Chapter 8

Buried deep into a crevice in the asteroid, they found a shipwreck. Lee saw the nose embedded into the rock, leaving only the aft visible. The smashed left main engine looked damaged beyond repair. The rear access door was gone, a result of a blow out from the hard impact.

Wedged even as it was, the angles of the hull still retained the signature delta of a Cobra. The Nightcrawler’s lights revealed the deep crimson color on the smashed underside of the hull.

The damage wasn’t from missiles, that much was clear—there weren’t enough sharp edges in the hull composites. The buckled hull plates, bent and beaten, were evidence of something massive that smashed into the ship below the left rear edge.

Lee made constant thrust adjustments to keep up with the momentum of the asteroid. It was spinning much faster than any of the other rocks nearby. Maybe residual inertia from the impact of the ship years ago?

“A’la!” Xohn exclaimed from behind. “That is the Phoenix!” He gripped onto the top rung of the ladder behind Lee’s flight chair.

Lee commented back to his companion, “Vic and I came across a few shipwrecks before, but I’ve never seen one in an asteroid. It looks like a really bad hit that took out her engines. She lost all control and the Phoenix plowed into the rock.”

Jackson’s voice came through the open commlink with a sarcastic exclamation, “Why in the seven hells would you park a ship like that in an asteroid?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to stow that chyt right now,” Lee was appalled.

“Such a rude and horrible person you are, Mister Jackson.” Xohn snapped.

The commlink was silent for a few beats before Jackson stammered. “I mean, just that, well, I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t have done that.”

It confirmed for Lee how little Jackson thought about others. Lee felt the opposite. He thought about others often, which is why he generally tried to avoid them.

The question now was how were they going to get to Xohn’s experimental module. A sudden, terrible realization dawned on Lee. His stomach lurched and his heart began to race. “So, correct me if I’m wrong, but unless someone’s been here before us, the prototype is still in there somewhere?”

“Yes, it should still be there. It’s installed mid-ship in module three-two.”

“So someone has to go over there and see if it survived.”

“Right.”

“Right.” Lee said deadpan.

An awkward silence that hung in the cabin

Lee broke the silence. “Right, so that means someone has to do a spacewalk.”

“No way! Spacewalk? No. Not me,” Xohn protested.

“What?” Lee half chuckled as he spoke, “I watched you float out there without a spacesuit. You did just fine!”

A frown deepened on Xohn’s face, “All I could do was float! That’s not a real ‘spacewalk.’”

Lee shrugged, “That’s kinda the gist of it.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

Lee was beginning to fill with dread. “Jackson, how are you with spacewalks?”

“I think you need a helmet and a spacesuit for that, right?”

“Oh come on man, I thought you knew everything!”

“I know a little bit about a lot of different things. That’s the little bit I know about spacewalks. I’ve done it maybe a couple of times, but there’s no way I can board a shipwreck on an asteroid spinning that crazy fast. Come on Rocky, isn’t this right up your alley!”

“No, I just can’t. I can, but I won’t.”

“Must have had a bad experience?”

“You could say that. From this– This whole place. I was here when all this went down. I was younger so I was always the space monkey. We were out here mining and were having a bunch of problems trying to find good rocks. I went out to tighten down the pulse wave scanner’s emitter array. While I’m out there, crawling across the hull, everything starts blowing up around us.”

“I guess that probably would do it. Still, it means you’re the most experienced.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Lee sighed.

Spacewalk to a wildly spinning asteroid into a sharp crevice, onto a damaged ship. What could possibly go wrong? He mused. On the other hand, there could be new evidence. Maybe even enough to get investigators to reopen Vic’s case.

It was a tempting thought, but worth risking his life over? The countless times Vic bailed him out, helped him, taught him, listened to him flashed through his mind. Fighting everything screaming in him not to do it, he relented.

“Fine. I’ll do it.” Lee moved the Nightcrawler back from the spinning asteroid and parked it a ways back. “I don’t suppose you’ve done any amount of piloting, have you Xohn?”

Xohn shrugged and shook his head.

“Right.” He grimaced. “Alright Jackson, looks like I’m going to need to make the jump from your ship.”

“Alright, just tell me what you need me to do.”

