The sequence was certainly different, and Grace grew concerned that was it—she must be heading down to the surface. She would have thought that being the one to make first contact would at least cheer her up somewhat. It was a guarantee in the history books, and while not as profitable as the Trafalgar’s engine part, that had to be something, right? The knot in her still-aching stomach suggested otherwise.
The interface rang out with a singsong tone, indicating the scan was complete. Looking down, the screen readout was red.
“That’s a negative on lifeforms,” she said aloud as she pulled up the more detailed readout—indications of bacteria and plant life, sure, but nothing humanish, certainly nothing extraterrestrial. She clicked back over to the engine readout. The pod had simply put itself in a higher orbit and she was back in the game. The naval ship was still on the edge of the system. They shouldn’t be able to detecting the pod at this range.
The pod’s fuel consumption was high; stocks were almost depleted. It would be a single chance, and she would have to burn the engines so hard there’s no way it wouldn’t light up every sensor that ship had. But the Navy were definitely heading closer to the centre of the system. They were no doubt on a course for the Trafalgar themselves. And if she wanted to beat them to it, this was her only chance.
If they wanted to claim the ship, she wouldn’t exactly be able to hold her own. They no doubt had guns and probably the latest mechanical battle armour. But if she found what she was looking for, she could be out of there before they even docked. This was her one chance. She had too much riding on this now that she had the costs of her stolen ship to pay for.
To pull this off, Grace knew she needed to get in close enough, then swing the pod around and reverse thrust to bring her in slow so that the manoeuvring thrusters could line her up with the docking hatch. It was doable. Just about.
Firing the port thruster, and gave a quick wave to the planet below as it left her line of sight. She raised her left hand over her eyes as the local star filled came into the viewport.
The Trafalgar itself was now too far to easily spot with the naked eye, but it was out there, a dot on the navigational sensor, another indicating the military ship.
Grace pulled up a spreadsheet and put some calculations about the distance and fuel available. She would need a 1/22 burn of the main thruster followed by five seconds of the starboard manoeuvring thruster to spin around and another twenty seconds of the main thruster to reverse to an almost complete stop, which should put her at a reasonable distance to dock manually.
She had never done a manual docking before; hell landing on the Nomadic was her first actual piloting. A part of her in that moment considered stopping and giving in, heading back. But she was deep in it now. She may find a way to give up later, but she might as well light up the night before she did so.
Looking at the readout, she ran some quick calculations and checked her safety belts. She was strapped into a chair as tightly as could be.
Taking a deep breath, her right arm initiated the burn.
The momentum threw her back in her seat, and her stomach instantly regretted it. The dot indicating the Trafalgar spun across the navigational readout, coming closer and closer to the line out from the pod itself on the HUD. She tweaked the angle of flight as the Trafalgar dashed in and out of the pods’ window as she closed in on it.
The countdown indicated fifteen seconds.
Grace stared at the navigational controls, with fixated glances, carefully moving her right index finger across the touchscreen, wishing for more tactile controls. She gently tapped the port thruster to move towards the hatch. At the slightest hint of this being too much, she applied equal pressure to the starboard thruster to counter it. The pod’s simple mechanisms did not account for the pressure applied merely where she pressed, but she was treating it as if it were the most sensitive input. Knowing if this didn’t work, she was done for.
The hatch filled the porthole. She could not get the onboard computer to synchronise an automated docking—annoying but not entirely unexpected, given the time the Trafalgar had been alone out here.
She had got the pod to recognise the docking hatch and was now manually matching it up as best she could. Again firing a thruster on the port side, this time to rotate the pod to match the docking station.
The momentum pushed her back in her seat. She countered with the other thruster, and then watched in horror as the docking hatch started to move away. Fuck. In a split second, she fired the port thruster just in time to bring it back. Again rotating the pod to line up. This time overdoing it and sending the pod into a spin, but holding it in place. Carefully levelling off with the starboard thruster, she slumped back in the seat as she gently spun, waiting for the hatch to come round again and line up.
