by Ramy Vance
“It’s napping?”
“I have no idea.”
Jaeger rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Virgil. You’re very helpful.”
“I’ll be repairing the mainframes again if you need me,” Virgil answered before going silent.
Jaeger chewed her lip as she and Toner approached the base juncture. “I’m worried we have an AI problem,” she confessed as they paused to activate their mag soles.
Toner eyed the nearest speaker as if afraid the thing might be listening in on them. His voice dropped. “It was getting weird in that fight. I mean, surrender was an option. A bad one, sure, but somebody had to put it on the table.”
She waved that away. “Oh, I know. I’m not going to crucify it for that. I just…” She paused, frowning at her boots.
“What is it?”
Jaeger wiggled her toes as she studied the settings on her mag soles. “How did you know how to use the reverse-polarity setting?”
“I just did.”
“Right, but you were very good at it. Like you had a lot of practice. I wasn’t.”
“You can’t be the expert at everything, Captain.”
Jaeger shook her head and straightened. “You’re right.” She activated the hatch leading to the wings. The corridors beyond appeared to rotate as the module beneath her feet kept up its steady, gravity-simulating spin. Jaeger grabbed the nearest ladder and pushed herself forward. The mag soles hummed faintly, sucking her to the floor.
Behind her, Toner ignored the ladder and jumped. Rather than slamming to the deck, he bounced lightly in the air and glided a smooth arc around her, his hands behind his back as he pushed off one leg, then another. He looked a bit like an ice skater, sliding frictionless circles in the wide corridor juncture.
Jaeger scowled.
Toner grinned. “It’s all in the butt,” he mouthed, pointing downward.
Jaeger would have to practice with the antigrav boots later. For now, she squared her shoulders and started a steady march toward Tetra. “I’m worried about Virgil. There’s no reason a ship’s autopilot should be that…” She struggled to find the right word.
“Bitchy?”
“Surly,” she said. She eyed a speaker and projector combo mounted to the overhead duct as they passed. Virgil might have been listening in, but there was nothing she could do about that. There might not be a place on the entire ship where the AI couldn’t eavesdrop. She tensed, waiting for it to butt in.
Toner looped a lazy circle and stopped in front of her, his hands clasped behind his back as he kicked, staying a few feet ahead of Jaeger as she moved. “It is kind of a dick,” he agreed.
“I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice. Did you hear the way it was talking about the temperature in No-A? It was practically gloating.”
“I wasn’t paying super close attention. A little distracted.”
Jaeger conceded the point with a nod.
“Have you talked to it?” Toner asked.
“What?” Jaeger was confused. “Yes, I’m talking to it all the time. You’ve heard me.”
Toner shook his head, easily bobbing as they passed beneath an overhead support strut. “You’re barking orders at it all the time. Have you, like, asked it what’s up? Seen how its day is going? Asked about its family?”
“It’s a computer. What the hell are you talking about?” Jaeger couldn’t help but stare at Toner’s legs as he swam through the air. She would have to remember that easy, coordinated kicking motion when she practiced with the antigrav.
“I’m talking about motivation, Jaeger.” Toner leaned backward until he was nearly horizontal with the floor, his chin resting on the palm of his hand as he swam idly beside her. “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless captain!’
“You complimented me for manning the shields right after you finished patching up a hole in the hull. A hole caused by my failure. I can’t speak for Virgil, but holy shit, do you know how it makes a man want to stand straighter when his captain pats him on the back and tells him he did a good job?” He winked. “Especially if she’s cute.”
Jaeger stumbled. She stared, open-mouthed, as Toner stretched his arms ahead of him and swam to the next intersection. There, he arched his spine, rolling a graceful series of cartwheels as he turned the corner toward Tetra sector.
He misjudged the length of the hallway and slammed chin-first into a corner strut. He let out a yelp of either surprise or pain—she couldn’t tell which—and wobbled in the air, cradling his chin.
Jaeger snickered as she strode past him. “Good job. Now quit showing off. We have a job to do.”
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, staring at the blinking red access panel beside the door to Tetra storage. Toner restlessly rubbed his jaw. Chastened by the crash, he’d turned on the gravity and finished the hike like the dignified human being he was not.
“So what’s the plan?” He fidgeted, opening and closing his mouth like he was trying to pop an eardrum—giving Jaeger too clear a look at his pointed teeth and the unnaturally wide angle of his jaw.
Jaeger rested her hand comfortably on the butt of her multitool. Her fingers slipped easily into the triggers. She had triple-checked that the battery was full. “We kill it.”
Toner blinked in surprise. “That’s…permanent.”
“Again, Toner. I’m always open to better ideas.”
They spoke in low tones, all too aware that excess noise would wake the thing up and bring it hurling toward this door. No point in wasting the element of surprise.
“Why kill it? Why not just try to isolate it?”
Jaeger shook her head. “It’s already broken out of that compartment once. Whatever it is, I can’t have it running amok on my ship. I just can’t. Not now, when time is running short. We can’t afford the liability.” She hesitated. “Besides…” she shifted her mass, restless.
“What is it?”