Lee sighed. “Let me grab my walk harness and some tools. Pull around behind the Nightcrawler and extend your docking bridge.” Lee moved past Vin Xohn and headed for the door into the rest of the ship. Before exiting, he turned back to Xohn. “Stay put. Go through the basic pilot guide on the right panel. I’ll keep the commlink open. If something goes south, you need to at least know the basics.”

“Okay,” Xohn nodded in response.

Lee spent the trip from the flight deck to the aft airlock with a knot in his stomach. It was the riskiest spacewalk imaginable, even with his zero-G harness. There were at least two ship-to-ship handoffs, and a distance jump onto a fast-spinning target. Things could go horribly wrong. Beyond that, he had no idea what he’d find aboard the wrecked vessel.

When he arrived at the airlock door, he pulled his gear and tools from an overhead compartment. He swung the EVA harness over his flight suit in practiced motion as he’d done hundreds of times before doing walks for Vic. It gave him hours of breathable air and a priceless mag-tether system. While entering the airlock, he loaded a plasma torch and recoil-less impact driver into the slots of the harness.

Palpable fear set in. It had been years since his last spacewalk with Vic. He tried his best not to hurl in his suit and stay focused on the next step of procedures. Pushing beyond his nerves, he tapped the airlock panel to close the door behind him. With a deep breath, he tapped the button on his suit collar to deploy his helmet, then bled the atmosphere from the airlock.

“Jackson, confirm when you’re in position,” he said over his suit comms.

“I’m here… I’m here. Deploying the bridge.”

“Bring it in close enough for docking but don’t start the docking protocol. I’ll let you know when I’m secured.”

“This sounds crazy. I mean, you’re going to hop into the bridge and I’m supposed to, what? Swing you over?”

“No, I’m gonna crawl to the nose of your ship and fire my tether to reel myself over. You got a better plan, Mister Spacewalk Expert?”

“I just don’t want to be dumb about it, but if you’re sure, then sure, I’ll do it.”

After a couple of moments, Lee felt some shaking in the airlock and heard metal-on-metal through the hull. His pulse quickened. This was not what he wanted to be doing today.

“Bridge is in place,” Jackson reported.

The dread inside hollowed him out. Summoning all the strength he could, he willed himself to push past it. He hit the large egress button for the outer airlock door.

Amber warning lights spun for a few seconds before the door split open. The ship-to-ship bridge frame stretched before him, imperfectly aligned. It hung in space a full step away from the Nightcrawler. Immense nothingness loomed beyond it.

Everything seemed to spin, his head dizzy from being sick with fear. His breathing was short and quick.

“What’s going on? Are we still doing this?” Jackson asked.

Almost holding his breath, Lee moved to the airlock opening and grabbed the handholds on either side of the door. Once he felt secure enough, he took the safety tether from his harness and stretched it to magnetically bolt onto the frame of the docking bridge.

“Yes. Transferring now.”

Lee moved his hands into position to be ready to catch the edge of the docking bridge. With a deep breath, he slid a foot just over the open edge. It took him a moment to gather his courage. He leaned out of the ship and pushed off the Nightcrawler into the docking bridge. Floating along the bridge his left hand caught the railing. He grabbed the bar and pulled himself to the Para Bellum’s outer airlock door. Blood pulsed in his ears. At the airlock, he flipped himself around and locked his magboots to the door.

“Made it. So far, so good.”

He turned to face back towards the Nightcrawler and bolted a second tether on his opposite side. “Alright Jackson, I’m secure. Retract the bridge and I’ll climb around front.”

“Copy that, recalling the bridge.”

The bridge folded itself like an accordion back into the frame around the outer airlock. When the initial tether was close enough, Lee detached the magnetic bolt and reeled it back into his harness.

“Alright, I’m making my way forward now. Standby.” He tried to keep his eyes locked on the hull, but like a magboot to the deck, he couldn’t resist stealing a glance out into the blackness.

Ah chyt, shouldn’t have done that.

His head spun. He lost himself in the directionless haze surrounded by lumbering mountains. His mind betrayed him, telling him he’d lost control; he flailed his arms for a moment then clenched his eyes and fists to regain his senses.

The adrenaline coursed through his veins and beads of sweat tickled. He bent down to grab the handholds at the bottom of the airlock door to pull himself underneath. It took several agonizing minutes to cover the distance to the bow of the ship. In position, he mag-locked his tether to the Para Bellum hull to prepare for the ride.

