She Came From Outer Space Chapter 2
She awoke, screaming, thrashing inside her sleeping bag.
“LILY! LILY WHAT'S WRONG!? TALK TO US! LILY RESPOND!”
Lily hyperventilated, forcing herself to swallow to wet her throat before croaking back.
“Bad dream.”
“Lily you were off the charts, that was more than just a bad dream. It was looking almost like you were having a seizure. As medical chief I'm putting a halt to any work until we do a remote diagnosis.”
Lily tore her way out of the sleeping bag, rage and frustration replacing her fear. She would be so far behind on everything...
The diagnosis was a long, drawn out procedure where Lily tried her best not to scream as she went through the achingly obtuse questioning process, and performed a number of medical tests on herself. When it was finally done, she dumped all the medical waste in a bag and stowed it for destruction later.
Control seemed to get the message after that, and apart from one minor update later that day, didn't speak to her.
Thirteen days to go, she reminded herself.
Late in the day she had, through sheer force of will, and perhaps fuelled by her frustration, managed to complete the bare minimum tasks for the day. She told ground control she was taking an early break, and when nobody responded, she took that as them not contesting her decision. After all, what were they going to do? Send someone up there faster?
“Lily, sorry to bother you,” came a rather quieter than normal voice.
That was a good start, she thought, now they were treating her like a bomb waiting to go off.
“Listen, we're seeing something down here... uhhh we're detecting some kind of interference. We're declaring an emergency, given the circumstances. Expect communications to ffffffshhhhhhhhhhhhh-”
She waited, and waited, and nothing else came.
A few tests confirmed that there was some interference making any kind of communication impossible. With that, she blinked, and realised she was alone for the first time up here.
Lily wasn't sure how to feel, at first. She was alone - actually alone. Of course, she had been alone before, the whole time she’d been up there, but now... no one was there. No one was listening. No one to talk to, either, had she been so inclined.
She looked up at one of the cameras and did a comms check signal – a closed fist moving from side to side. If anyone saw it, the response was to move the camera side to side in acknowledgement. Nothing. No one could see or hear her.
Really, truly… alone. She smiled, and surprised herself as she did so. Others had been alone in space before, of course, but no one had ever been totally unsupervised. She chuckled, and shook her head disbelievingly.
With no way to know how long it would take to get comms back, she set about checking her agenda for the next few days. Depending on how long the blackout lasted, she might have to start generating new tasks.
BANG.
Something, somewhere, had just impacted the hull.
Lily grabbed her data pad and frantically checked the systems. Everything was reading as structurally sound, but that just meant whatever it was hadn't ripped a hole in the station.
She ran through every system again, and again, as she soared through pod after pod looking for any signs of damage. At last, she noticed a problem. One of the airlocks had a leak. She could see it through the observation window, a tiny white puff leaking out, precious oxygen slowly venting into space.
That was, realistically, not a massive problem. A full day’s EVA might be able to solve it. That would have to wait until the next mission arrived, though. She couldn’t go out there alone, and even with a team aboard she couldn’t go out there without communications.
She made her way to the next airlock behind it and sealed it shut, so there were still at least two doors between her and the void. The bang was probably a release of the small amount of air in the airlock, she reasoned.
Switching to external cameras and looking at it from the outside, she tried to judge the damage. That was when she noticed something. The door wasn't blown outwards, but rather bent inwards. How could a vacuum have formed in there? With enough force to suck in... what? The emptiness of space?
Lily shook her head. Impact. That was the only thing that made sense. Something had hit the airlock itself, however unlikely that seemed.
Lily panned the camera around, until at last she saw something that wasn't the white of the station, or the inky blackness of the cosmos. Something... golden. She judged it to be about 2 feet wide. It was a small... sphere. It must have bounced off the airlock and lodged itself in a small anchor of rigging. While it had done some damage, it must have been travelling pretty slowly, she mused. Lily realised just how lucky she was. Had it been going fast enough, that thing would have torn straight through the station.
She tried to get a better angle of it, but couldn't, as every other camera was blocked by the girders or just weren't in the right spot. Switching back, she zoomed in as best she could, the camera resolving the thing until it was a pixelated blur.
