While he was eager to get back out and neutralize the threat, Gan knew better than to rush into a high-stakes spacewalk without a thorough check of his physical condition. As an experienced spacefarer, he understood the punishing consequences of venturing into the void with even the slightest impairment. Just like the ship, his body needed to be in optimal working order. Pelve estimated he had been unconscious for less than a minute, but that brief lapse was enough to warrant a rigorous self-evaluation.

  The first order of business was to ensure that his oxygen levels were restored. His recent brush with hypoxia could have had serious repercussions. Low oxygen levels can impair cognitive and motor function, leading to slower reaction times, reduced coordination, and altered judgment—not the best condition to be in when working with potentially explosive mines in the unforgiving vacuum of space. Thankfully, the medical diagnostics that Pelve guided him through showed his oxygen saturation was back within the normal range. His lungs were efficiently delivering life-sustaining oxygen to his bloodstream, fueling his body for the daunting task ahead.

  Next, he performed a series of physical checks. A neurological examination to assess his balance, coordination, and reflexes. A visual acuity test to confirm his vision had not been compromised, an essential requirement when dealing with the minuscule details of disarming a mine. He also checked his motor skills by manipulating small tools, mimicking the delicate operations he would soon perform on the mine.

  Finally, Gan looked inward, assessing his mental and emotional state. The scare of near suffocation could have had psychological impacts that might impede his focus and decision-making abilities. He needed to be in control of his mind, free of the intrusive thoughts of anxiety, stress, or panic. He practiced a few calming breaths, steadying his heart rate and grounding himself in the reality of his task.

  In space, the margin for error was microscopic, the line between life and death thread thin. Despite the potential dangers, Gan was cleared for action. He was fortunate that his brief loss of consciousness didn’t cause any lasting harm.

  Donning a spacesuit is no small feat. These life-sustaining shells are not just garments; they are individual spacecraft, designed to offer the human body protection and sustenance in the harsh vacuum of space. It was always a meticulous process for Gan, one that demanded patience, precision, and focus.

  The initial challenge was maneuvering into the bulky body of the suit. This portion of the suit was engineered to protect the wearer from the hostile elements of space, offering layers of thermal protection and radiation shielding. Despite its life-preserving purpose, it was a cumbersome piece to handle. Its rigidity, meant to maintain pressure and counteract the body-crushing vacuum of space, made it difficult to put on, especially in a zero-gravity environment.

  Gan guided one leg and then the other into the lower section of the suit. The material was thick and resistant, making each movement an exercise in endurance and flexibility. He grappled with the torso piece, aligning his arms and threading them through the stiff sleeves. He had to perform this intricate dance of contortion while ensuring he didn’t trigger any of the suit’s various features prematurely.

  Once he had wriggled into the main body of the suit, he faced the challenge of sealing it. The suit was equipped with a variety of high-tech fastenings, each requiring a specific sequence to ensure a proper fit and effective seal. These mechanisms were designed to be handled by gloved hands, so Gan had to make sure they were all fastened before proceeding with the gloves.

  The gloves were a test of dexterity. Crafted with an intricate web of microwires for flexibility and an outer layer resilient to micrometeoroids, they had to be carefully aligned and sealed to the arm sections of the suit. Each finger slot had to be filled correctly, the palms aligned, and the wrist seal locked securely. A misstep here could render his hands useless, or worse, exposed to the unforgiving conditions outside the ship.

  Lastly, he had to secure the helmet. The clear dome was his window to the cosmos, armed with heads-up displays and communication systems. Gan handled it with the utmost care, aligning it to the suit’s collar ring. With a satisfying hiss and click, the helmet locked into place, beginning a series of internal checks.

  It was an arduous process, one that took a significant amount of time and effort, but it was necessary. After all, this suit was all that would stand between him and the infinite vacuum of space.

  Gan grabbed the tool kit out of the ship’s maintenance closet and headed for the airlock. He grasped the handrails and used them to propel himself down the hallway until he reached the end.

  It took Gan a second, but he opened the hatch leading away from the main common area and descended downwards. When he was all the way down, Gan closed the latch behind him.

  He was inside the airlock—a small sparse room with a built-in bench on one wall. On the other wall was a view port and a small solid green light next to it.

  When he first got his ship, Gan would come down for hours at a time just to watch space pass by. Gan had marveled at the breathtaking panorama that stretched out before him. Swirls of cosmic dust and distant nebulae painted the black canvas with an ethereal, pastel glow.

