IV
The next morning I was awoken by the sound of an alarm originating from Archie's speaker grill in my room. The alarm beeped continuously for over a minute, but still I clutched at the bed covers and simply turned myself over. Eventually, the beeping stopped. I smiled as I huddled up comfortably against the warm mattress. Then, there was a klaxon, which almost deafened me as it blared through the room. I sat bolt upright, the smile wiped from my face, and shouted to Archie.
"Oh, for fuck's sake, Archie, I'm trying to sleep." I snapped, and the klaxon suddenly stopped.
"With respect, sir," Archie replied calmly, "The time is already 1000 hours. Omicron Alpha Regulations dictate that no member of a ship's crew may remain asleep past the time of 1000 hours without a genuine medical reason."
Walking over to the wardrobe, I continued to converse with Archie. Although sometimes I hated the fact that the ship's computer interface was literally everywhere aboard, watching all of us constantly, sometimes I embraced it, as conversations with Archie were much more civilised than those held with the other crew members.
"Is 'can't be arsed' a genuine medical reason?" I joked, to which Archie replied that it wasn't, although I could report my condition to Science and Medical if I felt my work could be endangered by 'not being arsed'. See? Serious, as ever. Of course, I soon remembered why this morning Archie was particularly determined to wake me up by 10. Today was the day. The day that we sent a support team aboard the XH-12. Salvage, rescue, who knew? But today, we went aboard.
By the time I'd reached the Briefing Room, the time was already half past ten, and the room was empty. I quickly slotted my timecard into the machine, and rushed out to look for them. I soon found everyone on the bridge; Grike sat in a seat at a huge control panel, whilst Smith and Holmes stood next to a wall of buttons and switches, both of them frantically pressing and flicking in a seemingly random order. Goddard and Nicholson were not qualified to control the ship in any capacity, so the two of them just leaned against the bridge window, staring out into deep space. I approached Alan, who had a pretty annoyed look on his face. When he saw me heading towards him, he flicked a lever and stood up from the seat.
"And where the hell have you been?" He snapped, pushing me towards the chair. "You're supposed to be our navigational officer. So navigate." I gave him a disgusted look, then sat down and flicked down the same lever he had just pulled up. I was now in primary control of the DSPSCV Archimedes.
"Ok, I'm here now guys." I announced, adjusting the height of the chair. "Right. Holmes, do we have a radar lock-on?"
"Yes, we do." She replied, gazing up at a large computer monitor. "Port-side, sector 10."
"Smith, punch up Port-10." I ordered, fiddling with a dial on the side of my own monitor.
"Displaying Port-10 now." He assured me, before pressing a collection of buttons to his right. On my monitor, a radar appeared, and the section labeled Port-10 was enlarged to fill the screen. A white dot in the direct centre of the square confirmed it. That was the XH-12.
Thirty minutes later, we'd changed course, locked on to the XH-12, and were now within a close enough range to make visual contact. Goddard and Nicholson were the first to see the ship, because they'd spent the whole journey staring out of the window. When I looked up from my control panel and saw the ship myself, I was a little shocked by the size of it. The Jupiter Mining Corporation was famous for its huge, high-capacity ships, of course. But this was on a whole new level. It was… tiny. I mean, really tiny. The radar wasn't really enough to illustrate what the ship actually looked like, but it was feeble, to say the least. A single-decked blue box, with tracks and a fuselage that resembled a Chinook helicopter. There was nowhere for one of our Syracusia 1 capsules to dock, because the ship itself seemed only slightly bigger than the Syracusia 1.
"That's not a whole ship, surely?" Cara asked as the Archimedes drew closer to the XH-12. Then it all fell into place.
"Of course it isn't!" I exclaimed. "That's not the XH-12. It's one of the XH-12's landing craft." There were a few sounds of agreement throughout the room. The general consensus was that the craft was, in fact, not the XH-12 itself. But if that was the case, we had a problem. We couldn't dock the Syracusia.
"You know what this means, right?" I asked, turning around in my chair to face Cara and Nathan. "We're gonna have to walk over there." They sighed almost in unison, and I joined in.
"Well…" Nathan began, heading towards the door into the corridor, "Better suit up, then."
A little more than 15 minutes passed by the time the three of us had changed into our EVA suits. Like our uniforms underneath, they were black, with white detailing and Ashbridge Industries International badges dotted here and there. They weren't the most comfortable spacesuits ever made, but they'd do the job. Now, Cara and myself stood beside airlock A-1, waiting for Nathan to turn up.
"Nervous?" I asked, seeing a distressed look in Cara's eye.
"A little." She nodded. "I haven't spacewalked since I was aboard the SS Norman-Stanley. You?"
"Well…" I began, hesitant to admit that I was more than a tad concerned about what we might find aboard the XH-12's landing craft. "It's more the destination than the journey I'm worried about."
Just then, Nathan popped up behind us, an eager expression on his face. Although being the ship's Science and Medical Officer made him quite concerned about the safety risks involved in both the spacewalk and boarding the other ship, he was secretly quite excited by the mystery of the whole situation. He politely asked us to step aside, insistent on leading the way, and pushed a button on the airlock's interior door. The three of us walked through, and the door slid down behind us.
"Archie?" I called out once the door was safely sealed. "De-pressurize A-1."
"Affirmative, sir." Archie's voice replied over the speaker in the airlock. "De-pressurizing A-1." A small grate opened in the floor beneath us, and an incredibly loud noise erupted through the airlock as the air itself was sucked out of the tiny room.
It took about a minute before the airlock was fully drained of air, but when it was, the exterior door opened automatically. Nathan once again took the lead, and was the first to step out into the gaping maw of space, gripping a handle on the ship's exterior to support himself. I heard his voice buzz through the speaker inside my helmet.
"Ok, you two." He said slowly. "I can see the XH-12's landing craft just a couple of minutes ahead of our current position."
"Alan says our velocity should reach zero in about two minutes." I replied. "We might just undershoot."
"Shit. In that case, everyone turn on EVA Safe-Nav." He ordered. I pressed a button on the neck of my helmet to ensure I had. Shortly after that, the ship's velocity was just above zero. Being in the vacuum of space, the engines didn't actually 'grind to a halt', but for the purposes of this story, I'll say that they did. The ship's engines slowly ground to a halt.
'This is it', I thought to myself, seeing that the blue landing craft was now only about twenty metres away from where we'd stopped. To be fair, we'd made a pretty good distance judgment on the part of the Archimedes. We'd still need to take a little walk, though. After announcing that it was 'go-time', Nathan was the first to let go of the Archimedes. He pushed away from the ship with his hands and feet and drifted slowly towards the other craft. The lack of air resistance out here ensured that he didn't slow down until he smacked into the blue ship's side. He climbed along an exterior railing until he reached what appeared to be the only exterior door on the vessel. A button at it's side overrode the lock, and the door slid open.
"Right, you can come over now, guys," Nathan announced, from the safety of the airlock he was now in. Cara went next, pushing herself away from the Archimedes in much the same way that Nathan had. Finally, when my two fellow crew members had reached the other airlock, I pushed away from the ship, imagining the gap as the space between a train and the platform, so as to take my mind off the fact that it was actually a much greater distance. When I reached the airlock on the other ship, Nathan slid the door closed and initiated emergency pressurization. As we waited for the airlock to fill with air, I wondered what we'd find on the other side of the door. What big mystery could such a tiny ship hold? As the last of the air was pushed into the room, the door began to slide open. We were about to find out.