Hard Vacuum 1
HARD VACUUM
By SIMON CANTAN
First published December 2013
This Kindle Edition published May 2014
Copyright © 2014 Simon Cantan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The moral right of Simon Cantan to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
Hard Vacuum
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are either products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously.
Published by Simon Cantan.
Edited by Garrett Robinson.
Cover by Author Marketing Club.
DOCKING
T
he space station was a gaudy-looking thing, emblazoned everywhere with the WeaverCorp logo. Four pizza-slice-shaped docking rings met in the middle in a bright, flashing round hub.
WC
blinked out into the vacuum of space from the top.
The troop ship, also billboarded with WeaverCorp logos, inched closer. It extended a long, flexible coupling towards the metal ring of the docking port. The coupling wrapped itself around the ring and clung on, pulling tight. The ship spurted again, matching speed with the station.
Kyra Sarin turned off her ReadyNet connection, and the image of the ship winked out of her vision. She grinned at the flight attendant sitting opposite her and got a shy smile in return. Kyra's dozen medals, floating back and forth, abruptly fell with a clink as the station's gravity enveloped them.
Kyra took a photo from the front pocket of her combat suit and stared at it. A static shot of her daughters, waving at the camera and smiling. They'd been four and seven, respectively, when the picture had been taken. Kyra didn't know what they'd look like now, after five long years of war. Communications in the outer solar system had been impossible. She wondered if they would even recognise her.
The flight attendant got to her feet and said something in Mandarin, waving to Kyra.
Kyra couldn't understand her words, but she got the message — she could leave the ship. Some genius on Earth had decided to hire English speakers to fight and Mandarin speakers as support. It was worst in supply situations, where the ReadyNet connections regularly messed up a translation.
Kyra unbuckled her seatbelt and got to her feet, pulling out her bag from an overhead locker. She glanced back at the rows of seats behind hers— five hundred of them, all now empty. Four hundred and ninety-nine of her friends (and enemies) had died at the hands of the Xenomigrants.
The flight attendant said something else, a little more urgently, and waved again.
Kyra nodded and followed the woman out of the ship, across the soft coupling and into the space station.
Five hundred soldiers were standing at attention in front of the docking port. They saluted as one. Their captain managed a weak smile, trying to hide her nervousness, and approached.
"Sergeant, it's an honour to meet you," the captain said.
Kyra read the woman's name —
Kumar
— and nodded. "Captain Kumar."
Captain Kumar leaned in close. "I don't mean to bother you, but I wondered if you have any advice?"
"Aim for the fucking knees," Kyra said. She pushed past the captain and walked between the soldiers, all of them still at full salute. They looked like innocent children. Some of them even wore makeup.
"Alright you fucking swamp rats, get on the boat before I shoot you myself!" Captain Kumar roared.
Kyra turned and watched row after row of soldiers jog inside the ship. She tried to recall the same moment, five years ago, when she'd flown out. The memory wouldn't come.
For over a decade, five hundred soldiers had gone out every month. All of them sent to fight the Xenomigrants around Eris. Of those thousands, four had survived long enough to return home. The screens in the barracks had played endless loops of their homecomings — a futile dream that it was possible to survive. Kyra had abandoned that hope early. Soldiers who clung to it died quickly — their minds focused on Earth and not on the gigantic bug trying to eat them.
The last soldier ran through the soft coupling into the ship, and the docking port irised shut.
Kyra walked to a nearby porthole and looked out. She watched the ship fall away from the station, white plumes of liquid jetting from it. Somehow, seeing the ship leave made the return to Earth more real. Now there was no way of her returning to Eris. For some reason, she felt a twinge of sadness, but it was suffocated under relief.
With the ship gone, the docking area sprang into action. Workers appeared from nearby corridors and began moving crates and connecting cables.
Kyra pulled up a map of the station on her ReadyNet and located the barracks — a short walk from the port. WeaverCorp probably didn't want soldiers traipsing around the station, getting in the way of the support personnel.
Kyra walked across the docking port, ignoring the shouting workers. One of them drove straight for her in a pallet-loader, a large crate blocking his view. Kyra activated the servos of her suit legs through her ReadyNet and sprang forward, vaulting four metres and clearing the crate. She glared back at the man as he sped by, oblivious.
Reaching the edge of the dock, Kyra turned down the corridor towards the barracks. On the right side, a dozen gaudy shops blinked and waved on her ReadyNet. She keyed them off. They still had old-fashioned lights and screens, but those were easier to ignore.
