T-Plus 13

The room went silent again as the Chief’s words sank in. Everyone’s faces were varying degrees of disgust or shock. Only Emerson and Richardson’s faces remained even, although the Navigator's face paled a few barely noticeable shades. Oliver surveyed the now mute room, his own dark thoughts and hypothesis forming in a corner of his mind. He shook his head and slammed the conference table, bringing everyone and himself back to the more pressing issue.

"Enough of this, our first priority is to get off this Station. Once we get out of here, then how, what, and when those aliens evolved won't matter. Okay, we have tethers and three suits. Joey, you're stuck with the Large one. Daniel, are you still okay for an excursion?"

Daniel turned the question over to the doctor still hovering around him. She looked up from her task, giving her patient another once-over before announcing her verdict.

"He should be fine. These aren't anything too serious. Just be careful when lifting your injured arm, and don't carry anything too heavy until it heals sufficiently."

Oliver nodded, breathing out a sigh of relief before continuing on.

"Good, next issue. When the three of us are out there, other than whoever's watching the tether, the rest of you need to hunt down an operational system."

"Any computer system?" Lucky asked.

"Anything that can send signals," Oliver replied. "At this point, it'll be fine if we can spit Morse code out at Triton."

"If we can see what's wrong with this first transformer, we can get the emergency power back up, and get some light again."

"With emergency lights, the clinics' systems would be able to transmit messages," Emerson said.

"Okay, then the search party check the clinics on each floor first. Avoid the second floor hospital for now...."

Oliver's voice trailed off, but everyone knew why he said that. Daniel's wound was only freshly wrapped.

"We need two people to stay behind and mind the tether. The rest of you, start searching everywhere you can.”

He beckoned toward Daniel and Joey, nodding over to where the three suits hung on the back of unused chairs.

“We’re going to get suited up and head out.”

The technician adjourned the meeting with another slam of his fist on the table. Everyone but the three who already knew they what they were doing decided who was going to stay behind with them using the most simplistic method they could: the age-old rock, paper, scissors. After a round-robin game, the Chief and Toast had the honor of staying behind. Oliver didn’t know if he should feel relieved or not with that combination.

Everyone dispersed, leaving Oliver, Daniel, and Joey in the room by themselves. Oliver tossed the other Medium suit over to Daniel, leaving the intern to go get his suit himself. Oliver unzipped the suit in his hand, shaking the legs out in front of him. He stepped into the suit right foot first, followed by the other foot. With the usual hopping in place and stretching his leg through the suit’s leg into the attached boot, he pulled the suit up to his waist. Next were his arms, and one at a time, he shoved his arms in and shrugged the suit over his shoulder. He held the zipper straight, and zipped himself up in the front. He picked up the helmet, tucking it under his arm for later.

The other two had also suited up. Joey’s suit looked a bit loose in some areas on him, but the length of it fit almost right. If he flapped his arms while keeping them straight and waddled for a bit, he’d look like an Earthen penguin with elongated wings.

“Ready?” Daniel asked.

Oliver and Joey nodded, hefting their helmets up and heading into the hangar. They followed the ready made path. Oliver was already sweating again by the end of the trail, the suit’s extra padding that served to keep the cold of space at bay doing its job too well indoors. Waiting by the end of the path, by the hangar doors, were the Chief and Toast. Sitting by their feet were the tethers they’d brought back and the tool box Oliver had acquired from Lab 5C a while back.

“Alright boys, you know the drill,” the Chief said, starting up his usual space excursion spiel. Oliver and Daniel had heard it every time they had to go, but this was Joey’s first time hearing it. “Keep tethered. If you start drifting, one of the others will attempt to grab you, but if you leave the range of our tethers, you’re on your own. Usually, we’d assemble a rescue operation and grab you with one of the drones or get the security squad to get off their asses, but we don’t have any of that right now. Stay close, no wide movements. This first excursion is only for scouting purposes. Once you figure out what’s wrong with the power system outside, come back, and we’ll regroup with the items we need to repair it.”

The three of them nodded. Joey was nodding rapidly, his head bobbing up and down as he absorbed the information. Daniel patted his shoulder.

“Relax. You’ll be fine. Just stay between Oliver and me.”

Joey continued his non-stop nodding. At this point, Oliver suspected the intern’s nervous system had overridden everything, and his nervous shaking had gotten to his head. Literally.

The Chief handed each of them a tether, the other end already tied to the rings beside the hatch doors. Oliver demonstrated to Joey how to loop it around his waist in a secure manner, clipping it in place. After making sure the intern had it on properly, Daniel followed suit. Oliver pulled his helmet over his head, latching the bottom to his suit’s collar. With the helmet covering his head, the sounds outside were muted. The usually quiet surroundings had become eerily more so. The visor was tinted, making the dark interior of the hangar almost pitch-black, but he’d appreciate the tinting once they got outside.

He turned to Daniel and Joey, nodding his head. They bobbed their helmeted heads back. The Chief added yet another nod to the chain of nods, and then he and Toast stepped over to the side, forcing open the double doors of the hatch. Usually, they were powered and would be able to open with the click of a button, but that wasn’t available to them at the moment. After the last time when a certain lab knocked the power out, they’d added handle-bars to the doors to make it easier for two people to open the hatch by hand.

