The Space Between Us (1)
The Orbital
The coupler didn’t fit.
Kira swore into her helmet. She’d known it wouldn’t.
It was an ancient ISA-Registry airlock. She had never seen one in person. Airlocks this old predated the universal collar by at least eighty years—but part of her had hoped the pitted ring would click anyway, like some mechanical miracle.
It didn't.
She hung there in silence, boots magnetized to the orbital's hull, tether snaking back to the Wren, stars burning in the black around her.
Somewhere behind Kaeilin's Moon, Gliese-442c turned slowly, oblivious to a lone woman standing on the exterior surface of a dead orbital that had been spinning around the moon for at least a century.
An exterior control panel next to the airlock refused to respond. No power. Never a good sign.
She hoped she hadn't wasted a quarter of her fuel getting here when she could have been on the surface of Gliese-442c spending an unwise share of the credits she had stumbled into just days earlier.
What she needed was a fuel source. 442c had fuel, of course, but why buy it when you can steal it?
Unless, of course, there is nothing to steal, which seemed to be more likely as each moment passed.
The orbital was dead.
But, if it had been salvaged before, why was the airlock still intact? Why bother to lock it back up on your way out?
Kira found the manual override panel.
Two thumb screws held it in place. She unscrewed both, letting them float—still tethered by thin safety wire.
The panel tilted open on stiff left-side hinges. Inside was a folded crank, worn but intact.
She pulled the shaft free until it clunked into place, then unfolded the handle and began cranking counterclockwise.
It took three full rotations to draw back the airlock bolts. On the last turn, she felt the clutch disengage, letting the handle spin freely in her grip.
She imagined the sound of the bolts releasing, though she knew there was nothing to hear in vacuum. But the faint vibration through her gloves was enough—her brain translated it into a click.
She pulled the hatch open and stepped into the airlock, her magboots clicking faintly on the deck—felt, not heard.
Then she leaned back into the void, unhooked the tether from The Wren, and clipped it to the manual crank housing, anchoring her ship to the orbital.
To her surprise, the orbital came to life when she tapped the power panel. Lights flickered on—two blew out immediately, but the rest held, casting a pale glow across the airlock.
Kira pressed the airlock control. The exterior door closed and locked on its own, seals engaging with a soft vibration underfoot.
The ingress sequence, however, failed. A red indicator flashed:
ATMOSPHERE FAULT
She wasn’t surprised. There was no reason to keep a breathable environment in a derelict this old. Whether the station still had enough onboard nitrogen and oxygen to spin up an atmosphere was another question—but not one she needed answered anytime soon.
Her HUD displayed 5 hours, 42 minutes breathable. More than enough. She’d know long before then whether this fossil was worth the detour.
It was a large station, sufficient for supporting at least twenty crew, possibly double that number.
The interior pressure light remained red, pulsing slow and steady—a heartbeat for a station long abandoned. Kira stood still for a moment, listening to the hiss of her oxygen feed, the faint rasp of her own breath inside the helmet.
The interior airlock door refused to respond to her key presses, despite the lights indicating the pad was still in working order. When she touched the ingress button, the red ATMOSPHERE FAULT indicator glowed steady for a moment—then resumed its slow blink.
Kira frowned inside her helmet.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the warning wasn’t about vacuum in the station. Maybe it meant the equalization system had failed—that there was an atmosphere on the other side of the door, and the lock just couldn’t balance the pressure.
The symbols were old ISA standards—color-coded, half worn. Nothing clear.
She stepped back, and studied the frame. A second access panel sat flush with the inner bulkhead, half-concealed behind a fold-down guard.
She popped it open. Another crank assembly—this one vertical, tight against the hinge column. She extended the handle and gave it a test twist.
It didn’t want to budge.
She planted her boots, locked her hips, and tried again, harder this time.
The crank resisted—then shifted a millimeter. A vibration ran up her forearms. She could feel pressure behind it, like the weight of air pressing against steel. It wasn’t just resistance—it was stored force, waiting to release.
Kira stopped.
If there was atmosphere inside, and the airlock wasn’t counterbalancing…
She glanced at the panel. No hydraulic assist. No brace bar. And no warning sticker.
Of course not. Why label something everyone assumed worked?
She hesitated. If the pressure was real and the bolts gave, the door would blow—right into her.
She could be knocked out. Worse, she could crack a joint seal. A broken suit with 12 psi of oxygen-rich air wouldn’t explode, but it would fail fast.
She exhaled and looked around the narrow airlock.
