Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (22 page)

He completed his sentence. “—poke a hole in the hull.”

A similar explosion on a different deck threw similarly
large fragments directly at the pod. Mike saw them coming, growing larger and
more menacing, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t dodge, couldn’t
run. He could only wait for—

Heavy impacts shook the pod. Their sounds rumbled
through the hull. The final few played a high-speed game of tug-of-war, one
slapping the pod around to the left, the next knocking it down, another shoving
it to the right.

When this beating stopped, a combination hissing and
howling sound filled the cabin. Mike felt his vacuum suit expand like an empty balloon
suddenly inflating. The loose folds and wrinkles of cloth which moments earlier
had gently touched his skin lifted away from his flesh. They became stiff and
resilient as the hissing sound grew weak and distant.

From within Tina’s helmet she peered at Mike out the
corner of her eye as if checking to see if she should be frightened.

He said calmly, “We lost our air.” His calmness
disappeared, however, when he looked down at the pod’s lifesupport readouts.

Without an intelligent computer to monitor and guide
it, lifesupport was striving to raise the pod’s internal pressure by flooding
the cabin with air. Considering there was a hole in the hull, this action was
not only futile, it was also stupid. But the automatics built into lifesupport
didn’t pause to think of this, since they were not able to think.

Mike turned to Tina. “Find the puncture.”

“What?”

“Find it. Find the hole in the hull!”

Never having patched a hull leak before, he had no idea
where the pod’s patch-kit might be stored—and he was in no the mood to start
searching for it now. And while it was also true that he’d never patched a suit
leak during an actual emergency at least he’d been through the safety drill for
patching suit leaks—not once but hundreds of times. Company rules required every
space-faring employee do it once a week, and he’d been with Hyperbolic Shipping
for fifteen years. Granted, there were significant differences between
patch-kits for hulls and those for suits, but self-hardening plastic foam was
still just self-hardening plastic foam.

Shoving a gloved hand into his vacuum suit’s thigh
pocket, he dug around for the patch-kit, pulled it out, opened it and removed
the hypodermic, but did not remove the hypodermic’s cap.

Glancing at Tina, he was tempted to ask if she’d found
it yet, but then imagined her reply:
If I’ve found it, why am I still
looking?

Her helmet blocked intermittently one of the interior
lights as she floated above her seat, scrutinizing the ceiling near the top of
the front window. Bare hull showed up there; if you can call the inner-most
layer of a four-layer hull “bare.” At least it was bare in the sense that it
was not hidden behind permanently mounted equipment, controls, furniture, or
other miscellaneous gear—something that could not be said about most of the
pod’s hull.

Mike had already begun to worry that the hole may be
somewhere not only hidden visually, but completely inaccessible. He unfastened
his seat belt and flipped himself upside-down to look in the foot area.
If
it’s behind this control panel we’re in trouble. There’s no way I can take it
off the wall. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking for the hole. Maybe I should figure
out how to make lifesupport stop dumping air into the cabin first, and then
look for the hole.
But he knew that could take anywhere from a minute to an
hour.

The silence of vacuum—which he usually enjoyed—was
beginning to wear on his nerves. It felt ominous, almost evil.
I can’t tell
if anything’s striking the hull.

He pressed his helmet against the metallic floor to
listen. He heard a few random hits but they were small, then there was another
fierce barrage of heavy impacts. Several fragments hit the hull hard enough,
and vibrated his helmet loud enough, to produce pain.

Tina shouted, “Found it!” while pointing with gloved
fingers to a narrow slit of a hole three inches long and a quarter inch wide
located in the ceiling at the top of the front window directly above Mike’s
chair.

Mike climbed out of the foot area and joined her.

The slit was as neat and clean as if it had been part of
the craft’s original design and had been cut in the hull by skilled machinists.
The fragment that made it was missing.

Probably blown out by the escaping air
, Mike
thought, as he uncapped the hypodermic, pointed the tip at the hole and
squeezed the trigger.