“We won’t survive another encounter with the saucer. If it finds us, we’re dead.” She nodded at the door. “Here’s the thing. The aliens didn’t seem hostile until they encountered that thing. If they come back and we present its head on a platter, maybe they’ll believe us when we say we mean them no harm.”
“What, like a cat bringing its master a dead bird?” Toner sounded amused. “How charming.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Jaeger sighed. She wasn’t happy with the plan. Toner was right. She would have preferred to isolate the creature and save it for later study. Killing it for tribute felt too much like paying bribes to a capricious tyrant—but if it meant salvaging her ship, she was ready to surrender that much.
That much, she decided, staring at the door, but no more.
Toner must have come to much the same conclusion because he activated the plasma cutter of his multitool and lifted it to his face as if it were an assault rifle. “You’re probably right,” he conceded. “But will you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Get behind me. And do what I say when things get hot. Yeah, yeah, you’re the captain. I may not know how to run a ship, but I’m pretty sure I know how to kick ass.”
“So.” Jaeger spoke quietly into her comm microphone. “Virgil. Uh. How’s your day going?”
“Badly,” the speaker answered.
Jaeger closed her eyes. “Okay, listen. I get it. Everyone’s having a bad day, and you’re probably stressed and overworked.” She had no idea if that was true or not. She had no idea what cooldown requirements an AI had. She also resented the idea of stroking a computer’s ego.
But there were more pressing matters to deal with.
“Once we get out of this mess, we can take some time to decompress and talk. Until then, I’m sorry, but I need all hands on board.”
“Of course, Captain.”
Jaeger could smell the sarcasm drifting through the speaker, but she could not bring herself to thank the computer for being a computer. She didn’t have time for it.
“Good. I’ve gotten a close look at the access panel to Tetra cargo. It looks fully functional. Is that correct?” She leaned around the corner to see Toner standing a few meters away from the door, checking over the settings on his plasma cutter. He glanced up and met her eye. She shook her head.
“That is correct,” Virgil said.
“So you can access and deactivate it on my mark?” she whispered. Around them, conduits and ducts hummed. The red panel on the door blinked. Toner double-checked that the knives and flashbangs tucked into various pockets of his suit were secure.
“I can,” Virgil said.
“Great. Where’s our critter?”
“Still inactive just inside the Tetra bay door.”
It was about to get one hell of a wake-up call.
“Open the door on my mark.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Jaeger met Toner’s eye again and nodded. He gave a tiny nod in return and retreated a few more steps up the corridor. He lifted his plasma cutter to his shoulder with the ease of a man who had lived and breathed combat training.
“Unseal the door,” she said.
There was a heartbeat of silence. Then the blinking red light turned green. Jaeger let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Nothing else happened.
“Ah…okay. Now, open the door.” Damn the pedantry of an uncooperative AI.
At least Virgil didn’t argue. Down the corridor, the double-wide, triple-reinforced storage hold door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. Jaeger felt the subtle shift of air currents as the pressure equalized.
From this angle, she could see only a thin sliver of the storage compartment, the featureless curved wall of the bulkhead beyond.
Overhead, the ducts hummed.
No tide of mutant alien spider monsters spilled out of the door.
Jaeger met Toner’s eye across the length of the hallway. He gestured to himself, then pointed toward Tetra. She nodded assent, her grip tightening on the trigger of her multitool.
Silently, Toner pushed himself around the corner and skated closer to the door, hugging the wall to minimize his profile. He’d turned his antigrav back on. There was no sneaking if your boots clanged to the floor with every footfall. The fine muscle coordination he must have had, to remain steady and silent as he drifted—and to make it look so easy—left her with a healthy twinge of envy.
He crept closer to the door, pressed to the wall as he studied something Jaeger couldn’t see. He stopped less than a meter from the threshold with his head cocked to one side. A puzzled look flickered over his face.
She bit back the impulse to call out and demand to know what the hell was in her ship.
Toner slowly lowered his plasma cutter. His hand fell instead to one of the flashbangs on his belt.
He gestured for her to stay where she was and slid quietly into Tetra hold.
Jaeger had about twenty hours of personal memory that encompassed the beginning and end of her known life. The next ten seconds that passed in tense silence as she waited for Toner to reappear made the last twenty hours seem short and relaxing by comparison. Her ears strained, but she could hear nothing over the faint electric hum of the ship around her.
Her fingers twitched over her comm. She debated sending a text demanding that Virgil update her—on the location of the bodies, on whether they were alive or dead, on anything at all—when Toner shot out of Tetra and flew up the corridor. Jaeger barely had time to jump to the side as he grabbed a corner strut and banked hard, bringing himself to a stop beside her.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun, his fingers digging painful grooves in her skin as he shoved her face-first into the wall.
She should have fought back. She should have lifted her plasma cutter and sliced into him. Images flashed through her mind, the suffocating tomb of the Jefferies tube, his steel-hard fingers coiled around her ankle as he pulled her close, his jaw opening wide, wider—
An explosion rattled the corridor behind them. Searing white light flooded her vision and, for the third or fourth time that day—she’d lost count—her eardrums popped as a wall of sound slammed into her.
