A cloud of micro-meteoroids striking the hull makes approximately the exact same noise as a stream of bullets doing the same. For that matter, it comes with about as little warning and does about the same damage, so the only practical difference between one and the other is who exactly, at that particular moment, is trying to kill you: some person, or just nature.
In either case, that was the sound that suddenly filled the barracks. Seconds later it was joined by a distant mechanical creaking, as somebody in the far-off bridge punched the throttle on the gravity drive and propelled them into evasive maneuvers. The stars out the window reeled into new angles, the people were thrown against the walls by the rotation, then nauseated by a lurching, as the gravity drive's compensator stage struggled to match the driver. There was a vibration and a roar reverberating through the walls as the CIWS spooled up and began returning fire.
This wasn't the sort of event that was necessarily new to the passengers and crew of C.T.K. Paver's Creek, but it was nonetheless unexpected and unprepared for at the moment, because they weren't even on a mission today. They hadn't been on the attack, they hadn't been in forbidden timespace, they hadn't even been doing anything.
The only thing filling Romanova's mind was the protest that it wasn't even fair! They were supposed to be home in time for dinner! Today had just been a training deployment!
"COORD LOCK, FOLKS!" Madame Ironclad's calm, commanding, (painfully loud) voice rang out of her helmet speakers to displace the chaos. "Knights, gear up with melee kit! Squires get masks! Bernard! Breach kit! Now!"
Romanova was a little behind the others as they tapped a hotkey on their tapes, to save their current temporal coordinates so they could hop back to now if need be. Most of the knights, her included, were already wearing armorsuits, and those that weren't were now kicking off the walls toward the lockers in the aft. The squires slipped into oxygen masks, then hurried behind the knights to help them mount and lock. Today's schedule had been to train on planetary recon, which meant their suits' arms were currently mounted with ranged weapons; useless for the close-quarters shipboard combat. Sam, Romanova's squire, had to spend a precious minute unbolting her railgun and counter-projector, before he could attach a knife to her left hand, and a waldo/plasma lance to her right. In her peripheral vision, the other knights were gearing up similarly; if the enemy decided to board, they'd be in for a nasty surprise.
"Why would they board? They wouldn't board." She whispered to Sam, as she fiddled with her helmet, trying to get it to seal. "They wouldn't be that dumb. They're here to blow us out of the sky."
"What do I know?" Sam tightened down the last bolt on her breastplate locks, and stole a glance at Ironclad. "I'm not psychic."
No boarders came. Nor did any respite from the assault. Despite the evasive maneuvers, the rattling on the hull was getting louder. As the reactive tiling got used up, some of the projectiles began piercing through. Sam emitted a brief curse as he got hit in the arm, and a few droplets of his greenish blood splattered onto her. Fiona's ammunition magazine was hit, so she ejected it and went for another one. Something glanced off Ironclad's breastplate with an audible 'ting', and bounced around the room. Perry must have jumped back to his coord lock a few times, because he shoved two people out of the way of incoming projectiles, before jumping back twice himself. A whistling sound of escaping air began to fill the cabin, at least until Bernard got out the breach kit, and began hunting down the holes and sealing them with a foam gun and generous amounts of tape. Kravt was outraged. "What is even GOING ON?"
"We're being shot to pieces, to hazard a guess!" Ironclad answered, her voice sounding exactly as unconcerned as ever it had been. "I'll try to raise the bridge as soon-"
A sudden warp event shook the ship. They could feel it through their feet, they could feel it in their guts, they could see the walls stretch and buckle as spacetime bent, they could see the stars out the window fold and occlude, and then everything snapped back to normal with incredible violence. All the people in the room were tossed about like coins in a piggy bank. Romanova hit the bulkhead hard enough to dent her helmet, and Sam's body seemed to go entirely liquid as he hit the same.
Her helmet wasn't the only thing damaged; the ship was too. An explosion sounded from somewhere ventral of the mess hall, then all their ears popped to the rushing sound of the whole cabin rapidly decompressing out the corridor. Sensors in the walls detected the pressure drop, and hydraulic motors began slamming hatches closed to isolate the ghastly reverse-flood.
There was a scream from outside the barracks, right before the hatch closed. Yamazaki, who didn't even have her armor fully locked yet, instinctively dived into the doorway, and let her breastplate jam the hatch open. "GET IN HERE!" She yelled, her voice carried by the last of the air. Three crewmembers thankfully scrambled their way out of the doomed section and into the barracks, and as soon as they were safe, Yamazaki wrenched her body out of the hatchway, and let it close. With so little air left in the room, everyone without fully locked armor, including Romanova and her dented helmet, was unconscious in seconds.
A minute later she woke again. Her tongue and eyeballs were uncomfortably dry from the vacuum exposure, her chilled sinuses still smelled the burnt-steak smell of space, and her sore eardrums filled with the hissing of the emergency life support pumps, as they flooded the room back up to acceptable pressure.
There were no sounds from the rest of the ship. The gravity drive was paused, the CIWS weren't firing, and most eerie of all, the reactor coolant pumps couldn't even be heard. Even the lighting had dropped down to the dull red of emergency lamps.
