understanding of how decompression sickness and sudden decompression worked. Yet, at the same time, none of her answers made any sense. Who would sit idly in their acceleration chairs while the pressure in the cabin slowly went from one atmosphere down to vacuum, presumably taking with it all the breathable air? The coils showed no signs of flash freezing or desiccation, and the only outside agent I knew of that could prevent decompression was a vacc suit. What had happened to these people?
I moved down the line of chairs, the laser cutter doing its gruesome work, and the little pouch of cores at my hip slowly filled. I was down to three rows when I felt a slight shiver course through the derelict’s hull.
I paused in my work and waited for a moment. The shiver came again, and then grew into a steady vibration. I felt the faintest tug pulling me toward the back of the cabin. The ship was accelerating.
“Persephone?” I asked aloud. At the same time directing a mental, Status? at Sarah.
“What the hell’s going on over there, Langston?” Miller demanded. “Our sensors show that the derelict’s engines just came online.”
The vessel is powering up and accelerating toward Sol, Sarah confirmed.
“Shit,” I swore. “I don’t know, Persephone. The damn engines just fired. By themselves. Are you sure no one’s aboard?”
“Sensors aren’t showing anything living over there except you, Langston.” There was a momentary pause. “Time to get off that boat.”
“Yeah, that’s a big roger. Heading to the airlock, now.” I panned my light across the last three rows. Nine souls lost, at least for a few months. I turned to go, but something stopped me in my tracks. Something had been different on those last bodies. I swept the flashlight back, panning it over the coils, looking for whatever had caught my attention.
One of the corpses, its pale, lifeless eyes wide open, stared back at me.
I jerked back from the sight, my entire body lurching away, which in microgravity was a stupid idea. The motion, sudden and sharp, tore my magnetic boots free of the deck, and sent me drifting, tumbling toward the front of the cabin. The beam of the light spun with me, panning across the bulkhead and overhead, losing focus on the open-eyed coil.
My heart raced as I reached out, using my arms like shock absorbers against the bulkheads, pulling my knees to my stomach and working to reorient myself so that down was, once again, the deck beneath my feet. I’d spent enough time in freefall that the move was instinctual. The boots touched down on the deck, electromagnets engaging, and I swept the flashlight back toward the far end of the cabin.
The rational part of my mind insisted on telling me that residual electrical energy in the brain could stimulate the ocular muscles and make the eyes of the corpse snap open. It had less explanation for the fact that the same coil, which had until that moment been firmly strapped into its acceleration couch, had pulled itself up and was floating in the microgravity. It moved gracelessly toward me, limbs that should have been long frozen reaching out to pull it past the seated heads of its fellow corpses, still locked into their own acceleration chairs. Its hands closed on the back of one of those chairs, and it pulled, launching itself forward, arms stretched out before it, fingers reaching.
The coil flew at me like a missile, the steadily increasing tug of the engines hardly slowing it. My conscious mind was still trying to catch up, to process what was happening. That didn’t stop instinct from kicking in, and my hands came up, even as I twisted my body at the hips and shoulders and knees, presenting as thin a profile as possible while my feet remained locked to the deck. The outstretched hands missed me by inches, and the rest of the coil continued to float past.
I dropped my hands down, slamming my suited forearms into the coil’s back as it passed, imparting a new vector that sent it careening first to the deck, and then bouncing off toward the overhead. The force jarred me, not just my arms, but put a terrible pulling strain on my ankles as the boot magnets competed with the action/reaction force of the strike. I once again pulled free from the deck, but only just, floating a few inches off the ground.
“Persephone,” I gasped. “Are you seeing this?”
I received no response.
“Persephone, do you copy?”
Silence.
Sarah, where