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Derelict: Chapter 2

I hummed an old song to myself, the lyrics and tune stuck in my head from listening to it for so long. Jerry needed a larger collection of music, all he had was albums from a long dead band that named itself, The Beatles. The logic behind it confounded me whenever I tried to think about it, but I found myself liking their songs more and more over time.

"When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be..." The words flowed out of me as I adjusted the ship's course one last time. I had awoken refreshed and ready for action. Manny had taken the time to cook up a nice breakfast of slop since most fresh and organic food didn't keep well on long trips. The grey slush that I poured down my throat to avoid tasting it had everything a working person needed to survive. Only if the manufacturer could make it taste like food instead of ass.

After the breakfast I went up to the cockpit to find that we were only an hour away from making visual contact with the station. In order to prepare to get close, I needed to change the ship's orbit so that we would slide up next to the station and match its speed. It was a complicated maneuver that required a lot of math. The navigation computer could handle most of the computations, but there were a few things that just required a human touch.

Computers had a bad habit of trying to make hairpin turns to get from point a to point b. This caused lots of jarring and complications for the crew since the inertia of a person doesn't like suddenly making ninety degree turns in space. The auto pilot was good for one thing, flying in a straight line while I went to take a dump, nothing more.

The maneuver I was trying to do was to get the ship to go in a nice arc, using the planet's gravity well to gently pull the ship in and close to the station. If done correctly, people inside the ship wouldn't notice anything. I was a good pilot, but not that good.

At a key moment, when I needed to activate the burners, I acted too fast and put too much power to the engines. The sudden burst of energy in the forward direction jerked me back into my seat. I quickly pulled stopped the burners and adjusted to the slightly off trajectory. A minor mistake that pilots made every once in a while. It was a harmless, but it did cause some havoc for the two people in the back of the ship.

"Did we hit something?" Jerry's voice came across the intercom worried. I heard Manny groaning and cursing in the background. He must have been sent flying. He was not a big person at only five foot five and only one hundred and fifty pounds. It allowed him to get into tight spaces to get to places that neither Jerry nor the ship's arms could reach. While this had been helpful in many occasions, it did make him susceptible to the kind of punishment I had accidentally dealt him.

I turned on my comm with a quick flip of my wrist. "No, just put too much juice in the engine."

"Watch it then." He warned. I could imagine him pointing one of his permanently grease stained fingers at me. "Manny nearly cracked his head open."

I uttered my apologies several times until Jerry just became fed up and told me to concentrate on flying the ship. He didn't sound too mad, just cautious which was good. A mad Jerry as not a good Jerry to be around. He was never the kind to smack someone around, but he didn't make life easy if he had a reason to be mad at me. He was like anyone else who wasn't in a good mood. They stormed around and avoided talking, but Jerry just had a way of being more loud and vulgar about it.

I made the final adjustments to the ship's course. We would end up right next to the station and then it was just a matter of getting us to an airlock so we could board the station and begin to take it apart piece by piece. For now I just watched the sun as it rose from behind Neptune. The sunshield kicked in to dim what would normally be blinding light, leaving the sun as a small white disk that was slowly peeking around the blue planet. Even at this distance, the sun lit up the patch hull of the ship. I could see the arms jutting out in front, their claw like hands currently open, ready to be put to use.

After some time star gazing and watching the sun rise higher and higher, a red light began to flash. The station was about to come into visual range.

"The station is coming into view." I spoke into the comm which I set to broadcast throughout the entire ship since I had no idea where Jerry or Manny currently were. If I had to guess, they were probably in the cargo bay planning out the best way to fit as much salvage as possible. The ship could usually take on one hundred kilotons of material with a little room to spare. The thing with a full cargo bay was that it took longer to accelerate so the journey back took longer. Getting back to mars would take about a week longer if we filled the ship up completely.

"Alright." Jerry's voice came up, any anger over my previous mistake gone from his voice. "Just don't crash us into the side of the station. It's not good for business."

I was about to try and come up with a witty reply, but I was cut off as I saw the station swing around the planet and into view. It was massive. Stations were often big, the ones over Earth were visible on the planet's surface, but they shrunk the farther out you got. Jupiter stations were a few kilometers is diameter and Saturn stations were half of that. This one was just as large as anything but the biggest stations over Earth. It wasn't even wheel shaped like expected. Instead, as I looked at the monitors that were feeding me a magnified image, I saw that it was shaped more like an American football which was spinning around on it longer axis to make artificial gravity.

Its surface was irregular and not smooth at all. It had a very industrial feel to it with an unpolished steel hull and with sharp, jutting spires coming out of it at points all across the body. It looked more like some sort of steampunk death machine than anything else. Only stations with a highly specialized purpose took any shape other than a wheel. Specialized meant expensive equipment which was all the better for us.

This was definitely going to be a something that needed to take several trips. Who knows, if the haul is good enough then Jerry may decide to hire a few extra hands for another ship temporarily. It would save time and be more efficient. I already had a good argument in my head, I just needed to take a good look at what was actually inside first.

All of my calculations were spot on and The Hydra which was now dwarfed entirely by the station, came right up to the hull that stretched in every direction like a sea of metal. There was just the matter of finding an airlock. There was no power in the station to let me get a lock on to signal to tell me where there was an airlock so I had to just use my eyes. I eventually came across the familiar ring shaped device that was an air lock and parked the ship right by it.

"Wow." Manny whistled as he walked into the cockpit with Jerry right behind him. He had a small goose egg on his head where he had hit it when I made the small mistake earlier. I made sure not to stare, he seemed fine and I don't think either of us wanted any awkward apologies at the moment. "I think this is going to be our biggest haul yet." He had his head titled back, looking up the wall that was just outside the cockpit.

