Miracle Workers (SCE Books 5-8) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [7]
And on top of it all, the walls were closing in on her. She was sure of it.
The thought came unbidden, surging to the front of her consciousness. She knew it was an odd notion and completely baseless, but she couldn’t shake it. The Jefferies tube was contracting around her. The walls threatened to crush the life out of her, chased back only when she shone her light at them.
“The tube is not getting smaller,” Gomez scolded herself. “It’s your imagination, so get over it and keep moving.” And so she did, pulling her weightless body through the crawlspace as quickly as she could, and doing her best to ignore the oppressive advance of the walls around her.
Movement ahead caught her attention, along with a swath of color contrasting with the dull gray dominating the rest of the tunnel. Gomez paused in her crawling, orienting herself so that her helmet lamps could illuminate the section of tube ahead of her. Her eyes focused on the source of the movement, and she felt a shiver travel the entire length of her body.
It was the skeleton of yet another Defiant crewmember, dressed in a red jumpsuit and floating freely in the confines of the Jefferies tube. The bones of the feet were bare, and there was no sign of the boots the man had once worn.
Man? Woman? Gomez had no idea what gender the crewmember might have been. She was only reasonably sure that the skeleton was even human. Had this person been an engineer, toiling away in the depths of the starship, only to be overcome by the effects of interspace? He or she had been isolated here, cut off from the rest of the ship’s crew. A maintenance crawlway seemed to Gomez to be a particularly lonely place to die.
However, that thought didn’t bother her nearly as much as the realization that the skeleton of the hapless victim was blocking her path through the Jefferies tube. She would have to maneuver past the dead crewman in order to continue forward.
“Dear God . . . ” she whispered, noticing the shake in her voice as the words escaped her lips. There was no way she could allow herself to touch the skeleton. The very idea of coming into contact with the crewman’s remains revolted her.
What the hell’s the matter with me? Her mind screamed the question at her. She had to press forward, of course. It was the only way to get to Lense and Blue. That’s what she needed to focus on, not the tightness of the crawlspace or the lifeless body floating before her or . . .
“Stop it!” she shouted, her voice echoing in the confines of her helmet. Then she remained in place for the additional couple of minutes it took to bring her rapid breathing down to something approaching normal. “You can do this,” she told herself. “You have to. Pattie and Elizabeth need you.”
Yes, that was it. She needed to concentrate on Pattie and Elizabeth and the fact that they were trapped outside the ship and needed her help to get back inside.
“Gomez to Lense,” she called out as she activated her communicator, painfully aware of the detectable nervousness in her voice. “How are you making out? How’s Pattie?”
“I’m at the airlock, Sonya,” the doctor replied. “Pattie is still unconscious, but her readings are stable.” She, too, had apparently noticed Gomez’s anxiety. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”
Gomez forced herself to take several deep breaths before replying. It would do no good to display any false bravado, she knew, as Lense would see through the façade with little effort. Better to be open about what was troubling her.
“I’m feeling a bit claustrophobic, Elizabeth,” she admitted. “I’ve spent my fair share of time crawling around Jefferies tubes, but I’ve never felt like this before. And there’s something else.