Warnings: Non-graphic descriptions of suffocation, asphyxiation, and near death desperation.
Lt. Lana Borman had never before seen a Lanius in the flesh, so to speak, and though she knew it to be ill-advised, Lana Borman had been taught never to get on a ship where you didn't know the crew. So, she had boarded, stored her things in the cockpit, and called both Lanius to the shield control room. She spent a moment looking at their forms through the view-port, studying them, before sucking in a deep breath and opening the blast doors. She strode in, purposefully, hands clasped at parade rest behind her back, intending to look them in the eye.
The two Lanius started, stood, and then regarded her in blank-faced confusion. At least, Lana assumed it to be confusion. Lanius were made of metal and some biological curiosity that made them suck the very air from the room around them, and Lana found their expressions quite impossible to discern.
She could hold her breath for about a minute, look them in the eye, and try.
The Lanius crew was identified as Manon and Narth, identical to Lana's eyes save for the fact that one of them reached back towards the workstation and produced a respirator. It did not speak a language that Lana understood, but it clanged forward on heavy, metallic steps and pushed the respirator against her hand, repeatedly, until she took it. It even tried to help her put it on, a spindly finger tugging on the strap around the back of her head, chirping in a tone Lana was almost sure counted for worried. A frown set heavily on her face, Lana waved her hand until it recoiled back, hovering a few steps away. She made eye contact, stared at it for an agonizing count of five, before very deliberately pulling the respirator over her nose and mouth. She tried not to suck in that first breath too greedily, too quickly, but it ended up too loud to her own ears regardless. The Lanius who had handed her the respirator made a deep noise that echoed at her, and Lana did not know what to make of it so she ignored it.
Lana had been told that the Lanius understood English, and so she told them her plan: vent the ship, the oxygen, save for the cockpit. Lana would live there, stay there, take her meals there, do everything from that little room, so far as protect the sparsely shielded and not-too grandly weaponed ship from intruders. The underlying message was, she hoped, rather clear: I am in command, and we are getting to the Federation. Both Lanius made a small sound, one after the other, which was similar enough that she took it for consent and dismissed them.
She watched the two go, sharp eyes narrowed to try to discern which went where. The one who gave her the respirator went to the engine room, the other to the weapons. A check of the crew status module in the cockpit showed that Manon was in the engine room, Narth the weapons systems. Manon and Narth. Manon, engineer, and Narth, weapons.
And then Lana, Federation officer and pilot extraordinaire. Though this system was unfamiliar to her, she knew she would pick it up soon. There wasn't a ship made that she couldn't learn to fly, given enough time and practice — and, she was to have nine sectors worth of it.
Her teeth clenched, Lana manually opened every door to the outside, save for the two leading to the cockpit. Watched through the screen as the warning lights flashed, as the oxygen meter dropped to 6%. Watched as the Lanius crew-members, Manon and Narth, seemed none too bothered by being exposed to the vacuum of space. They didn't even pause.
Lana repressed a shiver. It was so… inhuman to consider. Like the existence of the cloning device, all the way at the back of the ship. She was loathe to even think of the thing, much less consider it's use.
She'd flown advertised suicide missions that had better odds than this.
The data packet, so vital to the survival of the Federation, found it's home in the cot made up in the corner of the cockpit. She tucked it under her tiny pillow, just in the folds of the case, and very often chastised herself for falling into such a childish form of attempted protection. The lack of oxygen on the ship should have been enough of a deterrent to prevent someone from teleporting over and stealing it from her and, just in case it wasn't, Lana used the scrap from the Kruos' first pirate engagement to purchase blast doors. If it also made her feel better to see the heavy metal things out of the corner of her vision, while staring at the red lined map of the ship's oxygenated areas, then she did not admit it out loud.
She and the pair of Lanius crew-members had minimal contact. It was necessary. She could not be in a non-oxygenated room with them, and they could not be in an oxygenated room with her for long before it became non-oxygenated. The respirator was meant for emergencies only, and she did not feel overly confident about it's prolonged battery life. So, she stayed to the cockpit and they stayed where they were. The only time she saw them animated was when they got the chance to salvage scrap. One of them (Narth?) had found a Scrap Recovery Arm for the ship somewhere in the second sector and Lana could have almost sworn they were giddy schoolchildren. Occasionally, between jumps, Manon would leave the engine room to the cockpit. It would check first one door, then the other, then go to the door control room. Why, Lana had no inkling.
