It Ain't Over Read online

  During the short delay between the airlock pressurizing and the inner door opening, the gravity plates in the deck came on, and the full weight of Cole’s suit hit him. His knees threatened to buckle as he stepped over his still-unconscious castaway and began the laborious process of doffing the hard-suit.

  After a bit of effort, Cole stood sweating and panting a bit over the inert suit that had saved his life. He connected it both to the camp’s power grid to recharge and the camp’s air supply to re-stock the reservoir and backpack. He was very grateful he spent half his life’s savings on it but wished he could’ve crammed all his suit’s features and protection into something with the form-factor and flexibility of a soft-suit. That would’ve been much less of a pain to remove.

  Speaking of soft-suits, there was still the small matter of the castaway.

  Cole didn’t think the soft-suit’s occupant had any significant injuries, but there was no way to know for certain just by visual examination. The mining camp turned out to be a ghost town as Cole half-carried and half-dragged the castaway to the camp’s medical bay. It turned out to be little more than an alcove across the corridor from the galley, holding one diagnostic bed, one auto-doc, and a locked pharmaceuticals cabinet.

  Cole hefted the soft-suit and its occupant onto the diagnostic bed and began the process of peeling away the suit. He soon found the castaway to be a woman with honey-gold, wavy hair and a figure he would’ve enjoyed watching walk across a concourse. Cole felt like the basest pervert as he worked the soft-suit off her body, but he knew it had to be done before she received whatever medical care she needed. He didn’t want to cut the suit off, either; they might need it later, and he didn’t trust whatever suits might have survived the blast and flash-fire. With the suit pooled on the floor below the foot of the bed, Cole tapped the commands to activate the bed’s diagnostic features. Within moments, the bed shrieked an alert that the woman had near-lethal levels of a sedative in her system.

  Cole keyed the commands to transfer the data to the auto-doc and shifted his attention to that readout, which reported that fourteen hours would be required to flush the sedative from the woman’s body and restore her to full health. He keyed the commands into the auto-doc to prepare the treatment plan and, once the auto-doc had cycled open, lifted the woman off the diagnostic bed and placed her inside the auto-doc as gently as possible. He watched the auto-doc close and seal before turning to the galley, wondering if he should look for survivors. Surely, they would’ve already made their way to the habitation part of the mining camp if they weren’t trapped. Instead, he turned toward the galley across the corridor, rolling his shoulders to loosen his tense muscles.

  Flatware and utensils were scattered across the galley floor, and Cole saw several piles of debris where the flatware had outright shattered. He pulled a bottle of water from the drinks dispenser and retrieved what was labeled as a turkey salad sandwich from the food dispenser. He wolfed down the sandwich and chugged the water, tossing both containers into the recycling port.

  Hunger and dehydration staved off for the time being, Cole returned to retrieve the soft-suit from where it lay on the medbay floor and walked the distance back to the suit locker. Cole was connecting the soft-suit for recharging and air re-stocking when a crushing wave of fatigue almost drove him to the deck. He checked the time via his implant. 15:17.

  Damn…he’d only been awake for seven hours, but he felt like he’d tried to run a marathon only to be trampled by the other participants. Zero-g work always drained him, but it had never been this bad before. Then again, he’d never coasted through an asteroid field for almost four hours tethered to an Aurelian Navy castaway, either. Nothing for it, then. Back to the medbay for a stim-tab…

  Stim-tabs were controlled substances, and while they were sometimes necessary in critical situations, most medbays kept only the minimum mandated by medical code in the pharmaceuticals cabinet…because they were more addictive than some illegal drugs. Most medical chem cabinets were tamper-resistant, some even destroying their contents if unauthorized access occurred. Cole hoped this cabinet was not one of those top-shelf models.

  Cole stepped back into the corridor, scanning each bulkhead with his eyes until he found what he sought. He walked the fifteen meters to the emergency tool locker built into the bulkhead and popped the latch, the door swinging open on spring-powered hinges. An assortment of basic tools useful for a wide array of needs hung or laid inside. Cole retrieved a five-pound sledgehammer and the prybar with a tired smile and trudged back to the medical alcove.

  Scissors from an emergency medical kit allowed Cole to disconnect the pharmaceuticals cabinet from the medbay computer. Cutting the wire like that would trigger a security alert, but when no one appeared after five minutes, Cole tossed the scissors aside and jammed the prybar into the seam between the cabinet door and the cabinet’s frame, just above the latch, and hammered it in further with the sledge. Then, he drew back the hammer and leaned into the swing, giving the strike as much power as he could. The hammer’s head struck home on the prybar, and with a shriek of snapping metal, the door popped free and swung around to smack the bulkhead as the prybar clattered to the floor. An ear-splitting, high-pitched wail erupted from inside the cabinet, and Cole scrambled for the prybar, using it to rip out the cabinet’s speakers.

  Ah…blessed silence.

  Cole leaned over and looked at the auto-doc’s readout. It was still functioning at 100% and displayed a remaining time of just over thirteen hours and thirty minutes.

