I took a deep breath of the filtered air from my spacesuit’s tank. My seals held, and the tether to the shuttle(Referred to by the game as a “Lanyard”) was solidly connected to the harness built into the suit’s fabric. Another deep breath steadied me as I tried to push the concerns raised by recent events behind me. I needed to focus on the job at hand, so I could deal with any potential brain damage I had later.
“Departing VB-1 now. All seals reading no leaks, suit Reaction Control Systems all show green.” I said over the comms, pressing the button that vented the cockpit atmosphere into the small tanks where it’d sit compressed until I got back.
“Roger Kaela. Your helmet cam is coming through. Don’t blank out on me while you are in the wreck, okay?” Lea’s voice came in through the helmet speaker. Concern coloured her tone, but she was trying to hide it. Probably because Soren or the other crew were there. She likely wanted me to come back to the ship immediately so we could figure out if I was okay. I’d already turned her down once when I’d answered her over the comms.
“I won’t. Just keep talking to me. I’m going to EVA now.” I said, pressing the button that slid open the hatch above me once the atmosphere was completely drained out of the cockpit. Sliding out of the seat was a small challenge as I had to practically curl my tail and its semi-flexible covering between my legs. I pushed down on the outside rim of the hatch, sliding out carefully into the vacuum of space. Carefully pressing one foot down after the other onto the outer skin of the small shuttle, the mag-boots activated and held me in place as I looked around.
Looking almost directly up, I confirmed my position comparatively to the wrecked shuttle. It was torn almost in half, the middle of the shuttle having clearly detonated. What looked weird to me was the fact that the explosion looked like it blasted inwards, with the metal torn in both directions like it had received a hit from a missile or bomb. Only the overly engineered spine running through the floor of the shuttle held the front and rear sections together. Nothing about this shuttle was salvageable really, though I just needed to hope that some of the components that survived would help me and Lea be able to determine what actual model the Scout was.
Giving one last tug on my lanyard, a swift kick pushed me off the Type 15 and across the ten or so metres towards the opening in the roof. A quick and controlled burst of RCS slowed my rapid approach, and helped me position myself as I reached out, and grabbed onto one of the less sharp pieces of bent metal around the tear.
“I’ve successfully boarded the shuttle.” I said as I began to take a closer look into the compartment where the miners would have sat during the flight to their worksites. It was a disaster. The steel benches were still in place down the sides of the shuttle, but the rest of the cabin had been trashed as any loose object or person was thrown around, then sucked out of the shuttle during the explosive decompression that wrecked it. Thankfully there were no full bodies, but I still tried to ignore the… remnants of an arm that was still gripped around an emergency bar from where it had been torn off of some poor miner. “So, Lea. Where do I need to start?”
“Cockpit is probably your best bet,” Lea explained over the comms, as I turned my attention to the half-open door that led to the cockpit. It was partially removed from its sliding tracks, pulled apart and leaving no doubt that the cockpit was in just as bad of a state as everything else. “If we can manage to pull some of the data drives from the black boxes, then we might be able to confirm which variant we are looking at here. Otherwise, we’ll need to start pulling apart some of the fuel system.”
“Copy. Moving that way now.” I replied, pushing myself off the roof of the shuttle towards the broken doors. The gap left was just big enough for me to get my small body through, carefully and gently pulling my way into the cockpit as to not tear my suit or lanyard.
The cockpit was just as trashed as everything else. The nearly foot thick reinforced glass that made up the window of the cockpit had deep cracks spider webbing through the entire volume, and there was old blood hanging in the air. The two pilots were both very dead. One had the corner of a panel impaled through his head, while the other looked to have asphyxiated when something had cracked the glass on his helmet. Neither pilot had moved from their seat, with the safety straps holding them in. I gulped to myself, pushing what I was seeing to the back of my mind. I was thankful this was just a set piece, and not real people. It helped me separate that from seeing real dead bodies, and I knew some of the fantasy VR games were far worse when it came to the corpses you could find.
I pulled on the zero-g bars along the inside of the cockpit towards the computer consoles that sat between the pilot’s chairs. There wasn’t any power left, but there was always a way to remove the black box from the console manually for exactly this reason. Lea and I had gone over where it should be before I even got into the Type 15, so I carefully pulled myself down to the rear of the center bank of computers, and twisted the release handle on the back of a red and white outlined panel. It gave a small hiss as the sealed space released the black box, which was just a flat computer chip about the size of a clipboard. Taking it, I opened a long, flat pocket on the front of my spacesuit, sliding the precious computer board into it before I tabbed my comms back on.