It was on the second jump in the third sector that the words FUBAR suicide mission really came into being. A slaver ship, heavily armed, had demanded that they surrender one of themselves over, and the others would be spared. Lana had immediately and without thinking told them what they could do with themselves.
The ship would have been on fire, had it not been for the lack of oxygen across 94% of the systems.
The slavers caught on, eventually. Began targeting the cockpit, first with an ion blast, and then with a missile. Lana was hit by the impact, slamming her head against the control panel, but that hit was nothing on the kick in the gut of a hull breach. The air hissing, rapidly, of her cockpit.
Scrambling first for the respirator, Lana's clumsy movements knocked the thing down, behind the panel. Cursing, she turned to the breach, pressure already in her sinuses, her throat, her chest. She grabbed the tools, emergency measures meant for this sort of thing, but her hands were clumsy and her head pounding. Her breaths gasps, sucking in not enough, stars dancing before her vision. The tools she dropped, on by one, and though she heard the slaver's ship explode, her heart still raced. Nothing was working! Futility, she grasped the metal with her pale hands and pressed, attempting to push it back.
The blast door hissed open behind her. Her eyes snapped up, blearily identifying a Lanius behind her. She was half sure it was Manon, though she did not know why.
A hand, solid as the ship itself, grabbed her tightly and yanked her back, throwing her roughly into the adjacent room. The warning lights in here were pink, a dull shade, rather than red stripes. Gasping, coughing, Lana sucked in what oxygen she could gather, hearing metal on metal clang from the cockpit. But it had left the blast door open here, though it had thought to close the one behind him. The hull breach sucked the air from this room, spurned onwards by the anaerobic thing in the next room. She wanted to say something, to tell him, to get up and close the blast door herself, but she could not. Head spinning, she could urge herself to do nothing more than suck in the scant oxygen around her. And then it was back, the Lanius, clanging heavy footsteps towards her. She put her hands up, between them, tried to croak out that he needed to get back, go back, get away from her, she couldn't breathe as it was, but he continued. Manon advanced as her visions gave way to the blackness at the edges of them.
The metal hand was back, gripping her jumpsuit, and before she knew it she was thrown again, back into the cockpit. The door clanged shut behind her form, the blast door shutting.
And she must have lost herself to the blackness at the edges of her vision for a moment, because she could not recall falling asleep. She could not recall curling up on the cold metal floor and consciously shutting her eyes.
Somewhere, over the ringing in her ears, Lana heard that whining that passed for speech. It was muffled, far away, but the banging that accompanied it was not. It clanged, metal on metal, harsh and heavy and loud and Lana curled up on herself, clamping her hands over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut and willing the noise to go away. If anything, it got louder.
Her limbs heavy, Lana forced movement. She put her forearms down, got to her knees, then her palms down and got to her feet. Stumbled, a bit, and walked right into the blast door. Through the glass viewport, she could see Manon. Had Manon been making all that ruckus?
Lana Borman, an officer with the Federation, pressed her forehead to the cold glass separating them, letting the weight of her body rest on the sturdy metal door. The breaths she gasped in tore their way back out her throat, quickly fogging the glass between them. She could just make out Manon gesticulating, making loud rumbling noises that were as clearly distressed as they were alien. It reached out, a long spindly metal hand, and it scraped against the glass by her face. It rumbled, again, but softer. Lana's first instinct was to call such a sound relief.
She coughed, trying to make way in her burning throat for words to squeeze out. "I'm fine," she gasped, voice quiet and harsh. Probably inaudible too, through the blast door. Lana lifted her eyes, forced them to focus. Manon's face was as impassible, inhuman, but his hand remained pressed against the glass, his head tilted to the side, and in his body rumbling noises that she could not decipher.
"Not getting rid of me that easily," Lana continued, a bit louder, and she had to cough after saying so. She sniffed, squeezing her eyes shut against the moisture there. Just the effort, just coughing, she lied to herself. "I'm okay, it's fine. Don't be afraid," she said, though she wasn't sure who she was addressing.
Also published on my tumblr, behindthescarydoor.