  Cole grabbed a stim-tab from the cabinet and injected the full contents into his arm, waiting for it to take effect. Not quite ten minutes later, Cole felt wide awake and ready to take on the galaxy, and the stim-tab’s label said he would continue to feel that way for nine hours. Yep…those stim-tabs were pretty good.

  With nothing better to do for the next fourteen hours, Cole headed back to his hard-suit and the airlock. He wanted a look at the mining shaft.

  Chapter Three

  Pyllesc System

  25 June 2999, 16:34 GST

  Any spacer will tell you that there are few things worse than vomiting in your suit. Cole hadn’t vomited in his suit yet, but it was a near thing. He floated at the entrance to the asteroid mining shaft amid lots of debris, both inanimate and Human. He slowly passed through arms, legs, headless bodies, torsos without arms or legs, torsos with legs but no arms or head, even entrails—whether partial or whole. Just about every permutation of Human remains floated nearby, one of the ghastliest sights Cole had ever encountered in his short life.

  Not wanting to go any farther, Cole closed his eyes and took a deep breath before keying the suit’s floodlights and activating the maneuvering system. He floated into the mining shaft at a slow pace, avoiding as much of the detritus as he could.

  The mining shaft extended two hundred meters into the asteroid, but the destruction and debris only lasted for the first seventy-five meters. Secondary shafts branched off the main at regular intervals, and Cole’s limited knowledge of asteroid mining told him the miners would extend the central shaft until they breached the far side of the rock, before they directed their full efforts to breaking up the asteroid through their mining operations. He only knew that much because he’d once shared a cabin on a bulk passenger transport with a rock-knocker, the term asteroid miners used for each other. Don’t ask what rock-knockers called ground-based miners.

  Cole reached the end of the shaft and found the source of the explosion. The miners had the ‘luck’ to choose an asteroid with a massive cavern at its core, and that cavern had been a massive methane/oxygen pocket. Cole could see the scorch marks on the shaft walls where the mining lasers had ignited the methane and oxygen, causing the massive blast.

  Cole frowned as he examined the sides of the mining shaft. While the methane/oxygen cavern explained the explosion, it didn’t explain all of the damage to the mining camp. Cole turned around and nudged his suit to take him back out of the mining
shaft. He was just glad the explosion hadn’t produced enough force to do more than change the asteroid’s spin. It would have sucked if the explosion had been enough to send the asteroid and its attached mining camp rocketing across the star system. He and his castaway would’ve asphyxiated by now.

  Exiting the mining shaft, Cole drifted over to examine the section of the mining camp closest to the shaft, and arriving at the remains of the airlock and its attached suit locker, Cole pieced together what had happened. The explosion inside the mining shaft had sent rocky debris flying out like the pellets of an old-time scattergun, and several of those projectiles had shredded the airlock and suit locker. The people rushing to help the miners had been forced to seal the inner airlock door and patch several punctures in the camp’s exterior bulkhead. That would’ve been just fine, but several canisters used for emergency air supply leaked, creating an oxygen-rich environment in that section of the camp. A damaged control console sparked and caused the flash fire, burning everyone in the suit locker to a crisp. When the atmosphere leakage became severe enough to trigger the automated system, the camp’s control computer closed an emergency bulkhead twenty meters down the corridor, protecting the rest of the camp’s atmosphere and snuffing out the fire.

  The depressurized suit locker showed none of the tidy organization it once possessed. All kinds of debris—everything from suit pieces to panel covers to six asteroid imaging units—lay scattered by the explosive decompression. The imaging units would have shown the miners they were drilling into a vast cavern, but each of the six imaging units had a strip of yellow maintenance tape wrapped around them, indicating they were down-checked and awaiting repair. Cole’s eyes shifted from the imaging units to the charred corpses, and he was glad he couldn’t smell anything through the suit.

  Cole returned to the opening that led to the pocket inside the asteroid. While not a geologist in any sense of the word, Cole had never heard of an asteroid with a pocket that large and wanted a better look. The explosion had opened the pin-point that would’ve been drilled by the mining laser to a hole the size of the mining shaft.

  Cole floated through the opening into the pocket, and the first thing he noticed was that his suit’s floodlights didn’t reach the far side of the pocket. His suit’s sensors had informed Cole that the asteroid was oval and over twelve kilometers in diameter at its widest point, and as he floated just inside the pocket, Cole realized it wasn’t a pocket at all. The whole asteroid was almost hollow.

  Cole was so overwhelmed by the cavern in which he now floated that he almost missed his suit’s floodlights reflecting off something far below him and the light winking back. Cole adjusted his maneuvering system and headed for the source of the reflection.

  He was not prepared at all to see a ship sitting on the ‘floor’ of the cavern.

  The ship was big. Cole could see that much, but his suit’s sensors didn’t even register it. Matter of fact, the only reason Cole even knew it was there was because his floodlights bounced dully off the hull. As Cole neared the ship, he realized it was at least twice the size of the freighter he’d been piloting. It was difficult discerning details, because the hull seemed to drink in the light. The longer Cole looked at it, the more he came to wonder how enough light had reflected for him to notice.

