Chapter 7: Meltdown

Eriksen was awoken by blaring alarms. He rose out of his bed groggily, rubbing his eyes and wincing as his soreness from the previous day’s activities made his muscles ache. What the hell was going on now?

He pulled on his clothes and left his room, yawning sleepily as he tapped at a nearby terminal. Nazka emerged from the cabin adjacent to his, already in a bad mood, her ears flat against her head as she sidled up next to him.

“What’s with all the fuckin’ noise?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he replied irately, scrutinizing the touch panel as she flicked her tail impatiently. “Oh fuck, that’s not good.”

“What’s not good?”

“Reactor three is nearing its thermal limit, it must have been damaged in the explosion. The early warning system has been triggered.”

“Early warning?”

“Yeah, that reactor is nuclear, it uses plutonium fuel rods to heat water which turns into steam and is forced through a pipe. The steam then spins a turbine to generate electricity, which is fed into the superlight drive and stored in the battery banks to power the ship. You can get smaller ones, like the ones on Yachts or Coursers. Those are much more compact, but they generate a lot less power. On a ship this size, we use large-scale models, advanced boiling reactors. Problem is if they overheat then they tend to uh ... catastrophically melt down and turn the entire aft section of the ship into radioactive slag while dosing the crew with enough rads that your cancers will get cancer.”

“You idiot!” Nazka exclaimed. He recoiled, afraid that she might claw him. “This is your own damned fault. If you hadn’t blown a big ass hole in the engine room, then this wouldn’t be happening. We’re lucky those reactors didn’t go off like a fucking tac nuke!”

“Nuclear reactors can’t explode,” he snapped, “nuclear bombs work completely differently. Not that I’d expect someone who is awed by shower heads to understand nuclear physics.”

“You’re a fucking freight jockey, don’t talk down to me when the only reason you know any more than I do is because you had to pass an employee safety exam.”

“Oh very funny,” he shot back. “Unless you’d like to trade insults until the radiation scrambles our genes like a DNA omelet, we need to do something about this and fast.”

“Well, what are you supposed to do in this situation? What’s the standard procedure?”

“I don’t know, I missed the employee safety exam. I was jacking off that day.” She clocked him with a backhand, gentle by her standards, but it sent him reeling. He steadied himself and glared at her as she planted her hands on her wide hips. “Fine fine, there are two solutions to this problem. Either we cool the rods in the reactor, or we eject the core into space. Since I don’t actually know how to even diagnose a problem with a nuclear reactor, let alone fix one, our best bet is to ditch the thing.”

“And how do we do that?”

Eriksen lifted two of his fingers up to her.

“Two ways. The cores can be ejected by entering an emergency override code into the main console in the cockpit, or via a manual release in the engineering section.”

“Time’s up,” Nazka spat, “open the damned cockpit door. You don’t have a choice now.”

“Oh, I’m not opening that fucking door,” Eriksen replied with a wide grin. “That door stays closed as long as you’re on this ship. I’ll let the freighter melt into a puddle of molten slag before I let you win.”

“Fine. Then I’m going to get on my shuttle, return to the Black Claw, and leave you to cook along with this forsaken heap of scrap.” She kicked the wall in frustration and spat something in her native language, insults and curses no doubt.

“No you’re not, because if you do that, then you get nothing. No loot, no freighter, and no Eriksen. I know that you pirates operate on a thin profit margin, how much did it cost you to buy that ship and outfit your crew, how much have you spent so far in this venture? My bet is that if you leave empty-handed, you’re ruined, you can’t afford to let this vessel be destroyed any more than I can.”

She reached down and gripped him by the collar of his shirt, lifting him off the deck and bringing him up to her face, her hackles raised as she snarled at him. Eriksen wasn’t fazed, it was all for show. He was holding the reigns now, and she knew it as well as he did. She dropped him back down, loosing a long sigh and running her claws through her hair in exasperation.

“Alright, what do we do?”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy crawling into an enclosed space with a reactor that could go critical at any moment. Might as well stick my head in a fucking microwave. The aft section has no atmosphere anyway, it’s open to space, so I say we EVA along the outside of the hull and trigger the release from there.”

“You can do that? There’s a release on the outside of the ship?”

“Yeah, for use if the aft section is somehow inaccessible from the inside. These freighters are expensive, and they’re built to last. The redundant systems have redundant systems.” She looked conflicted, worried, and Eriksen’s smile only grew as he watched her fret. “What’s the matter, have you never spacewalked before?”

“Not ... as such, no,” Nazka replied hesitantly.

“You have a pressure suit, right? You won’t last with just your oxygen mask. In fact, I can’t believe that you survived as long as you did when I vented the engine room, a human would have been killed regardless.”