Thick white fluid flowed out. With it, Mike drew a
white line along one side of the slit-shaped hole. The fluid bubbled and grew
and quickly reached the hole’s edge. Some bubbles disappeared into the hole,
but the bubbling mass grew too fast for all of it to get sucked in. The mass
expanded and covered the hole and continued to grow. It was as big as half a
basketball when it suddenly congealed.

Within seconds, Mike felt his suit lose its rigidity.
He looked at Tina and she looked at him, but neither spoke or displayed
emotion.

A soft hissing sound rose out of the silence. The sound
grew louder until it was far too loud. And then it stopped.

He smiled. “We have normal air pressure.”

She smiled back.

“But don’t take your helmet off,” he added quickly. “Stay
in full suit. We might lose pressure again before this is over.”

He climbed back into his seat and strapped in. Tina did
the same.

Searching the control panel for the lifesupport
controls, within a few minutes he deciphered the secret of how to make the
stupid machine stop wasting air by trying to flood the cabin during a hull
leak.

Wish I knew how much damage all these impacts are
doing to our externally mounted systems. I wish I could see—

The arms! They have cameras!

Scanning the toggle switches next to the monitor, he
located those that activated the mechanical arm cameras. Two new images
appeared when he flipped them. Both showed dark starry skies.

He pulled the claw-gloves on over his vacuum suit’s
gloves, but was too anxious to adjust them for the larger size, so he only got
them half-way on. When he held his arms out with his hands pointing back at his
face the two new images on the monitor shifted to include most of the pod’s
front. The front window was visible, and through it, Tina and he could be seen
in vacuum suits—she sitting normally and he with his arms stretched out
awkwardly in front of him.

The pod’s front was no longer white, but a dirty dark
grey. There were holes, narrow and deep, burned black into the hull’s
insulation. Jagged fragments protruded like splintered knife blades broken off
from dozens of stab wounds. And everywhere: re-solidified beads—silvery of
stainless steel and crystalline of glass. The beads all twinkled like little
stars in a dirty-grey soot-covered night.

Swinging an arm up, Mike pointed his hand down toward
the top of his head. Soot and stabs and beads were not uniformly spread on the
pod’s roof. They thinned out gradually across the curved surface toward the
craft’s rear which remained relatively clean and unscathed.

Mike was most concerned, however, about the heat
exchangers. There were two, mounted about six feet apart, high on the pod’s two
sides like the remaining tufts of hair above a bald man’s ears.

Their design was simple enough: hundreds of parallel
aluminum vanes painted black, held together by several yards of aluminum tubing
also painted black, protected by nothing more than rectangular wire cages not
painted at all.

All the heat exchanger vanes closest to the pod’s front
were beaten and dented and jammed with small fragments of glass and metal.
Bringing the camera in close to one of the heat exchangers, Mike searched for
vapor jets, streamers, gas clouds, anything that might indicate a coolant leak.
As he played the camera around to examine the unit from different angles, a
fragment like a ragged ninja throwing-star hit it, bending vanes and imbedding
itself deeply into the protective wire mesh.

Another fragment hit; then another. The image displayed
by the monitor shook wildly. Clanging noises on the hull announced they were
under another fragment barrage. Thunder rolled through the cabin, and another
earthquake shook their claustrophobic little universe. During the worst of
this, the image of the heat exchanger disappeared from the monitor screen and was
replaced by static.

Pulling his hand down, Mike looked at the mechanical
arm outside. Its hand and forearm were missing all the way down to the elbow.

Suddenly, a pure white cloud of gas a dozen times too
bright to look at without pain erupted from Corvus’s far side. In under a
second it swelled to fifty times the size of Corvus and seemed destined to fill
the entire sky. The great ship was silhouetted pitch-black against this vast
sheet of blinding white.

And then the ship began to grow.

Impossible!

Corvus grew larger.

It can’t!

The tumbling ship was now twice as large.

