by Rok Chillah
Two images seemed to creep out at one from nowhere, at odd moments, unexpectedly, on a wall monitor here or there. One was the white and blue wispy globe of Earth with its cratered olivine Moon. The other image was that of another disconcertingly blue planet with wispy clouds, albeit four times the diameter of the home world, and choked with liquid methane: Neptune, named after the ancient Roman sea god. In that second picture, one tended to be looking over a greenish-glassy landscape pimpled like a melon's skin: Triton, Neptune's largest moon. That image came from Triton Base, the orbiting space station from which workers could rise or fall above Triton. As the image of Earth got smaller, the image of Neptune got larger.
As always, the ship performed miracles in managing its artificial gravity, spinning on its axis, and it was sometimes hard to remember one was deep in the solar system like a grain of sand in the ocean.
There was a definite shudder now. The workpod was moving slowly on its axis, heading through the vastness inside the ship toward the next trouble spot the crew must fix, resulting from the recent meteorite impact. The images of Earth and Neptune had not appreciably changed in size, but that was an illusion of the human eye and the ship's technology, for the ship was rushing along faster than a bullet shot from a rifle. All banter stopped for a moment, and the crew of WorkPod01 looked up.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen." A face appeared on the view screen, that of Captain Venable in his command module far away on the other side of the ship. The captain had a classic face, filled with a mix of severity and understanding. The colors were bad, and he looked a bit washed out. Ridge always thought it was the low sunlight this far out, but they had batteries charged up to the point of smelling and foaming, so it had to be just a few bad wires someplace. He'd thought about putting in a work order, just as a mercy thing, because the imperfect reception annoyed his engineering nature, but then he always dismissed the thought. Why volunteer for things, when it could only lead to complications and unexpected consequences?
"Good morning," the Captain said. He appeared to glance at a wall clock near his desk. "Still early." He smiled, like a friend who knew each of them personally, and each of the crew had met Venable at least once or twice. "I'm sure you are ready for a long, hard work day," the Captain said, "and I want to be sure to thank you for your great work in saving and restoring the ship thus far, and to tell you how much I look forward to our being completely back on line and in good shape as we approach our target planetary system."
Ridge nodded to himself, picturing: elevator-style, a dark blob amid lengthy dark and copper-colored shadows, the entire workpod would be moving toward the next trouble spot. On its upper side (up and down being artificial but necessary concepts here) WorkPod01 was a rather luxurious living area for eight. On its lower side, it contained a complete workshop. In a few hours, the entire pod could traverse huge industrial segments of the yawning interior of the ship. It was good this way. You could drive your home to your work, unlike uncomfortably commuting for hours between home and a job in the teeming and smoky industrial centers of Earth.
"Again," the Captain said, as he sat with his big, gnarled hands folded on his glass desktop, "thank you for your heroic and decisive action in saving the ship a few weeks back, and for staying on top of things so that we can make it safely to Triton for repairs. In the meantime, we have new secondary explosive damage in the outer cargo pods in Level..." (he paused, put on reading lenses, and consulted the gleaming readouts in his desk surface) "...61. That's where you will need to apply your next set of workarounds. I'm expecting..." (again he paused and waited while his desk computed data and spat out results) "...that you will need just two days to restore power and then splice together the cabling on 61A through 61L. It does get a little trickier. The shaft you're on is impacted all the way up to Ring 98, where we had a major blowout. WorkPod07 and WorkPod10 were unable to get close enough to make repairs..."
Ridge spoke up, helping the Old Man. "Sir, I believe those pods are more chemostatically oriented. We have the complete systech kit on our station for the repairs I think we'll need to make."
"Thank you, Senior Lead. You are absolutely right." The Old Man grinned feebly. "At least, I feel reassured to hear you say so."
Laughter rumbled through WorkPod01.
"We'll make you proud of us," Ridge boomed. He winked at Lantz and Mughali.
"Set your chronometers," the Captain said. "Thirty-six hours max, and I expect you'll return for an equal rest period. Insurance regulations, you understand."
Ridge spoke for everyone else. "That sounds good to all of us, Sir. Let someone else carry the load while we rest."
"That's right. Division of labor." The Captain looked pleased. "Thanks again, and best of luck. See you all back here safely at the end of your shift." Captain Venable signed off.
Tomson gave his usual supercilious look, and Lantz regarded Tomson with faint displeasure. Yun gave a thumbs-up sign demonstrating his equanimity, while the pragmatic Jerez quietly helped herself to a slice of bread, which she started buttering.
"All right," Ridge said as he carried his cereal dish to the sink, and tucked his Homeric classic on a shelf under the table for later reference. "Let's clean up so we return to a clean home." It seemed childish, but they had to be reminded sometimes not to act like a bunch of toddlers. It was all part of the human condition.
Just then there was a pounding on the door.
"What's that?" Tomson said, frowning. As EMT and sergeant at arms, as well as Bones or Doc, whatever epithet best clung to his strong shoulders at that moment, he was the first to push the others aside and stride to the portal. The gate was not quite ready to open, but he pulled aside the stiff canvas drapes covering a wide, narrow window in one door, and several persons cried out in shock and anguish.