“Yeah, there’s one in the shuttle, but...” She trailed off, crossing her arms over her chest defensively, her hardcase demeanor somewhat lessened by her flat ears and her drooping tail.

“I can’t believe it,” Eriksen laughed, “you’re fucking scared!”

“I am not!” Nazka shot back.

“Yes you are! For God’s sake Nazka, there are janitors who get paid peanuts to clean the hulls of ships, and you can’t do one spacewalk? What happened to your superior warrior primitivist bullshit?”

“I am not scared,” she insisted, “I’ve just never done it before.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” Eriksen said as he gestured towards the hangar door. “Go suit up, and I’ll meet you in the bay in ten.”

Eriksen stood at the bottom of the shuttle’s ramp, clad in one of the remaining emergency pressure suits, the yellow plastic rustling as he sealed the hood. It wasn’t ideal, these weren’t intended for use in deep space. If anything larger than a dust particle hit him, it would tear through the suit like it was made of wet toilet paper. The suit’s lining was about as thin as their chances of actually pulling this off before the reactor melted like an ice cream dropped on a hot sidewalk. He waited impatiently for Nazka to emerge, every second that she wasted brought them one second closer to nuclear doom.

She finally descended the ramp, clad from head to toe in a red space suit. He had never even seen her wear shoes and so he was unused to seeing her completely covered. Even her long tail was encased in a flexible tube, and her boots looked more like reproductions of her paw-like feet, with magnets visible where her fleshy pads would have been. It was lightly armored, and the joints were reinforced to give it the look of an old-timey deep-sea diving suit, albeit much lighter and far more flexible. She seemed out of practice as she came to a stop beside him. She glanced down at him past her narrow visor, and he gestured to her with his fingers, indicating what channel to tune her short-range radio to. There was a hiss of static and then her shallow breathing came through on the other end, she sounded nervous.

“So let me get this straight,” Eriksen said derisively, looking her up and down. “You’ve never done an EVA before, yet you thought it best to buy a light combat suit? You’ve never taken the time to train in the thing, that’s obvious from the way you’re walking, yet you had the time to paint that ridiculous black claw logo on the chest piece? Is that a registered trademark? Are you running a pirate crew or a fucking LLC?”

“Let’s just get this over with,” she grumbled, her apprehension now greater than her anger.

“Very well, follow me.”

Eriksen made his way forward towards the shimmering force field that shielded the hangar bay from open space. It would keep the atmosphere in, but it would allow solid objects to pass uninhibited. Towards the far left was a ramp that fell out of view at an unnatural angle, connecting the deck to the hull outside in a way that would allow someone in a suit to easily walk along it. He stopped beside a control panel a short distance from the field, tapping at the screen with his gloved hands.

“I’m gonna turn off the AG field,” he explained, gesturing Nazka forward to stand beside the glowing wall of energy. “We don’t need the artificial gravity making this any screwier or more disorienting than it needs to be. Make sure your mag boots are turned on, the lights on the heels should be red. On my mark, walk down the ramp.”

“Okay,” she replied, “I’ll make sure to ... hey wait! The magnetic boots are turned on when the light is green, asshole. I know that. Were you going to make me walk right off the ship and into space? You miserable little,” she trailed off into a string of alien curse words as Eriksen gave her an exaggerated shrug.

“It was worth a shot. Now get ready, I’m about to shut off the gravity.”

He heard her gasp in alarm as the artificial gravity field powered down, and he felt his body attempting to float off the deck, secured by his magnetic boots.

“You’re not really falling,” he said, attempting to reassure the obviously frightened alien as she was no use to him hysterical. “That’s just the liquid in your inner ear floating around. Your body can’t get its balance without gravity and so it sends signals telling you that you’re in free fall. Use the boots, one foot on the ground at all times, be conscious of how and where you’re walking. One mistake and you might float off into space. You only need to be out of range of my arm to be lost forever, I’m not trying to scare you I just want you to stay alert. This is potentially dangerous, but it will be perfectly safe as long as you remain in control, understand?”

She nodded, steeling herself. Making sure that his boots were secure and working correctly, Eriksen took a few faltering steps down the ramp and passed through the shimmering barrier, his head spinning as his brain tried to make sense of the angled surface. The hull stretched out before him, the only horizon in sight, the endless expanse of space making for a surreal and terrifying sky. Nazka kept pace behind him, wobbling in her mag boots, still trying to find the right gait in this new environment.

“Look at the hull,” Eriksen panted. Moving around in low-G was surprisingly hard work. “Pretend it’s the ground, then slowly raise your eyes. Try to trick your brain into thinking that it can see a horizon. Don’t look up, you’ll just get disoriented. If you start to panic, then you might make a mistake and fall away.”

