Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,2

require an oxidizer, which was just as well. Oxygen was precious enough without wasting it on cutting. My vacc-suit facescreen automatically polarized, darkening before the intense light could damage my eyes. I drew slow, even breaths, moving the torch at a barely perceptible rate as the metal of the door began to glow a brilliant cherry red.

* * *

The countdown on the digital display in my view read 1:38 and I was on my second-to-last plasma cutter when I finished slicing through the composite airlock door. I grabbed an electromagnetic grip—little more than a power source, some wire, and a handle—from my harness and pressed it against the piece of metal still seated in the door. A mental command activated the magnet, locking the handle to the door. I shifted my feet, sliding them around until they were both planted just under the hole and activated the magnetic locks in them as well. By bending at the knees and hips, I slid down into a crouch, and wrapped both hands around the handle of the magnetic grips.

I drew a deep breath and stood, keeping the motion smooth and the force constant. The door section pulled free and rather than trying to fight its inertia, I held on long enough to guide it safely past my head, and then let go. The chunk of metal drifted off into space, another bit of junk that would, eventually, be pulled into the sun.

“I’m through.”

“Roger that. Be careful.”

Maneuvering through the hole required unclipping the safety tether and deactivating the magnets in my boots. For just an instant, I hung next to the derelict vessel, only Newton and Keppler keeping me in place relative to the ship. Then I grabbed the edges of the hole I’d just cut and swam my way into the airlock.

My boots clicked back onto the deck, and I swept the beam of the flashlight around me. The unadorned gray of the bulkheads drank in the light, making the room seem somehow darker than the blackness outside. The light passed over a lump, positioned before the hatch leading deeper into the vessel.

I focused the beam on it and froze. “Damn,” I muttered. “You guys seeing this?”

There was a long moment of silence on the other end of the comm. “Yeah, Langston,” Miller’s voice came back. “We’ve got it. Is that what I think it is?”

It was a body. A body that had succumbed to a combination of asphyxiation and decompression. It had been male, once, though the features were distorted enough that it was nearly impossible to tell much beyond that. “It is,” I replied to Miller’s question while simultaneously sending mental instructions to Sarah to take several deep scans of the scene from the suit’s external sensors.

Already done, Langston.

“You know what you’ve gotta do, Langston,” Miller said. “This just turned into a retrieval.”

“Roger that, Persephone.” I steeled myself for what came next. “You guys might want to turn off the displays for a minute.” I received an affirmative click back and swallowed hard.

One of the tools on my harness was a small laser cutter. Not powerful enough to slice through bulkheads, it was the perfect tool for salvaging electronics or other equipment that was bolted rather than welded in place. It also made a fair utility knife if the need arose… and an excellent field scalpel.

The corpse sat with its back against the door as if the person had simply sat down to die. There was no expression on the face—it’s hard to have an expression when your features have been twisted by asphyxiation and decompression—in fact, it barely looked like a face at all. Which was good, considering what I was about to do.

I reached out one hand and placed it on the corpse’s shoulder. In the microgravity, it was easy enough to turn the body over. It spun, maintaining its seated stance, frozen in position by the near absolute-zero temperatures of the holed and depressurized ship. I braced the body between the deck and bulkhead, relying on my boots to keep me in place as I pressed down against the corpse. It wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t fun; it wasn’t dignified. It was, however, necessary.

I found the hollow at the back of the corpse’s skull and pressed the laser cutter close. Then, I began to cut. Flesh, blood, and bone all sublimated under the heat of the laser, creating thin trails of smoke that dissipated almost instantly. It didn’t take long. I reattached the laser cutter to my harness