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There was a loud thud as the pod made relatively gentle contact with the ship, followed by a clank as the docking mechanism engaged.
Grace rested back in the seat for a moment and just let herself believe.
She had been utterly convinced she would not make the docking successful.
She stood up and attempted to open the hatch. Nothing.
“Oh crap, don’t tell me I made it this far and it all still ends in this pod.” She threw her fist against the transparent porthole. The material designed to withstand the vacuum of space barely registered a thud.
She wanted to scream and jump around in frustration, but the pod allowed room for neither activity.
“God damn it,” she said to herself, the frustration boiling over.
She tapped on the side of the control panel with her left hand. It beeped. She looked down; the screen had jumped over from the control interface to an orange panel. There was an icon for an airlock. She studied the readout for a moment.
The pod was telling her something—the Trafalgar was not registering an oxygen atmosphere. That must have been why the pod had not initiated automated docking; it didn’t register it as a survivable environment. Had the ship been exposed to a vacuum?
She studied her options. There was a manual override being offered. She reached into the compartment under the seat and retrieved her helmet. The tank in her environment suit still had the best part of an hour’s breathable air; it would have to do. She was gambling everything on finding more oxygen in that time, either to re-pressurise the ship or to replace her tank. Not great odds, but not necessarily impossible either.
She wasn’t sure how much fuel the pod contained. While she might break away from the Trafalgar, she wasn’t leaving the system anytime soon. Going in was starting to look like her best option.
The helmet clicked as she locked it into position. Her breathing rang around her head in a metallic reverb as she got used to the claustrophobia once more. She tapped the options on the control panel, and a beeping alarm sounded with a computerised voice reminding her she was about to enter an unpressured environment. She deactivated it, forcing a new window to pop up, requiring her to click a button to approve the command to depressurise the pod.
Grace stepped back, having the suit run one more checklist to confirm it would remain pressurised the moment she stepped into the airlock.
All came back green and she took a deep breath and held it and hit the panel. The front of the escape pod slid out to one side, and Grace.
The airlock was as nondescript. There were four hanging spaces for EV suits, but they were all empty. She reached up for the airlock’s interface. Her finger tapped against the plastic touchscreen. Nothing happened. Grace paused. That was it, she supposed—all this to end up in the airlock. She wanted to think it had been a fun ride, like gambling everything on a crazy adventure had been worth it, but she was starting to feel pissed off. She wouldn’t have to pay for the stolen ship or any of the other expenses she had racked up, but surely she would rather have done all that, even if it all ended like this?
She was tempted to punch the wall but remembered how frail these environmental suits could be. If it ended like this, well, at least it had been an adventure. But if ended because the suit got torn in a moment of frustration, that was another matter entirely.
She turned and looked at the panel. There was a small red light. About a millimetre in diameter There was light; that meant there was power, and if there was power, there was a chance.
She wondered if it was a bio-registered that needed to be activated by recognising when a fingerprint or retina. She continued to tap on it with her gloved hand, and a moment later, the screen finally came to life. The image was ghosted and saturated with years of non-use, but it recognised that the internal pressure matched that of the airlock, and the internal door began to slide up and open.
Grace ran out of the airlock onto the battleship Trafalgar, the first person to do so in two hundred and fifty years. She tried to think of something poignant. It didn’t come.
The corridor was empty, a complete contrast to the Nomadic, which had been the site of a gruesome disaster. Abandoned, this was more in keeping with the Mary Celeste.
There were several store cupboards. She hoped another environment suit or air tanks would be kept nearby, but the cupboards were empty, and she had no such luck.
“Dammit,” she said as she walked down the corridor. The internal lights were starting to click on, the corridor lighting up down to the next bulkhead. She wondered if that was happening all over the ship.
If they had scopes on it, that military ship would have noticed it. But then she wasn’t too concerned, considering anyone in the system who was paying attention hadn’t seen her pod light up the night sky.