Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [96]
“They’re all aboard, Lieutenant,” she said into her suit’s comm system as the shuttlepod’s outer hatch began to close with agonizing slowness. She grabbed at the ladder as the pain in her thigh flared up again, probably because of the abrupt reactivation of the grav plating. She also noticed that her own voice sounded faint inside her helmet, and thought she was beginning to feel light-headed. Had all her air escaped already? Ever Invincible, she told herself, repeating the phrase over and over in her head in an endless loop.
“Thanks, Corporal,” O’Neill replied from the cockpit. “Now I’m getting us back on the road.”
Five very distressed-looking people, two dressed in Starfleet uniforms, three in mottled, gray-camo MACO livery, grabbed for whatever handholds they could find as the alien ship and the Xindi facility—both of which had been visible a moment earlier through the closing but still narrowly open airlock—suddenly vanished.
A moment later the hatch clanged silently shut and air began hissing rapidly into the now-sealed chamber.
Boo-Yah! Peruzzi thought.
Silence reigned.
At first Archer thought it was the final silence, the silence of death. But the excruciating pain he was experiencing argued eloquently that he was still very much alive. He felt as though his lungs had been removed from his body, stretched out on a taffy-pulling rack, and then haphazardly replaced.
But at least I can still see, Archer thought, blinking rapidly in the harsh, fragmented illumination of what he recognized as the interior of Shuttlepod One’s still completely depressurized airlock, whose outer hatch was still in the process of sealing the little auxiliary vessel off from the hard vacuum that embraced her hull.
The soundlessness that dominated the narrow chamber—or was it the entire universe?—was gradually replaced by a gentle hissing. The sibilant noise grew steadily louder, progressively eclipsing the pain that throbbed in his chest, a sensation that had already begun to recede like an outgoing ocean tide.
Gravity had returned, momentarily confusing his inner ear as it took notice of the outer airlock hatch suddenly reassuming its familiar direction of “up.” The deck lurched beneath his feet; no doubt the inertial dampers were struggling to catch up with a sudden, large acceleration load. He braced himself against the ladder that ran from the airlock to the companionway, narrowly avoiding toppling onto the still-sealed inner hatch that led downward into the aft portion of the pressurized crew compartment. Archer saw that Reed and the three MACOs were in much the same condition he was, each of them seeking stability by grabbing at either the ladder or other nearby handholds. An environment-suited figure that Archer finally recognized, through the glare that obscured her helmet’s faceplate, as Corporal Peruzzi also stood nearby on wobbly feet.
Within a few impossibly long moments, the deck had settled down, and Archer’s oxygen-starved lungs were greedily gulping down air. Reed and the MACOs were doing likewise, and Archer was grateful to note that no one appeared to have been seriously injured during their transit. He disengaged his tether line in order to move toward a nearby external viewport.
Through the small port, Archer could see the fake Xindi weapons facility rapidly dropping away into the infinite dark, Trahve’s small ship still right beside it, though no longer locked in place by the station’s sinister-looking armatures and grapnels. Trahve’s vessel, looking almost like a toy at this range, seemed to be venting great plumes of gas from the vicinity of its engine nacelles. Archer wondered if Trahve might succeed in averting the imminent detonation of his propulsion system after all—until he saw the small escape pod that darted from the vessel’s belly, confirming