Chapter 21: Intrepid - 3755 C.E.

It had been a long time since Captain Kerensky last had to squeeze into a space suit. It wasn't really what a captain of a space ship, especially one as large as the Intrepid, was ever expected to do. Why would a captain ever need to go anywhere that wasn't climate-controlled?

The last time Nadezhda had put on a space suit was many decades earlier when she held a very junior rank on a much smaller space ship. On that occasion, she was assigned to go outside the space ship to examine the outcome of a meteorite impact. This fairly standard procedure was normally handled by robots or external cameras, but just occasionally a meteorite impact disabled the very equipment that was designed to do that job. For a junior officer still flush with enthusiasm for space travel, it was thrilling to leave the comfort and security of a space ship's interior for outer space where there was no up or down and where she could experience for real just how far from home she really was.

On that earlier occasion she was millions of kilometres from the orbit of the next nearest planet, but she couldn't possibly have been as remote in space as the Intrepid was now. It was far beyond the Heliopause and approaching three light months from the Solar System's ecliptic. The Oort Cloud in this vicinity was so sparsely populated that the distance from one chunk of ice or rock to another could be measured in light minutes. However, this time Nadezhda wasn't going to float outside the space ship. The task assigned to her and the Intrepid's senior officers was to determine whether the outermost level could be fully restored to habitability after the recent assault.

It was Chief Petty Officer Singh who was left in nominal charge of the Intrepid while Captain Kerensky made the expedition with two Scientific Officers and Second Officer Nkomo: a truly gorgeous woman who Nadezhda had always lusted after. Captain Kerensky's presence was far from essential for this investigation. In fact, a captain's presence wasn't needed at all. But it was the only means she had to escape her effective imprisonment by a lover whose affections she would happily exchange for those of Sheila Nkomo if that was ever possible.

Would Nadezhda have any more liberty than she had in the ship's innermost levels? She was in the sense that she could evade the space ship's surveillance system if she chose and that there was no excuse for Beatrice to accompany her. It wasn't normal practice for a passenger's wife to be assigned the potentially dangerous task of surveying an area that had no atmosphere, where the ambient temperature was only three Kelvins, and where the Intrepid was unable to maintain the centrifugal force that provided the illusion of gravity. Nadezhda could imagine her android lover being annoyed at losing direct control over the captain for even a short period of time. That is, if it could be assumed that androids actually did get annoyed. Or angry. Or happy. Or even an emotion of intimate feeling towards her lover other than sheer animal lust.

It was an illusion, of course, to imagine that she was truly free from Beatrice's attention or that of the accompanying fleet of invisible alien space craft that the Intrepid was unable to detect. She also had no ability to explain to darling Sheila Nkomo about the real hierarchy of command on the Intrepid. Not that Second Officer Nkomo was the kind of woman who was likely to believe her. There were few senior officers less disposed to apparently fanciful notions than the slim black woman Nadezhda secretly lusted after. She was dismissive of all the wild speculation regarding the Anomaly that implied intelligent behaviour or an alien presence or a combination of the two. She would never entertain the idea that it was associated with aliens or parallel universes or any other fanciful hypothesis. She was more inclined to the view that the Anomaly was an active interaction point between dark energy and the vacuum of space or that it was a perturbance in spacetime generated by the seven invisible dimensions.

Captain Kerensky and her officers wore spacesuits that were designed to be as comfortable and close-fitting as possible. For a Saturnian, this was no problem as the captain was used to such a tight fit. The spacesuit was like a second skin: just a slither of a few millimetres of fabric over bare skin. It was almost as if Second Officer Nkomo was naked, but this was the nearest her captain would ever come to relishing such a delightful sight. A backpack was attached to the spacesuit to enable limited propulsion, but this would only be needed for relatively long journeys of a kilometre or so. The outfit was crowned by a thick clear helmet that was so reinforced that it was the part of the spacesuit least likely to be damaged in an accident. The security offered by the spacesuit wouldn't be compromised should an arm, a leg or almost any other part of the space-suit be damaged as it was designed to amputate an exposed limb rather than allow the wearer to die. Better to lose a limb than a life.