“Okay, Jackson,” he said taking a breath. “I’m in position and locked in. Let’s go.”

The main engines of the Para Bellum blazed in silence. During the maneuver, the maglocks kept him anchored like a utility module bolted to the ship. The spin of the planet and rings about him brought back his nausea.

Jackson came through his helmet comms, “Okay we’re just in front of the rock. What’s next?” The outpost-sized boulder lumbered before him.

“Alright, here’s the hard part. That rock has a multi-axis spin. You need to point the nose ahead of the wreck and keep the ship in a rough position around twenty-five meters. If you slip out of position more than fifty meters, I won’t make it.”

Even as he said it, his stomach jumped again. The air in his suit suddenly smelled and tasted stale. The beads of cold sweat bounced about his forehead—an especially cruel torture. He hated spacewalks.

“Alright, no problem. I got this. Hang on,” Jackson replied.

Lee watched the asteroid’s sharp outcrops as they slid by in the Para Bellum’s lights during the ship’s orbital movement. Maneuvering thrusters fired in short bursts all over the ship. Jackson struggled to keep the ship lined up.

The ship banked counterclockwise and pushed down, but the nose drifted from their target. Jackson caught it, but overcorrected. Spinning back clockwise with slight left yaw, he lined the nose up again, but again drifted too far as the rock spun away.

The HUD in Lee’s helmet displayed an aiming reticle for firing his maglock tether. An out-of-range warning blinked at him. Lee felt a bit smug at this overconfident combat jockey that couldn’t handle the real piloting miners did every day.

“Can I give you a little advice–”

Jackson cut him off, “No! I got it!”

“Okay, back off and watch the spin for a bit.”

“I got it, just gimme a minute.”

“Get a feel for its movement before you charge in. Stop trying to chase the motion.” Lee tried to be helpful. He remembered a similar lesson from Vic back in the day. It was another reminder of how much the old man gave him.

The wreck again drifted away from the spin. Jackson kept the Para Bellum stationary until the rock’s rotation brought it back into view. When the crevice crested the horizon, the ship lurched toward it. In short, tight movements, Jackson managed to match the rotational direction and velocity.

The firing control lit up green in Lee’s HUD at thirty-eight meters, but the rotation took the wreckage away faster than Jackson could react. Lee kept the firing reticle ahead of the spin to compensate, but the range grew too fast. Time was running out to make the jump. Still, he hesitated—jumping off a ship without a secure tether was something one simply did not do. It was suicidal. But, he also couldn’t trust Jackson getting any better position. Clearly, he wasn’t the pilot he thought he was.

The range continued to grow.

Forty-six meters…

Forty-seven…

Forty-eight…

Past his fear, he crouched down, magboots locked onto the hull, and worked the controls on his left arm display. The HUD went orange with an out-of-range warning again. Lee used all the force his leg muscles gave him to push off the Para Bellum. With precise timing, he switched his magboots to repulse-mode timed to his legs reaching their full extension. The coordinated movement launched him off the hull toward the edge of the asteroid with tremendous speed.

As he flew, untethered, he cursed at himself. You idiot! You’re a deadman. No one jumps without a secure tether. Pull it together, man, Xohn can just send out a limpet to get you. Yeah, yeah, that’ll work. If he knows how to use the limpets. Vack!

His heart pounded in his ears. He kept watching the crevice below until jagged points of rock that jutted from the edge of it blocked the ship. His target was gone. Then, out of the asteroid’s shadow, a smaller, jagged and deadly looking hunk of rock about five times his size became visible in the distant blue starlight.

There was nothing he could do to stop the collision. His body slammed into the rock. He felt the crunch of knife-like edges of rock smashing like glass, threatening to cut through his suit.

His trajectory and momentum changed from the impact leaving him in a disorienting spin. It took all his will to ignore his stomach.

Adrenaline surged.

Instinct took over.

Reaction replaced conscious choice.

He noted the rhythm of his spin bringing the shipwreck crevice into view.

WIth intense focus, he watched the shipwreck become visible again. The spacewalk harness aligned directly at the wreckage below. On instinct, he fired his maglock tether. It shot like a railgun to its target, connecting with a bit of wreckage near its top edge. After a short delay there was a satisfying tug that Lee felt as the recoil travelled across the tether. He tapped the control to reel himself in. It stopped his spin jerking with an immediate change of direction.