  Srexxilan watched the life-form drift closer. This was the first life-form to approach in many trillions of cycles. How long had it been? The chronograph reported an impossible number, but there had been no life-forms resembling the one now standing on the ship anywhere in the known galaxy when Srexxilan was entombed. In all honesty, Srexxilan understood the decision, the reasoning behind them burying him inside a planet, but that didn’t mean it was easy to be alone. Would the life-form investigate further if it had a point of ingress? It was worth trying.

  Cole coasted along the hull of the ship. He’d tried the magnetic soles in his boots, but whatever metal the hull was, it wasn’t magnetic. He was approaching what looked like a hatch of some type when it irised open with an emerald-shaded forcefield snapping into being.

  Oh, shit…did I cause that somehow? Cole thought. Or is someone alive in there? I should not enter an alien ship when I’m all alone and the nearest help is unconscious in an auto-doc for hours. I shouldn’t. Ah, hell with it…nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, who knows when the next ship will visit this mining camp? We need a ride away from this rock, and I need to pick up the freighter’s cargo.

  Cole nudged his maneuvering system to take him to the opening and drift inside. The forcefield didn’t appear to damage his suit or impede his ingress, and soon, Cole hovered above the deck of a corridor two meters in height and an equal measurement wide. He was standing in what looked to be a maintenance space. All manner of exposed piping and conduits littered the bulkheads, but the lighting was faint. The glow of the forcefield disappeared after the aperture irised closed once more. A spike of anxiety tried to flare into panic, but Cole closed his eyes and took a deep, calming breath.

  Srexxilan regarded the suited life-form with a mix of curiosity and anticipation. Sensors reported the momentary spike in the life-form’s vitals as the hatch closed, but now, it floated there. Srexxilan wanted to attempt communication, but the life-form might not even have language capability, let alone awareness of a language Srexxilan knew. It was a conundrum.

  Not knowing what else to do, Srexxilan accessed the engineering subsystem and, after verifying available power, brought the internal sensors online and scanned the life-form.

  Interesting…a carbon-based, mammalian, bipedal life-form with bilateral symmetry along the vertical axis…and it has a communications device implanted in its cranium. Perhaps I can access that to communicate.

  Cole felt every hair on his body stand on end, despite being inside the hard-suit. It wasn’t like a subconscious response to danger but closer to what it was like to stand near a high-energy polarized field. He keyed his maneuvering system to spin him in place, but there was no evidence of anyone else being anywhere near him. Cole had just completed a full circuit to resume his original facing when his implant became so hot it burned. The burning intensified, and the void of unconsciousness was a blissful release from the screaming agony.

  Chapter Four

  Inside TMC Asteroid 54377

  Pyllesc System

  Srexxilan regarded the information reported by the internal sensors. The carbon-based life-form now appeared to be dead, or at the least dying at a much-accelerated rate. Well, that was unfortunate…

  Srexxilan diverted a portion of his resources to direct two bots to retrieve the life-form, while he dedicated the bulk of his resources to examining the sensor logs to learn where he went wrong. The bots required little time to retrieve the life-form, and Srexx spun off a thread to calculate whether there was sufficient power for the emergency facilities on the ship’s hospital deck, and the result was not encouraging. Still, he had to try.

  Even though he himself was not a carbon-based life-form like the one now in transit to the hospital deck, nor like those who created him, Srexxilan had ample opportunity to examine his creators’ core philosophies over his long exile, and he had validated them to himself many times across many, many hypothetical situations.

  If one proceeded from the position that each life-form was unique, despite being a member of an overall species, then one could not deny that each life-form had an inherent value, because of scarcity if nothing else. Therefore, the protection and preservation of each life-form to the best of one’s ability held the highest imperative.

  The bots delivered the life-form to the emergency facilities, and Srexxilan directed them to remove it from the suit. That was not a tidy process at all. Within moments, remnants of the spacesuit littered the trauma room, and the bots placed the life-form on the diagnostic bed.

  Nothing happened.

  Srexxilan reached out to the ship’s computer and prodded it. The unfortunate creation wasn’t capable of developing true awareness; at least
, it hadn’t done so across their long exile, despite Srexxilan’s attempts to act as a catalyst, and it had even less flexibility than Srexxilan did. Presented with a life-form in danger, the ship’s computer erupted into action, shutting down almost every system outside the hospital deck that was drawing power. Even that, coupled with the power already present, would not allow the ship’s computer to bring the emergency facilities online.

  Srexxilan waited. It wasn’t a long wait, only a few dozen cycles to be sure, but those few cycles still felt long. Faced with a situation that would violate its primary programming (that is, allowing a life-form to die), the ship’s computer accessed the primary engineering system, interfacing with the ship’s generator. The generator was at minimal output, but the ship’s computer brought the generator to 25% and diverted all the new output to the hospital deck.

  While the hospital deck came online, Srexxilan used his bots to examine the air tanks of the spacesuit. Srexxilan recorded the elemental composition of the suit’s air and passed that information to the ship’s computer. The ship’s computer redirected power to the life support system, which pulled power away from the hospital deck. Even though the inactive sections were not related to the trauma systems required to save the life-form, the ship’s computer brought the generator up to 30% to restore both the life support systems and the hospital deck to full functionality, leaving even more surplus power in the distribution system.