  Farther away, innumerable stars of varying sizes and colors twinkled as they pierced the darkness with their radiant light. Some appeared as tiny white specks while others, larger and closer, shone with hues of red, blue, and yellow.

  Closer to his ship, he had watched as asteroids drifted through space, their rugged surfaces pockmarked by the scars of ancient impacts. Some were rocky while others glistened with ice, reflecting starlight as they tumbled through the void. Occasionally, they collided, sending smaller fragments flying into the darkness and adding to the debris that filled the sector.

  He also had observed the ghostly dance of solar winds as they interacted with the ship’s magnetic field, creating a delicate, shimmering curtain of light that enveloped the vessel. As charged particles from the nearby star collided with the magnetic field, they produced an otherworldly aurora that further mesmerized him.

  That was before he started picking up the strange holo-shows, though! There was something about watching the holograms that captivated Gan. He wondered what it would be like to land on a strange world and explore it. To be the first Ellurian to make contact with a new race. Gan realized he was daydreaming again, so he quickly focused back on the task at hand.

  At the far end of the room was a small hatch with both a red illuminated button and a wheel that could open the door manually. Next to the hatch was a mass of coiled cable wrapped around a tube. This was the tether cable Gan used for space walks outside the Valtorian. It was all that kept him from floating off into space and exploring the great unknown.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Gan sat down and buckled himself in with the strap attached to the seat. Then he punched the button to his right. The lower-level ship’s computer activated, and its robotic voice began counting backwards. Pelve had never done a countdown before now that Gan thought about it. Such mundane things seemed to be beneath him.

  The solid green light changed and was now a flashing amber light. When the ship’s computer finished counting backwards, the light began flashing red.

  Small vent holes that had been hidden opened and began sucking all the oxygen from the room and back into the main tank that held the ship’s oxygen reserves. Gan could hear the whooshing sound of the oxygen as it was vented out for a few seconds and then all was silent. A small paper Gan had left before on the seat went flying every which way before Gan caught it and crumpled it in his fist. He stuck it into a pocket of his suit to secure it. The paper was unimportant to him, but he didn’t want it adding to the debris in space.

  The red light changed once more from a flashing red to a solid yellow. It was now safe to exit the airlock.

  Gan undid his strap, floated to the hatch and attached the tether cable to his suit. This was the only thing between him coming back or floating off into space, never to be seen again.

  Gan grasped the wheel of the airlock’s hatch. He twisted it to the left for several rotations and was rewarded when it opened slowly. He pushed the door open and stepped out into the cold void of space. Gan allowed his body to float to the end of the tether line until it jerked taut.

  This whipped Gan around, and he got a good look at the Valtorian.

  She was metallic silver and several octs high with a few scars from close encounters with meteorites that had made it through the ship’s force-field. The only armaments on her were courtesy of the escape pod which was tucked in underneath on the ship’s bottom.

  She was nothing to look at, but she was functional. She had to be, to harvest all the material that Gan had salvaged. Even his Paktu was surprised at his progress.

  Gan suspected that this was why he could re-route a small percentage of the ship’s computing power towards collecting the videos and deciphering their communications.

  Gan marveled at the fact that he could captain her by himself, whereas his classmates had gotten ships so large and unwieldy that they had to have their own crews. If Gan were being honest with himself, the disadvantage of the Valtorian had become an advantage.

  Gan shook himself out of his reverie, activated his suit’s thrusters, and flew towards the ship.

  He didn’t want to approach too fast or he would wind up scarring the Valtorian’s metallic silver paint job and having a really bad day.

  Gan could not see the mine yet, because he had allowed the tether to guide him out facing the ship on the side opposite the Galley. He would have to travel to the other side where the Galley was. That is where he suspected the mine would be.

  Gan reeled himself back in using the tether cable and headed in the Galley’s direction. He drew closer and closer to the ship until he was hovering weightlessly above it. He looked down as he passed overhead and admired the colossal structure of titanium alloys and advanced composite materials stretched out before him. The Valtorian’s hull was a mosaic of ridges, panels, and embedded sensor arrays, glinting in the harsh, unfiltered sunlight of space. Large communication dishes stood like silent sentinels, while arrays of propulsion thrusters lay dormant, their metallic surfaces scarred by countless bursts of plasma fire.

  Around him, the star-strewn panorama of space unfolded in its breathtaking expanse. Brilliant constellations dotted the inky black, while distant galaxies painted smudges of light against the cosmic canvas. He glimpsed a nebula, its brilliant colors diffused across light-years.

  The other side of his ship drew closer, each pull on the tether a leap across the metallic landscape. Gan continued to pull himself forward until he saw it.

