Chapter 7: The Fall of Vesta Station

Riordan settled into his captain's chair, not bothering to strap in. There wasn’t time. The station's orbit was decaying. The view-ports glowed dull red from the friction of the atmosphere. The Swindler could handle it; she was rated for atmospheric flight. The station, however, wouldn’t last much longer. He grabbed the headset and toggled the PA system.

“Attention, attention, attention! Secure yourselves as best you can. The station has lost orbit and is dragging us into the atmosphere. This is going to be rough.” Riordan checked engine status; everything was green, or at least yellow, across the board. “Deuces Wild, this is the Passive Swindler, what’s your status, over,” Riordan said over the com.

“Passive Swindler, Deuces Wild. I can’t get the docking clamps to disengage. I think the station might have lost power,” Kevin said, barely concealing the panic in his voice.

Riordan toggled several controls and heard the muted thunks of the mooring clamps disengaging. The Swindler drifted away from the crippled station. “Deuces, the Swindler is away. Keep trying. I’ll come around to help,” Riordan said.

“Roger, Swindler.” Riordan heard clicking. “Negative on disengagement!”

Riordan fed power to the Swindler's engines. The ship shuddered and rocked from turbulence. Debris banged off her hull. Riordan heard cries of alarm from his passengers. He spun the Swindler around and accelerated, passing over the station’s docking arm. He examined the docking clamps attached to the Deuces Wild as he struggled to match the ever-increasing tumble of the station.

The entire area was illuminated by a sickly red glow as parts of the station overheated. Sensor scans revealed damage to the internal systems preventing the clamps from releasing on the Deuce’s side of the docking arm. The ambient glow increased to orange. It was getting harder to maintain control of their position. Riordan watched as the station began to visibly shudder as small sections of the outer hull vaporized.

‘“Deuces, punch your engines to max throttle on my mark. I have an idea,” Riordan called over the com channel.

“Roger, Swindler. I got my hand on the throttle. Say when!”

Struggling against the turbulence, Riordan brought the Swindler into position just above and dextral of the smaller craft. The Swindler's forward airlock opened. Riordan took manual control of the 30mm cannon. He carefully nudged the controls until the cross-hairs on the view-port lined up with the base of the starboard docking clamp. Alarms began to sound. Hull temperature was nearing critical.

“Deuces, I’m going to fire my weapons at the base of the dextral docking clamp. Stand by,” Riordan pressed the firing stud. At that same moment, a large piece of debris slammed into the sinistral side of the Swindler. The already struggling ship reeled from the impact. The rounds impacted the docking arm itself, tearing large holes through the hull. The docking arm catastrophically decompressed, sending bodies tumbling into space before being consumed by the plasmic corona of super-heated re-entry gasses.

“Goddamn it! Deuces, I missed. Hold steady.”

“Swindler, we’re starting to get nervous!”

Riordan lined the Swindler up for another shot. A glance at the systems board showed the sinistral-side plasma cannon was offline. Attitude control felt sluggish on that side, too. Sweat trickled down his cheek. The cross-hairs lined up, and Riordan fired a dozen rounds into the base of the dextral docking clamp.

“PUNCH IT, DEUCES!” Riordan yelled over the com channel.

The dual engine exhaust ports at the rear of the smaller ship glowed bright blue and then white. The dextral docking clamp started to tear away from the structure. Allowing the Swindler to drift higher above the stricken ship, Riordan fired a dozen rounds at the sinistral docking clamp. With a freakish suddenness, both clamps parted from the docking arm, and the smaller craft shot away from the stricken station.

“Swindler, we’re clear! We’re clear! Woooo!”

Riordan heard cheering in the background of the transmission. Riordan spun the Swindler around and buried her throttles to the stops. Riordan flipped to the rear-view on the small view screen to his right. He watched as the station grew smaller, engulfed in an eerie yellow glow, now edging toward white. A tail formed as the atmosphere thickened. Someone once said ‘Death was beautiful’. This was both beautiful and horrific. He watched while the Swindler strove to reach a safe distance. The view screen abruptly cut to white as the optical sensors overloaded. 'There goes the main reactor,' he thought.

“Deuces Wild, Passive Swindler, get on the emergency frequency and see if you can raise anyone from the surface. The station crew probably put out a distress call, but let’s make sure,” Riordan said over the com channel.

“Roger, Swindler, already on it,” the captain of the Deuces replied.

***

Captain Mareion Shepherd dispassionately watched through the main view-port. She listened to the com traffic coming from the crippled station and watched as explosions ripped holes in the outer hull.

“Captain, the strike team is almost back. They are reporting mission success, minimal casualties.”

“Tell team leader Nadzacovich I’ll meet him in the interrogation chamber when he arrives with the prisoner,” Shepherd said.

“Ma’am, Nadzacovich is listed as a casualty.”

Shepherd sighed. “I’m going to the Officer’s Mess for a steak and a glass of wine. Let me know when the prisoner is in the interrogation chamber.”

