Draft 2

Chapter 32

Month 3: The Dead Zone Continued

Helen squeezed through the narrow ventilation duct. The thermal coat she wore bunched around her elbows, restricting her reach. Worse, it scraped loudly against the frosted walls with every inch she managed to crawl.

Ahead of her, Unit Seven navigated the tunnel. The drone’s damaged logic board caused his blue optic to sputter.

“Madam, the ambient temperature in this secondary duct is currently thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Factoring in the forced-air wind chill and your lack of insulated facial gear, you will experience mild cold damage, colloquially known as frostnip, to the tip of your nose in approximately twelve minutes.”

“Keep moving, Seven. I’m crawling as fast as I can.”

“I am merely providing a timeline for your inevitable dermal discomfort. If the tissue progresses to numbness, would you like me to sing a sea shanty to distract you? My database contains a surprisingly robust collection of nineteenth-century whaling songs.”

“That’s not necessary, Seven.”

Suddenly, Seven’s legs locked and his optic died completely, plunging the duct into blackness. He dropped out of the air, striking the bottom of the duct with a clank.

“Seven!” Helen scrambled forward blindly. She swept her gloved hands back and forth across the icy duct, searching for him.

Her fingers finally brushed against his exterior. She scooped the lifeless drone into her hand. She popped the casing, found the manual reboot switch by feel in the dark, and pressed it hard.

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then, the optic strobed back to blue. His rotors spun up, lifting him out of her palm, but he immediately listed hard to the left, his chassis scraping against the side of the duct.

“Seven, hold still. You’re drifting.” Helen reached out, brushing his underbelly. She felt a jagged edge where a joint should have been. “Your front left leg is gone. It must have snapped when you fell.”

“On the positive side, Madam, the phantom itch in my left strut has been permanently resolved. On the negative side, I am now operating with a severe deficit in terrestrial mobility, and I am officially a lopsided liability.”

“You’re not a liability.” Helen nudged him into the center of the shaft. “I’ll weld a new leg on you as soon as we get our ship back. For now, fly as straight as you can.”

Helen pressed on, forcing herself to ignore the bitter cold. She approached a warped section of the duct, where the metal had buckled under the gravitational shear of the Dead Zone. She tried to shimmy past the narrowed opening, twisting her torso sideways to slide through.

The fabric of her coat snagged on a protruding rivet. She pulled her arm back to free the coat, but the narrow space pinned her arms down. She couldn’t reach the rivet, so she gave her shoulder a yank.

The fabric tore free, but the force of her pull dragged the rivet across the wall, creating a screech.

Helen stopped moving. Beneath her, she heard what sounded like the Kaelen Behemoth. The monster was moving through the corridor directly below her.

“Madam,” Seven whispered over her earpiece. “The specimen is directly beneath us.”

“Don’t move,” she whispered.

They waited until the thudding began to fade, heading aft toward the lower decks. The beast was likely hunting the noise John and Magnus were making.

Helen exhaled. “Let’s go. We’re almost to the lab.”

She crawled the last twenty yards with renewed urgency, finally reaching the slotted ventilation grate positioned directly over the Science Lab.

Helen dragged herself over the grate and looked down. She expected to see the warm sanctuary Claude had maintained. She anticipated the hum of the UV lights. Instead, a cloud of white vapor obscured the room.

Helen kicked the grate. The latches gave way, and the panel clattered to the floor below. She lowered herself through the opening and dropped.

She hit the deck and immediately lost her footing. The floor was slick with a sheet of ice. Helen fell hard onto her hip, biting back a curse.

The temperature in the lab was far worse than the duct. She pushed herself up. “Seven, what happened in here?”

Seven dropped through the opening and hovered near her shoulder. “The environmental processors were starved of power when Claude purged the heat. The extreme thermal shock caused the liquid nitrogen main concealed in the ceiling to shear open. The lab experienced a catastrophic cryogenic breach.”

