Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(109)
He stood in the open inner doorway of the airlock and found the button. Then raised his right leg and twisted his boot to fit between the second handrail and the wall. He didn’t bother trying to fit his other leg into the same space. Instead he pushed himself down until his knee was directly under the rail. He bent his leg so his calf rose up to make a hook.
He tried an overhand grip, then switched to underhand, locking his right glove on to the handrail nearest the door. Only then did he reach out, slide his left glove down the track of the inner airlock door until he found the gap that contained the emergency OPEN button.
Nothing to wait for. Either they had closed their own outer airlock door or they hadn’t. Not his job. Dabeet pushed the button.
Two things happened at once. The gravitics stopped, so that Dabeet was no longer sagging downward from his perch between the two handrails. But this barely registered with him because there was an enormous force trying to pry him out and hurl him through the door.
He was struck by several items, but the suit did its job so that nothing injured him. He couldn’t see anything that flew out the airlock door because the wind of the escaping atmo pushed his head against the wall so that his faceplate showed him nothing. His heads-up display was blinking with warnings—he was no longer in a breathable atmosphere, he was no longer in gravity, he was going onto suit atmospherics, the suit was beginning to provide warmth as the ambient temperature plummeted, and oh, yes, equilibrium was gone because Dabeet was inside a spaceship that was now spinning in every possible direction, roll, pitch, and yaw.
And then, after only a few seconds, it was over. The atmo was gone and so was the wind pushing his face against the wall and the force trying to pry his leg out from the handrail.
No bones broken. His grip still held. But now he needed to get his leg out, and to do that he had to pull himself forward.
It didn’t take long. His leg, being uninjured, turned, straightened, then bent as he needed it to. His boot came free of the handrail. This immediately caused him to float outward but his hand grip held.
He pulled himself into the wide-open airlock and took the short jump to the rail beside the outer door—almost without thinking, except that he did murmur to himself, “Outer handrail,” and saw how it attached to the ship, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to let go of the previous rail until—
His toe snagged on the frame of the inner door, causing him to spin ass-over-teakettle and now his reaching hand wasn’t actually reaching for anything and he was going to go out the door, he knew it—
But then his head fetched up against the side wall of the airlock and he caught the handrail near the inner door and caught himself and controlled himself, with the help of the suit’s power assist. He loved the design of this suit, because how else could a child have held on with one hand and managed to straighten himself and still his motion? He had no such strength in his wrist, in his arm, but the suit was strong enough, and now he held himself in place, his feet toward the outer door as he saw the station float past.
This was the first time he saw it through the door but he could not possibly have made any kind of jump that took him toward the station. By the time he saw it, it was already too late, any exit movement would have taken him through the door heading somewhere else, somewhere random.
The rotation was not as bad as he feared—the station had not passed so very quickly in front of the doorway.
There was no guarantee that it would ever be visible through the door again, though, because the ship was rotating in every direction.
Dabeet gathered himself, pulled his legs toward his chest, and again reached for the rail near the outer door. This time he caught it easily, despite a bit of coriolis effect from the multiple spinning.
Was the nanooze still on the outside surface?
Yes. Trying not to see the spinning, trying not to think about how far he already was from the Fleet School station, Dabeet clung to the doorframe while getting his body through the door and his feet planted squarely on the nanooze.
Then he looked for the station. The previous jump hadn’t been possible, but the next one would be.
He couldn’t see the station at all, though there were several points of light that might have been nearby ships catching sunlight. But “nearby” could mean five hundred kilometers and he would be invisible to them and anyway, Monkey might already have jumped, mightn’t she?
No, it had only been thirty seconds or so—a minute?—since he pushed the button and ejected the Juke ship from the airlock. They must have retracted the dockbridge before he—
No distractions! Look in the direction you’re spinning toward, he told himself. See it before it’s directly overhead.
It was never going to be directly overhead. He saw the station, the completed wheel, the half-completed wheel, the battleroom cubes attached to the center, but he wasn’t going to get a chance at a straight-up jump from this surface. Yet if he tried to walk—Don’t Walk! Don’t Run!—he wouldn’t get into a better position because in a few moments the station would be invisible again so, leaning in the direction of the station as best he could, Dabeet rose onto his toes and pushed off.
Only after he had left the surface did it occur to him that the rotating ship might collide with him, hitting him with the nose or tail of the vehicle.
It didn’t. He had pushed off with such vigor that the whole thing was already behind him.