“I don’t think you’ll have to do much. It feels like it’s catching on something.”
Mateo climbed a little higher and got one hand on the hatch. He held onto the ladder with the other.
“Push!” The hatch resisted then came free. Adem followed it into the crawlspace. “Lights are not working in here.” He inhaled sharply. “And we got bodies. At least three or four of them.”
“Are they dead? Let me see.”
Adem climbed the rest of the way up the ladder and tried to find room for his boots among the bones and fabric scraps.
Mateo’s waist came even with the hatchway. “I thought they’d be better preserved.”
Adem turned his helmet lamp on again and panned it up and down the sides of the narrow space. “What were they doing in here?”
“Maybe they were using the crawlspace after the power cut out.”
“Maybe.” Adem bent and fumbled in the debris. He held up a long bone and squinted at it through his faceplate. “That look gnawed to you?” He held the bone in front of Mateo’s helmet.
“Someone ate him?”
“I think we’re in someone’s trashcan. A nice long tunnel to get rid of the garbage.” Adem let go of the bone. It fell lazily, drawn down by mass-grav and sideways by the centripetal force generated by the ship’s tumble. “Let’s go up.” He put his boot on the first step of the ladder and began to climb.
The slight tug downward wasn’t enough to slow them much. It had barely been enough to make the remains collect in the bottom of the crawlspace. About halfway up they encountered another body, its arm hooked on the ladder. Adem looked it over carefully. “It’s a woman. This one didn’t get chewed on.”
“Maybe they weren’t hungry enough yet,” Mateo said.
Adem freed the corpse’s arm and let her drift down toward her crewmates. They had a lot of catching up to do. “Let’s keep going.” He opened the all-channel. “Check. Mateo and I are fine, about halfway up the access shaft to the engine room. We’ve found some bodies.”
Mateo cut in. “Somebody ate them!”
Adem twisted his body to frown at him. “Looks like they lived for a while after the planet went to pieces. What’s going on up there?”
“Reactor’s at eleven percent,” Charlie said. “Can’t see from here if it’s a malfunction or if someone dialed it down on purpose. We found an android that Odessa’s trying to reboot with the codes the captain gave her. She thinks it might be able to help us wake the nearsmart.”
“Be careful,” Adem said. “It will probably demand a clearance code or something before it does you any favors.”
“Odessa says she wasn’t born yesterday, oh Great Leader, but thanks for the advice. Out.”
Mateo and Adem climbed in silence until they reached the hatch to the engine room. “Climb back down a couple of steps,” Adem said. “There might be a pressure difference on the other side.”
Adem waited for Mateo to move then slid the hatch open. The equalizing air pressure hit Adem at gale force. He rocked back, clutching for the ladder with his free hand. He felt Mateo come up behind to keep him on the ladder.
“Looks like there was a pressure difference,” Mateo said.
Adem got his breathing and heart rate back under control and climbed the last few steps of the ladder and into the engineering section.
He woke his comm. “Lucy, how’s it coming on that gas analysis Mateo sent you?”
“It’s air,” she said. “But nothing you want to breathe. It’s full of toxins, probably just from outgassing. If you got the power back on, it might filter clean in a couple of days.”
“Is it touch toxic or only a problem if you breathe it?”
“There’s a good chance it would give you a bad rash and burn your eyes out of your head. It’s real cold in there anyway. No way could you warm it up in time.”
“Looks like we’re stuck in the suits. Out.” He turned in time to see Mateo pull himself out of the crawlspace. “I’ll check the thrusters. You check mass-grav.”
The engine room layout was similar to the one in the Hajj, so Adem had little trouble finding the thruster controls. The control board lit up with a little prodding. “Check,” he said. “Mateo and I are in engineering. Looks like we might have thruster control.”
“Mass-grav is at minimum,” Mateo said. “If you do anything, do it slow and careful.”
“Odessa says the android is in love with her,” Charlie said. “I think they’re getting married, but first it’s helping us get the nearsmart online. Thirty minutes.”
“Ten-four. The automatic controls look okay. I’m going to wake them up and let them do their thing on the tumble. You still secure over there, Lucy?”
“Tight as a tick,” she said. “Just don’t get crazy.”
Adem activated the thruster system’s automatic controls. The floor underneath his feet vibrated as the warship worked to steady itself.
“The tumble is slowing, little brother,” Lucy said. “I can almost look out the window without puking.”
Adem felt the tumble’s effect on the ship diminish. In minutes, the strongest pull was the weakened mass-grav system. He hopped experimentally. “Feels like ten percent gees. Probably as good as we’re going to get it. Mateo, start looking for spare parts. Pack up anything we can pull off without blowing anything up. Lucy, lock the survey ship down and start working on Mom’s laundry list. I’m going to check the engines.”
“Before you do that,” Mateo said, “I think I found the cannibal.”
The cannibal had made its nest in the pressure-suit locker right off mass-grav control.
“I was just checking to see if there was anything in there worth packing up,” Mateo said. “Scared the hell out of me to see him looking out at me like that.”
