“They’re going to hit us,” someone shouted, and then the entire asteroid rocked violently, so violently that Brent could have sworn that it was on the verge of coming apart completely. The lights flickered and went out as consoles exploded, warning that massive power surges were running amok through the asteroid… and all the emergency systems had failed. As the command centre was plunged into darkness, he could hear, faintly, the sound of escaping air.
If Sparta Asteroid had been a rotating asteroid, using its spin to generate artificial gravity rather than gravity generators, the Killer attack would have killed them all. The combination of the spin and damaged sections would have completed the task of ripping the asteroid apart. As it was, they were alive — barely — even if they were out of the fight. Brent brought up his command-level augmentation implants — he detested using them, but this was an emergency — and tried to ping for a working computer processor. There was no response, even when he made a general broadcast on the emergency frequency; the asteroid’s emergency system had been completely knocked out. He pushed aside the thought of how much redundancy had been built into the system — failure shouldn’t have been a possibility unless the asteroid had been completely destroyed — and struggled to pull himself together. The noise of escaping air was growing louder and the command crew were starting to panic. That could not be allowed.
“Quiet,” he bellowed, half-wishing that he had a chemical weapon to fire into the air. That would have assured him of their attention, although perhaps not reassured them of his sanity. “All right, the asteroid has taken a hit and we’re out of the fight. We have to concentrate on survival and not panic. Bring up your implants and prepare to activate your internal force fields.”
There was no argument, although he heard the sound of snivelling in the background. He didn’t blame the person who was on the verge of breaking down — they had anticipated a quick death from Killer weapons, not death by exposure to hard vacuum — but there was no time to panic. The internal force fields they all had as part of their combat augmentation would provide limited protection, yet he knew all too well that they would last — at best — an hour at most. Force fields drained power like a small black hole.
He felt his feet leaving the deck and realised that something else had failed. The gravity generator had been knocked out as well. He considered it for a moment and decided that it probably worked in their favour. It would be easier to rescue anyone trapped under falling stone. He triggered his augmented vision as well and peered around the command centre, marvelling at the strange view in front of him. The seventeen men and women in the command centre were clinging on for dear life, hanging on to their useless consoles or chairs. A handful of men were drifting in the air, unmoving; they’d been killed when their consoles exploded. The survivors were lucky that the compartment hadn’t caught fire.
“Bring up your augmented vision and focus on me,” Brent ordered. A faint draft was pulling him towards a hatch leading out towards the docks at one end of the asteroid, suggesting the location of the leak. He followed it reluctantly, activating his communications implant and ordering a permanent scan for other communicator signatures. If someone was trapped and helpless, they would be using their implants to call for help. “We cannot stay here.”
He skimmed through his memory of the asteroid’s layout and found the location of the emergency supplies, the ones that no one had ever considered that they might actually needed. He altered the map manually — it took longer than having the computers do it for him — and transmitted the altered map to the remaining people in the compartment. They responded, opening up their own communications systems, adding their signals to his broadband call for help. There was an outside chance that they would attract the Killers, Brent knew, but he had chosen to dismiss that possibility. If the Defence Force starships on the outside didn’t rescue them, they would die when their force fields ran out of power.
“Follow me,” he ordered, after a quick check of the survivors. There were a handful of tiny injuries, but no one had been so badly injured that they couldn’t move. The unlucky ones were dead. He pulled himself over to the cracked hatch and hunted for the manual release. Captain Waianae joined him a moment later and added her strength to his, allowing them to slowly crank the hatch open completely. They looked out onto a scene from hell. The air was visible now as it cooled, sucked down the corridor into the distance… the Killer ship, he realised, had to have impacted just a few kilometres away from their position. Who in their right mind would have thought of using a starship to smash an asteroid wide open?
We would have, he thought ruefully, as the cold started to seep into his bones. He shared a long glance with Captain Waianae and then activated his internal force field. The Killer tactic had proven spectacularly successful and now they had either departed or were engaging the Defence Force. He couldn’t do anything about it from his position, he knew, so he pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on the map. If they didn’t reach the emergency supplies, they were dead.
The remaining command staff followed him, struggling against the pull caused by the outpouring of air. The asteroid had enough air to keep generating the current for a few more minutes yet, Brent decided, but they couldn’t wait for it to run out and leave them standing in a vacuum. The emergency force fields that should have prevented more than a tiny outpouring of air had obviously failed as well, not entirely to his surprise. Humans had used kinetic weapons before — indeed, on Earth, early firearms had all been kinetic weapons — but it had been a long time since anyone had used kinetic weapons on such a scale. He pulled himself from handhold to handhold, wishing for a jetpack or some other way to manoeuvre without risking being sucked out by the airflow, and somehow made it all the way through the corridor. It was a moment later when he saw the dead bodies.
They had clearly been caught by surprise; three women, one man, all wearing Defence Force uniforms. They had had no time to raise their own force fields, or brace for impact; the shock had smashed them against the corridor and killed them. The outpouring of air was pulling them gradually towards the breach in the hull; Brent wanted to catch them, to tether them to something so that their bodies could be recovered later, but they had no time. He found himself hoping that the bodies patched the rent in the hull, although he knew that that wasn’t likely. Their problems were far worse than a single tiny hull breach.
“Keep going,” he hissed, as two of the command staff looked as if they were about to give up and wait for death. The outpouring of air was slowing down now, suggesting that the air supply was running out. There were more objects floating in the air now, everything from vital equipment to clothes and supplies; he found himself battering them out of his way as they crawled into the emergency compartment. The young Brent had wondered why the Community bothered insisting that emergency compartments were part and parcel of every asteroid settlement; the older and wiser Admiral was grateful that they were there. He keyed the door and it hissed open, revealing a sealed compartment and enough supplies to outfit all of the command staff.
“Get everyone into suits and equipped,” he ordered Captain Waianae, who moved to obey. Pulling on suits without gravity wasn’t easy, but they would manage it, somehow. The entire Defence Force took classes in how to move without gravity, although Brent knew that most cadets passed the exams and then never went outside a gravity field again. He made a mental note to insist that — if they got out alive — everyone in the Defence Force was exposed to zero-gravity at least once per year. The lesson should have been learned long ago.