Free Stories 2018

by Baen Books

  "Thirty minutes."

  "Fine," Lori said. "I'm going to make tea before I start then."

  She pushed off from the bulkhead, pulled herself through the hatch, and disappeared into the food prep area.

  Gavin replaced the headset, and the dimly-lit ventilation shaft became his world once again.

  "—still there?" Hope's voice came through the speakers. "Gavin, can you hear—"

  "Yeah," he said. "Sorry. I had to detach to talk to Lori."

  "Oh," Hope said, her voice thick with maternal anxiety. "Okay."

  Gavin moved his legs through the plastic bubbles that floated in the box, their limp, unflexed forms offering almost no force feedback. Beneath his feet, bubbles flexed each time the homunculus's feet touched the floor.

  The tiny bot speed-walked through the narrow ventilation shaft until he came to a crossroad. Gavin looked left, then right, but saw nothing.

  He thought, for a moment, he heard shuffling, but it could've simply been a shift in the air pressure.

  Or it could've been a child.

  Gavin turned left, which he knew would take him toward the long shaft that led to the tidal power station.

  "Jonah?"

  Nothing.

  He heard another shuffle, and this time he was certain that it was the sound of cloth on plastic. He sped up, and the shuffling abruptly stopped.

  Gavin rounded the corner, and found himself looking into the wide blue eyes of a young boy. The boy seemed startled for only a moment before his face broke into a broad grin.

  "I found you!" Jonah said. "Or you found me. I thought you'd left me alone."

  "Hello Jonah," Gavin said. "My name is Gavin. Your mother is—"

  "Mama told me not to come down here," Jonah said, "but I knew you lived in the labyrinth. I knew I'd find you if I searched all the tunnels."

  "Jonah," Gavin asked, "who do you think I am?"

  The boy cocked his head to the side.

  "Fair folk never tell their real names," Jonah said. "Names have power—even I know that. I just thought I'd gotten too old to play with you, or—"

  "Fair folk," Gavin said. "You think I'm a fairy?"

  "Where are Mr. Pickles and Lady Twilight though? Are they further down?"

  The techs on Earth have been entertaining this boy, without realizing the consequences of their departure to research Hub 2.

  "Jonah, you mom is really worried about you," Gavin said. "We need to go back the way you came. You're probably not going to see Mr. Pickles and Lady Twilight for a while because they're working on a project. And truthfully—because I feel like their make-believe is getting dangerous for you—I'm just a guy in a box with a remote control. I'm not a fairy."

  Jonah frowned and sat back.

  "This is a trick," he said. "You don't want me to find your secret underground kingdom. Wait—are you one of the bad fairies?"

  "I'm not a—"

  "You stay away from me," Jonah said. "I'm not big, but I'm bigger than you. I can smash you if I want to."

  It was true, too. Durable as the carbon-fiber was on its aluminum frame, a few kicks would break Gavin's circuitry, leaving him incapacitated in the tunnel.

  "Okay, Jonah," he said. "I won't try to come near you."

  The plastic bubbles pulsed around Gavin, then pulsed again.

  What was that? A malfunction in the bubble box?

  Jonah's eyes grew wide again, so Gavin assumed he'd felt something too.

  Gavin tapped his fingers together.

  "Hope," he said through the radio, "there's something going on down here. The shaft just shook."

  "I felt it too," she said. "Let me look at some things. I'll call Scott."

  Gavin's homunculus took a step toward Jonah, but the boy scurried farther away.

  "You can't scare me that easily," Jonah said. "If you use earthquake magic, you'll die too."

  "Gavin," Hope said in his ear, "Scott says there's a small cryovolcano just south of here discharging ice. We might be feeling some of the seismic effects of—"

  "How sturdy is this plastic, Hope?" Gavin asked. "If the solids around this thing shift…"

  "You've got to get Jonah out of there, Gavin," Hope said. "Those shafts definitely aren't load-bearing. We have safety shut-offs at each end too, so if there's a breach or a leak, they'll automatically seal."

  "He doesn't want to come out," Gavin said. "Some of the techs from Earth have been pretending to be fairies from Jonah's books. He thinks they're down here somewhere and that I'm a 'bad fairy' who's trying to keep him out of their kingdom."