Mike screamed—if not out loud, in his heart and in his
mind. He screamed like a chimp caught in a bear trap. The huge ship was
lumbering forward: a mountain coming to crush him. Having tried throwing
everything else, this explosion now threw Corvus itself at the pod.

The bridge dome swung downward into, and then out of,
view. Corvus’s tail swung by even closer. Mike caught a glimpse of an engine
tilted to one side, as if dangling by a single I-beam.

Still growing, Corvus seemed to be shifting slightly to
the left.
Could it miss us? Could it—

The sun came out.

Mike screamed again—not in fear this time, but in pain.
The light seemed to be burning holes though the backs of his eyes. Clamping his
eyes shut did nothing. Even covering his faceplate with both forearms wasn’t
enough. The burning pain continued, as did his scream.

The thermal alarm buzzer sounded and worked its way in
through his helmet. Tina’s screams also entered Mike’s helmet, courtesy of
their suit radios, but Mike didn’t notice either of these. Half-way to panic,
he barely heard his own scream.

After a number of seconds of indecision, he forced
himself to pull one arm away from his face and feel about blindly for the
attitude jet joystick. When he found it, he turned the pod around to face away
from the sun.

Intense light streamed in through the little round
window on the hatch. The glare—reflected from the back of the pilot seat—filled
the cabin with more light than would be found in the brightest surgical
operating theater. Mike squeezed his eyes into narrow slits. Seeing was
painful, but no longer impossible.

He spotted Corvus out the front window. Though burned
and blackened, it was so brightly lit that its red glow was invisible. It now
appeared white.

It seemed an ungainly colossus, not just tumbling, but
running away; trying to escape from this pesky little pod to go off on some mad
quest of its own.

Then the bridge dome exploded.

Larreeeeeeee!
Mike felt his throat tighten; thought
for a moment he would cry; but he knew there was no time for that. Later, there
would be time. Later, if he survived.

Twisting in his seat, he glanced into the pod’s rear
and used one hand to shield his eyes against the glare. The shaft of sunlight streaming
in through the hatch window looked like an eight inch wide laser beam fired
into the pod from some kind of military super-weapon. Dust motes that foolishly
drifted into its cylindrical path burned slowly into tiny puffs of gray smoke.

Kim was exactly where he’d left her: strapped securely
to the rear wall next to the hatch. Her condition seemed unchanged. Still, he
worried and looked at her face, carefully. He had good reason.

The paint on the rear wall around her was turning brown
and giving off white smoke. Not the entire rear wall—some parts were better
insulated than others. The portions turning brown were those which hid the
structural ribbing that reinforced the pod’s hull. The ribs had displaced some
of the insulation during the craft’s design. Consequently, the brown areas
formed vertical and diagonal lines, which joined to form a network of large
triangles.

Where the white smoke appeared it did not rise, but
hugged the wall and grew dense. Or tried to—breezes from ventilation ducts
raked at it, tore it into chucks and began spreading it throughout the cabin.

Mike shoved the main engine throttles all the way
forward. Their thrust pressed him into his seat. He grabbed the attitude jet
joystick and waited, poised for action.

As Einstein said long ago: an acceleration is
indistinguishable from a gravitational field. The smoke must have known this,
for it began to rise—toward the front window.

Half a mile away, Corvus stopped shrinking and started
growing. Mike could also see that the pod’s interior was filling with a thin
white smoke.

Sixty seconds later, Corvus had grown to fill most of
the sky and had passed the pod on the right. The smoke, meanwhile, had
thickened and was making it difficult to see.

Then the operating room lights went out. The pod had
re-entered the shadow.

Mike spun the little craft around one hundred and
eighty degrees to use the main engines to slow the pod to a stop relative to
the giant ship and its giant shadow.

Smoke was now so thick Mike could no longer see the
control panel. Lifting a hand to his face, it appeared suddenly out of the
foggy whiteness just ten inches from his eyes.

Sunlight came screaming in through the front window. It
scattered throughout the smoke and filled every cubic micron of the pod’s
interior. Again, Mike was blind. And again, there was terrible pain.