The passengers, who were luckily unarmed unlike the other 'passengers' back at the engineering, were in chaos.
"Sir, what is going on!?"
"This is madness!"
"We are going to die!"
"Quick, there!"
"Commander!"
Everyone was trying to say something, but all the voices were ending up contributing to the chaos instead of order and safety. Normally, the educated way to handle this situation was to apply standart emergency procedures after the loss of life support, but it was probably the gunshots people were more worried about.
"SILENCE!" I yelled. "Listen to me!"
No one did. In the crowd, my voice was simply one of those random ones.
Firing my weapon was a guaranteed way to redirect all the attention to me, but there was a low, yet unnecessary risk of opening a hole on the ship's main hull. All the attention would get sucked out of the hole, into the vacuum of interplanetary space. In the end, I ultimately decided against that idea. Instead, I walked past the crowds and got to Nuan's cabin.
"Finally, some common sense..." I said.
Nuan had sat on her manuseat, wearing a spacesuit. She was breathing the nitrogen-oxygen mixture in the suit's tanks.
"What took so long?" she asked. I didn't bother telling all the interesting stories to her.
"Are you okay?" I asked instead.
"Do I look okay?" she replied. Sarcasm... It was quite possibly the most annoying thing to deal with, in an emergency.
"Just come with me." I said. She got up, and started walking to the door. But just then, the artificial gravity stopped working. Nuan found herself swimming/floating towards the door, rather than walking.
"Whoah! WAAH!"
I caught her in the air and pulled her out of the cabin. But forgetting Newton's third law of motion - I was now moving into the cabin.
"You idiot!" I didn't like her, but Nuan had every right to curse right now. I would not be able to stop without hitting the cabin's wall now. I eventually did, and then pushed myself out of the cabin as well.
"To the cockpit!" I said, showing the door to the front of the ship, all the way across the corridor. She held onto something and pushed herself forward. I did the same a few seconds afterwards. We were now practically swimming in the air with very little drag to slow us down.
Nuan reached the door first, but she was unable to open it. When I arrived, I could push the door open without sending myself back into the corridor.
"Inside!"
Nuan got into the cockpit. I closed and locked the door.
"What do we do here?" she asked. "It feels like we have trapped ourselves."
"You just try to live, I will handle the rest." I answered.
I inspected the panels in the cockpit for quite a while, and eventually found the lockdown switch. In civilian ships, the lockdown switch would be used in case of a hull breach, to prevent undamaged cabins from depressurising. It was a rarely used automatic safety feature (considering the relative safety of modern space travel), but it also had a manual override for obvious reasons. I played every possible scenario in my mind for a couple of seconds, and toggled the switch.
Every non-decorative door in the ship was now closed and locked by powerful electronic-hydraulic systems, and the door controls have been completely overridden; meaning that pressing (or even hacking into) the controlling circuits would no longer have any effect. This would keep the civilians and armed personnel in separate sections for a very long time - unless someone decided to blow up the door (in which case everyone would have bigger problems than the door that was blown up).
I suddenly sensed something on my shoulders. It was Nuan. She was shaking me around. I couldn't understand what she was trying to do.
She turned my seat towards her, and waved her hands in front of my eyes.
I was feeling... weird.
I could see Nuan's lips move, but I wasn't hearing much.
It was getting cold.
My vision was getting darker. A black tunnel in my eyes was obscuring my surroundings. I could only see directly ahead, barely making out colors.
I felt something on my face, and at the back of my head.
My vision was clearing up.
Nuan had removed her suit's helmet. She had removed the air tank from the suit and was trying to force the air mixture connection pipe into my mouth. It wasn't as good as an on-purpose gas mask; but I couldn't complain, could I? Apparently, with the life support failing, the cockpit was depressurising already.
After I gained full consciousness again, Nuan pulled the pipe away and got it in her own mouth to breathe.
I looked around, and found the comms headset. Then, I proceeded to open a channel to the nearby ship in our convoy, Martian Flight 17.
Just when I was about to talk, Nuan forced the pipe into my mouth again.
"This is- blugbhh-"
"Flight 09, we did NOT receive your last transmission. Please repeat."
I pushed Nuan's hand away and started talking.
"This is Commander Kagan of Flight 09. We have lost life support and are in need of immediate assistance. I need you to dock with us for the emergency transfer of passengers and -if possible- the repressurisation of the vessel."
"Flight 09, copy. This incident will be reported to the government as we approach for docking. Please maintain your current orientation and trajectory. We will perform the docking manuevers."
"Flight 17, copy."
As soon as I removed the headset, I found a pipe being forced into my mouth again. I pushed the pipe away for a second time.
"Cut it." I said.
"I just saved your life, and THIS is the first thing you have to say?" she frowned. I could now hear her clearly since the cockpit was repressurised a bit with the air stored in the emergency spacesuit.
"I am about to save everyone's life if you just let me, so I think that's more than a compensation ma'am." I replied.
I switched one of the cockpit monitors to 'docking camera' mode with telemetry overlay, and started watching as Flight 17 came into view.