  "Let me talk to him," Hope said.

  Gavin tapped his fingers for voice command.

  "Direct audio patch," he said, "Greenhouse 3 to external."

  In the shaft, the homunculus's voice changed from a man's to a woman's.

  "Jonah," Hope said. "Jonah, sweetie, I need you to come out of the tunnel. I'm in the greenhouse, okay? It's not safe down there and I need you to come out."

  Jonah kicked out at the homunculus with a speed Gavin hadn't expected. The boy's foot hurled him into the corner where the shaft turned. Plastic bubbles flexed against Gavin's chest and back almost simultaneously, and with a force that hurt. He moved to right the tiny avatar, and saw Jonah scrambling away from him in the shaft.

  "You are a bad fairy," the boy said. "Good fairies don't use the sorcerer's voice."

  Damn you, Arthur C. Clarke. "Any sufficiently advanced technology…"

  Just then, the shaft shook more violently, and Gavin dove forward as he watched the polyethylene rupture under his feet. He heard the hiss of gas-driven emergency shut-off valves closing, and knew in an instant that the homunculus—and the boy—were trapped.

  #

  "This just got really bad," Gavin said. "The plastic's a great insulator, but with a rupture, it's going to get cold down there—quick. I don't know if the gases are sealed inside either. Is there an emergency override to open the shutoff valve on your end?"

  "We designed these before I had Jonah," Hope said. "We weren't figuring anyone would be in them for any reason. The ceiling clearance was actually designed for the homunculi if we needed to do maintenance, and there are thin wires woven in to detect breaks. The locks don't deactivate until the electrical connection is restored and/or the gas sensors don't pick up anything but nitrogen, CO2, and oxygen. Well, trace amounts of methane, obviously—we didn't want a fart to shut down the ventilation."

  "The problem is, the longer we're sealed off, the more carbon dioxide we have—and less oxygen," Gavin said. "The rock that's poking through and the gases won't be as thermally conductive as, say, water, but it's still going to get cold in here."

  Gavin examined the rupture more closely. A liquid rivulet in the fissure outside the plastic seemed about to form a droplet, but as the rivulet approached the break in the plastic, it evaporated into a haze.

  "I've got liquid methane or ethane evaporating down here," Gavin said. "It's not a lot, but it's definitely getting in. The evaporation's making the air colder too."

  "I radioed Scott," Hope said. "He's closest to our heavy tools, but he's still got to get into his suit and drag them over. The truck's broken down right now."

  I'm not sure we have that kind of time.

  I could extract oxygen, maybe, if we had water or ice.

  It'd drain my power pretty quickly, but I could use the battery to heat my carbon-fibers—which probably wouldn't be enough to keep the kid alive anyway.

  Gavin made his way back to the door and found a rupture worse than the one nearest Jonah. A gap in the rock had opened several feet below the opening, and he could see a liquid swirling and wisping into gas beneath the shaft's plastic. He tapped his fingers together.

  "Spectrometer," he said, and a pale blue circle with a sample area label appeared in the center of his view. Given the homunculi's original expeditionary purpose, they'd been outfitted with an array of test equipment. Below him, he found ethane rather than methane evaporating i
n the cavity near the door. Gavin knew that ethane was heavier than air, and would remain trapped in the cavity. Methane would've floated up to fill the shaft, killing Jonah.

  "How long until Scott gets here?" he asked.

  "Thirty minutes, maybe," Hope said. "The suit, the airlocks—"

  "It'll take another ten to fifteen minutes to get through that hatch with hand-tools," Gavin said. "The temperature's dropping by about a degree a minute, and I've got hydrocarbon gases evaporating in from several breaks in the shaft. Jonah didn't bring his respirator on his adventure to find his friends, nor did he bring his electric coveralls."

  "Gavin, you've got to—" Hope said, but a sob caught in her throat. It was easy to be a calm, collected astronaut when it was her own life at stake, or that of another rational adult—one who'd volunteered to accept the risks. Her child was a different story.

  He looked down at his tiny hands and up at the 8-inch-thick plastic safety door.

  "What can I use?" he whispered.

  "Yourself."

  It wasn't Hope's voice this time, but Lori's, that came through the radio.

