Patchwork

by Elle E. Ire

  “Mom! Mom!”

  I whip my weapon toward the entrance, jerking it up before reflexes fire it at a small figure hanging on to one of the double doors.

  “Mommy!”

  Same kid I heard earlier calling from the promenade bakery. I recognize the voice. She (at least pitch would suggest female) must have felt her way along the walls or reached the pub by darting in spurts whenever the lights flashed. Brave, stupid, or desperate, I can’t tell which, but she’s here, and if she could see the dead body at her feet, she’d really be screaming.

  The figure staggers forward, tripping over the corpse but remaining upright with her hands outstretched. She reaches the center of the pub and stops. “Mommy?” The voice wavers, uncertain.

  “Stay where you are, Abby!” the server calls back. “I’m all right. I’ll find you. Just stay there.”

  So the waitress is Mom. Shuffling carries from behind the bar as she attempts to join her daughter.

  “Everyone hold position!” I order, putting all the authority I can muster into my tone. Movement ceases. I grin. Nice to know I’m not losing my touch. “We’ll get the lights back on, and then—”

  As if at my command, more flashes erupt from the restaurants and businesses outside the double doors. Alex curses in my ears. To my left, a panel I hadn’t noticed slides sideways, revealing a shallow storage space, and an uncounted figure steps from it. He’s got something in his hand. Not a gun. It’s small and round… and beeping.

  Fuck.

  “Everybody down!” I shout. Everyone drops except for the kid. She’s frozen where she stands, paralyzed by uncertainty and fear.

  At the same time, in my ears Alex yells, “Corren! Shut off your infrared. You’re about to be bli—”

  The lights in the Alpha Dog blaze to life, every single one of them, from the low-level emergency strips along the walls, to the warm glows of sconce lamps simulating old-Earth incandescents, to the full-on glaring bright whites of the naked tubes used for after-hours cleaning. I have a half second to react, but it’s too fast even for VC1. Everything flares white like I’m standing in the center of a sun going supernova. The pain receptors in my manufactured eyes scream with the burnout, then nothing. Nothing but afterimages of grays on white.

  By now the AI has certainly turned off my infrared, but I have no way of knowing. Any people or furnishings in the pub might as well be Arctic foxes in a blizzard as far as my eyesight is concerned.

  But I can hear. And that grenade is still beeping in the hand of the last remaining Sunfire in the joint.

  Switch off my boots’ magnetic soles, I instruct VC1.

  I access my implant’s memory of where the kid should be standing, take a quick breath, and dive for it.

  It’s a tremendous relief when I feel the impact of my body against the little girl’s, and we both go down in a tumbled heap. I’ve probably hurt her some. Her squeak of surprise followed by a cry of pain tells me as much. But any damage I’ve inflicted will be nothing compared to the shrapnel and debris that grenade will send flying.

  Together we roll over and over, me wrapping myself more firmly around her much smaller frame, shielding her from the imminent explosion with every part of me. I’m not wearing body armor. Paranoia goes only so far, and that much padding and metal isn’t part of my daily wardrobe. So I’m gonna take the hit, and I’m gonna take it hard. Already am, with the splinters and glass shards scraping, tearing, and embedding themselves in seemingly every inch of my exposed skin.

  My back slams into something solid, and holding the girl to my chest with one arm, I stretch out a palm to slap against cold metal—the wall. But there’s a sideways lip to it. A doorway? The front entrance, maybe? Doesn’t feel right. I’m disoriented by my blindness, the leap and the roll, but I don’t think our direction carried us toward the entrance.

  Another storage compartment? I don’t care. I haul our asses around the edge and into wherever we might be just as the Sunfire apparently tosses the grenade, and its metal casing tink-tink-tinks its way across the pub’s floor.

  There’s a hiss and a thunk. A familiar hiss. A familiar thunk. My blinded eyes go wide and my blood turns to ice in my veins as I realize exactly what I’ve dragged us into. I’m shoving the kid aside, scrambling on all fours, tearing already blunted nails against metal while I desperately feel for the hatch release.