There were two bodies in the locker, but the one who had propped himself against the wall and shot himself in the head had been male. The corpse stared balefully through slitted eyelids, its brain matter and blood signing the suicide all over the wall behind it. Adem prodded the second body with the toe of his boot. “You think she was dinner or a girlfriend?”
“I’m betting girlfriend.”
“I wonder how long they lived.”
“The whole story is probably on here.” He handed an ancient reader to Adem. “This was beside him.”
Adem slipped the reader into his thigh pocket for later. “I’m guessing these guys weren’t techs. Everything is in good enough shape down here that they could have kept things going for a good long time. Reactor went into emergency mode, stopping everything non-essential. Most of the system failures seem to be due to automatic cutoffs.”
“Maybe the squeezer caused an EM pulse. Fried or tripped all the circuits.”
“We’ll know more when we’ve downloaded everything.” Adem checked the time. “We have about twelve hours left. Focus on anything small and expensive. I’ll wake the reactor up a little more so we can use the lifts.”
“We bringing the bodies back?”
“Maybe we’ll try to get them all in one place so they can rest together, but that’s a low priority.”
“Might be some hard feelings there if this guy ate some of them.”
“We’ll let them work it out.” Adem opened the group channel. “Check. Mateo and I are fine. He’s starting salvage down here. I’m going to play with the reactor a little then head up your way.”
“Ten-four,” Charlie said. “The nearsmart is rebooting. Odessa is babysitting it. This thing is in pretty good shape. If the engines work, we could probably fly it back to Imbeleko and sell it.”
“I’ll let you know when I check the engines.” Adem chewed his lip. “My vote is to cherry-pick the thing and use the thrusters to crash it into the cloud’s center of mass. It’s too haunted.”
Mateo feigned a salute. “There’s a cargo scooter over there. I’ll charge it and load it up.”
“Keep an eye out for androids. They’re probably the biggest bang for the b
uck. Don’t try to activate them.” Adem left Mateo to scavenge and ducked into the corridor that led to the engine control. The big room beneath it was full of shadows, but there was more than enough light to see that the Hadfield would never fly again. He triggered his comm. “She’s open to vacuum down here, and the engines are twisted off their mounts. Nothing we could fix.”
“Anything in there worth packing up?”
“Not in the time we have left. I’ll poke around the control room for a minute, then we’ll steer clear.” Adem activated the overseer’s control panel. The telltales and screens flickered half-heartedly before coming to attention. A light blinked on the message panel, and Adem stroked the activation button. The message screen lit up to show a young woman. He synced his comm to the message output so he could hear her.
“Unless blowback happens soon, we’re not going to make it, captain. The engines are starting to run hot and the gravity fluctuations are pulling them out of alignment.” Something on the left side of the control console caught the woman’s attention. “Hold on to somethin–!” The screen went dark. Adem wondered what had scared her. Blowback, maybe, whatever that was. He downloaded the message to his reader to study later.
“Mateo, I’m through down here,” he announced. “I’m going forward to help Lucy.”
“Ten-four. Hey, do you have a schematic of the ship’s systems and locations? It would make scavenging a lot easier.”
The captain had deliberately kept that sort of thing scarce to lessen the chance of side missions to the Hadfield’s armory. Rakin was three weeks away and by the time he learned anything useful, the Hadfield would be back in the cloud. “I’ll send you what I have. Call me before you go anywhere dangerous.”
HISAKO
Age fifteen
The room was musky with dirty socks. The boy on the bed beside me reached for my breasts. I pushed his hands away.
“Why don’t you want me to kiss you?” he said.
“I don’t kiss with those.”
“They’re hanging out of your shirt like you want somebody to touch them.”
I pulled the shirt both up and down for better coverage. It was the only piece of clothing like it I had, the only one I could afford, which was funny because it used less material than any of my other clothes. It folded down into a square the size of a meal bar and fit into the outer pocket of my backpack – fortunate, because my mother would have never let me out of the house wearing it. “It’s a style,” I said. “Not an invitation.”
Or maybe it was. It was something. I’d worn it because I knew I would end up at Maki Hakala’s house after school. It was either go there or go home, and I was never going to let Maki, or anyone else from school, see where I lived. Maki lived in La Mur in a mansion and had proudly shown me a thousand year-old, non-functioning android named Trevor that Maki had gotten grounded over when he’d drawn a mustache on its face. “It came right off,” Maki assured me.
I had never seen a corpse, but Trevor sure looked like one to me. Yet, there he was, sitting in the Hakalas’ formal parlor in his very own chair. Creepy. “Touch him!” Maki had urged. “Go ahead. He’s still warm!” Super creepy.
Maki was bad at nonchalant. He leaned back on his pillows. “Hey, whatever. You’re the one who wanted to come over here.”
Buying the shirt had eaten up a month’s allowance and left me nothing for a stim or a meal or anything else we might have done. Maki had plenty of money, but I didn’t want him to get the idea that I owed him something.
“Are you hungry?” he said. “We have one of the only working food assemblers in Versailles City. All it can make are, like, chicken bars, but they’re okay.”
Food assemblers and androids were United Americas technology, which meant no one knew how to make or fix them anymore. Even trying to take them apart resulted in a meltdown or explosion, or so my Intro to Engineering teacher said. The food assemblers, back when they worked, had been able to make food out of reclaimed proteins and algae and shit.
