignified clouds around their corpses.

She saw one body floating nearby and she moved forward to the edge of the gantry and reached out for it. Her fingers brushed against the sleeve of the convict’s orange prison overalls and she pinched the fabric and pulled him in to her.

He was about her height, shorter and stockier than her and probably no more than twenty five years of age when he had died. His eyes were rolled up in their sockets and his cheeks were scarred where somebody had driven a horizontal blade backwards into his mouth, slicing through the flesh of his face and leaving him with a gruesome, bloodied and permanent grin.

She unzipped the one–piece uniform from his corpse and slipped into it, then removed his prison–issue socks and boots and pulled them on. They provided a little extra warmth and covered her nakedness.

She pushed the dead convict’s corpse away from her through the cloud of debris, high over the tiers below. She turned and looked into the nearest cell on the gantry. Amid the mess she could see a bed with restraining straps to prevent sleeping convicts from floating about in the zero–gravity conditions, along with a sink and toilet likewise adapted for the conditions.

On one wall was bolted a steel mirror.

She stepped into the cell, only then seeing the corpse of its former occupant floating against the ceiling, eyes white and his swollen purple tongue hanging loosely from an open mouth. She gently eased her way past beneath him and then stopped in front of the grubby mirror.

Her heart skipped a beat in her chest.

The mask completely covered her face, its surface covered in slits that allowed her to see and to breathe more easily. Made of plain, unadorned metal, her eyes peered back at her from within the dark, narrow slits. Atop her head, the full–face mask became two metal plates that extended down the back of her head and connected to a metal collar around her neck. Her hair, thick with the syrupy per–fluorocarbon, hung lank across her shoulders or floated upward in tangled tresses.

But that which scared her most was the metal probe that protruded from the upper lip of her mask and into her mouth, hugging the roof of her mouth and extending down into her throat. She coughed and her eyes watered as he saw for the first time what was preventing her from speaking. She reached up and pulled at the mask, but it would not budge and the pressure caused her throat to spasm. She gagged and coughed again, managed to swallow and bring her breathing under control as she stood up and looked at herself again.

She remembered the man in the storage unit. He had not worn a mask and nor had the other men in the capsules who had died, and they hadn’t as far as she knew been wired in with intravenous lines. She realised that she must have had them to provide her with nutrients of some kind, and wondered how long she had been incarcerated inside that tiny capsule.

She turned in the cell to look up at the dead convict floating above her. He wore no mask, had no tubes in his arms. She looked down at the rubbish floating around her in the cell and saw morsels of food among it. She reached out and grabbed some, throwing them into her mouth.

The food tasted stale and dry, and she struggled to swallow any of it. What she did manage to get down immediately made her thirsty. She moved across to the sink, reached down for the tube floating from the sink edge and put it in her mouth before twisting the tap.

A feeble trickle of cold water spluttered into her mouth and she swallowed it gratefully until the flow vanished. She made her way out of the cell and froze as she heard voices drifting again through the cell block. Distant, vague, ebbing and flowing as though heard from the last recalled remnants of a dream.

She forgot herself and tried to call out again, coughed as a result.

She blinked tears from her eyes at the strain on her throat as she heard the last ghostly whispers fade away into the silence around her. She looked to her left, down the cell block. The four tiers of cells ended at a control tower set into the towering walls and festooned with thick glass windows, arc–lights and automated cavitation weapons: the tools of crowd control, of non–lethal response systems.

One of the tower’s windows was shattered and one of the cavitation weapons twisted at an awkward angle on its mounts. As she scanned the block she realised that the prisoners had escaped, perhaps run riot. They had overwhelmed the tower, maybe murdered any officers monitoring them. Perhaps then the emergency override had been activated, and the prisoners suffocated in their own cells to protect the rest of the vessel…

But then, where were the rest of the crew?

What was in the rest of the vessel?

She glided along the gantry, pushing debris and floating corpses out of her way until she reached a flight of steps that descended down toward the floor of the block. There, she saw the body of a correctional officer lying flat against the base of the steps.

His uniform was soaked in blood, his face battered to an unrecognisable pulp of torn flesh and bone and his legs broken at awkward angles where they lay against the metal steps. She pulled herself down the steps toward the corpse, which was dressed in heavy black boots and dark blue uniform. Nearby lay an equally heavy looking helmet and face–shield that had been torn from the officer’s head before he had been beaten to death.

Unlike the prisoners, the officer’s body did not float in the air. The fabric was filled with micro–filaments of positively charged iron. The effect upon the wearer, as the uniform and boots attracted themselves to the negatively charged filaments in the vessel’s deck, was to replicate gravity.

Upon a prison vessel, enforced zero–gravity resulted in the convict population losing muscle mass, their weakened bones and reduced strength making them compliant and easy to control. The prison officers wore gravity suits, their muscles under the same load as planetary conditions and thus becoming far stronger than those of their unruly charges.

She reached down and yanked from the dead officer’s belly a four–inch shank, fashioned from the sharpened end of a fork handle, the pronged end of which had been encased in a sheath of thickly–wrapped medical dressing. The blade made a sucking sound and left a gloopy string of blood floating in mid–air as she dragged it free of the unyielding flesh.

She heard whispers just over her shoulder and she whirled, waving the scarlet–stained blade before her as a chill rippled across the back of her shoulders. A breath of sound, soft and gentle, carried like distant music on the cold air. She pushed off the edge of the stairs and drifted across the block to the guard tower.

The access door at its base was locked, so she pushed off the ground with her legs and floated up to the shattered window high above, careful to avoid cutting herself on the jagged remains of the smoked glass as she reached in and pulled herself inside.

The tower control room was deactivated, probably from elsewhere when the riot had begun. She realised that the situation had been sufficiently bad for the monitoring officers to have been abandoned to their fate inside the cell block.

The corpses of two dead officers and at least half a dozen convicts drifted through the control room, gently bumping into each other in an endless slow dance of death, their eyes staring into nothingness and ribbons of spilled blood, black and cold, lacing their bodies.

She eased her way between the corpses and heard once again the whispering voices, clearer now as she moved into the control room. She tensed, listening, and heard somebody speaking.