Options?
None.
She could walk away. But she’d already burned a quarter tank getting here, and she hadn’t come this far to be stopped by a stuck door.
She planted her boots again, braced herself off the far wall, and began cranking—slowly.
Each rotation took effort. Her suit’s shoulder servos pushed back, trying to prevent strain.
One bolt released. Then another.
The crank was looser now. She could feel the door ready to go—the bulkhead bulged faintly, a ripple you could only see if you were looking for it.
She counted down aloud, though no one could hear it but her.
“Three… two…”
The third bolt came free.
She braced for it. She tethered herself to the bulkhead. Angled her body slightly above the hinge so the swing wouldn’t catch her square in the chest. She even cushioned her stance, bent her knees, unlocked the shoulder servos.
She’d been hit by airlock doors before. This wasn’t her first antique.
Kira wrapped one gloved hand around the crank, the other gripping a side handle welded to the inner frame. She gave the crank the final turn.
The last bolt released with a mechanical snap that echoed up her arms—and then the door exploded open.
It didn’t swing. It punched.
Her body caught the door's edge as it flung outward, slamming her sideways into the opposite wall with enough force to knock the breath from her lungs. Her helmet cracked against the bulkhead, stars bursting in her vision. Thankfully, it didn’t fracture.
Her left arm folded awkwardly between her torso and the wall—a white spike of pain bloomed in her shoulder as something gave.
She didn’t scream. Just gritted her teeth and hissed air through them, curling in reflexively against the impact.
The door hung wide now, trembling on its overextended hinge. Warm air rushed around her—the station’s forgotten breath washing over her in dry, filtered gusts. Her HUD blinked rapidly.
Suit Impact Detected - LEFT ARM MOTOR RESET
Internal Pressure: 12.2 psi
O₂: 29%
No breach detected.
She laughed once, bitter and breathless.
"Great prep, Kira." she said.
She pushed herself off the wall, righting her stance with one good arm. Her suit servos whined, adjusting to the limp. Pain flared, then dulled as the auto-injector pricked her with a neuroblocker.
She was still breathing. But the orbital had just reminded her exactly who was in charge.
A warning flashed on her HUD:
LEFT ARM MOTOR STABILIZED.
RESTRICTED RANGE ACTIVE.
Shit.
Kira rested, her back to the bulkhead, feeling the waves of nausea. She gritted her teeth and steadied her breathing. Despite the meds, the shoulder throbbed like a live wire every time she moved. Her left arm hung slack, slightly rotated outward, the shoulder visibly sunken and misaligned beneath the suit’s flexible polymer. She’d seen enough of these in field hospitals to recognize the anterior dislocation. Classic mechanism: blunt force and torque. That door had hit harder than she’d expected.
But the suit was compensating, stabilizing her shoulder and arm, and administering a trickle of drugs. She couldn't just leave. It was time to continue on.
Despite the lights in the airlock, the interior of the ship remained dark—dead. Her shoulder lamp cast a narrow cone of white ahead, slicing through stagnant air and fine suspended dust. The corridor stretched forward—low ceiling, reinforced steel bulkheads, no labels in sight.
Despite the atmosphere, she kept her helmet on.
She stepped forward.
The deck plating was warped in places, the panel seams lined with frost where insulation had failed. Her suit HUD flickered once, picking up a weak heat signature, then dropped it.
“Ghosts,” she muttered. “Just ghosts.”
She reached a three-way intersection. One corridor ended in a collapsed bulkhead. Another led her deeper, toward what looked like a central spine. The ISA loved radial designs. Utility hubs in the center, wings spinning outward. This station was no different.
She reached a junction with faded stenciling across the floor:
CORE ACCESS / ADMIN - 30m
BLOCKS A–D / LEFT
BLOCKS E–H / RIGHT
Her heart skipped.
Blocks?
She pressed forward, following the right-hand path. The station trembled once—just a thermal flex from her entrance heat, she told herself.
At the far end of the hall, a reinforced door bore the ISA seal: three concentric rings with a stylized planet and an orbital track across it. Half the symbol was scorched black from an old electrical arc.
She overrode the lock manually. The door slid open with a low mechanical grind.
The lights came on when she stepped onto the bridge. It was much smaller than she had expected. Wrong somehow. Not built for observation—more like a command post than a research hub. There were no long-range telescopes, no science gear, no charts. Just three dead terminals, a backup logbook sealed in glass, and a floor schematic built into the wall: a clean ring of eight long corridors, labeled alphabetically, A-H.