  Then… boom.

  Even the airlock door can’t completely block the sound of the explosion of the incendiary device, though it’s more muffled than it would have been. I can’t see the flare of the blast. My eyes are too fucked-up. But it’s followed by chunks of plastic and wood pelting the window of the lock like angry hail.

  The window. Of the lock.

  I’m in the bar’s emergency side exit airlock, the same one Lyle left open when he made his surprise entrance. Only it’s not open anymore. Given the explosive circumstances, I should consider this a good thing, except….

  I died in an airlock.

  It’s how I ended up the way I am, how I lost 63 percent of my organic human brain and became… this. Since that event occurred, I haven’t been able to take prolonged stays in small spaces—elevators, closets, even rooms and ships without portholes or windows if they’re too cramped.

  I absolutely can’t take this.

  My hands shake, and I hold my breath, waiting for the air to cycle through and the hatch on the opposite side to slide open and let me out onto the promenade walkway and the nice, wonderful, spacious dome with its clear view of Earth and the stars beyond. But it doesn’t. Nothing moves. It’s silent except for the thudding in my chest and the whimpering of the kid on the floor beside me.

  The kid. Hell.

  I can’t melt down. Until we get out of here, I’ve absolutely got to hold it together, for the kid’s sake if not mine.

  Gritting my teeth against shock-induced chattering, I order VC1 to ramp up my emotion suppressors to full and hope the AI doesn’t take advantage of my current state and seize control of me altogether, because someday, she just might decide not to give that control back.

  Chapter 6: Kelly—Regroup

  VICK IS struggling.

  Gentle hands pull me to a seated position in the corridor just outside the opening to the promenade dome. With my eyes squeezed shut, I can’t see who’s helping me. Their emotions feel like strangers’, lacking the nuances I’ve come to recognize as those belonging to friends and acquaintances.

  I force one eyelid up, then blink both into the concerned face of a young man in a server’s uniform belonging to the Alpha Dog. He’s cute, if one goes for the vid-model type: tall, clean-cut, neatly trimmed blond hair about the shade of my own, teeth so white he had to have had them done in a salon. The pink aura of tension surrounding him clashes with the tan vest over a white button-down.

  “You okay?” he asks as I pull from his grip and break the contact. I’m having enough trouble with my own emotions. I can’t take his on too.

  “Fine,” I tell him, rising to my knees, then my feet. I sway into the wall and let it hold me up.

  “Not too fine.” But he doesn’t push it. His attention is torn between me and a crowd of gathered civilians all staring across the dome.

  I follow their gaze and immediately see why. The Alpha Dog’s lit up like a hearth, the glow of low-level flames flickering from the entrance, lapping their way over something blocking the double doors. More panic sets in.

  The fire suppression systems. They’ll spray that poisonous foam throughout the pub’s interior, regardless of survivors inside. The base’s oxygen is too precious to lose in large quantities. Everyone who lives in the moon’s habitat knows this. We sign on knowing it. But like so many other possible causes of death, we never expect to actually see it.

  I open my mouth to scream but snap it shut when there’s no sign of the foam, no indication that the nozzles built into the metal walls have extended. Did Vick shut those systems down too? It’s a terrible gamble if she did, risking e
veryone, but then the flow from the bar recedes a bit, the flames burning out. Though the pub’s furnishings are wood, everything’s treated with flame-resistant chemicals. Other than that, there’s not a lot of flammable material at all.

  I start toward the spectators, then fall back when my trembling limbs refuse to propel me away from the wall.

  “What happened?” I ask. Vick. Vick’s still in there. I no longer sense her panic. I no longer sense anything at all from her, which would be concerning if I didn’t know with absolute certainty that I’d feel it if she died, even in the midst of emotion shock.

  I’ve felt it before.

  I stare across the dome, watching as the fire suppression systems finally activate, jetting the less powerful but nontoxic pink foam from ceiling tubes through the Alpha Dog doors rather than the poisonous blue variety for bigger conflagrations. The remaining flames and the sounds of hurt and fear take me even more comprehensively into the past, to a shuttleport and a terrorist attack, and the second to last time Vick lost her life.