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“Black box secured.” I informed the crew, letting out a sigh of relief.
“Good work,” Lea replied, “Let’s check out that fuel system anyways while we are here. You’ll need to head to the rear of the crew compartment.”
“I don’t know...” I replied. It was probably for the best that we get as much evidence as we could, but there was still this growing feeling of concern. The explosion looked like the ship had taken damage from weapons fire, and pretty heavy duty weapons fire at that. At least, that was only an observation based on what I’d seen done to fighters when they got hit by missiles in dogfights. “I’m getting a really bad feeling from this.”
“You are the one who’s out there, Kaela. You make the call.” Soren said, cutting in on the comms channel.
I was quiet for a moment, as I pulled myself carefully back through the doors to the cabin. Eventually though, I made up my mind. “I’m coming back. There’s something wrong here, and I don’t-”
I was cut off as I turned back towards the Type 15 I’d come in on. Floating in the dark between me and my ride home was someone in a pitch black spacesuit. They were holding a matching compact laser rifle, which was lowered as I turned.
The figure and I stared at each other, both of us clearly off guard for a moment. They recovered first, raising the rifle at me as my pulse started pounding in my ears. I reacted a moment later, slamming the RCS controls as hard as I could to push me out the other side of the shuttle from them, hoping to get some cover. A laser flew past me silently as I felt my lanyard hit something, and hit it hard. I glanced over just enough to see that the tether had slammed into the side of the assailant, just as I ducked around the side of the shuttle's hull.
“Kaela, what the hell is happening?!” Lea suddenly shouted in my ear as my hand darted down the side of my right leg, and wrapped around my own pistol. It was a chemical fired weapon, so I was going to have to deal with the recoil of every shot sending me flying, but at least I was armed.
“I’ve got someone shooting at me, Lea!” I barked back, fear creeping into my voice. This wasn’t my first time in an extra-vehicular shoot-out, but it was only the second. That growing sense of dread only got worse as the firm hold the lanyard had on me suddenly slacked, and the realisation that whoever was attacking me had just severed my safety line dawned.
“Dammit, who? Why!?” Lea replied, and I growled slightly in return. I only had a few seconds before my attacker came around the top or bottom of the shuttle and I lost my cover.
“Don’t have the time to chat!” I snapped back at her, which I immediately regretted. But the situation was getting to me.
Alex cut in before my stress got too much to handle, bringing me back to reality. “Kaela, I’ve got a visual on your attacker. They are going over the top of the shuttle.”
“Roger,” was all I responded with, moving quickly with my RCS pack around underneath. I needed to be careful, watching the gauge for my fuel more carefully. It was my only chance to get home now, with my tether cut. I lifted my pistol, aiming it with both hands. Fuck, I needed to spend more time training with it, both in and out of space suit. I was lucky my finger still fit inside the trigger guard.
The attacker came around the side of the shuttle with their rifle up, and I pulled the trigger. Even through the silence of space, I could feel and see the weapon going off as the shock from the recoil transferred through my arm, and a billowing plume of gases shot from the end of the barrel. It pushed me back, throwing my aim off, but it was at least enough for the black suited person to realise that it was now just as dangerous to them as it was me. They ducked back over the top of the shuttle as I steadied myself with my RCS, still keeping the pistol aimed.
There was a pause, just a few heartbeats, but it felt like it dragged on for an hour before they re-emerged, laser-rifle firing at me. I shifted over to the right and with the expanding cloud of gases from my shot obscuring the open void between us, their aim was wide as they came around the side. I returned the favour in the silence of space. This time though, I was expecting the recoil and accounted for it with my subtle RCS manipulations. I was rewarded with spurts of shooting oxygen split seconds later appearing across the enemy’s suit, before the self-sealing material closed the holes. The person doubled over as the shots hit, their rifle getting dropped as they started to spin off from the impacts. The whole exchange took mere moments from the second they emerged from the side of the shuttle, but I’d won our little firefight, even if only by the luck of my tether knocking them off balance at the start.
My first instinct was to leave them, let the mysterious person float off into the black back to whatever ship they came here on. But as I looked around… The only vessel I could see was my own small shuttle.
Before I fully processed what I was doing, I pushed myself away from the wreck of the shuttle towards the figure. I grabbed them with a soft grunt of exertion as their weight only added to how much RCS I was burning, before dragging them towards the Type 15. I could only hope that they didn’t try to stab me on the way there.