Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [29]
He chortled and looked to Jiterica, as if he expected some specific reaction from her. But not knowing what it might be, she remained silent and waited for a clue.
“Rrright,” Chiang said at last. He rapped on the type-3 again. “Well then, let’s see if we can’t—”
Before the lieutenant could finish his sentence, he was cut off by a loud clanging noise. Chiang turned grim suddenly, no longer the affable tour guide. He shouted out some orders, then pointed to the double doors that comprised the shuttlebay’s entrance.
“Let’s go,” he said to Jiterica.
She understood the reason for his sense of urgency. The loud sound she “heard” through her audio sensors was the signal for all personnel to respond to some immediate danger—loss of air pressure, exposure to radiation, or something equally inimical to humanoid life—by unhesitatingly evacuating the shuttlebay.
Jiterica wasn’t sure why such an action was necessary. To her knowledge, the ship was not under attack. Nor was it in the vicinity of any dangerous phenomena. On the other hand, anomalies cropped up from time to time in the course of subspace travel, and the Stargazer might have encountered one of them.
In any case, it wasn’t the Nizhrak’s place to determine the reason for the evacuation. Her only responsibility was to leave the area as quickly as possible.
There had been half a dozen other crewmen in the bay besides Jiterica and Chiang—two humans, a Vulcan, a Bolian, a Carpathian, and a Vobilite. They all locked down their respective control stations and scampered for the exit.
But Jiterica couldn’t scamper. Her containment suit wasn’t equipped to let her move that quickly. All she could do was proceed at her usual deliberate, mechanical pace—a limitation that had never been an issue until that moment.
Chiang noticed Jiterica’s difficulty, stopped halfway to the exit and came back for her. But her condensed mass was more or less equal to the lieutenant’s, so he didn’t have the option of picking her up and carrying her. All he could do was turn her around, grab her suit under its armpits and drag her toward the double doors.
Jiterica felt feeble and embarrassed. Had she been back in the roiling chaos of her homeworld, she would simply have altered her form and ridden one of the storm winds away from peril. Here, in this place of rigidly enforced geometric boundaries, she was forced to depend on a fellow crewman for assistance.
Little by little, Chiang pulled her in the direction of safety, the heels of her bulky white suit scraping on the floor. But the lieutenant wasn’t moving quickly enough. According to the evacuation protocols Jiterica had studied, they had only twenty seconds to reach the exit before a duranium barrier descended from the ceiling and sealed off the shuttlebay.
Twelve seconds had already gone by, and they hadn’t even cleared the last of the shuttlepods. At this rate, they wouldn’t make it. They wouldn’t even come close.
“Go,” she told Chiang over the sound of the klaxon. “Leave me.”
“I can’t,” he gasped into her audio sensors, his voice ragged with effort. “You’re part of my crew . . . my responsibility . . .”
Just then, the ensign saw another crewman appear on her right and grab her by the arm. A moment later, someone else appeared to grab her by the other one. Pooling their strength with Chiang’s, they dragged her with greater speed over the shuttle deck.
But it wasn’t going to be enough, the ensign told herself. As the ceiling rushed past her, its details framed in her faceplate, she counted down the seconds in her mind.
Seven seconds. Six. Five . . .
“Leave me,” she pleaded a second time.
This time, Chiang didn’t respond. Looking back at the man, Jiterica saw the rictus of strain on his face and realized he was struggling too hard to get an answer out.
Behind her, a heavy metal barrier started to descend from its slot in the ceiling. Once it closed, there would be no getting it open again. Whoever remained on the wrong side of it would be trapped.
Four, Jiterica thought.