He did a quick count.
There were fourteen suited figures. Fourteen.
Someone was gone.
That was impossible. Everyone had been clipped: hypercarbon strongline attached to hullalloy rings on a bulkhead wall. The utility belt on a Navy engineer's pressure suit was made of diamond-tensile monofilament. You could hang a pair of thrashing African elephants from these rigs with a ten-thousand-year safety margin.
Rating Inders was waving her arms wildly, trying to get Frick's attention. He looked over at her, disbelief pounding in his head. She pointed at a short crack in the cargo bay bulkhead. The crack ran straight through the line of clip rings.
Then he saw it: One of the hullalloy rings had been ripped out.
The tether rigs were sound, but the bulkhead was cracking.
Frick climbed his strongline up and touched his suit's audio probe to the bulkhead. He heard the familiar hum of the Lynx's air nanos, and the moan of decompression through what must have been another hull breach on the other side. And something else--the high-pitched tremolo of tiny pits propagating in hullalloy. The forward bulkhead--the last hullalloy barrier between the Lynx and massive decompression--was cavitating. Frick swallowed at the menacing sound. One of the flockers must have released a metal-eating virus; nothing else would cause the material to disintegrate this way.
In minutes, or perhaps seconds, the engineering team would all be pitching through the void.
Frick brought his hand up in a fist, thumb and little finger extended. The vacuum hand sign for lethal emergency. When he had 107 every eye on him, the engineer brought the hand down to point at the hatchway. They had to get it open.
Even through pressure masks, he recognized surprise in a few faces. The other side of the bulkhead was still pressurized. Opening the hatchway now would piss away still more of the Lynx's oxygen, and test the structural integrity of the walls between here and the next bulkhead, all the way back at the forward gunnery station.
But with the bulkhead cracking, the oxygen was gone anyway. And it would go far less explosively if they let it flow through the hatchway than if the whole bulkhead blew. At this moment, the hullalloy had hard vacuum on one side and almost a full atmosphere on the other. They had to equalize the pressure. The Lynx's designers would have assumed that the cargo area would lose pressure gradually, at least twenty seconds to empty the huge space of air. No one would foresee the entire front of the ship being sheared away at once. And of course the metal virus added to the stresses on the metal.
Metasmith was the first to react. She swung on her tether like an acrobat, planting her magnet next to the hatchway and bracing her feet to either side. She gave the manual wheel a twist. It seemed to protest for a moment, then started to turn. A few more hands reached the wheel in time to speed her efforts.
When the hatch blew, the outrush of air knocked Metasmith back at a dangerous velocity. But the woman swung in a leisurely arc, letting her strongline run out to its full length. She executed a perfect landing on the far side of the cargo bay bulkhead, as pretty as zero-gee ballet.
Frick pressed his audio probe back against the bulkhead. It shrieked with the familiar wail of decompression, but the engineer's sharp ears still detected the soprano ringing of a travelling hullalloy fissure.
The Lynx was still breaking. He shut his eyes and listened carefully, praying. Then it came--the sound was changing. The ringing seemed to gradually recede, lessening as the stresses of unequal pressure drained away through the open hatchway.
Frick opened his eyes, sighing with relief.
Now he could actually see the damage in front of him. The crack traveled past him, missing his own tether ring by a few centimeters. He stuck his suited finger into the fissure. It was less than four centimeters deep. And there was no notable vibration trembling within it.
The ship's hullalloy had an immune system, nanomachines that should fight off the Rix virus, but it might take a while for the infection to be completely eliminated. What the ship needed was a respite from the stresses of high gee and sudden jolts, but for the moment, the Lynx had stabilized.
At least until the captain decided to break her again.
Engineer-Rating
Engineer-Rating Telmore Bigz blinked his eyes again, hoping sight would return.
Bigz knew he was lucky to be alive at all. By rights, his head should be smeared across the Legis system by now. Pure chance had saved him. As he'd been torn from the bulkhead wall, his face mask must have been whipped around so that it had sealed itself. Either that, or Bigz had done so with some autonomic part of his brain whose actions were not recorded in memory.
But in the seconds of hard vacuum, his eyes must have bugged bad. He could see a sort of blurry streak before him, and that was all.
From the screaming in his head, Bigz figured that his eardrums had blown too. But that didn't bother him much. Out here in the airless void, sound was not a native species. And with communications forbidden, he wouldn't be talking to anyone on his suit radio.
But Bigz wished that he could see.
At least then he could figure out why he'd been plucked from the bulkhead. Bigz was positive that he'd been clipped right. Any shock strong enough to break his monofilament line should have snapped him in two like a breadstick.
He concentrated on the blurry streak. It pulsed every few seconds, a building-top blinker seen through a rain-soaked window.
Bigz judged the period to be about four seconds. A pressure suit emergency beacon pulsed once per second, so it wasn't a crew mate out there.
Then the rating understood. The pulsing light was the Legis sun, andTelmore Bigz was spinning, rotating once every four seconds.
He waited some more, and found that his sight seemed to be gradually coming back. There were other pulsing things, all with the same four-second period. They slowly resolved into streaks of light.
Stars. He could almost see the sun now, a distant but sharp disk against the black void.
Bigz felt strangely euphoric. The screaming headache that he should be suffering was absent, the pants-pissing fear he expected to feel had also not materialized. He carefully checked the medical charges on his utility belt.
He grunted with recognition as his fingers found the expended shockpack. Whatever lizard part of his brain had managed to seal his face mask had also pumped him fill of painkiller and stimulants. He was alone in the vacuum, spinning out of control, half-blind and completely deafened, but Bigz felt as sharp and confident as a man after his first cup of coffee in the morning.