Standish Page 20

  Standish found Avi’s tracker without difficulty on the map, he was already at a lifeboat station, and after a few seconds, he was off the map, presumably safely ejected from the doomed ship and on his way to the safety of the planet’s surface. Standish knew that there was no guarantee how long the surface would remain safe if the attacking forces pressed their assault. Rechecking the map, Standish switched to a mode that allowed her to determine which crewmembers were alive but weren’t moving to either the escape pods or rear medical. That number came to eight. Those were the wounded that she needed to tend to.

  With the time allotted and only eight crewmembers injured, Standish knew that there was an excellent chance that she’d be able to get to all of them in time and safely transport them to the medical bay. She just hoped that the shelter was able to survive re-entry because if it couldn’t, she knew that she was fucked.

  The first group of wounded were below her on level two. Three injured dots on her tracking device representing those in need of her assistance. She walked back to the lift shaft and opened the emergency access ladder that was in the bulkhead next to the lift doors. Putting her head inside, she used her optical suite to look down to the lowest deck, which she was able to confirm was still accessible. Reaching forward, she took hold of the closest rung, and then stepped into the shaft, and started climbing down to the second deck.

  Other than lighting that her suit was putting out, the shaft was totally dark. There was something about the experience, a feeling of loneliness and isolation, that was giving Standish an uncomfortable vibe. She wasn’t sure what it was, she just wished that Jae or Avi were still around to help. She paused for a moment, closed her eyes and focused. She had work to do. It was all on her now. Opening her eyes, she continued down the ladder.

  Reaching the next deck, Standish pushed open the access port, then stepped into the hallway and activated her boots mag-lock. The corridor was covered in debris and smoke that was floating in the zero-gravity air, all billowing from some unseen source. Closing the hatch behind her, she checked her tracking system on her map. The three wounded crewmembers were straight ahead of her towards the rear of the ship, just before the sizeable medical bay that covered decks two and three.

  Not wanting to waste time, Standish started running down the corridor until she began finding bodies. Two crewmembers floated dead in the middle of the hallway. Their bodies were heavily burned, but Standish couldn’t see the source of the fire. Double-checking their vital signs, her suit confirmed they were dead. Leaving the corpses floating in the hallway, Standish continued forward and came across a group of three crew members who were also burned, but still alive, hanging in the air like puppets who were still attached to their strings.

  Checking the first patient, Standish went into full medic mode. Confirm injury, assess, treat, if not critical, move on to the next wounded crewmember. She checked all three patients in rapid succession and applied neural stimulants that would start cutting off the pain receptors and attached a special anti-burn nano-bot pack to the forehead of each victim. The kits would start allowing their bodies to begin regenerating the burned tissue at once. It wasn’t a fast procedure, but it was the first step in recovery. Delicately, Standish moved around the wounded crewmembers and walked up to the hatch to the medical bay, and tried to open it, but the door was locked. Toggling the intercom, Standish opened a channel.

  “Open this hatch!” She demanded, but there was silence from the other side of the blast door. “Open this hatch, or I’ll blow it open.” She wasn’t going to do that, but the threat wasn’t going to hurt her efforts to get the door open.

  After a few moments silence, the door finally slid open to reveal a large room filled with a mix of medical personnel and frightened crew members, all floating around the space, many clutching onto anything bolted down. Stepping into the white coloured room with her mag-lock still active, Standish flipped up her blast shield and looked around the med-bay. “Who is in command here?” She demanded. “There are wounded crew outside.” She pointed to the three burn victims that weren’t more than a few metres away from the hatch, but no one moved to help them.

  Disgusted, Standish moved towards the medic that had opened the hatch, and grabbed him by the arm, and pulled his floating body towards the opening, and then pointed at the three crewmembers laying on the ground. “Help them!” She ordered, giving the figure a shove.

