Intergalactic

Micah was hunched over inside the narrow ventilation shaft, his toolbox to one side, a work lamp on a small tripod on the other, the control panel open before him. His toolbox was standing next to him on the metal floor, the panel being in a horizontal portion of the shaft.

„There you are, little bugger.“, he said to himself, pulling out the burnt-out relay. It was unusually quiet in the shaft today, with but a few distant noises from the inside of the station traveling through its length.

Two days since the marines arrived. No violence, no arrests, they simply took control of the docking bay and the control center. The rumors spoke about interrogations, of the stern but friendly sort. Micah wiped away a few beads of sweat from his forehead. Without the fans running, the ventilation shafts always became uncomfortably hot within minutes.

After a day, life returned to semblance of normal on Binary Bloom. Everything was subdued, as if waiting for a storm to pass, but the market and shops opened again and most people went about their business. For Micah, that was fixing things around the station. Keeping Binary Bloom running was always a challenge, with its different parts and pieces, and the alien superstructure that the station was built into showing through here and there.

He switched out the relay for a new one and put it into its place, then screwed the control panel shut again. He was muscular, but short, the result of growing up on a planet with higher gravity than Earth. That was why it was usually him who went into the shafts and other cramped spaces.

A metallic clanking from further down the shaft made him turn around just as he was about to climb up the rungs, having packed up his equipment and strapped it to his belt. He stopped and took his foot of the first rung, listening for more sounds. There was a shuffling kind of noise, barely perceptible. Without the clang before he’d not have noticed it.

He slowly moved across the parallel section towards the other vertical part of the shaft, this one leading down. His rubber shoes made no sound. It was an intentional feature, most sounds being amplified inside the small shafts and maintenance tunnels of the station. Peering down the shaft he spotted a flickering, quickly moving light down two levels, where the shaft ended in the ceiling of a wider main air duct. A second later, the light disappeared.

Micah knew that there were no other planned works in this section - otherwise they would have been merged with his small repair. He started climbing down, methodically, in the quick but distinctly unhurried way of someone intimately familiar with every movement. He reached the main duct in ten seconds, emerging in its ceiling, the smaller shaft offset to the side so that the rungs could continue on the wall of the main duct.

Stepping off the ladder, the mechanic looked to both sides, his head-mounted lamp casting a cone of light into the darkness. Nothing. And yet, this must have been the source of those sounds. Micah went a few steps into the air duct, checking floor, ceiling and walls carefully. There! A panel to one side was undone. It was hanging on the four studs at its corners, but there were no nuts on them. More than odd. An apprentice in a hurry might forget one nut, but not all four.

Micah approached the panel carefully and listened. On the other side, behind the sound-dampening foam he knew to be inside those panels, he heard voices. His forehead creased in confusion. His eyes narrowed, darting along the edges of the panel and fixating for a split second on each of the studs that was missing a nut. None of the panels in this part of the system should lead to any rooms. If they did, he would have taken them to access the work he had just concluded, not crawled through a narrow shaft for five minutes.

„Oh well“, he thought to himself, „let’s figure this out.“

He lifted the panel from the studs and moved it aside. The opening it revealed was just large enough for a man to squeeze through while bent over. Behind it, he found a small, dimly lit room filled with crates, boxes and several items of clearly alien origin lying around openly. Two female figures standing on the other end of the room, five or six steps away from Micah, whirled around at the sound of the panel being pushed aside. They were standing in shadows cast by the boxes around them and Micah could barely make out their silhouettes, but no details.

„Shit!“, one of them exclaimed, ducking deeper into cover behind a few boxes. The other woman, slightly smaller, took a step towards the opening Micah was looking through, her right arm falling to her side, then raising again. Micah spotted the outline of a gun in her hand and jumped to the side at the same moment a loud whooping sound echoed through the room and into the air duct where it reverberated through the metal tube, coming back four, five, six times in the following second. The typical sound of a magnetic railgun firing.

Micah yelled out as pain shot up from his leg. A quick glance showed him that the pants had been shredded. Flechette. Of course. Micah grabbed the panel he had just moved aside and slammed it on the studs. As the hole closed, he could see the trigger-happy woman walking towards him, the gun raised, and just as the panel slid unto the studs, it rattled under the impact of another set of needles hitting it. But it held. Flechette was the common ammunition on spacecrafts and stations. The risk of puncturing the hull was too large with bullets. It also meant a somewhat solid panel could stop them. Small dents indicated the impact points.

Micah grabbed the screwer from his tool belt and rammed it on the top-right bolt, then the top-left one. It whirled twice, screwing on a standard nut from its compartment. He was thankful that most of his tools were zero-gravity versions because he occasionally worked on the outside hull. Loose bolts would be a liability in zero-g, so the tool stored and fed them from an internal storage.

Right now, all of those were flashes of background thoughts in Micah’s head. Blood was running from his leg in a thin line. Painful, but not serious. A few needles were still poking out from his flesh, but most of the flechettes had missed him or just shredded his pant. He grimaced and stood up, grabbing the lamp he had dropped, then moved quickly through the vent, limping slightly. The nearest exit was some distance along, but he didn’t want to try climbing a ladder with that leg.

A loud banging from behind washed over him, followed by several similar sounds. A grin shot across his face before it was replaced again by determination and pain. It would take them a bit to open that panel from the other side. But in the end, it was just a panel. Micah kept moving. The banging stopped. The woman had understood that the panel had been fixed.

Two corners and almost a minute later, Micah had finally reached the exit. As he had hoped, it was open. They had come this way. He climbed through into the small maintenance room behind. He stopped for a moment to rip some of the cloth from his pant and bind it across the wound, suppressing a yelp as he dragged it across the needles still stuck in his flesh, pressing them in even deeper. But he had no time to pull them out. Behind the door the bustle of Binary Bloom waited. He could merge into the crowd and disappear - as long as he left no trail of blood that would be easy to follow. A crash echoed out from the air duct, signaling that it was time to go. Micah opened the door and stepped into the corridor, quickly vanishing among the people moving about.