  Vick once told me her greatest fear is dying alone. Mine is having her die in my presence. I’ve faced mine, more than once. If I have my way, she’ll never have to face hers. And that means getting to her now.

  She must have her suppressors on full, which is a problem all in itself but something I can deal with once we’re reunited. On its own, one hand drops to my cargo pants pocket, patting the syringes I placed there. Yes, I can deal with Vick.

  “What happened?” I ask again, realizing I never got an answer.

  “Didn’t you hear the explosion?” the waiter asks, still facing the pub.

  “I was pretty out of it.”

  He glances over his shoulder. “Yeah.” A pause while he studies me more closely. “Clairvoyant? Precog?”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “You’re some kinda Talent. You dropped right before the fireworks. Like you knew it was coming.”

  “Empath,” I admit. Some people are funny about Talents. I never know who will fear me, hate me, resent me, or just take me in stride. No anger or terror rolls off this guy, so I guess we’re okay. “I’ve got a friend in there.”

  He nods, a flood of sympathy surging from him.

  No. Vick’s okay. She has to be.

  I close my eyes for a moment, reaching for our bond. It’s there, a tether of aqua stretching from my center in a taut line leading into the Alpha Dog. My breath leaves me in a long, slow exhalation of relief.

  A squad of emergency response personnel comes sprinting up the corridor, the pounding of their boots like rolling thunder. They’re in full gear: flame-retardant orange jumpsuits and matching hoods with plastic see-through face panels. Some of the suits bear dark scorch marks and other signs of damage, and I wonder what additional disaster they’re arriving from.

  I’m pushing away from the wall a second time when one of the new arrivals grips my arm in an orange-gloved hand. Peering through the ash-covered faceplate, I recognize Officer Sanderson, head of station security and a friend of Vick’s.

  “Stay put,” she tells me, voice tinny over the speaker embedded in the hood. “I promise I’ll wave you over as soon as we’ve got that fire under control. Comms are out, but sensors indicate a number of survivors hunkered down inside. Try not to worry. Scan data says it was a low-level handheld incendiary blast. Unless she was right on top of the grenade, she should recover from any damage it did.”

  Except that Vick always tends to be right on top of anything dangerous that’s going on.

  I force a nod, and with a firm pat to my shoulder, Sanderson lets me go. She waves a couple of hand commands at her team, and the six of them race off across the dome’s central walkway, now fully lit by working emergency lighting and the flashing reds of warning indicators. Dull alarms whoop in the background, coming from the dome’s far side and setting up a pounding headache in my already sore skull.

  I try my comm, despite what Sanderson said. No response. No signal at all.

  Beyond the crowd, I spot movement in the shadows and make out Alex. I raise my arm to wave, but he shakes his head and places one finger over his lips. Without a word, he reaches to the side and closes a panel protecting some circuitry in the wall. Then he fades back into the dimness as if he were never there.

  Huh. I’m wondering just how much of Vick’s tampering was authorized by the base’s facilitators.

  A moment later he appears beside me, sauntering up as if he hadn’t been here all along. He joins me in staring across the dome with all the others. “Any word?” he asks, tapping the side of his head.

  “I’m not a telepath,” I remind him for the thousandth time. People who spend time with both me and Vick often mistake us for having clear, consistent communications since we’re so in tune with each other, tonight’s argument notwithstanding. “There are no true telepaths.”

  He nods once in my peripheral vision. “Sure there aren’t.”

  I sigh. I’m wondering why he isn’t rushing in to help. After all, he and Lyle are close. They’ve been a team since well before adding in Vick and myself. But he’s not wearing protective coverings, and he probably knows, just like I do, that he’d be more of a hindrance than an asset.

  The minutes tick by. As soon as the glow of the flames fades, the pair of us start across the walkway, not waiting for Sanderson’s okay. She’s in the entryway as we arrive, blocking my view of the charred interior and holding up a hand, palm out, to stop us in our tracks. Whatever jammed the doors open before has been removed, replaced by a metal ale keg someone rolled into the position.