  "Remember the early days of lithium-ion batteries?" she asked. "Cell phones, laptops—"

  "I wasn't born then, Lori," he said. "Neither were you."

  "Well maybe it pays to be a history buff," she said. "They used lithium-ions with other metals in the anodes rather than straight lithium because they were more stable and could be recharged. They still had problems though, especially with cheap knock-off batteries with bad separators. Sometimes the batteries would catch fire or explode. They were prone to thermal runaway. Our batteries have a gel electrolyte now, but they're pretty much the same design, Gavin."

  "Good thing we have top-notch separators, right?"

  "Lithium's still unstable, and if you connect the cathode and anode directly—"

  "It would catch fire, but I'd probably just burn up inside the—" Gavin said, then paused. He looked down at the hydrocarbon gas pool building under the break near the door. "Oh. I'm just the detonator."

  "I can be there in one minute's flight," Lori said. "I'll have to go in and pull the kid out once the hatch is breached."

  "Hope," Gavin said, "this is your call. We can wait for your husband, and risk gas filling up this shaft while the temperature drops. I don't think Jonah will get hypothermia, but he may run out of air. We might get another tremor, too."

  Gavin waited.

  "What's the worst thing that can happen if you blow the door?" she asked.

  "The worst thing is that I don't actually blow it, and maybe the tunnel around the opening collapses. As long as Jonah stays around the corner, there's almost no risk of shrapnel."

  "Shrapnel?"

  "Well," Lori said, "if we wait too long, the methane and ethane concentrations mean you'll get a fireball inside the shaft also. You pretty much have to do this now or not at all."

  "No," Hope said. "No no no. Wait for Scott. He'll get here, and we can get my baby in a respirator, and—"

  She stopped talking, as though her attention had been taken by something on another channel. Gavin thought he might've lost his radio connection.

  "Lori?"

  "Yeah," Lori said, "I'm here, but you might only have me on the ship's internal."

  "Scott says there's a fissure outside the toolshed," Hope said finally. "The frame on the airlock split and the inner door won't open. The safety circuit won't allow it."

  "Can he pull the circuit and hotwire it?" Lori asked.

  "I think so," Hope said, "but it's going to take time."

  "Hope—" Lori said.

  "Okay," Hope said. "Do it. I'll put on my respirator and get Jonah's. The air's going to get pretty foul."

  "I'm flying to Greenhouse 3 now," Lori said. "I'll take the other respirator in with me."

  Gavin walked back to where Jonah sat huddled in the shaft.

  "Hey buddy," Gavin said. "Sorry about all the bad fairy tricks earlier. You passed the test. We're going to let you into the fairy kingdom, okay?"

  "I don’t feel good," Jonah said. "My head hurts."

  "Yeah," Gavin said. "We can fix that in a minute. My friend Princess Lori is going to come show you where the gate to the fairy kingdom is."

  "Really?"

  "Really," Gavin said. "I just need one favor from you."

  "What?" Jonah asked, eying him with renewed suspicion.

  "I need you to pull my wings off. I don't have the strength to do it at that angle."

  "Why?"

  "Honestly," Gavin said, "it's so I can open a door for you. Don't worry—they'll grow back. It's fairy magic."

  Gavin turned. Either the kid would do it, or he wouldn't.

  After a moment, he felt a tug in the bubble box.

  Error R999—came up in his display—catastrophic damage to—

  "Yeah," Gavin whispered, "I know."

  He turned, and picked up the folded wings from the floor of the shaft.

  "Stay here kid," Gavin said. "Princess Lori won't come if you see the magical gate open, okay? You should really cover your ears and close your eyes too. The overpressure can make your ears bleed."

  "What's overpressure?" Jonah asked.

  "More fairy magic."

  "Okay."

  "How big's this fireball going to be?" Gavin asked when he rounded the corner.

  "Most of the pictures I've seen were about a twelve-inch radius," Lori said. "The electrolyte burns will hit the far walls though. I'm inside the airlock now."

  Gavin stepped up to the break near the safety door and pulled up the corner of the ruptured plastic, widening the gap enough to wedge himself inside. The safety door was only about an inch from the homunculus's face.