It looked golden, at least she could tell that much, and as the rotating arm of the station passed and light shone down for a moment, it reflected brilliantly. It was... beautiful.
She stared at its delicate twinkling, before the arm passed over and blocked out the light again. For a moment, Lily blinked as though she'd been staring into the sun, a glint burned into the lids of her eyes as she closed them. Coming back to her senses, she thought through what she should do in this situation.
Her personal project was up in smoke already. Even if she'd had time to work on it, she would have struggled to get much done alone. This, however, this was something she could... focus on. Her eyes were naturally drawn back to the glinting surface as the sun hit it again, and even through the monitor it was clear whatever it was had a brilliant shine.
This would be her project, at least until communications were restored. There was little that could go wrong, really, if she left a few steps out of her daily routine. The water might not get stirred, the air might miss a few cycles, but with just one person aboard that really wasn't very important. The station was, if anything, being under-utilised. This, however, this thing... it could be important.
She looked down, panning the camera, and saw a latch point just below it, and realised there might be an answer to both of her problems not too far away.
The Armature X was a semi autonomous robotic arm, which could move around the outside of the station remotely. She hadn't had much practice with it beyond a few test movements, but in principle it was simple. It moved from latch point to latch point, and as long as it was latched on it could operate and charge itself if need be, although its battery life was more than sufficient for hours of remote work if needed.
For the next 40 minutes, she slowly and methodically moved it from one point to the next, trying to focus on other tasks in the meantime as it automatically moved, and trying not to let curiosity get the better of her. Too many times she caught herself craning out of a view port to try to get a glimpse, or staring through a camera at the beautiful golden orb.
She couldn’t help but wonder what it was though. It seemed intact. It hadn't shattered when it hit the airlock, so it was made of tougher stuff... an old satellite maybe? Really old? Something designed to last a long, long time?
With a small beep, her data pad informed her the Armature was ready to move to the final latch point, and she set it into motion. Watching closely, she brought the Armature to a crawl as it slowly latched on, before finally coming to a stop. Now she could grab whatever it was out there and move it inside.
There was a vacuum exposure pod in the research area, a small observation booth where biological samples could be observed being exposed to the vacuum of space. It was perfectly airtight, and could be sealed again once whatever this thing was had been brought inside.
However, she was no longer telling the Armature to move from one pre-programmed latch point to another, as it had done a thousand times before. Controlling it manually was a bit tricky, and given her lack of practice she had resorted to simply moving each joint individually, at a painfully slow pace. It just never seemed to go where she wanted it to, like a giant mechanical puzzle, or reversing a car with three trailers hitched in succession to the back of it. What she really needed it to do was... curl in on itself?
Suddenly, struck with a flash of inspiration from her earlier ‘practice’ in her sleeping bag, she tried simply rotating each joint in on itself until, at last, the golden ball was pinched delicately yet firmly between the Armature's fingers.
Getting it to the research airlock was another matter, and she spent the better part of an hour doing so. However, once it was in, she had a different job to do. Now this orb wasn’t presenting any possible threat of coming loose, she could seal the door. As much as she would have loved to rush down and take a look at whatever this thing was, she had to secure the station first.
First she used the Armature X, which struggled at first, but managed to dislodge a piece of plating that was stuck between the airlock door and the hull and cast it into a terminal velocity. However, as she had predicted may happen, the door wouldn't lock. As such, she had to make the regrettable decision to seal the door permanently.
For now that involved vacuum-cement, which she set the Armature to liberally spray into the airlock through the gap. The door would be, at least, airtight again, but it would take some poor bastard a lot of effort to fix it at a future date. It may just never be fixed, she mused idly. The effort might just not be worth it, given the difficulty of doing so on EVA. In any case, she wouldn't be unlocking the other doors behind it any time soon just on principle of safety.
She brushed the sweat from her head. The tedium and exhaustion of piloting the Armature for hours was over. However, she still had a laundry list - quite literally in one case - of things to do. Yet she could put her curiosity aside no more. She HAD to know what had smashed into the airlock.
Pulling herself up through the medical wing, she floated across to the research bay where the airtight exposure capsule lay. She opened the viewing panels, and at last, there it was...
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