No Surrender - Jeff Mariotte [10]
“Boots on, everyone. We have to get to ops!” she shouted over the comlink. “We have to bring the gyrostabilizers back on-line before this stuff kills us.”
“Either that or cut the artificial gravity,” Kieran Duffy replied. “That would at least minimize the impact of everything being tossed around.”
“I’d rather restore stabilizers if we have that option,” Gomez put in brusquely.
“Me, too,” Duffy said. “I’m only saying, if we can’t, we have a backup plan.”
“Corsi, you remember the layout, right?” Gomez asked. “We’re not that far from the operations center.”
“I remember,” Corsi replied. She at least had the advantage that she was standing on the floor—though upside-down, with the blood rushing to her head. This couldn’t last too long, or she might have to drop to the ceiling and then work her way back up to the hatchway.
The station’s next tumble, though, solved the problem for her. Suddenly she swung sideways. Now “down” was precisely the wall she wanted, the one with the hatchway in it. Instinctively putting her arms out to brace herself for the impact, she stepped down the vertical surface toward the hatch. “Let’s go, people!” she called. “This is the way out!”
Corsi opened the hatch while the others followed suit from whichever surface they happened to be on. Everybody was able to grab a rail or a rung, and they started moving toward the hatchway. The difficulty came when the station continued its roll, and suddenly she was climbing up into the hatchway instead of simply sideways or down through it. Beyond the hatch, an empty corridor waited. She knew it led to the station’s operations room and a command center, what would pass for a bridge on the antique space station. Either one would help, though operations was their preferred destination; from there it would be easiest to appraise the damage and assess how to proceed.
Corsi could see two hatchways ahead—above, just this moment, though she knew that would change—and she was sure that operations had been the one to the right. But for a moment she was not so sure which way was right. She wasn’t moving along the floor of the corridor, she was sure—the floor was currently to her left side. Which meant, she deduced, that the hatch she wanted was the one that would be in front of her when she climbed up the corridor to it.
She really hated this whole deal.
Another few minutes and two shifts in perspective later, she managed to get the hatch into operations open. Something had fallen into it, she guessed, jamming it, and she’d had to use a P-38 to get the door open. When she finally did so, she was not at all surprised to see that the big space was full of massive pieces of equipment rolling and falling and bouncing like leaves in a strong wind. Didn’t these people secure anything? she wondered. She scanned the room with her tricorder, finding no signs of life.
“Commander Gomez.”
“What is it, Corsi?” Gomez asked.
“Please join me at this hatchway.”
Gomez muttered her assent, and a moment later had slid down the corridor to squat at Corsi’s side by the open hatch. “I see,” she said.
“There are no lifesigns in there. No security risk that I can determine—except for the incredibly obvious one.”
“The equipment is pretty much smashed to smithereens.” Corsi could hear Gomez sigh through the comlink. “Getting any of that repaired and functioning will be a challenge—especially since it’ll mean dodging the big chunks.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you think the command center will be in any better shape?”
“We can check, but considering what we’ve seen so far, I don’t see any reason to think that it will be.”
“If it’s not significantly better, it does us no good. We can access the operations computers from there, but if they’re utterly destroyed, we still need to get in here at some point.”
“Your call, Commander,” Corsi said.