  "Little man in a great big world," Gavin said. "Only way to make a difference is to tear your wings off and set yourself on fire."

  "Don't get too dramatic down there, Babe," Lori said. "It's not your real body."

  "It feels like it."

  Gavin stripped the aramid-fiber cloth from one of his wings and separated a rib from the frame. He popped open the battery hatch on his back, and in one smooth motion, wedged the rib across the anode and cathode.

  Error F451. Battery short—

  Then nothing. Gavin's goggles went black and the bubbles stopped bubbling.

  #

  Lori heard a WHUMP at the same instant the plastic safety door flew out into the ventilation duct. She took Jonah's respirator from Hope and ignored the desperation in the mother's eyes.

  "Jonah?"

  Nothing.

  She stepped over the charred remains of Gavin's homunculus, and traced the path to where he'd said Jonah was.

  "Jonah?"

  The boy looked at her, and she saw blood at the corner of his ear.

  Ruptured eardrum. At least he'll survive to figure out when to take good advice.

  Jonah seemed to be in a state of shock from the explosion and resultant pain, which Lori was half-thankful for as he numbly accepted her fitting the respirator to his face and leading him through the cloud of toxic fumes.

  #

  Two months later, when Jonah's eardrums had healed, he watched the two homunculi he'd known as Mr. Pickles and Lady Twilight wave and then dance while video of their controllers on Earth live-streamed behind them. He promised his mother he'd never venture into the shafts again.

  Gavin and Lori put the finishing touches on their main habitat, and began work on their power and ventilation. Gavin had been given control of another homunculus, and corporate put a replacement unit on the next resupply rocket. They'd finished ahead of schedule, since Scott had taken time away from teaching online exobotany classes to help them build, and the other colonists had begun pitching in whenever they could.

  "Thanks for saving my son when I couldn't," Scott said, as they admired their day's work.

  "Thanks for helping us build," Gavin said. He hesitated before adding, "This may sound horrible, but I'm actually kind of glad it happened."
r />   "Why's that?" Scott asked.

  "Lori had been in a funk for about a month," Gavin said. "There wasn't a reason for it apart from the mental exhaustion of routine and confinement. She—well, after we rescued Jonah—she perked up. She actually told me that, 'seeing your charred little robot body turned me on.' Can you believe that? No offense meant. Of course I wouldn't want to see Jonah in danger again."

  "No offense taken," Scott said. "If you were the sort of people who thrived in dull routine, you would've stayed on Earth, right?"

  "I suppose. Lori wanted to be a pirate until she was fifteen."

  "Hey, I got something from corporate you're going to want to see," Scott said. "Milton sent it to Hope first, since they'd collaborated on it."

  "What's that?"

  "The first data from the inside of a black hole," Scott said. "It's not quite what anyone thought it was. Maybe that's your next big adventure."

  "If Lori lets me live long enough to reach Titan, you mean."

  "Obviously."

  By Echo Light

  Tim Powers

  “Have you seen Eddie?”

  In the dappled sunlight that filtered through the boughs and yellow blossoms of the acacia, the face of the young woman who had spoken was in momentary shadow, and Sebastian Vickery closed the book he had been reading and squinted up at her.

  Only a few yards behind her, past the flat gravel shoulder, were the rushing lanes of the Santa Monica freeway—known as Old Man 10 to the few fortune-tellers who still inhabited the overgrown borders and onramp-encircled islands of the Los Angeles freeways—and behind the carob tree at Vickery’s back was a short slope down to the parking lot of a row of apartment buildings.

  Eddie might have been one of those freeway-side gypsies, though Vickery couldn’t recall one with that name. There was an Edgy, but Vickery hadn’t run across Edgy since the events of last May. Most of the furtive mediums had lost their livelihoods then, and Vickery himself had been left with what he thought of as an occasional and unwanted vision impairment.

  “I haven’t seen anybody,” he told her.

  “He was—so mean to me!”

  Vickery tried to think of a response, and finally just shook his head and said, “Sorry to hear it.”

  “You’re reading a book,” the woman said then, stepping into the little clearing. The diesel-scented breeze shaking the surrounding leaves was warm, but she was wearing a long khaki coat. “I’ve done that. I bet I’ve read . . . a hundred books.”