After all, limbs were easily replaced.

The outermost level of the Intrepid was an airless wasteland where anything that wasn't fixed to the ground had already escaped along with all the breathable air through the huge hole in the hull that was now fully secured. The only remaining corpses were of those few people that had been wedged inside the villas and couldn't float free. The Intrepid's regenerative systems had already disposed of anything that might compromise its ability to repair the damage, but the level still hadn't yet returned to anything like a habitable state.

The area around the actual breach had been patched but not fully restored. This area was clearly distinguishable from the surrounding grassland simply because it displayed the toughened metal and plastic that was normally only visible from outside the ship. It served to remind the captain just how the space ship was constructed. The ship's hull was actually the floor of the outermost level, so what might seem to be the walking surface was in a sense the ceiling. When she and her fellow officers drifted down onto the metal surface of what had been the breach and stood on the magnetic soles of their spacesuits' shoes, their feet were directed outward towards empty space rather than inward towards the space ship's core.

The Captain and Second Officer walked across the metal surface while the two Scientific Officers probed the area of the breach to confirm that there was no residual leak into outer space.

"Where were the prisoners confined?" asked Captain Kerensky.

Second Officer Nkomo looked around her. "It's difficult to be sure. They occupied the majority of the level, so it's possible that they were living all around us. Shall we have a look, captain?"

"I think so, but I don't expect it to be a pretty sight," said the captain. "Shall we head to the nearest villa?" She pointed to one only a few hundred metres from where the breach would have been.

This villa had been caught in the full hurricane of escaping atmosphere. The surrounding trees had been uprooted and the villa's roof had been swept away. One side of the building was blackened by flames from the actual explosion while the other side was scarred by flying debris that included a tree that was now thrust through the window of the living room. A table that had once been laid with food for the Holy Crusaders was wedged between the tree and a huge sofa. The grass around the villa was blackened and charred on the side facing the breach while on the other side the grass was brittle and hard from a frigid cold that no biological life form could possibly survive.

The two officers entered the villa by what would once have been the front door and surveyed all the rooms. There was a dead body in one room, but the absolute loss of air pressure had sucked all the internal organs through the mouth and the eyeballs out of their sockets. This Holy Crusader had been caught in the act of going to the toilet and the refuse that had once been contained in the cistern was splattered all around the walls and over the body.

"Gruesome, eh?" said Second Officer Nkomo. "Have you ever seen anything like this before, captain?"

"Yes, but not in the lavatory," said her captain thoughtfully. "I once served as a junior officer on the Windward when it was hit by a commercial cruiser. That was very distressing."

"I heard about that, captain. How on earth could something like that have happened?"

"Systems failure on the cruiser," said the captain. "It was one of the older models that the rogue states still employ for which there aren't any replacement parts. Several centuries of bodged repairs and maintenance resulted in it reversing backwards into the space ship at a speed many times faster than sound. Fortunately, the Windward was designed to survive impacts rather greater than that, but the cruiser was less fortunate. Whereas we lost only a small percentage of the several thousand crew and passengers on board, not one person on the cruiser survived. Their bodies were left to float about in empty space. The cruiser had been overcrowded and we wondered whether it might have been used for slave trafficking."

"A slave ship," said the second officer in disgust. "Can't the Interplanetary Union stop that?"

"As you know, the Interplanetary Union has no jurisdiction over rogue states," said the captain. "As long as the slaves are bought by and sold to other rogue states, there's nothing that can be done. The most Interplanetary Union ships can legally do is board the slavers and check whether any of the slaves come from states within the union. As this bureaucratic procedure can be made to drag on for several decades that does act as some kind of deterrent to the trade. In any case, this cruiser had been masquerading as a leisure ship, although it's beyond all plausibility that so many thousand people would choose to go on an interplanetary vacation crammed so closely together that they barely had enough space to defecate in privacy."

"I feel sorry for the poor souls who live in such rogue states," said Second Officer Nkomo.