Catastrophe 2 (Patreon)

@OhWolfy wanted to see some disaster-action starring an engineer name Kai'to. He even sent me the awesome character reference you can find here:  https://www.furaffinity.net/view/35964228/ 

I felt like making a couple changes, so my Kai'to is now female and single instead of male and married, but who knows? Perhaps this story is set before she finds her mate.

Regardless, things are gonna get a whole lot worse for poor Kai before they'll get better!

——— 

Kai’to had just finished her maintenance on the air disinfector when the lights went out. “Huh?” she gulped. The red emergency lights clicked on, the gravity switched off, and she pulled her head from the claustrophobically small air vent.

Aboard the Clay Basin I, there were three types of doors: airtight hatches, non-airtight doors, and airlocks. Airlocks allowed the crew to move between different environments—from normal air to the commissioner’s sulfur-rich atmosphere, or between normal air and vacuum. Non-airtight doors were the common doors found on bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets. But the rest of the ship’s hatches were airtight.

When closed, these hatches could keep the space on one side pressurized while the other side was exposed to pressures as low as hard vacuum. Compartmentalization was vital in a hull breach, keeping a single hole from releasing all of the ship’s crucial atmosphere into space. During an emergency, all the hatches swung shut, and an indicator lamp beside each lit either red or blue to indicate whether there was atmosphere on the opposite side. The crew was still able to open blue hatches during an emergency and move from compartment to compartment, but so long as the gateship remained in an emergency lock-down, the hatches automatically swung shut again after use.

Kai’to held onto the air vent lightly with one paw and turned about. The brown geroo floated at an intersection of two corridors—two hallways stretching into the darkness on either side and a short corridor in front of her that ended in a closed hatch with a blue LED glowing in the panel beside it. The hatch had been open less than an hour earlier when she started the task.

“A hull breach?” she whispered with worry in her voice. She cocked one of her rounded ears and listened with green eyes shut. With the power out and the engine’s omnipresent humming silenced, the ship felt empty and dead, like deep space. She couldn’t hear any sign of a leak. Perhaps it had been on the far end of the ship—an airlock with a bad gasket or maybe the door on the shuttle bay didn’t seal completely? No reason to panic, surely.

She pulled the strand from the holster on her left shoulder to check for an announcement. She didn’t have a mate or cubs to check in on, but she worried for her parents and Oka—the young cub next door whom she looked after when his parents were busy.

“No Network Detected,” read the screen and Kai’to’s ears drooped. Geroo lacked sophisticated facial muscles, so unlike the krakun, they had evolved to frown with their ears.

“Probably just a glitch,” she reassured herself, trying not to fret, “...a tripped breaker or overloaded circuit.” Although rare, lots of problems could trigger an emergency lock-down.

Taking a moment to push her strand back into the holster, she shoved away from the air vent and drifted toward the nearest hatch.

“Crap. Crap. Crap!” she muttered. Kai’to hadn’t pushed off nearly hard enough and now she was drifting slowly off course. She flailed helplessly about and even tried using her arms to “swim” toward her goal, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Sighing, she waited patiently and thought back on the last time she’d been in zero-g. Kai’to had been nine at the time, and all the neighborhood parents had taken their cubs to a storage bay that they’d cleared out the day before. Then they had switched off the artificial gravity and let the families float about for an hour.

A couple of the younger cubs got so excited that they actually wet themselves. It had been the best Visitor Day celebration ever, and each year after, cubs begged their parents to let them do it again.

When Kai finally reached the far wall, she was careful to push off harder. This time, the striped geroo with the cream-colored belly flew straighter but in the completely wrong direction. She pushed off at an angle on her third leap, setting her into a nauseating spin, but the fourth leap was a good one, and when she finally reached the hatch’s handle, she clung to it tightly, resting awhile, trying to regain her orientation.

Then, steadying herself with both legs, she pulled the hatch open and climbed through.

The next corridor was a short one, perhaps twenty meters long before turning to the right. Along the left wall, she could see two apartment doors. She paid them little mind at first until she suddenly noticed the indicators next to the door handles—each was blinking red.

“No!” she gasped, and without thinking about it, she leapt from her perch and glided silently to the first door. She snatched the handle on the first try and bounced against the doorframe, shedding her momentum. Then, her heart hammering behind her sternum, she ran the pads of her free paw against the hatch’s surface.

She stared at the indicator lamp and willed it to turn blue, but it obstinately refused.

She checked the time on her strand—nearly seventeen hundred hours now. Kai’to didn’t know who lived in these apartments, but perhaps they worked first shift? Maybe no one was home when the air bled out of their homes.

What if they had a little Oka of their own? A cub being watched over by a friendly neighbor until his parents got off work … a little fluff-ball that enjoyed nothing more than napping on the rug when he tired of playing with his blocks?

Her heart wanted to shove the door open, to look for survivors that she could pull to safety, but her rational mind knew better. Most geroo kept their doors locked, and even if she had a passcode, doing so would only bleed away some of the corridor’s precious atmosphere … perhaps even blow her out into space if the breach were large enough.

No, if a cub was still inside one of these apartments, waiting for his folks, then he was dead, and nothing could change it.

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dx0L1OkFNTIosGlejGnOZeTHOUSRMcAdpZmjb_Jmv_A/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?