Free Outriders by Jay Posey Page B

Piper turned back and ducked down through the hatch. It was slightly shorter than a normal doorway, but the connecting corridor was only a few steps long so she didn’t have to hunch over long. The pod was pretty straightforward. A couple of crash couches with harnesses, nav rig, full sensor suite. Supplies were locked in a rugged case. Efficient, but not without some thought for at least a little comfort. Whoever had designed it seemed to understand that people might have to sit in there for a couple of weeks before anyone found them. Piper tried not think too much about that as she slipped inside and punched the code to close the hatches. She sat down on one of the crash couches, but she didn’t strap in. That was a little more than she could handle.
    She’d never actually used a lifepod before, except for the basic training scenario everyone had to go through before getting assigned to a hop, and that one had been back on-planet. There was something eerie about the real thing; knowing that she was hanging out in space, just a few button presses away from being cut loose. To her surprise, space didn’t seem quite so inviting at that particular moment.
    It was only a minute or two before Piper couldn’t handle the silence anymore. She picked at her fingernails, thought about opening the hatches again so she could at least hear Gennady working, but decided against it for fear of interfering with whatever the “something” was he was planning to do. Finally, she decided to power up the pod’s sensor suite and see if she could get a different perspective on whatever was going on. She scooted over to the console and ran through the activation protocol. Pale blue patterns arced to life as the sensors cycled online. The console bleeped once with a cheery tone.
    And then promptly went dark.
    Everything went dark.
    A moment later, the pod vibrated with a dull, metallic thunder. Piper shot up from the crash couch, punched at the panel by the hatch. Too late. She went lightheaded and fell back into the couch. A few seconds later she started falling the wrong direction, up from the floor towards what used to be a wall.
    The pod was tumbling out of the station’s gravity aura.
    Gennady had cut her loose.
    Piper snatched the strap of a harness on one of the crash couches, scrambled to pull herself into it. She hadn’t been in zero-G since her emergency training course almost ten years before. It took her almost a full minute to get her body under control. While she was still fastening the buckles, the pod’s power spun up again as if nothing unusual had happened a few minutes before; sensors came online, the nav rig initialized, internal gravity stabilized. Piper immediately went to work on the nearest console, running a sensor sweep and bringing a projection up on the pod wall.
    “Show me the station,” she said, “YN-773, one-one-hundredth scale.”
    “Certainly,” the console replied, “YN-773, one-one-hundredth scale.”
    The image appeared, crystal clear like there was nothing between her and the station but empty space. And from top to bottom, YN-773 was dark. Completely, totally, dark. She’d never seen it like that before. As her mind tried to process what she was seeing, a silver-thread halo appeared around the hole in space.
    From the silhouette she could tell now that it was a rock, moving at incredible speed. An enormous one, maybe as much as twenty percent of the size of the station.
    Piper’s mouth dropped open, but nothing came out. No sound. Not even a breath. The rock smashed into the center column of YN-773 and too many things happened at once for Piper to comprehend. The station twisted, compressed, expanded, and folded all at the same time, a physical impossibility made manifest by the force and shockwave of the asteroid tumbling and tearing its way through the structure. A flash of light and then the rock, too, flew apart in a billion fragments, a planet-killing shotgun blast of minerals that