  Looking around the room, she flipped down her blast shield, and then pulled up the ships manifest on her heads-up-display and activated the facial recognition software and quickly found the senior medical officer in the room. “You there.” She pointed at a short looking Floxian with a grey mohawk.

  The figure didn’t move, so Standish marched over to where he was floating, and assumed a very dominant position, towering over the doctor who was holding onto a medical bed for support. “You need to take charge of this space, doctor.” She said, and with as little force as possible, because she was wearing a U7 Rescue Technician armour, slapped the shocked Floxian across the face. “We are going to crash onto Killious, and you need to prep this medical bay for that.” Standish looked around at the other faces in the room. Most looked dazed. Peering back down at the doctor, she issued her ultimatum. “I’m going to retrieve more wounded. This place will be operating under disaster protocols when I return.”

  Standish spun around and without hesitating, marched back towards the hatch and out of the room without giving anyone else in the chamber a second look. Exiting the med-bay, Standish broke into a run, and dashed down the hallway, pushing past the two dead bodies that were floating in the middle of the hallway. She reached the emergency ladder and started her descent down to level three. Her tracker showed her that there was one wounded crewmember on that deck, and when she pulled herself out of the emergency access hatch, she could see that the level had taken considerably more damage than the two levels above.

  The ceiling had collapsed, and Standish had to crawl out of the ladder-well. Turning to look towards the front of the ship, she could tell that the blast door was partial damaged, and the only thing keeping the corridor pressurised was the considerable amount of debris that had been sucked into place.

  Continuing to crawl to the rear of the ship, Standish kept moving as best she could. She knew that even though there were only a handful of wounded crewmembers for her to reach, time was of the essence. The longer it took for her to get to them, the less time she would have inside the medical centre when the ship finally broke through into the atmosphere of Killious and started its tumble down towards the planets icy surface.

  After more work, going up and down the emergency access tunnel, she finally got the penultimate wounded crew member into the med bay. That left just one crewmember still alive in the rear half of the ship for her to retrieve. Before she departed the bay for her final retrieval, she made sure that the senior medical officer was in control of the situation, and that everyone was preparing themselves for the crash landing they were about to make on the planet’s surface.

  Leaving the medical bay for the last time, Standish rushed down the hallway to the access shaft and started climbing down to the lowest level on the ship, deck six, where the last patient was located.

  Reaching the lowest level of the passageway, she pushed the hatch open onto the adjoining hallway, stood up, checking the blast door towards where the bow had been was in place, satisfied, she directed her attention down the corridor, reviewing her tracking system, Standish confirmed that her final package was in the second room down the hallway on the starboard side.

  Cutting her mag-lock, Standish gave herself a gentle push off the ground, and glided down the hallway until she reached the door, then instinctively reached down towards the access keypad, but just before she tried to open the hatch, she noticed a red light flashing at the top of the keypad, indicating that the room had lost pressure.

  Rechecking her tracker, she was able to confirm the crewmember on the other side of the
door was alive and uninjured. Taking a step back, Standish started to consider her options. She didn’t see any way to extract the person from the room that didn’t involve compromising the pressurisation of the rest of the ship.

  Moving back to the first room she had walked by, she opened the door and stepped inside. She looked around the darkened room and realised that she was surrounded by maintenance equipment, and one piece that caught her eye quickly was a heavy cutter. Floating over to where it was clamped down, she looked at the metre-long tool, and confirmed that it was intact, and with a full charge.

  Checking her position, Standish pulled out the spider charge from the small of her back, primed it, then threw it at the hull, while taking a firm grasp on a nearby shelf. Standish knew that there would be a sharp, but brief, rush of air out of the room when it depressurised.

  The charge hit the wall and detonated. The wall disappeared, and everything not tied down inside the room vanished into the vacuum of space. Once the room had stabilised, Standish released her grip, and reactivated her mag-lock on her books, and walked over to the heavy cutter and picked it up, along with the large battery pack, then moved to the large hole that had been blown in the side of the Laakari.

