Free Here Be Dragons by Craig Alan

hesitated, then caught Elena’s eyes inside her helmet.
    “Come back as soon as you drop her off,” she said. “If you don’t see me, go straight to the bridge.”
    He passed the equipment forward, and she secured the kits to her suit as best as she could. His voice was harsh and scratched, and each word sounded like it had been ground out between metal.
    “Good luck.”
    Ikenna sketched a salute, and then turned and kicked off back up the corridor towards Rivkah’s office, holding Makarim tightly to his body.
    “And shut the door on your way out!”
    She turned back to the atmospheric readout. The meters were blank and ringed with warning lights—there was a vacuum of the other side of this bulkhead. Nearly five minutes had passed, and there had been no other signs of combat—no impacts, nothing from their own weapons, and no further alerts from the bridge. Elena could have gone around the breach, and headed straight there. The compartment on the other side of this hatch was the most dangerous place on the ship, and it wasn’t her place to act as a one-woman search and rescue.
    Elena positioned herself next to the hatch and peered through the thick porthole set into the metal. For the first time, she saw the tiny smear of blood on the glass.
    She tore a panel from the wall again, and rotated the handle. The warning lights were now overlaid with a soft amber—a quarantined bulkhead couldn’t be unsealed that easily. She took one more glance back to ensure that the compartment behind her was empty, then activated the intercom once more.
    “Override, compartment P-10. Authorization, Gonzales.”
    The computers analyzed her voiceprint and confirmed her identity—no part of the ship was deliberately exposed to the vacuum except by order of the flight officer. The override request was relayed up to the bridge, and the answer came back immediately.
    Confirmed .
    There was a sudden wind in the air as the vents began to suck the atmosphere out of the compartment. The smoke twisted into long, thin cables and wisped out of sight. The life support system needed a full minute to purge the corridor of breathable air, to match the emptiness on the other side.
    Everyone in the Agency went through the vacuum test at Phobos. The door locked behind you, and the slit windows opened before you. It had to be a surprise, lest the instinctive response to hold one’s breath forced the vacuum to rip the air from the lungs. Elena would never forget the wailing of the breach, and the way its shriek had slowly died and left nothing but dead quiet. It had lasted half a minute, and she had awoken two hours later, silently screaming.
    Elena opened the hatch and dived through. The black smoke was gone, blown out by the breach, but a white mist had taken its place. Liquid water from the radiation shield had seeped into the compartment and formed a raincloud that had quickly chilled and frozen Every surface glistened brightly. A layer of frost had settled on her suit already, and Elena ran a hand across her faceplate and peered into the depths.
    She could see in a glance that the vast majority of the hull was still intact, and there was no more blood that she could find—but that meant nothing if it had been blown outside. The walls were blackened in places, and the outer bulkhead was warped from the force of the shock wave that had run through it. Elena took a breath and slowly launched herself down the middle of the compartment, without touching the walls. It was standard protocol to shut down power to a breached compartment, but destruction of this sort could flummox the wiring—and without air to produce a spark, she would never realize a circuit was live until she touched it.
    The breach was less than halfway down the corridor—a bulging crater over a meter across. Water poured from the edges of the exit wound and crystallized before her eyes. The inner bulkhead on the opposite of the crater was scorched black. The hole itself, at the