What happened? Did we beat them? Or did we escape? ...Or did they really get us this time?
"Oof, look at that." Ironclad scoffed.
"What's wrong?" Bernard asked.
Their eyes followed her pointed waldo towards the window, and found to their surprise that there were no stars outside. No sun, no moon or planetshine, nothing but blackness.
"Madlads." Ironclad shook her head. "We escaped to underspace. That warp event must've been the drop... Hmph."
"That shouldn't be possible." Sam frowned. "Dropping takes an hour."
"Yeah, I mean...?" Fiona frowned. "I didn't know the ferryman was strong enough to do it that fast."
"I don't think he is." Ironclad hummed. "I guess they must've given him a tape. He looped back until there was enough of him that he was strong enough to drop us nearly instantly."
"He can use a tape? Isn't he too big to use a tape?"
"I don't know?" Ironclad shrugged. "Maybe he used the ship's node or something. Anyway! How're you dorks all holding up? Everyone good?"
Twenty three voices, all ten knights, all ten squires, and the three crewmen, sounded off that they were doing just fine. Romanova said it was her first time getting vented, and that it hadn't been much to her liking. Kravt complained that the oxygen masks were all shaped for human faces, and hadn't even fit her. Sam had just finished healing over the wound in his arm, and said that he was fine too. Bernard twirled the foam gun like a revolver and said he'd sealed all the big holes that he could find, so the air should stay.
"Sweet." The grim face painted on Ironclad's opaque helmet never betrayed a single sign of her emotion, but sometimes her voice did, and Romanova though she heard a tinge of relief here. "Bernard, toss Kravt some tape for her mask, then see about hunting down any smaller holes. Rest of you... I'd say take another coord lock, but I don't see much point since we can't time travel in underspace anyway... I'm gonna try to raise the bridge."
As the Madame went over to the console, Romanova wrestled her helmet off and held it between her waldo and her knife, examining the dent.
"What's wrong?" Sam glanced over at her.
"I-it! It's not sealing! I had it all locked up when we decompressed, but it didn't seal, I almost died, I don't know...?"
"You just let the gasket slip out of the groove. Just need to push it back in." Sam sighed and took it. His fingers morphed thin enough for him to force them into the groove and pry it a little wider. The rubber seal lay in properly. "There. If it still doesn't seal, wrap the slot in some of that hull tape."
"Oh. T-thanks Sam. Thanks."
"How many times have you deployed anyway?" He asked her. "...I haven't seen you around."
"This is my first time. Well! I mean, I've had simulation training in the suit a few times-"
"That doesn't count." He suppressed whatever he'd been about to say. "...Well. You're doing good so far."
"Thanks."
Ironclad made a grumpy little noise, and turned away from the console. "Nobody's answering from command. I think the intercom might be broken, but anyway."
Even as she spoke, the life support ran out of air. The pumps puttered to a stop at around 90% pressure, without any more to give.
The whole ship was silent.
So there they were. A room full of knights, with no space suits, vacuum on the other side of the only door out, dead and powerless in the infinite formless void of underspace,
With 8 hours of air left.
"We never trained for this." Romanova's voice had an edge to it. All the adventures she'd imagined since she'd joined the militia, all the noble deeds she'd do, all the stories she'd be able to tell, all seemed to fall instantly flat upon this, her first real deployment. "I never prepared for this." She whispered to herself.
"What's the plan, Madame?" Bernard asked.
"Well..." Ironclad considered that. "I reckon we'll need to get blankets off the cots and hang them across the outer wall. Underspace generally tends to sit at a balmy absolute zero kelvin this time of year, so it'll be nippy in here in a couple hours..." The madame never seemed to be in the least discomforted or worried by the discomforting and worrisome things that came out of her mouth, which was a talent her subordinates did not share, but quickly learned. "Put something over the window too, it's just plain bad luck to gaze into the blackness. Oh yeah, and charge your suits batteries while we still have a little power left."
They did so.
"Anyone got a pack of cards?"
They'd been trapped in the barracks for going on 5 hours; their oxygen was more than half gone, and there was frost forming on the hull, by the time they made contact with anybody else in the ship. It came as a faint scratching and jingling, coming from the water pipes. Bernard got a screwdriver and undid the maintenance cover, and a sparkling purple light filled the barracks as a fairy flew out. "You're alive! I found you! You're alive!" His tiny voice tweeted happily.
"Oh hey there Cloverstem." Madame Ironclad gave a little wave. "Of course we're alive, what kind of amateurs do you take us for? How are things back in engineering?"
The fairy buzzed to a landing on the knee of the Madame's armor, and removed his tiny pressure helmet. His antennae trembled in the thin air and his compound eyes blinked around at all of them. "Dead! Ahem! Sorry. Dead." His voice squeaked . "Ahem! No! I mean! We're all still alive! The crew is mostly okay, but the ship is dead! The hard drop nearly tore the underdrive ring loose from its fittings, so we can't exit underspace without a 90% chance of leaving the entire actual ship behind. Not an option! Gravity, Thermal, and Ion drives all run the same risks, and to top it off, there's something out there!"