The Chief and Toast pulled the doors apart, opening a gap just large enough for the three of them to squeeze through. Once all of them made it past, they let the doors close with a loud, reverberating boom. The room they entered was completely dark, and they hadn’t brought their flashlights with them. Oliver walked forward, putting his hands out in front of him. With a few steps, his gloved hands hit the smooth surface of the outer door. A loud thud and an equally loud yelp that could be heard through the helmets followed, announcing Joey’s arrival at the door.

Oliver ignored the intern in pain, patting the smoothness of the door and sliding his hands across its surface until he found the handles. He tapped another pair of gloves, which patted the back of his arm. Joey’s loud whimpering still came from further to the side, so the mysterious gloves must belong to Daniel. With the capable technician already claiming this handlebar, Oliver continued in search of the other one.

Once he got a hold of the unclaimed handle, he pounded the door to signal to Daniel he was ready. A muffled bang replied back. Oliver pulled his handle, straining all the muscles in his arms and back as he heaved the door. With a bit more strain, the doors slid open, allowing a thin strip of light in. Joey stopped his whining once the light revealed his figure. The further they opened the door, the more light poured in and the less he felt gravity affecting him. Oliver squinted despite the tinted visors. This was the first bright light they’d seen since the alien invasion happened, and how dearly had he missed being able to see more than a narrow view.

They made sure their tethers were on tight again before they floated out past the edge of the Station. Daniel held Joey back, waving at Oliver to go first. He nodded, swinging out to the other side of the door. It stayed in place without shutting. Seeing that it was secure, he turned his attention out of the Station.

The view from right here always stunned him breathless no matter how many times he looked out. In the far distance, the light of the Sun washed over everything in the galaxy. It was much dimmer out here than if they were back on Earth or Mars, but it was still bright enough to illuminate the blue outline of Neptune. Revolving below them was Triton, its terraformed surface overflowing with life and people who didn’t even realize the Station above them was experiencing an alien crisis. They were too high up for him to recognize anything, but he knew, the only people that could help them were down there. The Space Elevator that connected them still glowed with power, its energy coming directly from the light that were absorbed by the solar panels situated all over it. But the most amazing view wasn’t that. It wasn’t civilization and how far they’d come. It was the immense universe that surrounded them.

If he ignored the closer, brighter lights nearby and focused outward, he could see the stars of other galaxies twinkling. They blinked, they shone with brilliance, and sometimes they radiated with power that could be seen from where he stood. Some of those galaxies were only reachable with Navigators, and those transport tickets cost an entire lifetime’s worth of paychecks. But regardless, this closeup view of what everyone down there considered the night sky was the reason why he wanted to go up into space.

A gloved hand patted his shoulder, pulling him back from his reverie. Oliver turned to see Daniel nodding and smiling with understanding. Behind him, Joey was still in a complete daze, not even realizing his eyes had widened to their maximum. Daniel went over and waved his gloved hand in front of the intern, pulling him out of his wonder. The intern snapped back, patting his face in embarrassment.

Oliver turned his attention back outside again. He made his way out of the Station, keeping a hand on the handles that were welded into the side of the Station for excursions like this. There was no floor beneath him and no roof above him, but neither was there any fear of “falling.” Out here, there was no such thing. The only thing he feared was losing the tether and being stranded out here, left to float with no way to propel himself toward safety. He floated along, a strong grip on one handlebar at a time, aiming for the transformer that powered their emergency power.

With him checking over his shoulder to make sure Joey was following, the journey was slower than usual. Daniel was brought up the rear, ready to grab the intern if his grip slipped even for a second.

Going from no light to all the light in the world was a sudden change, but Oliver’s sight adjusted with the help of the visor. Soon, they sped up their pace once the intern got a handle on what to do. Oliver took the time to observe the damages that accrued on the surface of the Station during the last week or so. There were no noticeable breaches on this end, but there were various injuries and bruises on the gray metal. Some sections looked like something hit against it from the inside bending it outwards and creating lumps; other sections looked like a drone had hit it from the outside, denting the metal inwards. Certain sections had long scratches that ran along the surface. Oliver paused on one particularly deep cut, guesstimating how far in it went with his eyes. It looked about three inches deep and two inches wide. Nothing they couldn’t fix within a week, but with the amount of damages he’d seen, this would take several months to completely fix up if the same frequency of damages covered the entire Station.

They rounded the curve of the Station and finally spotted the transformer they’d been aiming for.

“Now, that’s going to be a lot of work,” Oliver muttered to himself when he saw it from afar.

The transformer was attached on one of the columns that extended out to the Station’s outer gravitational ring. The entire column had a twisted and exposed several holes in the outer shell. Luckily, nothing was actually in the columns other than vents and electrical cords. The transformer itself looked fine on the surface, albeit a bit dented on one side, being largely unaffected from whatever happened inside the column, but the solar panels that sat nearby it to power it had disappeared somewhere.

Oliver alighted down beside the transformer with Joey and Daniel. The two senior technicians rubbed their heads, or rather, their helmets and gave each other worried glances. This became a lot messier than they were hoping.