  The mine was a huge, disgusting, metallic blob of orange that had affixed itself to his ship. Gan’s distaste for it was almost visceral. To him, it was one of those things that just did not belong.

  Gan circled about it cautiously to make sure it wouldn’t arm itself or do something else. Luckily for him, it appeared to be in a sleep state.

  Gan aimed to the right of it and landed on top of his ship’s superstructure.

  He secured the ship’s toolbox to an exposed beam and started rifling through it. As he did so, he heard Pelve over the comm speakers inside his helmet announce that oxygen levels were continuing to climb back to normal levels inside the Valtorian. Aside from that, the rest of his time in space was silent.

  It took him a few moments, but Gan found what he was looking for. He withdrew a thin metallic wand that was folded against itself. Gan unfolded it and was rewarded with a thin, four foot long bar.

  Gan intended to use it to pry the mine off his ship’s hull. Then he hoped to deactivate the mine before bringing it inside. Gan gave the mine a closer inspection. There were three tripod-like feet that connected the bottom of the mine to the superstructure of his ship. On what passed for the mine’s front was a small display screen. Its surface was scratched and dented, but he could still make out its display. It flashed ever changing characters in a format unfamiliar to him. Occasionally, some of the characters would repeat. Gan suspected it was a countdown of sorts. He didn’t want to be around when it got to whatever its version of zero was. That gave him even more of a reason to remove said mine.

  He went to apply his tool to the feet of the mine and was surprised when it stopped and refused to go any further. Gan could feel a powerful force pushing the hand containing the bar backwards. Gan changed his grip. Even though he grasped the pry bar in both hands, Gan could not bring it towards the mine.

  These developments made matters more interesting. Gan would have to deactivate the mine here instead of removing it from the ship’s hull and attempting to deactivate it a safe distance away. He folded the tool back up and replaced it in the toolbox. Gan rifled through the toolbox some more until he found a small box-like object with exposed wires. The wires were composed of a plastic-like material that he hoped could be attached to the mine.

  Gan could then connect to it wirelessly and begin communicating with the mine’s internal computer.

  Once communications were established, Gan could use it to override the mine’s operating system.

  When that was accomplished, he could force the mine to disarm and detach itself from the Valtorian.

  It took some doing, but he got the right communication protocols set up on it. The mine seemed to use an older communication frequency than what was currently in use today. Finally, after much trial and error, Gan was rewarded with several short, dull tones that echoed through his helmet’s speaker system. The first two tones were the Valtorian’s initial greeting, and the next three tones were the mine’s response. That confirmed the ship was able to establish communications with the mine.

  Engaging the Marau space mine’s intricate code system was not unlike attempting to unlock an encrypted vault of an advanced civilization. It was a challenge to the mind and to the machinery involved, a complex dance of numbers and calculations that could take a fraction of a second or days on end, depending on the complexity of the code and the power of the processing system involved.

  However, Gan had an advantage. Elo had secured several thousand cracked codes from their well-placed spy within the Marau military. This crucial information acted as a pre-existing blueprint, a guide to navigate through the labyrinthine cryptography of the mine’s security system. This trove of cracked codes provided a starting point, allowing them to bypass thousands, if not millions, of fruitless attempts. It was like possessing a skeleton key in a mansion of locked doors, narrowing down the number of keys needed to open the main vault.

  The task was not simple. The low-level ship’s computer had to iterate through each possible code, trying them against the mine’s defenses. This process, akin to finding a needle in a haystack, required an intricate dance of trial and error, brute force, and pattern recognition. The ship’s computer had to cross-reference each code with the mine’s responses, interpreting feedback, learning, and adapting its approach with each attempt.

  Time was of the essence. The mine was a ticking time bomb, programmed to re-arm in half a day, and each passing moment brought them closer to another potential disaster. Yet, the process couldn’t be rushed. Each code was a guess, an attempt to pick a lock in the dark, and it required patience and precision. Gan could only watch as the machine worked, cycling through thousands of code combinations in the desperate hope of finding the one that would disarm the menacing mine.

  literally stuck to his ship, an anti-removal mechanism, and a desperate race against the clock—what could possibly go wrong? ??

  calm before the storm—meticulous preparation, careful maneuvering, and the nerve-wracking process of cracking the mine’s security. But now that Gan has engaged the decryption process, the real tension begins. Will he crack the code in time, or is this mine about to turn the Valtorian into space dust?

  creative? Drop your predictions below! ??

  favorite, rate, or leave a review—it really helps me out! ?? Thanks for reading, and see you in the next chapter!