I looked up; we had shot right past the balcony with the cafe, and were heading directly towards the observation deck at the endcap-end of the spine. Sarah was far ahead of me. Simple physics, she had less mass, thus accelerated faster. But a minute or two later I caught up with her as we approached the observation deck. George had her hovering at idle power in front of the windows. Windows there were… but no door. George had taken us somewhere with no damned door!
“Gun,” was all he said. Ah. A few blasts from the shotgun put an adequate hole in the window. Once again, the fanpacks ran to full power, yanking us down the tunnel, around corners, down hallways and at last to the cargo bay. As we flew over the threshold the gravity plating grabbed hold, but the fanpacks kept us aloft and moving at a faster pace than I could’ve run. And so we flew right into the George. As soon as the outer door closed, Sarah yelled “Get us out of here!” The airlock hosed us down with who knows what noxious chemicals, then set us on fire; George was clearly taking no chances that a biological nasty might’ve come on board with us. Then we were hosed down with good old fashioned clean water, and the suits fell off us. The inner door opened and we ran to the flight deck.
Loff was in the co-pilots seat, looking worried as only a Thessi can. “I want to go home,” says he.
“You and me both, brother,” I says. George had us already in motion. We’d detached from the floor, landing gear retracted, turned to exit the docking bay door. The closed door.
I gestured angrily at the door, looked up at the ceiling of the flight deck. “George,” I said, “open the goddamn door and get us gone from this dump.”
“The door mechanism is not meant to open with the bay fully pressurized. I can have a bot out to close off and depressurize the bay momentarily.”
“Like hell,” I said. “Remember the window? Gun.” Sarah, seated in the captains chair between and behind the two pilots seats, just nodded.
The George, you’ll recall, was a cargo ship, not a warship. We didn’t have missile racks and big-ass laser batteries. But you gotta be nuts to go out into the dark in a ship that cannot drive off the occasional dumbass who thinks it’d be an entertaining jape to try to take your ship from you. So we had anti-armor machine guns mounted in retractable turrets, top and bottom, fore and aft. Pretty much an off the shelf system. Illegal on a few worlds; but those worlds sucked, and we didn’t go there. The machine guns did a fair job of turning the door into a ragged mesh; the engines on full thrust, along with the pressure of the remaining air in the bay, were more than enough to punch us through. Sounded horrible, though… scraped up the whole ship. At the time, I couldn’t have cared less.
“Stand us off ten kilometers,” Sarah said. And so we drifted out to ten kilometers, turned the ship to look at the station. It looked just as it had on the way in, if you didn’t notice the screwed up docking bay. At least nothing reached out to grab us.
We looked at the station for maybe twenty seconds. “Can anything think of one reason why we should stay here a minute longer?” Cap’n Sarah asked. Nobody said a word. “Then let’s gooooooooo.”
“No can do,” George replied. “Hyperdrive is not functional.”
“What? Why?” I’m pretty sure that was all three of us.
“Outer surface hyperdrive circuitry was damaged when we shoved our way through the door. Had we waited a few moments for a bot to properly operate the docking bay pressure cycle, like I recommended, we would now be on our way back to Atlantis.” Sumbitch sounded smug as all get-out. All I could do was sigh.
Sarah also sighed. “Send bots out to fix the circuitry.”
“Already done.”
“Time to finish?”
“No more than a half hour.”
“Fine.” Another sigh. We were all silent for a bit. While this was by no means good news, it wasn’t terrible news. And it seemed unlikely that anything would come out of the station to get us. We had escaped whatever it was that had trashed the station, with only the loss of a fare… and a passenger. All we had to do was wait a bit, and we could go home. It seems odd to me now, but at the time I never even thought about the salvage value of the station. But then, how do you claim a derelict city?
After a few silent minutes, Sarah asked, “What else in this system was populated?”
George explained, in reasonable terms but a condescending tone, that several thousand people worked at the tritium mining facilities around the gas giant named Jenkins. There was a Mars-mass planet (Landis) only a million kilometers from the primary; an Earth-mass planet (Yenne) about 7 million kilometers out. Both were tidally locked, hot as hell and loaded with enough heavy metals to be worth automated mining facilities that sometimes had visits. There were a number of asteroids and comets that had small farmsteads on them, but nothing major. Attempts at contact via radio and hyperwave continued to be unsuccessful.
“What’s closest?” Sarah asked. Landis was closest at the moment. “Put it on screen. Let’s see what’s there. Maybe someone can tell us what’s going on.”
The one really good telescope the George had emerged from its bay in the nose of the ship and turned towards Landis. The image appeared on the main display… an empty patch of sky, slightly lit up by the proximity of the star. “Landis is not in the position charts say it should be in,” George said, sounding annoyed. I just knew that he was blaming humans for incorrect data entry. Sarah asked him to please look for Landis, wherever it was. After panning the scope over a wide swath of sky, he found the only thing in Landis’ orbit. But instead of a super-hot metal-rich world a bit smaller than Mars, all that appeared was a dust cloud. “Where’s Landis?” Loff asked. I thought it was a fair question.
The image slewed back and forth, scanning the vicinity. Nothing appeared apart from the dust cloud. Data on the screen gave approximate dimensions of the cloud: a prolate spheroid about fifty thousand kilometers thick by eighty thousand kilometers long. Mass readings indicated that it was only a few percent the mass of Landis. George was silent. “OK, show me Yenne,” Sarah said. The telescope repositioned for a few minutes; clearly Yenne was also out of place. At last, though, George found it. This time, there was a planet dead-center on the screen. For a split second I was relieved. But relief didn’t last, replaced with… I don’t even know.