“You’re not helping,” she grumbled over the radio. She sounded overstimulated.

“We’re heading aft,” he added, ignoring her comment. “We need to walk over the support beams that make up the midsection of the freighter, where the cargo containers are hitched. It’s going to feel like you’re walking a tightrope a million miles in the air, just try not to look down, and remember that your boots will secure you to the metal. As long as there’s one magnet touching the hull you won’t fall, it’s impossible.”

It was hard to grasp the sheer size of the vessel from the inside, but once you were looking at the hull as it extended off into the distance, the thousand-foot behemoth really came into perspective. Without the haze of an atmosphere, you could see crisp and clear almost infinitely, it screwed with your sense of scale. They had emerged from the hangar, which put them close to where the skeletal scaffold connected to the front section of the ship, their view of the distant aft section blocked by some of the cargo containers that were secured to the frame. Eriksen made his way forward carefully, his eyes fixed to the deck so as to avoid a potentially fatal trip on any protruding pipes or panels that decorated the ship’s surface. These vessels were not designed for atmospheric flight, and so there was no effort wasted on making their hulls flush and clean. If it was cheaper or more expedient to leave something jutting out of the hull then there it would stay. He couldn’t easily turn his head to keep an eye on Nazka, but he could hear her breathing into her suit radio, she seemed to be doing okay.

It was a short walk to the scaffold, and the pair stopped just short of it, examining the long stretch of metal tubes that lay before them. The tubes were thick and large, they had to take the stresses of acceleration as the engines pushed the great ship from the rear, and they were about as thick around as an oil drum as a result. Quite comfortable to walk on for a human, less so for the larger Borealan. They were scarcely thicker than her own thighs.

“One foot in front of the other,” Eriksen advised, “take it one step at a time and keep your eyes forward.”

There was no real sense of motion in space, you could be moving at thousands of meters per second, and you’d never know it without another object for reference. The vessel might as well have been standing still as the immovable stars dotted the velvet blackness of space all around them. When a ship entered superlight, it conserved any momentum that it had built up prior to the jump, maintaining its speed once deposited back into realspace. The freighter was still cruising at full speed, and despite the damage to the engines it would continue to do so until something caused it to decelerate. There was no friction or drag in space that would slow an object over time. Gravity would be a factor, but not this far from any planetary bodies. There were various gravity assist maneuvers that could be attempted in order to gain or shed velocity in the case of a main engine failure. There was something incredibly primal and gratifying about harnessing the very forces of nature itself to propel a vessel, like playing with some cosmic executive toy, but Eriksen had only attempted it in the simulator. He didn’t fancy trying it out under real conditions. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.

He took a step out onto the nearest metal tube, feeling the magnets in his boot secure him to it, and he began his perilous journey. He had to resist the urge to extend his arms in order to balance himself like a child walking along a felled log, there was no up or down here, and the only balance that mattered was making sure that his left boot had a solid hold before he put the right one forward.

“Follow behind me,” he said to Nazka, “but not too close. I don’t want you knocking into me and sending me flying away.”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered, “just my luck to raid the only freighter in the system that’s piloted by a lunatic.”

“Some might say that leaving the safety of a planet is lunacy, yet here we both are,” Eriksen said as he made his way along the support. “No atmosphere for us to breathe and no magnetosphere to protect us from radiation, no sun to keep us from freezing in an instant, only what food and water we can carry with us. We accepted the risks along with the rewards. Space is a hostile place and accidents were bound to happen, you knew that. Every time we leave the dock it could be our last voyage, doesn’t matter how prepared you are. You might get pasted by a rogue meteorite or barbecued by a solar flare or a gamma-ray burst.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Not really, I’m just saying, worrying about your mortality is kind of pointless in this line of work. I once heard a story about a guy who was killed by a grain of sand, can you believe that? Dude was performing maintenance on a radio antenna on the hull of a station, and a micro-meteor smaller than a grain of rice hit him. It was going so fast that it punched a hole the size of a fist straight through his suit and blew him open like he’d been hit by a railgun. In all the infinite reaches of the universe, there was one speck of sand and one random nobody. Their paths happened to coincide through some bizarre fluke of fate, and he could never have seen it coming.”

“What about my crew?” she asked. “Did they see it coming when you blasted them into space?”

“Your line of work, if you can call it that, is very high reward but also very high risk. Those guys knew that any one mission could have been their last. If I had armed security guards or ship-to-ship defenses, then they would have been equally dead. Castle doctrine, you force your way onto my ship, I get to use whatever force I deem necessary to remove you under UN law. You know how you avoid getting spaced? Don’t be a fucking pirate.”