A nightmarish and violent scene-a desperate scene without rhyme or explanation-was taking place before their eyes.
A man was outside the door, pounding on the glass window with the palms of his hands so that the door shook. The man was screaming, but his words sounded muffled and incoherent. His eyes were wide with terror and pain, and he seemed to be throwing himself against the door repeatedly.
"My God," a woman cried out-Jerez.
"We have to help him," someone said, but another person said: "No, don't open the door, he looks crazy." Another person said: "He looks berserk. He's scaring the shazzam out of me."
Ridge and Tomson exchanged glances. Tomson reached up in a small box above the door and pulled out a handgun. He looked at Ridge and shook his head. "Keep the door closed until we know what's going on."
"Anyone know that guy?" Tomson said.
There was a murmur of negation, a collective gasp of horror.
"I'm for that," Ridge said. Tomson tossed him a gun, and he caught it deftly while picking up a hand-phone from the wall. Pressing the buttons 3-3-3, he attempted to connect directly to Venable's CP while crew shrieked and nervously laughed all around him. The desperate man kept pounding on the window, but more feebly. He was leaving bloody palm prints now. It was getting hard to see through the reddish gore. "Hello, Captain?" Ridge was puzzled. "Sir? We are having an emergency of some sort." Instead of the Captain, he only heard static as if the line had been severed. "Sir, we need to know if something is going on out there."
There was a general shriek, and the techs inside fell back as the man suddenly appeared to be attacked from behind. He looked over his shoulder and made a face of sheer terror. Just one more time he looked into the window through the haze of his own dripping blood and gore. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open as if he were yelling-a warning of some kind, Ridge thought-and then gray shapes flashed by, tearing him away. It was all over in a second or two. Ridge did not get a good look at the man's attackers, and he was sure nobody else had. The window was just that gory and dirty by now. They had a single fleeting glimpse of the man being torn away backward, his eyes rolling up in his head, his arms twisted behind him. Grayish sha
pes, maybe men in pressure suits, briefly appeared on either side of his receding figure, and then he was gone.
The techs and engineers stood frozen in shock and disbelief, looking at the smeared window. Ridge hung the phone back up. "Nobody home," he told Tomson.
"What do you want to do, Ridge?" Tomson asked.
Ridge stepped forward. "We will go out as an armed work party. The work has to get done. There is no choice. The ship needs to be repaired, and we are on a tight schedule."
"That's pretty scary," several people protested.
Lantz asked in a kind of lamely hopeful tone: "Do you suppose the man lost his mind, and the ship's constables came to take him away?" Nobody answered her, and Ridge thought her scenario might have some faint grain of hope, but then again he'd never heard of an arrest going down in quite this manner. Wouldn't they leave one guy to knock politely on the door and tell everyone it was okay to come out? Ridge shrugged. "We'll carry guns and watch our backs. We cannot afford to slip schedule. Everyone okay with that?"
He received only pale, scared looks, but nobody refused. He thought grimly, as Tomson handed out the rest of the side arms, they wouldn't dare-they get paid too much. "The show goes on as scheduled," he told them. Nobody made a sound in reply. Armed and uncertain, they all fell back as Tomson rolled open the door. Ridge felt the blast of stale, oily, almost decaying air from outside. He felt goose bumps on his arms, and prickles of fear up and down his spine. There was not a sound to be heard, except for the distant dripping of water, and all the faint little noises that a huge ship naturally made, like wind rushing through tunnels, and metal popping as ambient temperatures changed.
"Door's open," Tomson said as if they needed to be reminded to step outside.
Chapter 4
Ready?" Ridge said. He was the first out, followed by Tomson. Ridge and Tomson stepped gingerly about on the clanging, vibrating, gridded steel platform outside. They kept their guns aimed straight ahead and looked carefully about. Ridge examined the spattering of bloody hand prints on the portal.
Tomson said grimly: "We were not dreaming, Ridge."
"No, we weren't. I wish we were." Ridge's gaze followed the trail of fresh blood away from the portal, over the railing, down into the blackness below.
Tomson stepped up to the steel railing and touched the thick blood there with one fingertip. "No doubt about it. That is blood. What do you suppose that was all about?"
"I cannot imagine," Ridge said.
Brenna stepped up behind Ridge, briefly putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Her touch went through him like the warmth of a heat lamp. "Probably some poor soul lost his mind," she said. "The ship's constabulary had to take him away, and the Captain will give us a talk about it later."
"Yes yes yes," came a murmur of assent. The group were digesting and denying, processing and getting on with things, as humans wanted to do. Ridge felt the urge to put it behind him also. He said: "Let's lock down the workpod completely." It was SOP anyway, some esoteric Corporate regulation probably having to do with insurance rules.
"Let's get our jobs done and get the hell back here where it's safe and sane," Lantz said as she buckled up her web gear. "Yes yes yes," came the chorus, and the others secured their gear. Each of the eight technicians wore a light-weight rig similar to hers, olive drab in color, held together with adjustable straps and consisting of cylinders and pouches sitting snugly against the chest and back.
