Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,83

platoon’s worth of weaponry certainly wouldn’t hurt our odds.

He didn’t ask me to check his gear either, I noted. Instead, I had Sarah run diagnostics, testing all of the seals and making sure she could connect wirelessly to every bit of gear I carried. All systems are go, Carter, came her eventual reply.

“Are you ready?” Korben asked, echoing Shay’s earlier question.

I nodded and issued the mental command that engaged the hood of the VaccTech suit. It flowed up over my head and down my face, connecting at my neck. A new heads-up display appeared in my vision, with the suit status and oxygen levels prominently displayed. “Open the inner lock,” I said.

Korben nodded, and the door in front of me beeped and then slowly cycled, raising on silent tracks. I stepped through. The airlock was large, designed to facilitate the rapid exit of the assault team strapped in the back. Of course, for really quick exits, they’d just depressurize the ship and throw open the doors. It wasted a lot of oxygen, but there was no faster way. No sense doing that at the moment—maybe if I could get the ship on the other side stable, but the soldiers in back still had hours before that was even a possibility.

I moved forward to the outer door and pulled a safety line from the retractor integral to the suit. I snapped it in place on a convenient ring. “Go for outer lock,” I said, falling back on procedure despite the ludicrousness of the situation.

The lights in the airlock went from clean white to sullen red and a flashing alert popped up in my HUD. “Warning. Warning. Depressurization imminent. Verify suit integrity. Warning. Warning.”

I ran the diagnostics again, still coming back clean, but I didn’t consider the time wasted. Redundancy and care could keep you alive outside. A ship full of potential cyber-zombies and world-ending plague or not, I was going to do it right.

Prepare for atmosphere evacuation. The words originated with the ship’s communication network, though they came to me in Sarah’s voice as she handled the integration between the ship’s systems and my own. Machinery churned to life, and, at first, I could hear the faint hiss of escaping atmosphere. My heartbeat quickened. I trusted my equipment. Trusted my experience. But there was always a visceral, bowel-loosening moment when that most precious of life-supporting elements was sucked away.

The hissing faded and then ceased entirely. I could no longer hear the machinery, not in the near-vacuum of the airlock, but I could feel the faint vibrations through the hull. Outer door cycling, Sarah warned. With a mental command, I engaged my magnetic boots, feeling them clamp firmly to the hull. The thrust from the shuttle’s engines was still giving us a simulated gravity, and whatever few molecules of air remained in the airlock wouldn’t be enough to send me tumbling into space, but there was no such thing as taking too many precautions when you were standing on the precipice of the infinite.

The door in front of me slid open and I drew a deep breath of canned air as I stared out into the vastness of space. This moment, more than anything else, was what I lived for. In a life that stretched to effective immortality, you found something you loved, and could continue to love, forever. If you didn’t, well, a simple DNR—do not re-coil—note in your medical files and you could find whatever final oblivion awaited. Most chose to live on, but there was a difference between lengthening life and truly living it. I suspected that for Shay, the vastness of cyberspace and the god-like power the best programmers could wield there was her raison d’être. For me it was the endless expanse, and the untold mysteries that still awaited us in their swirling depths. In that moment, I always felt a slight tingle of pity for those who had come before, those brave explorers who had broken the bounds of the Earth’s atmosphere, who had dreamed and longed to go farther, to know more. But, cursed with a few scant scores of years, they could only dream.

Bound by Einstein, we still couldn’t pierce the veil of reality and venture out at speeds that would take us to other solar systems, other galaxies. But we would. I knew we would, believed it on a level that was even deeper than knowing. And so long as Genetechnic didn’t wipe my backup from existence, I’d be there to see it.

Well,