A Planet Too Far: Beyond the Stars, #1 by Nick Webb

Author:Nick Webb [Fitzgerald, Patrice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Astral Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I floated past a lot of things. I saw computer screens powered down and inert, I saw half-melted emergency bulkheads breached and useless, I saw personal effects floating in the nothingness and loose bulkheads and yellow oxygen masks drifting like tentacles, their precious cargo long ago discharged.

But I saw no bodies. Personal effects, plenty. Weapons and shell casings, sure. Blood, and lots of it, including some that looked like the victims had been dragged. Not a single corpse.

Finally, the red line led towards a thick blast door labelled Secure Hold. There was a button to open it, but the display glowed with an angry red hue and flashed the words decompression failure. The metal had the same acid scoring as every other door we’d seen, but this one had held up, probably due to its significant thickness and anti-theft reinforced polymers.

The shipbuilders valued the passengers’ gold more than it valued their lives. Although, by booking passage with that particular ship, the paying customers were de-facto supporting them.

Whatever. It wasn’t my job to feel sorry for anyone.

“Man,” said Stanco as he crawled around the corner, “we are going to get so much free shit.”

“Salvage of non-Earthborn items isn’t one of our objectives,” said Angel, appearing right behind him.

“You kidding? What’s the point of being a Crisis Exacerbation Specialist if you don’t get to loot anything afterwards?”

I shook my head. “Golovanov said we were Private Third-Party… something-or-rather Engineers.”

“Golovanov,” said Angel, “can also hear you. The audio is piped into mission command.”

“We’ve been through a lot,” I said. “He can handle a joke.”

Stanco floated toward the door, peering in close.

“Thoughts?” I asked.

He extended a giant metal hand, reaching out and touching the pitted and scarred door. “Knock knock,” Stanco said, rapping silently on the metal. Anyone inside could hear us, but we had no hope of hearing them through the vacuum of space. “We should send through a probe first.”

That sounded gas. Stanco pulled a small metal oval about the size of a discus off his back and clipped it to the wall. It glowed faintly as it began to cut into the door.

The minutes ticked away.

“How long could someone survive in there?” I asked. “There’s air, so presumably they didn’t just die.”

Angel’s suit’s head appeared over Stanco’s metal shoulder. I could see her portrait on the side of my vision, but I looked her in her optics, too. Some human habits died hard. “With food and water, a long time. The ship was well stocked, and no matter how strong that acid is, they must have had some time to prepare. There were armed guards at the first door to be breached, after all. As each door went down… they probably stockpiled as much as they could inside and waited it out. Fortunately, these doors won’t open if there’s no air on our side, so if they’re in there thinking they’re saved, they’ll have to wait a bit longer.”

Made sense.

“What do you think they did to pass the time?” asked Stanco.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.