Under Tomson's direction, Yu and Mahaffey used hand-held wireless devices to make the twin doors slide shut. They locked the portal tightly, and Ridge could see nobody smaller than a crazed hippo could force his way through there. At least their home was safe, although now they had no way back in. The only way to re-enter WorkPod01 would be when they returned and telephoned Captain Venable to have him transmit the entry codes.
"We're ready to rock and roll," Tomson said. "Are we going to open the workstation down under?" He meant the lower floor of WorkPod01, which contained practically an entire factory, tool making facility, whatever one could think of. Normally, it was an island brightly lit from inside, with its doors open and a ramp laid down to truck in heavy parts, motors, assemblies, special tools, even portable generators and hoses.
"No, let's hold off," Ridge said. "Let's go out on Ring 61 and assess what we have going on. Then I'll decide whether we come back here for tools, or bring the shop out there with us." Implicit in his thinking was the fact that it took a lot of work, a lot of energy, and a lot of time to move a fifty ton room made of solid steel and containing all that equipment. He'd need a special auth from Venable plus possibly assistance from one or two other workpods. It was tricky running the shop out there, separating it from under WorkPod01 and then trucking it out like a gondola at a ski lift. It wasn't something to do unless one had to.
With that decided, for the first time Ridge was able to focus on the platform and the guts of the huge ship beyond. The steel grid platform, big enough to park a truck on and surrounded by safety railings, seemed jammed among the massive girders making up the ship's inward skeleton. The men and women in their suits and helmets, with miners' lamps atop their visors, stood in puddles of light, while all around them loomed darkness. The sun itself was too far away now to shed anywhere near the bright heat it did on Earth or the Moon. The ship's nuclear reactors were on minimum output, and the ion drives did not ordinarily power internal systems.
Ridge counted heads. "Everyone ready?"
Single-file, looking like old-fashioned miners going down into the bowels of the Earth, the eight technicians with Ridge in the lead started on their journey. Their voices echoed hollowly in the nocturnal void that stretched in all directions, offset only by the faint glow of daylight from that distant little star, that pinprick known as the sun. Huge girders, much lighter than their massive shapes suggested, curved through the darkness. Their crisscross members merged and blended with other gloomy shapes, like large round containers and tanks, work platforms, ring shafts, and other features. That was just the inner cylinder, with zero G at its central axis. The precious cargo was stashed in blisters, pods, and hangars in the inner skin of the ship. Deserted stretches of walkways represented the loading and unloading bays for when she was to dock in orbit of Triton.
As they carefully made their way along catwalks high in the air, Ridge tried to call Venable again, this time on his collar com. No reply. Ridge tried calling the other numbers he knew, including the Provost Marshal, the Chief Engineering Officer, and more, but the communications grid appeared to be dead. Ridge kept getting a prickling feeling up and down his spine that they were being watched.
The others were voicing questions of their own. Mahaffey was never one to be put off. "Hey, this place looks like it took a direct hit from an atomic bomb."
Yu said: "Come on, it's not quite that bad."
"It sure is dark and spooky," Lantz said. Her normally pale, freckled features looked ashen.
Ridge walked ahead, with Tomson bringing up the rear. Ridge told them: "Keep your eyes on the path ahead and your hands on the railings at all times." He took a deep breath. "If you feel the need for oxygen, pull out your mouthpiece. Tomson tested all the bottles and gear, so we should be in good shape."
Tomson, in the rear, said dryly: "If you trust that I'm not ready to be yanked off the window by any guys in white coats."
"Those weren't guys in white coats," Jerez said. When she was nervous, her Universal Anglo slipped deeper into a classic Castilian Spanish complete with lisped letter 's.' Yu thought it was cute and told her so, for which he got a tongue-lashing in Tagalog. Several persons laughed.
"Eyes on the path," Ridge reminded them. He was troubled, though. Nothing was as he remembered it. He did not remember the vastness and cavernous nature of the ship's interior, at least not around Ring 61, which he had always assumed to be a Ring of many small compartments. Looking around in the dim light, he began to think that the devastation here was much worse than anything he had seen in ot
her decks they'd worked. He tried to picture the other decks, but couldn't put a number to any one. It scared him a bit that his memory was so vague in places. He wondered if he were going insane. At first it was just a nagging thought. He kept seeing Brenna's alluring look over her shoulder as she pranced away in her turban and robe a while ago. Did she do that on purpose? Was it just how she was? How could a seductress have slipped through the fine toothed comb of Corporate industrial psychologists? Or was it all in his imagination, and was he having problems with Dorothy without knowing it? Then he got a real scare. He couldn't remember the names of his children. This made him tremble with fear. He had chills going up and down his arms and back.
"Ridge, are you okay?" Jerez asked from nearby.
He nodded, but tears were running down his cheeks. Am I going insane? Or is it fear of heights, something new I didn't know I suffer from? What is going on here?
"Ridge?" Brenna asked from mid-line of slowly moving figures in a phantasmagoric landscape. Nightmare within nightmare. He was in love with her, and it was eating him up. Why did he suddenly now realize this? Why was her tone so warm and concerned, as if she knew what was burning inside of him? Was it in her too, this desire to hold and be held, this longing for one another's warmth and reassurance?