She found the medbay just off the bridge. The lights came on as she entered, and she stared wide-eyed at the vast assortment of medical supplies and drugs.
"It's a gold mine," she said out loud.
The medbay was cramped but dense—more like a submarine’s infirmary than a hospital suite. Stainless steel cabinets lined the walls, some open, others sealed with yellowed mechanical locks. A few bore faded ISA decals, their corners peeling.
Shelves groaned under the weight of tightly packed supply kits: vacuum-sealed trauma packs, injectors in color-coded foam slots, wound staplers, suture mesh, and surgical adhesives. One corner housed a collapsible surgical chair still wrapped in its original plastic. Next to it, a portable sterilizer hummed softly—still functional.
The diagnostic bed dominated the center of the room, anchored to the deck with bolted rails. Its surface was cracked in places, the padding worn to the frame, but the console beside it blinked faint green, cycling through low-power vitals mode. A retractable arm overhead bore a cluster of multi-function scanners and a long mechanical injector, the kind that could administer sedatives, nanomed packs, or aggressive antivirals in a single press.
A locker in the back wall had been left ajar, revealing rows of labeled drawers and vials: antibiotics, coagulants, muscle relaxants, synthblood cartridges, pain suppressors, nerve dampeners. She spotted two spare IV racks, a bone-saw in its cradle, and a clamshell med-stasis pod still powered but coated in dust.
She was certain that everything was long expired, but someone out there would buy this stuff, no questions asked. Black market clinics, fringe smugglers. Even backworld hospitals would trade clean water for half of this. Sterility seals and cold storage mattered more than dates. The solid-form drugs would have lost some efficacy, but who would know? Injectables might be hit or miss. But the diagnostic tools, surgical gear, and implantables were a literal treasure, even if they were outdated.
On the wall behind the diagnostic couch, an embedded touchscreen flickered to life at her approach. The interface was basic—early-ISA standard blue—but offered full triage protocols, anatomical overlays, and procedure walk-throughs. She tapped twice. The screen responded with a low chirp and opened a visual guide for joint reductions.
She straddled the diagnostic couch and let her injured arm hang off the edge, gently rotating it outward. Gravity alone wouldn’t do it. She needed leverage.
Kira tied a length of surgical tubing to her wrist and looped the other end under a rail at the base of the couch. Then, she leaned her body weight away from it, using the tension to pull her arm down and outward while angling her torso forward—like she was drawing a bow with her bones.
Pain exploded. She grunted, kept going.
The humeral head resisted, then—
Thunk.
A meaty pop deep in her shoulder. Searing white light behind her eyes. But the socket was full again.
She screamed.
Then slumped back, drenched in sweat. Still alone. But no longer broken.
She tapped on her wrist, increasing the dosage of neuro-blocker, lay on the diagnostic table, and rested, nearly falling asleep in the process.
She shook her head. Falling asleep on a limited tank was asking to die quietly.
She hesitated before removing the helmet. An ancient facility. Unknown life support integrity. But the readout held steady: 12.2 psi. 29% oxygen. No toxins flagged. And she needed a full breath.
It took time. Her shoulder made the motion agonizing. When it finally lifted free, the scent of ethanol, ozone, and something older hit her—metallic and stale, like the breath of a lost civilization.
Kira returned to the bridge.
A placard, paint chipped, but still legible, read:
ISA PENAL ORBITAL
INMATE TRANSPORT AND CRYONIC DETENTION FACILITY 1414-A
ENTRY RESTRICTED UNDER ARTICLE 12-C, EARTH CODE
Kira took a step back.
She turned to the nearest terminal, brushing away dust. The screen flickered. Power was low, but the system still lived—barely.
She accessed the wing logs.
Eight wings. Sixty-four pods per wing.
A grid of indicators appeared.
Red. Red. Red. Red.
Null. Failed. Decompressed. Power loss.
Until one.
WING A / POD 19
STATUS: STABLE
CRYOGENIC INTEGRITY: 4% POWER REMAINING
One lone green square, flickering in a sea of red. One life in a tomb of dead.
She checked the access logs. Then stood back, eyes wide.
She stared at the readout, chilled.
The last time the airlock had been opened had been 232 years ago.
She hadn’t found fuel. She’d found an ancient prison.
And something inside it was still alive.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.
What a world builder you are. I was right with Kira all the way...And the title The Space Between Us...how perfect for this! Great story...
I’m very intrigued. I also love the name Kira!!!