It was just as well that the Dragon had decided to relocate her Dungeon for the evening, I decided as I began to dig through the accumulated filth. The filter was complete toast, and I had to remove it entirely from its mounting. This required me to reroute the airflow system, redirecting the ventilation through some seldom-used ducting on the other end of the station. Once that was done I was able to remove the filter without having the build-up of dust and dirt blasted all over the Dragon’s precious torture equipment, a calamity whose dire consequences I had absolutely no intentions of suffering through.
It was fortunate that the control room was located just under the Dungeon; all of the really kinky stuff was kept as far as possible towards the ends of the Henhouse so that those with relatively conventional tastes need not deal with the more abstruse sexual desires of our other guests. I’d just entered to control room in order to verify with the computer that I indeed had a spare electro-filter in stock when all hell broke loose.
It started with a radio call on the Red frequency, which was reserved for life-threatening events. “Emergency!” the desperate sounding voice called out. “Emergency at the South-” Then the voice was cut off in a burst of static.
Instantly I dropped the filter on the counter and forgot about it. “Repeat!” I demanded into the microphone. “This is the Henhouse. Repeat your emergency call!”
There was a long silence. Then another voice spoke up. “Oh my God!” the woman on the other end said softly. “It’s going up. All of it! There’s been a whole series of explosions; I don’t think there’s going to be any survivors. Goddamn blueberries! This is Barbara Mitchell. If you hear my voice, please tell my family that--” Then she too was cut off in a burst off static.
Suddenly adrenaline was flooding into my system by the gallon. “What the hell’s going on?” demanded yet another voice. “This is Peter Thomas four-seven, Collins, inbound from Solarium Three. I repeat, what the hell? There’s debris all over!”
There was a long moment of silence, until Control’s voice finally spoke up. “All inbounds,” the voice began. “This is Lagrange Station control. For the past several minutes there has been-- ”
Lagrange may have finished their sentence, but I never got to hear it. Suddenly the Henhouse was struck a terrific, terrible blow, knocking me off of my feet and slamming me into the far wall. I struck head-first, stunning me slightly. A precious second passed while I shook off the blow, until an icepick of pain in both of my ears caused my training to kick in. In a flash was up and moving automatically. The pressure was dropping like a rock! I was about to find myself breathing vacuum!
All of the internal doors of the Henhouse were designed to be airtight, and the Control Room door was already beginning to close itself. Red warning lights were flashing everywhere, and the air was foggy from the sudden pressure drop. I forced myself to face directly into the teeth of the wind, and pulled myself through the closing portal so quickly that I drifted yards down the hallway before finding a handrail that I could use to stop my movement. Behind me the door slid solidly shut, and suddenly the terrible roar of rushing air faded away to nothing. My chest was heaving as I floated next to my handgrip, more from my close call than from momentary lack of air. I must have been very frightened indeed, because I’d taken at least four or five such breaths before I realized that I was floating in a place where I should have been standing, and it was two or three more breaths beyond that before I came to appreciate just how incredibly bad a sign that was.
Instantly I was on the move again, once I recognized that we must have suffered structural damage on an almost incomprehensible level. Somehow the part of the Henhouse in which I was standing had come adrift from the rest, I was slowly realizing, and therefore was no longer spinning for gravity.
We didn’t seem to be losing any more air, or if we were at least it wasn’t being lost very rapidly. Therefore, my first job was to inform myself of what was going on and how badly the Henhouse was damaged. I couldn’t exactly get into the Control Room right at the moment; by now it was chock-full of hard vacuum. And I had a sick feeling that the other Control Room, located at the extreme opposite end of the Henhouse so as to ensure that one or the other would always be functional, was equally unavailable. So I decided to fall back on more primitive methods. The first boudoir on the left had a large porthole, I knew, and I tore the door open without knocking. A semi-human voice cried out in terror when I did so, and then was joined by a second.
“It’s all right,” I reassured the room’s occupants automatically, my training kicking in once more. Alarming the passengers was a very bad thing to do. “Please, it’s all right. I just need to look around here a little bit.”
I was in the Menagerie, I realized suddenly, the boudoir where Trixie and Myrna plied their rather unusual trade. The fox and rabbit girls were curled up in a sort of little furball up against the far bulkhead, while their current client, who was dressed up in a sensation-suit to look like an oversized teddy bear, spun helplessly in mid-air. He looked rather as if he wanted to scream, but he was gagged much too tightly to allow for that sort of thing.
I had no time to spare for the client, however, nor even any for Trixie and Myrna, who were usually so nice to me. Instead I kicked skillfully off of the nearest object-a toy box full of big rubber balls and real teddy bears and such- that was solidly affixed to the deck. Inadvertently I knocked the lid ajar, and slowly the room began to fill with oversized child’s toys as I glided across to the port.
Things were bad, I realized once I was able to force my mind to comprehend what my eyes were seeing. Very, very bad. Much of the Henhouse was quite simply gone; we had been sliced almost precisely in two at the narrow point where the long central shaft connected the two groups of orbital shacks. Our docking point was gone as well, and with it Aphrodite. We were tumbling, and the stars were near-streaks across my field of vision.
“Jesus Christ!” I whispered under my breath. “What the hell happened?”
Suddenly Lagrange Station itself swept across my view, and my question was at least partially answered by the fleeting glimpse I caught of her. Lagrange’s skin was peeled back like an onion’s around the South Pole, and even as I watched there was an intense flash of light from somewhere in that region. Bits and pieces of wreckage were everywhere, and for them to be visible at such a distance even the smallest must have weighed tons. It was incredible! The explosions must have been colossal, and we’d been unlucky enough to catch a packet of debris from one of the very first.
“Marvin?” Trixie’s trembling voice asked.
I turned to face her. Her ears were lowered in fear, and her eyes were open very, very wide. “Yes?”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I clicked my beak together, trying to figure out how to answer. “There’s been accident,” I replied at last. “A bad one, aboard Lagrange.”
“Uh-huh,” she replied, though from her posture I didn’t think that she was really listening my words so much as the tone that they were spoken in.
So I tried to sound confident for her. “We’ve been hit hard,” I said. “But we’re not losing air. I think we’re going to be all right.” Then I cocked my head and looked at the fox and rabbit girls critically. “Neither of you are steward-trained, are you?”