  Looking outside, Standish could see the massive space battle raging in the distance. She wasn’t sure about the numbers involved, but it seemed like the battle from Qera had just continued in the Killious system. From her vantage point, she couldn’t tell who had the upper hand, but the space above Killious was strewn with debris and shattered warships.

  Standish quickly checked the condition of the Laarkari just outside the breach. Everything looked in order and undamaged. Releasing her mag-lock, Standish floated off the decking, heavy cutter in her right hand, the battery pack in her left, and gave a tiny squeeze of power from her suit’s built-in thrusters to get moving. They might not have had the same capabilities as the thruster packs, but they would suffice to get her out onto the ships hull.

  Exiting the ship, Standish moved towards the stern far enough to where the bulkheads between the two compartments met. From there she could see a long fissure in the ship’s hull, only a few millimetres wide, that must have depressurised the room she was trying to enter. Reaching the scar, Standish leaned forward and peered inside, but couldn’t see much because of all the debris floating in the chamber. Whoever was alive inside must have had an emergency suit available or something else keeping them alive in the vacuum.

  Pushing herself gently off the hull, Standish brought the large, heavy cutter up, and pointed it at a spot just above the top of the fissure, and turned on the battery pack. Looking down at the hand controls of the cutter, Standish waited until the unit was powered up entirely, then took a firm grip on the activation grip, and started the cutter up, unleashing a ten-centimetre blue flame that begun cutting through the hull of the ship with ease. Following the lines of the fissure that was already in the shell, it didn’t take Standish long to produce a gash parallel to the crack, then quickly sliced two connecting cuts.

  Letting go of the cutter, and the battery pack, Standish used her built-in thrusters and charged at the panel she had created, and without any trouble, was able to push into the ship. Inside, it didn’t take long for Standish to spot the survivor among all the clutter of the storage closet. A young male, from some species she didn’t recognise, had zipped themselves inside a survival bag. Blind luck, Standish thought.

  Standish moved up to the bag, and flipped up her blast shield so that she could make eye contact with the male and activated her external speakers. “The ship is compromised. We need to get to the top-side airlock.” Standish gave the room another quick inspection. “Just hold on, I’m going to drag you up there.” She didn’t wait to hear a response, she grabbed the bottom of the bag with her left hand, lowered her blast shield, then gave a little squirt of power from her thrusters, and cruised right out the hole she had just cut.

  Outside, Standish checked the immediate vicinity of the hole and saw the heavy cutter drifting away from the ship. Looking up along the hull, Standish didn’t see any dangers, so she activated her thrusters, and started up the hull, skimming over the surface, the survival bag dragging behind her. While Standish slowly climbed up the hull, she took a moment to look off into space, and while she could see some ships in the distance, she couldn’t tell whose they were, or if they were firing at each other. Maybe the battle was over, she thought to herself. While she hoped for rescue, she doubted that it would come before the Laakari crashed into Killious.

  As she continued along the hull, she could see the glow from Killious getting brighter as she neared the top of the ship. Even though she knew that Killious was an ice-world, the radiant glow warmed her soul. When the planet finally came entirely into view, it was a beacon of hope floating above the ship, so close, but still so far. When she reached the top hatch, she opened it quickly, and pushed the survival bag inside first, then clamoured in after it.

  Closing the hatch, Standish quickly started the airlock cycle, which pressurised the space in seconds. Once the room was secure, she flipped up her blast shield, and knelt down next to the survival bag and unzipped the young crewmember.

  “Are you wounded?” She asked.

  “No.” He replied, standing up, kicking the bag off his feet. “What’s happened?” He asked, gently floating off the decking.

  “The ship is heavily damaged, and we’re being pulled down to Killious.” She replied, moving to the airlock hatch.

  “Are there any escape pods left?”

  “Negative.” She replied, opening the hatch and stepping out onto the first deck of the ship, her mag-lock activated.