She opened the barracks door and walked inside. Row after row of bunks filled the space, all empty.
"Hello?" Kyra called. Her voice echoed around the giant room. "Where the fuck is everyone?"
Her ReadyNet brain implant showed the icon for an incoming video message in the corner of her eye. She focused on it to click it open.
A short, smiling Indian man waved at her. "Hello, Sergeant Sarin. I'm Manik Dada, your liaison Earthside for your reintegration back to Earth. I'm here to help with the transition to civilian life. I'm sorry I can't be there, but all non-emergency shuttles were confined to the hubs for the past week. Your shuttle has now launched and will arrive in twenty-four hours' time, after it resupplies Kingman station. In the meantime, we've credited your account with two hundred Weaver dollars. You can spend it at any of the station shops. If there's anything else I can do for you, please don't hesitate to contact me."
Manik grinned and the video froze, holding on his wide grin and half-open eyes.
Kyra closed the video, throwing her bag on the nearest bunk and sighed. Typical WeaverCorp bullshit. They couldn't organise a wet dick in a whorehouse. She walked to a bunk and lay down, helmet and armour on because she was too used to it to sleep any other way. Closing her eyes, Kyra set a timer for twenty-four hours ahead. She deactivated her ReadyNet and fell asleep in an instant.
INFILTRATION
K
yra's eyes snapped open, and she looked around. Something had woken her. The bunk was shaking. Sitting up, Kyra scanned the room. The shaking stopped. For a moment, she wasn't sure if she'd dreamt it.
She switched on her ReadyNet and checked for station alarms, but there was nothing active. Kyra called up her shuttle timer - twenty-two hours, fifteen minutes. Grumbling, she lay back down and closed her eyes. Something had probably just fallen over in the dock.
***
Her eyes flicked open again, this time to the unmistakable whisper of flak fire.
Kyra rolled to her feet and rushed to her bag, searching for her gun. It took her a long second to remember it wasn't there. It had been taken before she'd boarded the troop transport home - needed for the war effort. It had felt like losing a limb when they'd taken it.
Kyra dropped her bag and darted to the door. She opened it a crack and looked outside.
Men with guns were out in the corridor, rounding up the station crew. One of the gunmen moved from shop to shop, searching for anyone hiding in the racks.
Kyra sprinted to the rear of the barracks where she knew she'd find an airlock. The exit was standard on every WeaverCorp barracks in the solar system. It had saved her life more times than she could count. She bolted into it, checked her suit seals and pulled the door closed. As the airlock cycled, she stared through the window in the inner door.
A gunman strode into the barracks, his gun held ready. He walked to her bag and poked at it. Seeing there were no weapons inside, the man moved on to search under each bunk.
The airlock finished cycling and pinged. Kyra shoved the outer door open and clambered outside. She could see the man inside the barracks hurrying towards the airlock.
She was concentrating too much on the man and almost missed the handhold on the hull. She didn't have thrusters. A missed handhold meant a slow death drifting through space. Kyra pulled herself close to the hull and waited. When she thought enough time had passed, she looked back through the window.
The man walked away from the airlock; apparently he hadn't seen her. He reached her bag and picked it up again, slinging it over his shoulder.
"Once I get that gun, I'm going to give you a prostate exam with the barrel," Kyra growled.
Kyra wondered just who the men were. They were obviously military from the way they moved, but they didn't keep together like a squad. She concluded that they had to be mercs.
Male mercs too. From her experience on the front lines at Eris, men weren't worth a damn in combat. They were too weak and too emotional to handle it.
She closed the outer airlock door and scanned the area around her. She was clinging to the wall of the large metal wing, which extended all the way to the centre of the station. A few handholds ringed the door but didn't extend further out. A hundred metres to her right, a soft coupling tunnel connected Delta Wing to Alpha. Following the length of the soft coupling with her eye, she could see an airlock jutting out, halfway down. It was two hundred metres from where Kyra floated.
Kyra enhanced her vision with her ReadyNet and zoomed in on the airlock. She could make out handles around it. Without any kind of propulsion, it was going to be risky, but she didn't see any other way. She lined up, planting her feet against the hull. After making a last
-
second adjustment, she launched herself into space.
A hundred and seventy-five metres to go.
A hundred and fifty.
The space station jolted from some kind of impact, shifting to her left.
Kyra knew she wasn't going to make it. She was going to glance off a blank section of the hull and drift away into space.