  I open my mouth to ask after Vick, but before I can say a word, medical personnel arrive and rush inside. Sanderson follows them, leaving me and Alex without any more answers than when we began.

  I take another step and out come the medics, some leading wounded by the arm—a woman in a waitress outfit looking shell-shocked, probably literally, and a male/female couple in Storm uniforms with what appear to be minor cuts and scrapes and a few burns. The waitress pauses, looking back at the pub, then snaps out of her stupor and struggles against the medic’s grip. “Where’s Abby?” she cries, panic setting in. “Where’s my daughter?”

  “Your daughter is fine,” the woman in a white uniform tells her. “She’s safe. The technicians are working on getting her out. She’s unharmed. We’ll treat your injuries in the center of the dome and you can wait for her right there.”

  A glance toward the indicated area shows the medical personnel have set up a first aid station right in the circle of benches in the middle of the hydroponics garden walkway. The waitress calms herself somewhat and allows the medic to lead her away.

  Then come the stretchers with dazed and unconscious Sunfires laid out on them. There are three in total, two with circular bruising in the centers of their foreheads. Nice, neat work. Single shots. I recognize Vick’s touch with her XR-7 Security Blanket.

  I grin. Its real nickname is the Safety Net, but Vick sleeps with the damn thing under her pillow, so I like mine better.

  The third looks like someone tackled and beat the crap out of him. I’m guessing Lyle took that one down. Vick’s all finesse unless she must be otherwise. Lyle’s the bruiser.

  Last are the bodies. Four. Sealed in black bags and each carried between two medics. I glance away from the pub doors while Alex drops a hand on my shoulder. “You need to leave?” he asks. The alarms choose that moment to shut off. His question echoes in my ears.

  I straighten and steel myself. “Not without Vick. I’m okay. I wasn’t close enough to absorb the deaths.” Hadn’t felt any of them, in fact, not with Vick’s anxiety burning through me like wildfire.

  Trailing the dead are Officer Sanderson, now out of her hazard gear and carrying the orange jumpsuit over her arm, and finally—

  “Lyle!” both Alex and I shout together. We give each other sheepish grins; then Alex moves forward to embrace Lyle in one of those quick manly hugs-that-aren’t-really-hugs-no-not-at-all. Except
this one lasts longer than usual. Guess Alex worried more than I thought he did.

  “Where’s Vick?” I interrupt, causing them to step back from each other, Lyle swiping a hand across his face to hide his relief. The yellow aura glowing around him confirms his embarrassment and attraction. Interesting.

  Something to investigate another day.

  Lyle’s got some burns across his cheek, blistering and rather serious, which again remind me just how dangerous this whole situation was.

  “Vick,” I say again. “Where. Is. She?”

  “Yeah, about that,” Sanderson says, running a hand through her close-cropped blond hair. “She’s not hurt. Well, not seriously. But we do have a bit of a problem I’m hoping you can help us with. Come with me.”

  On that ominous note, she spins on her booted heel and leads us back into the somewhat charred interior of the Alpha Dog Pub.

  Chapter 7: Vick—Death Knell

  I AM remembering.

  The lock won’t open. I’ve input the wrong code a couple of times and now it won’t open. Fuck.

  Why the hell is the air cycling out? That’s not supposed to happen in a training scenario. Some kind of glitch?

  And why is Stephen unslinging his rifle?

  Oh God. The claustrophobia. I knew we should have reported it to the medics. But no. “He’s our teammate,” Devin said. “Gotta cover for him,” Devin said.

  Gonna get us all killed.

  “Hey, Stephen, calm the fuck down!” I shout. I grab for the rifle, but it goes off, sending bullets ricocheting off the interior metal walls of the airlock. Not blunted rounds. These are the real thing, loaded into our weapons in the armory we just left for the next phase of this training exercise in the fully shielded gun range on the other side of this airlock. They aren’t meant for use in the rest of Girard Moon Base. They definitely aren’t meant for use here.