Instinct made her reach up to cover her head, but Toner had already thrown his arms over her. He shielded her with his body as they huddled against the wall. The man was like a bear trap: lean and sharp and hard beneath his jumpsuit and brutally efficient.
A secondary explosion, more felt than heard, rattled the corridor beneath her feet. She sucked in a breath and smelled a fading whiff of something like gunpowder. Dark spots clouded her sight. She shouted but could barely hear herself over the ringing in her ears.
“What the hell?”
Toner pulled away from her, spinning around to face Tetra, his hands falling to his plasma cutter. He scrubbed his eyes with the back of a hand, apparently clearing out spots of his own. “Damn, those flashbangs have a lot of juice.”
He sounded like he was talking to her from the other end of a very long tunnel.
“What’s going—”
“You stay here.” Without another word, Toner kicked off, flying back down the corridor.
Jaeger stared after him as he vanished back into Tetra. When she’d agreed to let Toner take the lead on this mission, she’d done so on the condition that he would tell her what the hell was going on.
If she couldn’t trust him to communicate, she decided, she couldn’t trust him to call the shots.
She ran after him, her plasma cutter coiled comfortably around her fist.
She made three long, thunking strides toward tetra when Toner flew out again.
Not the easy, controlled superman glide, either. He slammed into the opposite bulkhead like a rodeo clown thrown from a prized bull. The support struts rattled from a crash that should have pulverized the spine of a normal human.
The Tetra beast roared.
Toner waved frantically for Jaeger to retreat. Electricity crackled through the air as he activated his plasma cutter and lifted it toward Tetra.
Jaeger, exhausted, stunned, hyped on adrenaline, and still blinking away blurred vision, could not begin to adequately describe the thing that came barreling out of the storage bay. Only three words came to mind: gray Volkswagen bus.
A few more words floated up from her addled brain as the monster let out a deep, bone-shaking bellow and charged Toner.
Fleshy. Too many legs.
Also, quite massive. So massive that Jaeger thought if it pinned Toner, it very well might crush him, however superhuman he might be. By the aching slowness of Toner’s movements, as he tried to scramble away, he might not be able to shake off another massive injury.
Toner's plan had already gone to hell. It was her turn to step in.
Jaeger cupped her hands over her mouth. “Hey!”
The word sounded tinny and distant behind the ringing of her eardrums, but it was enough.
The many-legged, fleshy, gray Volkswagen bus skidded to a halt centimeters from crushing Toner into the bulkhead, its segmented body rippling like a fat caterpillar.
It turned to face Jaeger.
Well, that was the wrong word. It didn’t have a face.
It had a puckered hole lined with thousands of tiny glistening teeth.
Jaeger saw the metal pin of a flashbang dangling from one of those many, many hooked teeth. She had time to wonder if it had swallowed the rest of the shell casing before it made a sound like the screeching of old tires and charged her.
Chapter Eighteen
Fast was another word that came to mind as Jaeger struggled to describe this monster. Unfairly fast.
It didn’t have the benefit of mag soles or antigrav boots. It didn’t need them. Long claws tipped each of its fat legs that gripped the bulkhead and struts, making the whole creature ripple as it flowed through a corridor, like a burrowing caterpillar-mole demon.
The lack of gravity also meant it could work up one hell of a lot of momentum in a few short strides.
Jaeger screamed and flung herself
around the nearest bend, hands scrabbling for purchase. She kicked forward, scrambling hand-over-feet as the monster ripped up the hallway behind her. It crashed into the bulkhead hard enough to make the walls rattle, shook itself, and paused to turn its massive bulk down the side corridor after her.
Serpentine, Jaeger thought with a wild glance over her shoulder. This thing had speed and power, but all that momentum means it has the turning radius of a canned ham.
If she had Toner’s skill with the antigrav, she was sure she could fly circles around it. If she tried to activate them now, her gut said that she’d slam through the corridors like a punctured balloon.
Behind her, the monster made the sound of tortured brakes. Jaeger heard the distant high crackle of an active plasma lance from somewhere down the hall.
“Jaeger!” Toner screamed as she hurled around the next corner and up the main corridor toward the starboard wing. “Serpentine!”
Thanks.
“Virgil,” she croaked into her mic. “Where am I going?”
“I don’t know,” the AI said from the comp speaker on her belt. Her ringing ears made it hard to parse the AI’s tone, but she would swear it sounded amused. “Where do you want to go?”
“In circles.” She sucked at the stale air, lungs and muscles burning as she threw herself forward, with Satan’s Love Bus screeching at her heels. “Lead me in circles. It’s the only way I can stay ahead of this thing.”
And if she were lucky, Toner would realize what she was doing and use the time to carve new holes in the monster’s backside while it was distracted. Maybe he could climb up its ass and rip out its heart.
There was a contemplative pause of only about nine thousand years as Virgil calculated the correct corridor path. Then, just as she reached a junction and stretched out her arms to bank hard to the right, it said: “Turn left now.”
She flailed to change direction, slamming both feet to the wall with bone-rattling force. She would swear she felt the wind of the monster’s passing brush over the fabric of her flight suit as she shot down the opposite corridor.