The Walls Between Us, Part 1

It was pretty obvious something was wrong when all the lights on the station blinked out in an instant. Everyone looked up from what they were doing, whether it be observing lab rats or sipping on a pouch of rather tasteless stew. Not that they could see anything in the pitch black, but they looked around anyway. 

They heard something though. At first there was near silence. The hum of the artificial gravity and life supporting systems was still omnipresent, but all the earthly creatures were still and quiet. Instinct ruled in that moment. The scientists of Earth all breathed the shallow breathes of prey, hoping they hadn’t been spotted. 

Two in the mess, clutching their food. Three in the labs, alarmed but unmoving. Two in the quarters, bleary eyed, but aware something is very wrong. They all listen somehow knowing that there is something other than the thrum of their home to hear.

There is a crunch of metal as something impacts and pierces the thin corridor that connects the main sections of the station. Something sparks as it is cut. A punctured pipe hisses. There are no alarms blaring to harken the end of the station. The hissing and popping dies out as the thrum of the station falls silent. 

The false gravity, an imitation made by magnets, fails and everything is adrift. It’s not dramatic in the moment. Objects hang approximately where they started without any force to move it. The crew provides some force. 

No longer frozen, hoping in vain to avoid detection, the humans all move. Suddenly there’s motion and sound as they push off of their surrounding floating through the air. Research equipment crashes in the wall in the lab. Rats squeak as the table beneath their cage is shoved away, sending the structure around them spiraling slowly. In the mess, chairs tumble into tables and packets of food are left floating. The chaos is unseen in the darkness, but the clattering obscures a new low hissing sound coming through with whatever has pierced the station. 

Some of the crew head toward the fresh wound in the hull, the rest jolt away as best they can. One, smallest of the humans, ducks into a storage compartment in the lab. In the sleeping quarters, the two poorly rest crew members scrabble in the dark to find the communications panel that sits dormant. Another human cowers beneath a table, interpreting the banging of chairs into tables as the approach of an intruder instead of her friend’s departure to the corridor. 

❖

The corridor is dimly lit where the wall is broken. I come through the arched door of the mess and can make out the forms of Lisa and Rem drifting in from the lab. Their white suits all seem pale blue in the icy light that peeks through the opening. I want to communicate to Lisa, but it feels too risky to speak so close to the unknown force ripping through the station and the light is too dim to make out her face this distantly. So when Lisa moves, pushing off the wall, toward the center and the light, I follow her lead. Rem hesitates in the door, but slowly comes along with one hand gripping the line of emergency handholds on the wall at all times.

The area of the corridor wall that crunched and folded is a rough circle slightly wider than I am tall. The cause of the damage sits in the center. A cluster of ovals of varying colors, each ranging in size from a the size a fingertip to about four inches across, are bundled together in a cylindrical probe. The whole encasement is about two feet across and a set of seven small ovals glow pale blue on its flat face. 

Lisa, Rem, and I all steady ourselves in front of the probe and the crumpled wall. I grip a support braced across the ceiling, my feet dangling in the zero gravity. Rem still clings to a handhold on the wall. Lisa boldly places a hand on section of the broken hull, a mere foot from the encroaching probe. 

“Lisa!” Rem warns in a quiet hiss as the tall woman leans closer to the probe. “Be careful. It may be a weapon or something.”

“We won’t know unless we look. We can’t remove it without killing ourselves. The whole would depressurize the station. If it’s a bomb our best bet is to defuse it,” Lisa says. She’s leaning into the probe’s light and looking at it’s edges. A rubbery looking sealant forms a thin messy line around it. 

I feel a little dizzy. I grip my handhold tighter and blame the zero gravity conditions. I’ll adjust and the sensation will pass. That’s what I tell myself, at least. 

“I don’t think it’s a weapon. If whoever this is wanted to kill us they wouldn’t have sealed the hull around this thing. They can tear through the station’s hull, they don’t need to blow it up,” Lisa remarks. One of the lights flickers on its surface. 

I notice the hissing sound when it picks up volume. It had been there this whole time, subtle in comparison to the visual display. Now it’s too loud to ignore, even as my own heartbeat seems to be a thunderstorm in my head.

“What’s that?” I ask. My voice sounds off to my own ears, slurred and slow.

“Gas,” Rem says. His eyes are wide and reflecting the light as he looks up at me. “How are you feeling, Abner?”

I don’t have an answer to that. The dim light is getting dimmer. One of the probe’s lights blinks out and my vision goes black.