Helen looked around. The metal counters were covered in layer of frost. Racks of glass specimen vials lay shattered across the floor, their botanical contents flash-frozen into useless gray lumps.

“We need to find the biometric drive and get out,” Helen said, wrapping her arms around her chest.

Helen moved toward Claude’s primary workstation, her boots crunching over the broken glass and frozen chemical runoff. She tried pulling open the desk drawers, hoping Claude had abandoned his keys in the chaos of the pipe bursting. She yanked the top drawer open, finding nothing but neatly organized sterile wipes and empty slides. Then she tried the lead-lined bottom drawer, ripping it off its tracks. Empty.

She checked the pockets of a spare lab coat hanging near the emergency shower. Nothing. Claude had cleared out.

“He took it,” Helen said. “He wouldn’t leave his payday behind.”

She rushed to the primary terminal on the desk. The monitor was cracked down the center, but the power still held. The screen glowed with faint light, displaying an active command prompt.

“Seven, interface with the terminal. Pull up the recent system logs. Tell me what he was doing before the pipe burst.”

Seven extended a leg and moved to slot it into the data port on the side of the console. Without his front left strut to balance his weight, the drone tipped sideways, his chassis banging against the monitor. He couldn’t keep the connection pin seated.

“My apologies, Madam. My center of gravity is insufficient to maintain the physical uplink.”

“I’ve got you.” Helen removed her glove. She cupped her hand beneath his chassis, physically holding him upright and driving the pin into the port so the connection wouldn’t sever.

Seven processed the data. “The terminal indicates a localized data transfer was initiated. It appears Science Officer Kinskey attempted to download his encrypted biometric keys, his forged navigational logs, and the complete genomic sequence of Kaelen creature onto a portable physical drive.”

“Did he get it?”

“The transfer stalled at ninety-four percent completion,” Seven said. “The timestamp correlates exactly with the rupture of the nitrogen main. He aborted the sequence and took the physical drive with him.”

“Of course he did. He knows the ship is dead in the void. He’s heading to the lower logic hub to manually reboot the Scuttle lock.”

“That is the only logical conclusion, Madam.”

“Seven, scan the internal network. Look for Claude’s localized ID tag. He has to be wearing his comms badge.”

“Initiating ship-wide scan.” Seven remained awkwardly balanced against her hand. “I have located the tag. However, my processing capability is compromised. I cannot pinpoint his exact static location. I can only confirm his trajectory.”

“Where is he?”

“He is currently descending through the aft stairwell. He has bypassed Deck Two and is moving directly into the lower decks.”

Helen thought a moment. “John and Magnus are drawing the creature away from the dark-matter reactor and into the central Cargo Neck. Claude’s walking right into the middle of it.”

“Correct, Madam. Science Officer Kinskey is now navigating the lower decks without real-time telemetry.”

“Which means he doesn’t know they are actively luring the monster into the Cargo Neck. He thinks he can just sneak past the chaos to the logic hub. If Claude walks into that corridor, he’s going to step right into the crossfire. The monster will tear him apart.”

“That would be a highly efficient resolution to our Science Officer problem, Madam.”

“That’s true, Seven,” Helen said as Seven disconnected, and she put her glove back on. “But if the creature eats him, the physical data drive gets lost in the wreckage, or crushed, or eaten with him. We’ll never get the biometric keys. We’ll never regain control for the navigation. We’ll drift our here until we freeze to death.”

Helen looked around the ruined lab. Near the doorway, Claude’s tool-roll lay on a side counter. She rushed over to it and grabbed a crowbar. Then she stepped up to the lab’s door panel and keyed the manual release. The doors slid open.

“Madam, what is your current objective?” Seven zipped over to her shoulder.

“I have to go down there and find Claude before the monster does.”

“I must state for the record that navigating a corridor occupied by an apex predator is statistically equivalent to suicide.”

“Document my irrational decisions later, Seven,” Helen said, gripping the crowbar. “Right now, I need to make sure our monster doesn’t eat our only set of keys.”

Helen needs to play bodyguard for Claude.