***

The two ships waited in high polar orbit over the agricultural planet, Besitera, for the red and white painted Orbital Guard Emergency Rescue and Evacuation ships to arrive and take custody of the evacuees. Riordan was overwhelmed. The sheer tragedy of what happened lay heavy on him. After nearly an hour, there were still nothing more than vague reports on the planet-wide networks, and nothing on the Quantum Phase Networks, the Q-Net. An official government spokesperson hinted that the station's destruction was an act of terror by unnamed separatists.

Riordan found Sarah among the refugees and set her to work distributing food and water from the ship’s stores. Several of the women had basic first-aid knowledge. Riordan declared the center of the cargo hold for the wounded only. Many of the refugees were seriously wounded, either by gunfire or burns from the explosions. Sarah brought the women with children up to the rec room and put a cartoon vid on the projector. There were more children than mothers. Riordan vividly remembered one man fighting his way to the front of the crowd and handing Riordan his little boy before turning to help keep others with less courage from breaking through and flooding the corridor to the ship berthing. It didn’t make much difference, but at least he tried.

There were several teenage boys included with the refugees. Riordan took them to the command deck and sat one of them at the coms console and another at the engineering console to watch the waste and life support systems. The last young man had a large bandage wrapped around his head. Riordan handed him a tablet and tasked him with creating a manifest of all the passengers.

Once a semblance of control was established, Riordan went to the cargo bay to help with the wounded. Glori was tending to a woman with severe burns. Her shoulder and back were covered with blisters weeping fluids, soaking what remained of her nightshirt.

“I need more bandages,” she said to the woman helping her.

"Jaisen?" Riordan asked, placing his hand on her shoulder.

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She roughly shrugged it off. “He went to work on a ship last night. I haven’t seen him since.”

He let the silence fill the gap. “I’m sorry.”

“Captain!” The young man tasked with monitoring life support called from the catwalk above the cargo floor.

“Yeah! What is it?” Riordan called back, thankful for the distraction from the loss of his friend.

“Life support just went red, sir!”

“Shize!” he said, sprinting for the ladder.

On the command deck, he fiddled with some controls on the life support board. Numbers flashed on the small screen.

"Traden, how many survivors do we have on board?"

“307, sir.” The young man said, looking at the tablet.

The maximum rated capacity of the Swindler when she was a passenger liner was 30 passengers and five crew, and that was a long time ago. Riordan rebuilt the life support system, streamlining it and customizing the efficiency for less than 16 passengers. Life support would last for months with just himself as the crew. The readout said they had less than 2 hours of life support left.

“Any word from the surface on when the rescue ships are coming?” He asked the young man staffing the comm board.

"They said it's going to be several hours yet until the debris field clears enough to risk a rendezvous." The teen paused. "There are rumors on the planet side message boards that the Confederation has taken responsibility for the attack." The teen nervously finished.

“That’s ludicrous! The UCIS was crushed a century ago, and the systems have been occupied by Federal forces ever since.”

“That’s what the boards are saying, sir.”

Much of the reason Riordan left the Fleet was the way Subjects of the Occupied Territories were allowed to serve in the Fleet but were subject to restrictions in duty stations, specialties, and rank advancement. Former UCIS systems weren’t even officially recognized as more than territorial possessions of the Feds. Their citizens were considered second-class Subjects toiling under the yoke of oppressive reparation sanctions for their role in the civil war.

Riordan crammed himself into the cramped sinistral-side corner of the command deck, tapping at the cobbled-together touchscreen that controlled the life support and waste management functions. The issue appeared to be the CO2 scrubbers. They were way past replacement limits, and with the extra CO2 being produced by the survivors, they were failing fast. He paused for a second, trying to remember where he stowed the spare CO2 scrubbers. O2, oxygen, levels were getting low, but the CO2 scrubbers were the immediate concern. Surely, the rescue ships would be here in time. Riordan grunted as he pulled open a small locker under the control display, retrieving a breathing apparatus.

"Listen up, boys! Some bad shize just happened… but it happened to all of us. We just need to keep our shize together for a few more hours. Once we get you on the rescue ships, you can freak out, cry yourself to sleep, whatever you need to do. Right now, I need a crew of stone-faced space dogs. Are you that crew?"

He sent one of the boys on a mission to a passenger suite he used for storage to find the CO2 scrubbers. When the young man returned he instructed the young man how to replace the filters in the scrubber assemblies, which were all the same type, much newer, and more efficient than the original design of the ship.

“And there,” Riordan said, snapping the cover back into place. “It’s that easy,” he finished, handing the small duffel of replacements to the teen.

“Down there, to the left, and in the back?” the teen asked uncertainty.

“Aft sinistral section, just follow the map I uploaded to your tablet. You have seven more to change. Come get me if you need help.”

Riordan headed toward the rec room, emergency breather still in hand. He planned to retrieve at least half a dozen in case life support failed, the plan being to isolate everyone in the cargo hold and concentrate life support there. The breathers would allow him and a few others to move around the ship, affecting repairs or changing filters.

“Whoa!” he said, as Sarah nearly barreled into him. Her arms were full of various bundles and cartons.