"This is going to take a few trips." Jerry kept a calm face, though a small twitch at the side of his mouth was all I needed to see to know that he was dying to get to work. I was as well, there was a lot to be done and we had all the time in the world to do it. "We should get to it." He clapped his hands together and briskly walked away, most likely to our own airlock to get a space suit on.

Manny took a bit longer, he just kept his eyes glued outside before giving one more whistle and a nod to me. I returned it with an eager expression and he just about skipped away. He was the only person who could do that, I could hit my head and Jerry already had to duck slightly to go anywhere in his own ship.

As per the routine that we had all established, I extended a docking tube over to the ship. Normally the station would do that, but The Hydra was specially modified to let us in to places that had no power. There was also a special clamp on the ship's docking tube which would provide a small amount of power to let us open the door. If the door needed authorization, we would just cut through it. It was all in the bag.

"I'm walking across now." I heard Jerry on the comm and stood up to look out of the cockpit to watch the large man in a bulky suit slowly hobble across the transparent docking tube. He stopped shy of the door and tried to get in. "No good, I'll have to cut it." He pulled a plasma cutter from his utility belt. "Shit." He coughed. "My torch is dead. Troy, get out here with another one."

I made a quick check of the instruments to make sure the ship wouldn't drift away and headed towards the airlock where my own suit was. I passed Manny who was getting some heavy lifting equipment ready. He loved to tinker with machines and find new inquisitive ways to make our lives a little easier. He had half of an exo-suit on. He had built it out of spare parts that no one wanted to buy off of us, it was his pride and joy, letting him lift nearly three times his body weight even though most of the work would happen in zero gravity. I let him be, Jerry was waiting for me and my torch.

The airlock was a circular room with large lockers on either side which held the spacesuits. I pulled open a nondescript locker which I knew held my own suit and began to pull on the heavy garment. It took time to get the suit on. It wasn't one of the fancy new models that weighed as much as a feather and had tons of built in systems. No, most of the technology on my suit that used to be white but was now grey, could be traced back to the twenty first century. It had a life support system that recycled CO2, grav-boots, a few monitoring systems that let me access computer ports wirelessly and a few other gizmos that I rarely used.

I put on the helmet and twisted into place until there was a click. I was good to go. My torch was already on my belt along with a few extra fuel canisters and oxygen tanks in case I was going to be out there longer than expected. I didn't need to go back to the cockpit since the only thing that would jar us would be if something were to hit the ship. We were close enough the hull and one of the spires that nothing would hit us, it would be perfectly safe to leave the ship entirely unattended which was what was going to happen once Manny got all of his gear ready. He would join us and we would begin work.

I turned the knob by the exit and the hatch that I had come in closed while the air was vented to create a vacuum. Slowly, the sound of the air leaving the room was replaced with my own breathing as the amount of air decreased. When there was none left, the hatch going out opened up and I was met with the long tunnel of the docking tube with Jerry impatiently waiting on the other end by the station's own airlock.

I took my first step and felt he magnets on the bottom of my boots latch onto the metal grating beneath me. The sound reverberated through my suit and I heard the muffled thumps of each step. Space was not for the claustrophobic. Even when surrounded by the vast emptiness, you were still jammed into a suit with nothing but your own breathing to comfort you. I had a minor case of claustrophobia, but I had learned ways to cope.

I breathed in and out in time with my steps to stop me from hyperventilating and kept my eyes focused on what was ahead. As I got closer, Jerry tapped the side of his helmet. For a moment I had no idea what he was trying to say until I realized that was it, I couldn't hear him.

I turned on the radio through a switch on the arm of my suit.

"Go ahead and get this door cracked open and let's see what's inside." There was a slight delay between watching him say something and actually hearing it. It was a small one, but noticeable.

Pulling the torch off of my utility belt, I positioned myself in front of the dead hatch. There was a small viewing window that let me get a glimmer of the inside. There was enough light filtering in to let me see that there was just an empty room with lockers. It was very similar to The Hydra's own airlock. I guess that if it isn't broken, then there is no need to fix the design.

I put the nose of the torch at the bottom left corner and turned it on. A bright beam came on and my face shield dimmed to accommodate it. The torch was making quick work like it was supposed to. It was originally meant to be used in the construction of ships and stations, but using a superheated plasma to quickly cut through nearly any hull material, but now it was going to help me take apart the station but by bit. I had to move slow though since the plasma beam could be adjusted to shoot out nearly three feet to get through thicker material, one slip and I could lose a limb, the vacuum would do the rest. Though I did note that there was a gush of air coming from inside that was blowing against my suit. There was still air and maybe enough to breathe in.

Moving at a slow, but steady pace, I cut a roughly man sized hole and pushed the piece of metal where it fell to the floor. Right, the station had gravity since it was rotating. Newer stations tended to have a grav generator. I had no idea how they worked, but The Hydra had a cheap one installed that was enough to keep me from drifting off of my bed at night.

I turned off the torch and stowed it back on my belt while Jerry took the first steps aboard the station.

"Looks fairly modern." He observed. The walls weren't the polished white walls that filled a person's imagination when they thought of space stations, but it wasn't the old rusted metal that I had grown accustomed to in old abandoned stations. If there was still air inside a ship, it would rust until it ate through the hull. The airlock I was now standing in looked worn, but clean of degradation.

"Wait for me." Manny hollered unnecessarily across the comm. I turned and watched the short man stiffly run across the docking tube with his ridiculous amount of equipment. He skidded to a halt just inside and grinned though the condensation that had formed on the inside of his helmet from his panting.

"Now that we're all here." Jerry announced. "Let's see what this station has in store for us."