The airlock was there, five meters away. Then four. Her mind skipped, and it was flashing past her. She shot out her arm, grabbing for it, and the frame hit her wrist. She clutched for it, snatching the way Cyn had. She was spinning, the impact turning all her forward momentum angular. But she was over the airlock. Its pale mouth rose up from under her feet and vanished overhead, and back again, and back again. When she reached out, her hand was actually inside the ship, but she couldn’t touch the frame. Couldn’t pull herself in. The Pella was drifting away, losing its color as her consciousness began to fade. So close. She’d come so very close. Centimeters more, and she might have lived. But space was unforgiving. People died there all the time. The Pella loosed another plume from its maneuvering thrusters, as if in solemn agreement.
Without thinking, she drew up her leg, the spin increasing as she bent tight. She pulled off the shoe that Sárta hadn’t gotten. Her hands felt weird. Clumsy, awkward, more than half numbed. When she stretched back out, the spin slowed to what it had been. She tried to judge the timing, but too little of her mind was left. In the end, she saw the Pella at the end of a distant and darkening hall and threw the shoe at it as hard as her failing strength allowed.
Ejection mass. The spin slowed. Her hands reached farther into the airlock. She was drifting in. Her heel hit the steel frame and the pain was excruciating and very far away. Her mind blinked. She had an impression of the airlock control panel, the lights trying to impart some critical information. She couldn’t see the colors or the symbols on the pad. Her consciousness faded and was gone.
Naomi woke herself up coughing. The deck was pressing against her face. She couldn’t tell if she was desperately weak or under high burn. The edges of the airlock around her were fuzzy. She coughed again, a deep wet sound. Images of hemorrhaging lungs filled her mind, but the fluid she brought up was clear. Her hands were almost unrecognizable as hands. Her fingers were thick as sausages, filled with plasma and fluid. Her skin was too hurt to touch, like a bad sunburn. Her joints ached from her toes to the vertebrae in her neck. Her belly felt like someone had kicked her in the gut a couple dozen times.
She forced a breath. She could do that. Inhale, exhale. Something gurgled in her lungs. Not blood, though. She told herself it wasn’t blood. She rolled onto her side, tucked her legs up, rose to sitting, and then lay back down again as the world swam. That was more than a g. That had to be more than a g. She couldn’t be that weak, could she?
The Chetzemoka hummed under her. She realized vaguely that she was hearing words. Voices. A voice. She knew that didn’t make sense, but she didn’t know why. She pressed her hands to her face. A storm of emotions ran through her – elation, grief, triumph, rage. Her brain wasn’t working well enough yet to associate them with anything. They just happened, and she watched and waited and gathered her scattered self together. Her hands and feet started hurting, tortured nerve endings screaming at her. She ignored them. Pain was only pain, after all. She’d lived through worse.
Next time, she made it to her feet. The little black thumb of the decompression kit was still lodged in her leg. She pulled it out, lifted it to shoulder high, and dropped it. It fell like maybe one and a half, two gs. That was nice. If she’d felt this bad at just one g, she’d have been worried. She should probably have been worried anyway.
She cycled the inner door open and stumbled out to the cheap locker room. The lockers hung open, EVA suits hanging in them or scattered on the floor. The air bottles were all gone. The voice – it was just one voice, but her ears seemed to have lost all their treble and left only an incomprehensible soup of bass tones – was familiar. She thought she should know it. She moved through the abandoned ship. She wondered how long she’d been unconscious, and if there was any way to know where she was, what heading she was on, and how fast she was already traveling.
She reached a control panel and tried to access the navigation system, but it was locked down. As was the comm, the system status, the repair and diagnostics. She laid her forehead against the panel more from exhaustion than despair. The direct contact of bone on ceramic changed the voice, sound conduction through contact, like pressing helmets together and shouting. She knew the voice. She knew the words. “This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control. Please retransmit.” She chuckled, coughed up the clear fluid, spat it on the deck, and laughed again. The message was a lie built by Marco to lure Jim to his death.
Every bit of it was true.
Chapter Forty-two: Holden