“You know your medical bay is horribly antiquated?” she replied to his quizzical glance at her parcels.

“I’ve been meaning to upgrade that.”

“At least you have plenty of supplies, right?" she answered, trying to slip past him. She was hoping he wouldn’t notice her puffy eyes and red cheeks.

“Sarah,” he started, gently putting his hand on her shoulder to stop her. “I’m sorry about your father… there just wasn’t time to find him… He was a good man and deserved better.”

Sarah’s shoulders slumped, and she looked away.

“Tar died over a cycle ago. Cancer.”

“Cancer? That’s easily treated…”

“If you have credits,” she retorted, pulling away and starting down the hallway.

Riordan dropped his hand as he watched her retreat to the ladder leading below decks. He said nothing because what could he say that would change anything anyway? ‘Sarah, what a complicating factor,’ he thought as he entered the rec room. ‘A problem for another time,’ he thought as he rummaged around in the under counter lockers retrieving more breather units.

Glori graciously accepted the medical supplies from Sarah. She seemed a good bit calmer and more put together than most of the other survivors. Glori sifted through the bundles and surprisingly found several ampules of morph and morph-a.

“Sarah, where did you get these? The medical station had almost nothing!”

“The captain has a pretty large selection of ‘Medicine’ hidden on the recreation deck,” she replied, making air quotes.

“Still, these are restricted items.”

“Well, our Captain makes his own rules apparently.”

“Sometimes, breaking the rules can be a good thing,” Glori said, administering a dose of the pain medication to the severely burned woman she was attending to. “Sometimes,” she finished solemnly. They spoke little as Glori moved from patient to patient, aided by Sarah. She had more than a passing knowledge of first aid and even more involved procedures. She didn't wait to be asked. As soon as Sarah boarded, she started helping Glori triage the wounded by severity, moving the most seriously wounded to the former passenger cabins. The less seriously injured were relegated to areas on the cargo floor and told to be patient.

‘What a mess’, Glori thought. They had babies without mothers, mothers without babies, children, and teens, all shell-shocked and suffering. Their lives changed forever in the short span of a few minutes, including her own. Jaisen! Her stomach knotted just thinking of him. He wasn't on the Swindler, and she hasn't been able to check with the Captain of the Deuces Wild. If he wasn't on the only two ships that were at the station, then the only alternative was…

The most severely injured woman passed a few minutes after the Swindler reached a safe distance. With prompt advanced care, Glori thought everyone else might survive. However, a little boy would certainly lose an eye. Her current patient settled down as the morph took hold. Glori used her medical scanner to add the current patient to her growing triage database. The entries consisted of hasty full-body scans and genetic profiles. Glori set up cross-referencing to match the unaccompanied children, some of whom were non-verbal, to possible relatives. As a habit, she scanned Sarah just to make sure she was in good health.

Notifications popped up on her device as she finished her current scan. Another pair of matches had been found. She brought up the results, and her jaw dropped. Sarah has a parent on the ship!

The replaced CO2 scrubbers held out as the rescue ships arrived to collect survivors. Riordan had added to the dwindling O2 supply by cutting the mouth valves off the breather canisters and directly venting the O2, increasing the percentage of available oxygen in the air to reduce the strain on the already overtaxed life support system. It likely didn’t do much but it made him feel better about the situation.

Riordan leaned heavily on the catwalk railing above the cargo bay, marveling at the mess left behind. Bloody bandages, food wrappers, and the occasional personal item littered every surface. The ship was eerily quiet now. Only the steady hum of ship systems kept the silence from being complete. He heard someone approaching and wearily turned to face them. It could only be one person, Glori, who decided to stay on with him rather than board a rescue ship. What he saw on her face surprised him; hope and excitement. It was a nice change from the grim determination of the past few hours. He noticed her medical scanner. She held it out to him wordlessly, one hand covering her mouth as a tear rolled down her cheek.

“What is it?” He asked, concerned. He reviewed the data.

“You put a medical tracker in your husband?”

“Yes. He never had the time for a check-up, and it lets me keep track of his health, diet, etc."

“This means Jaisen wasn’t on the station? Where was he?”

“I don’t know, but that shows he left the station shortly before the first explosion. The last ping on his tracker was on the docking arm. Maybe he got a pickup job at another station or planet?”

“Wouldn’t he have left you a message or something?” Riordan asked, handing her back the scanner.

“Maybe he did, but I didn’t get it. A ship did leave the station about the same time he did, but the records are lost with the station. They weren’t uploaded to the Q-Net in time. I was woken from a dead sleep by the first explosion. I barely had time to dress and grab my emergency kit.” She barely choked back emotion. “He’s alive, Atticus!”

He returned her frantic hug, genuinely excited at the news. She pulled back, her face sobering.

“There’s something else.” She tapped the screen of the scanner and handed it back to him.

Curious, he looks at the screen. “Hijo de Puta! Please tell me you haven’t told her!”

“No, I came straight to you about it. She doesn’t know? What’s going on?”

“She can’t know, it’s complicated. None of it’s her fault and now isn’t the time, is it?”