  The corridor was precisely how it looked when she had last been here. Nothing was out of place. Stepping back inside the chamber, she put out her hand towards the young crewman and waited for him to grab her gloved hand. Once he took it, she turned and started walking quickly down the hallway until they reached the access ladder.

  “You should be able to pull yourself down to the next deck.” She said and waited for him to grab hold of the first rung. Once he was inside the shaft, he started pulling himself headfirst down to the next deck. Standish was hot on his heels, she wasn’t wasting any time.

  Exiting the hatch on deck two, the crewman had already pushed himself off the bulkhead wall and was floating through the air towards the entrance to medical. Standish walked up behind him and gave him a light push on his boot, sending him the rest of the way down the corridor. Reaching medical, they found that the senior officer had almost finished strapping everyone down in anticipation of re-entry.

  Standish looked around the room while walking up to the senior officer, dragging the freshly rescued crewman with her. “Are there enough restraints for everyone?” She asked.

  The doctor nodded. “Yes.” An awkward smile on his face.

  Running a bio-scan on the doctor, Standish confirmed her theory as to why the doctor had the silly grin on his face: pharmacology. He’d pumped drugs designed to calm patients into his system, along with an inhibitor that would allow him to focus his mind. It might have been a cheat, but it allowed him to get the med centre ready.

  Standish flipped up her blast shield and looked around the room. “Are you sure this will survive re-entry and impact with the surface?”

  The doctor shrugged. “I’m no engineer, but if we all take the correct emergency injections and tablets before entry, we should survive the gravitation forces upon landing, assuming that the integrity of the disaster shelter itself hasn’t been compromised.”

  Standish nodded. It was now a waiting game. She checked her mapping systems and confirmed that they were caught in the hold of Killious’s gravity. It was only a matter of time until they were pulled down to the planet’s surface, and hopefully not smashed into a million tiny pieces upon impact.

  Spotting a restraint hold near the primary hatch, Standish walked over to it, turned around, and put her back against the wall, and activated the eme
rgency safety restraints that were designed to keep the user in place in the event that the ship was in an uncontrollable spin, which it would no doubt be in once it broke through the atmosphere and started tumbling towards the ground.

  Looking down past her feet, she could see that almost everyone on the lower deck of the medical department was strapped in, ready for the long drop that was coming. She had training dealing with disaster shelters on Tekori, but she never expected to find herself inside one. The ship was going down, and she was going to be taken for a ride.

  Once the Laakari was caught in the planet’s gravity, its orbit continued to degrade until the ship transition from being in cosmic space to the planet’s upper atmosphere. At about eighty miles above the planet’s surface, atmospheric drag takes over, and that’s when things started to happen fast.

  The ship’s hull started to heat up rapidly to three-thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and the entire rear half of the vessel began to shudder violently due to the lack of uniformity in the density of the atmosphere. Inside the medical hold, Standish could feel the vibrations rattle through the interior walls of the ship, but her U7 suit and its rubber exterior shell gave her adequate protection from the vibrations. Eventually, the shuddering became less violent as the dense lower atmosphere slowed the Laakari closer to its terminal velocity.

  Killious was a snow-covered world, and that might be the one thing that was going to keep them alive, she hoped. If the ship hit a mountain or other landmass, they were fucked. If the vessel impacted on solid ice, they were fucked. But, if the ship landed on nice soft, fresh snow, they stood a chance of survival.

  Looking at the faces of those inside the disaster shelter, Standish knew that there was real fear present, a sense of panic. The long descent to the planet’s surface didn’t help. Five minutes of sheer terror was one thing, but the continued threat of death during the fall to the planet’s surface was getting too much for some crew members nerves. Standish hated waiting, but she was readying herself for her duties once they crashed. Even though she was in a room filled with medical personnel, they weren’t emergency medical technicians, and they weren’t trained to operate under these circumstances, and none of them was wearing armour like Standish.