“I’m not hungry,” I said. “We could do our homework. That was sort of the point of this.”
“Was it?” He leaned toward me and smirked.
“That’s what lab partners do.”
He flopped backward on the bed. “I don’t want to.”
“Let’s clean this place up then.” I reached for a pillow but spotted several things on the floor, even on the bed I was sitting on, that I had no interest in touching. “Or we can watch something.” I woke up his entertainment system and told it to play the action movie channel out of New Berlin.
Maki sighed. “Get up for a minute.” He straightened his comforter and bedspread and lined up the scattered pillows against the headboard. I let him put his arm around me as we watched the film.
It was really stupid. Some guy was running around in a torn shirt fighting robots. There was a woman in it, too, but she didn’t do much more than get in trouble and throw herself on torn-shirt guy whenever the robots showed up. I was barely paying attention to it, but I hadn’t realized that Maki wasn’t either until he cleared his throat and started reading.
Nibble
Hair like bristles,
sharp like spines
Scales ran down his body,
but there was no greater love than mine.
Tail like a paddle,
tiny ears slicked back,
he made a little squawk,
when I snuck him in my pack.
He was beautiful,
but not as beautiful as a real cat.
He was charming,
but not as charming as other pets.
But I still love him.
Though he Nibbled at my socks.
“Give that back!” I said.
“You’re the one who left it unlocked.” He rose to his knees and held my reader over his head. “Did you write that?”
I lunged for it, getting my chest in his face.
“Nibble, nibble!” Maki twisted and somehow ended up on top of me, the reader just out of reach. “Did you write it?”
“I wrote it a long time ago. Give it to me!” I squeezed my fingers into a fist. “I’m going to hit you so hard!” He laughed and handed over the reader. EuroD boys like Maki had good manners, as long as they thought they were relating to someone within their own social class. Mine were less refined. I really would have hit him.
“I had a cat once,” he said. “The maid forgot to feed it or something. We got home from New Berlin, and it was dead under my bed.”
“Is that why your room smells so bad?”
“Funny,” he said. “Mother fired the maid and recorded a video of me crying to go in her personnel file. She probably never worked again.”
“What was its name?”
“Meghan something. I can’t remember her last name. We usually just called her The Maid.”
“No, the cat’s name.”
Maki stared blankly for a few seconds. “I can’t remember. I didn’t get a chance to play with it much. It was always sleeping. I just remember being upset when it was gone. I was on medication for a couple of months until I got over it. Mother said she was tired of seeing me snotting around.”
“I was upset about Nibble, too. He got out by accident and someone ate him.”
He put his hand to his mouth. “Sandcats are basically lizards, right?”
“I wrote the poem a couple years later. My dad liked it. He used to read me poetry when I was little.”
“Weird. Is he a teacher?”
My father was currently in jail because his drinking buddies were political radicals and wanted terrorists. “He does a lot of things.”
“I don’t really know what my father does. Some kind of business. He makes a lot of trips to Versailles Station and New Berlin. He has a mistress there and another son.”
“He has four kids?” I didn’t know anyone who had more than three children. Maki’s sister was two years older and an absolute termagant. His little brother was twelve.
Maki crossed his arms. “He’s very rich. He can have as many kids as he wants.”
“I bet your mother’s happy about it.”
“She has a lover somewhere. I heard them talking once.” He very obviously cast about for a new subject. “Do you still write poetry?”
“I’m more into music. I play a few instruments.”
His eyes brightened. “I always wanted to learn how to play something. I asked my father for lessons, but he said it would be a waste of money.”
“There are programs you can put on your reader that would help,” I said. “I can show you.”
“There’s no one to play for. My father is never home, and Mother barely notices I’m here.” Maki’s mouth twisted. Somehow we’d gotten back to his family troubles, and he wasn’t happy to be there.
“You got a new maid, right?” I elbowed him. “Play for yourself, silly. Play for Trevor. Play for me. We can start a band. What do you want to learn?”
“Drums, maybe? Every band needs to have drums, right?”
“You could do drums. Or we could use a program for that, and you could learn guitar.”
“Let me show you something.” Maki told the entertainment system to stop the movie and summoned his personal channel. “Play Spaceman Thirty-Seven,” he said. The screen changed from explosions and computer-generated blood to a man sitting in a hallway with a guitar. The image quality wasn’t great, like it had been broadcast at low power or had traveled a long way. The man was handsome but melancholy, his hair dark and curly.
“I know him,” I said.
It had been a few years since I had looked at Adem’s picture. I’d even deleted it off my reader.
Maki’s jaw dropped. “You’re a Spacehead?”
“What?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.
“This is an old, old song called ‘The Midnight Special.’ It’s from Earth.” Adem sang in English. He wasn’t great on guitar, but he had a good voice. The song was a yearning, lonely thing even though the lyrics didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
When the video ended, Maki told his system to display a list of all the vids on his channel. “I’d never guess you were a Spacehead, too.” He licked his lips. “I only have a few dozen of them, but I know a guy who says there are more than a hundred.”
The Light Years Page 8