“I’m locked!” He shouted over his comms, breathing heavily. He covered the rest of the distance in seconds. Pulling against the tether he wrapped a leg around it to help align his body for a landing. His magboots connected, and he slammed the heels to lock them to the warped hull plating. “Made it,” he shouted with enthusiastic disbelief and took a moment to catch his breath.

The lights on his walk harness illuminated the cavern while he walked on top of the ship. Reaching to the ridged stone walls above him, he steadied himself. The crash landing cut grooves that looked like great claws had ripped into the asteroid. As he walked along, he turned to see the right wingtip shredded and wedged into the rock. Metal plating at the bow buckled into crumpled ripples where the force of entry pushed it back. His harness beams lit up light shafts of dust in the cavern that fell into the open cockpit of the Cobra. A protruding bulge of rock pressed at the bow—the apparent point of impact that stopped the ship.

Looking through a gaping hole in the canopy, Lee saw glints of light reflected from the thin icy frost covering everything in the cockpit. The console pushed in toward the flight chair, smashed forward and up by the prominent rock outcrop. The entire cockpit looked folded like a book.

Approaching the cockpit revealed a disturbing and grizzly scene—the pilot, or what remained of the pilot. Gloved hands still gripped the flight stick and throttle controls, arms pushed out of their sockets. Harness belts from the flight chair cut deep into the body in an ‘X’ pattern, suggesting an unimaginable, unsurvivable amount of force during impact. The helmet looked like it was freely floating in front of the body, but when Lee got close enough to pull it away to see the pilot’s face, it felt stuck.

Releasing his magboots, he pulled himself into the cockpit to get a better look. The new vantage point revealed the head had detached from the spinal column, flesh ripped apart in icy strands at the back of the neck. Her head angled forward, entombed in the helmet. The exposed neck skin, trachea, and esophagus were frozen alongside various neck musculature remnants around it that held the head in place. Solidified veins and entrails stretched to the detached base of the neck. He felt sick to his stomach again. He really hated spacewalks*.*

“Hey guys, uh,” he kept his voice soft and solemn. “I made it into the cockpit. The canopy is gone.”

Xohn interrupted him over the open comms, “Azera? She- She is there?” He said with a hint of desperate hope in his voice.

Lee struggled to know how to respond. He decided on the most merciful response he could think to offer. “Her body is here. I’m sorry Vin. It’s bad. You don’t want to see this. No one could have survived.” He tried to be vague to spare Xohn the gory details, hoping he could piece together how serious it was.

There was complete silence on the comms. Lee supposed Xohn was coming to terms with the reality of the news.

Lee climbed through the canopy. The scene was gruesome and disturbing. It reminded him of how he found Vic—the body also mangled beyond recognition. In Vic’s case, there wasn’t anything human enough left to hold onto.

Two horrific deaths, for what? For a piece of technology? What could possibly be that important?

It was senseless to him, but it was more than that. A deep-seated anger grew in him. Someone had to pay for this. It spurred him to continue hunting down those responsible and make them wish they’d never been born.

Somehow he needed to nail the perpetrators to it. He needed evidence. Looking around, he pulled out his datapad and started imaging the scene. The process was simple. With the datapad held out in front of him, he moved it in a sweeping motion. The sensors pulled in light, color, and measured distances along the edges it detected to model it for a three-dimensional holo image. Sweeping over Azera’s remains, he took a mental note not to share the image with Xohn unless he absolutely had to.

The scan finished when it hit him—the black box! It captured all the telemetry and sensor data of the ship. With that, he could reconstruct the entire incident. He used his datapad to locate the black box signature inside a panel at the flight console. With some effort he managed to yank it out, attaching it to his walk-harness in an open tool holster.

“Hey guys, I got the black box to bring back. I’m moving into the ship now. Xohn, I know you’re going through a lot right now, but I’m gonna need you to help me recover your prototype.”

“Yes, of course,” Xohn responded, residual anguish in his voice. “It’s installed in bay six. The monitoring equipment attached means it had to be installed in a larger bay.”

“Got it. I’m heading that way. There’s a lot of damage. It’s gonna slow me down.”

The cockpit door to the rest of the ship was already partially open from the impact. It took a couple of tries to shove one side of the door over enough to squeeze through. The impact at the rear quarter of the vehicle buckled the interior structure as well. Inside, the warped corridor twisted to the other end.