"Some-? What? Something out in underspace?"
"Yes!" Cloverstem chirped in a panic.
"What is it?" Romanova asked nervously.
"I don't know! The ferryman is the only one who can see it, he says it's big. I don't know what 'big' means, I mean, you're big to me, but I think he meant really, really-"
"Okay, okay, slow down, let me guess." Ironclad chuckled. "We can't run, because all our propulsion systems would glow like a flashlight against this background. Meaning we've either got to kill the thing here and now, or find a way to stealth so it can't find us..."
"No!" Cloverstem shook his head. "No way to kill it with any weapon here! And also no way to stealth! The counter-perceptive tarps are full of holes, and we wouldn't know which direction to aim a cloaking field! There's only one way out of this, and that's to get back out of underspace! You have to go on spacewalk and tie the drive ring back down!"
"Us?" Ironclad was slightly surprised.
"US?" Romanova was much more surprised.
"Oh lord." Sam blinked.
"Yes! You!" Cloverstem insisted. "All the space suits built for extended EVA were down in the airlocks, and the airlocks are perforated! No way to get to them! You knights are the only ones that can do it!"
"Alright then cool!" Ironclad stood up and kicked off the wall. "Fun fun fun, we'll get right on it. I assume radio silence?"
"Radio silence! Yes!" Cloverstem buzzed in a little circle. "I can stowaway in your helmet to give directions!"
"Ain't nobody gets in this helmet." Ironclad shook a finger of her waldo. "Go rig up the hardline comms. Anyway, ahem, ALRIGHT LADIES AND LADS, LOOK ALIVE!" Ironclad raised a fist to call the rest of the room to attention. "I want all the knights, anyone and everyone with a hardsuit, on THIS side of the room, by the door. Everyone ELSE, THAT side. Bernard, I want you to string up a sealant tarp across the middle of the room here so we can get out the door without venting the rest of y'all. Sam, 8adD5#(, Kravt, ;6[]aaa, 00110111, you five are the only non-humans without hardsuits, how are you guys with vacuum?"
"I can handle it." Sam shapeshifted into something spider-like, covered in thick and leathery skin. His mouth and nostrils closed and sealed.
"I still need to breathe." 8adD5#( said.
"Me too." Kravt growled. "I have gills."
"I can only hold my breath for 20 minutes." ;6[]aaa admitted.
"01001001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01100001 01101001 01110010 00101110" 00110111 claimed.
"Alrighty then! Sam, 00110111, get over here. Rest of you, take it easy, we'll see you later. Let's move!"
"What-?" As Romanova took her place beside Ironclad, she could scarcely believe that she was doing so. "These! These aren't space suits!" Bernard was setting up the pressure tarp, and the noise of him pulling the tape off the roll sounded to her like shovelfuls of dirt striking a coffin.
"Oh yeah?" Ironclad's voice sounded like a smug smirk, which Romanova didn't like. "It's a suit, isn't it? And it's in space, isn't it?"
"They're not airtight!" Romanova protested uselessly up into the Madame's blank, unreadable armor plate of a face. She peeled back the ribbing on her elbow joint to show the flannel zero suit beneath. "They've got sealed life support in the helmet, but that's just for underwater and primordial! It doesn't...?! It doesn't hold pressure!"
"You don't need pressure over your whole body to survive." Ironclad's helmet tilted. "You need it on your head, which the helmet does, and a little chest compression to keep the lungs from bruising, which a quarter-turn on the torso locks will do... But the rest needs no pampering. It'll swell up your arms and legs, turn your fingers into sausages, it'll hurt like nothing you've ever felt before, and if you're unlucky it'll boil all your urine and feces straight out your tubes... But no permanent damage. You'll be basically almost fine in a couple hours."
She looked around at the other knights. None of them so much as mentioned it. Maybe none of them ever would. They were all looking at her, waiting for her. Bernard paused before affixing the last corner of the tarp, paused to let her step out if she wanted to. "And you're all okay with that?" She whispered.
"I think we are." Ironclad considered it all for a moment, and then her voice got as quiet as Romanova had ever heard it. "...You know kid, I'm sorry. I know you're new. New, and expected to do something very painful and very scary. And I suppose if I'm being honest, then yes, you have a moderately high chance of dying out there today, and I'm sorry about that. But see here, we're adrift in underspace. The Paver's Creek will freeze and decay and break apart down here if somebody doesn't do something; all hands lost, all friends lost. Family lost. You lost too; if you want to be selfish about it. But we? We have a chance of making it better, of pulling through, of saving everyone... It may be hopeless. It may be the end. Things will certainly get worse for us, much worse, as bad and as painful and terrible as they've ever been, before they get better. But we're heroes around here. We're all knights. So in times like these? In times like these, there's nothing for it but to smile, and have a Merry Christmas."
Romanova thought that was a queer thing to say, given that this was 1400 B.C. and also September, and also nowhere near Earth, and also traveling near lightspeed through 5-space, but she decided that these were all questions for another time, because now, there was work to be done. "Okay."
Author's Note:
What the heck...?