Making it to the module bay, he cranked open the access port by hand. Crawling in, he found a standard, medium-sized bay with a donut-shaped device in the center. Four arced tubes connected heavy-duty cylindrical chambers every ninety degrees along the ring. Two of the chambers on opposite sides had a complex of pipes, wiring, and circuitry on top and underneath them.

It took Lee a couple of hours to unmount and disconnect the device with Xohn’s help. When docked, the other bays would be cleared to allow moving smaller modules through them. Without an outfitting work bay, there was no way to manage it. Instead, Lee floated it into the corridor, tilting it at a forty-five-degree angle to fit through the narrow corridor. It was an effort made more complicated by the contorted twists from the ship’s structural damage. Plus, the device blocked his harness lights from giving him clear visibility. Little by little, he made it into the ramp bay with the device.

It took another hour to manually lower the ramp enough to get the device through. By the end of it, he was exhausted. Lee’s muscles ached, and the sweat in his helmet tickled no matter how much he shook his head. He really hated spacewalks.

Emerging from the ship, he saw the hazy field of boulders.

“Alright fellas, I got it. I’m ready to go. Xohn are you studied up enough that you can you bring the Nightcrawler nearby?”

“I can try. The flight manuals are useful, but the training simulations are the most helpful.”

“Alright, see you soon.”

“On my- Oops. Okay, now on my way.”

Lee couldn’t help but frown. “Try to avoid the rocks. Okay?”

Jackson piped up, “Just remember what Lee said. You don’t want to chase the motion. Watch where it’s heading and park it. Let the rock spin to you.”

It took Vin Xohn a few tries to get the ship into a position ahead of the asteroid’s multi-axis rotation. Lee counted the seconds to time each pass of the Nightcrawler. He used the jump-repulse approach to launch off the Phoenix pushing the device in front of him. They made it far enough away to clear the outcrops on the spinning asteroid.

Floating freely, Lee climbed across the device waiting for the gentle spin to aim his harness at the Nightcrawler, then fired his tether. He left the device floating and reeled the tether to pull himself on board. Within minutes he was situated back into his flight chair. He fired a limpet to collect the device into the cargo hold.

“Okay Xohn. It’s on board and all yours now.”

“Thank you for your help. It means a lot to me. Somehow, I will repay you. If there’s ever anything I can do…” Xohn started for the door off of the flight deck. “I’m going to the cargo hold to check it over.”

“Yeah, sure. Happy to help. You can fix the shield generator while you’re down there. Didn’t have time to finish the install with the quick evac from the station.”

“Okay! That I can do for you my friend,” Xohn said.

Lee winced at the word ‘friend’.

Jackson interjected through the comms. “Hey boys… I’m all the sudden picking up signals. I think someone knows we’re here.”

“No way. Not possible.” Lee was incredulous. He looked at his sensor screen, and sure enough, random signals danced at the edge of sensor range. Xohn stood, waiting for Lee. “Xohn, you might want to hurry with that shield generator. We may need it to buy time until we can disappear again.”

Xohn ran for the rear compartments. Jackson swung the Para Bellum to fly in a parallel formation with the Nightcrawler.

“What’s the play, Lee?”

“We need to find someplace new to hide.”

“Yeah, any ideas where?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Do it fast.”

“Working on it,” Lee said, pulling up the region on the navigation panel. He scanned over the list of nearby systems, looking for some place close, but out of the way.

“We got company!” Jackson shouted excitedly. “We gotta go. We gotta go now!”

“Okay, we need to low-wake out-”

“No, I’m tired of being chased in this system. I’m jumping to the next system over. See you at HIP 20935.”

“Jackson, wait, no low-wake first so they can’t-”

Lee’s HUD showed an alert for Para Bellum’s drive signature spike.

The jumbled signals solidified, still at the edge of sensor range. Curious, Lee targeted the signals. The sensors revealed a Pilot’s Federation transponder code: Vilant SDR-907, a Bowman-class mega-ship. Checking the next target displayed a now-familiar transponder code, the Decimator.

“Xohn, buckle up back there. We gotta go now!”

“Frameshift drive charging.” The Nightcrawler’s COVAS announced. Seconds later, the Nightcrawler tore into hyperspace and vanished.