by D. Brumbley
She just laughed and shook her head. Her burning arousal had settled at a simmer as soon as they had gotten onto the pod, especially after her concern with seeing all the busy technicians and her impending nausea. Mercury looked at his hand as he ran it over the netting, which really didn’t make it any more scandalous than the fact that all the netting and harness had already hiked her dress nearly up to her underwear. Perhaps that was why people wore jumpsuits. “I feel alright. Thank you for your concern.”
“You’re welcome.” He smiled and moved to pull the hatch shut manually so that the pod could go through its automated process to seal itself off from the dock. Harnessing himself fully took very little time, with his hands much more practiced at seeing to himself than seeing to others. “Whew, alright, here we go.” He brought the controls to life, the glass windows of the pod turning immediately to technical specifications and guidance assists that Orion could apparently make some sense of as his eyes darted around the interior. “Port control, this is pod Al-Jabbar 017, disengaging clamps. Field is checked, unlike the asshole who almost ran me over on my way in this morning…pressure is good, charge is full, passage is clear and wheels are up.” The locking clamps holding the pod to the station began clicking themselves off right beneath Mercury’s feet, and she could see the airlock closing to push them farther away, giving them a gentle shove away from the station in the process.
Al-Jabbar 017, you’re clear for departure. Fly sa- The transmission cut off with some kind of interference, then went dead the next moment.
Orion just gave the console a confused look. “Huh. Well, ‘have a nice day’ to you too, pal.” Orion made a few final adjustments to set the thrust away from the station, but just as Mercury felt the last of the docking clamps release beneath her, light exploded along the side of the station right in front of her eyes, and their pod was sent hurtling backward with tremendous, soundless force.
Everything was a blur. Mercury couldn’t even think to be afraid as their pod went hurtling through space. She knew by the various curses flying out of Orion’s mouth that they weren’t flying by his control. She didn’t know if their pod was damaged or what was happening, but she couldn’t feel any rushing air or crushing vacuum, so the pod must have still been intact. They spun and wobbled and Orion continued to try and gain control, but all she could see once she had focused on the view in front of them was fire, pieces of the space station, and one of the arms of the station…
Five arms of the station continued to spin beneath/beside/above them, but where the sixth had been, fire was billowing out into space through a field of debris. The arm itself had been blown fully clear of the station at a break near the hub of the docks. Suddenly the initial shock wore off and she felt sick as she watched the whole scene unfurl. “Oh god…the arm…”
Orion was still struggling madly to get any kind of control over the pod, but he had them at least oriented in a stable plane within moments, the two of them watching helplessly as shrapnel tore through space. The pod was equipped with systems to target and destroy small pieces of debris before making impact, so as to maintain the structural integrity of the glass and steel, and the small burners at either end of the pod were busy as Orion and Mercury watched, keeping bits and pieces of the explosion at bay. He also had the presence of mind to turn on visual recording for the exterior, to capture as many images of what they were seeing as possible.
They were the only ship free and clear in close proximity to the Station, at least on their side, but Orion could see a larger shuttle moving away in the distance, already with thousands of meters between it and Station Nine. “I guess now we know why those techs were in such a hurry.” He said quietly.
Rotational inertia had kept the broken arm moving to fling it away from the hub of the station, but there had been obvious damage to the end of one of the adjacent arms as well, where the two arms had collided. Nine was off its axis of rotation from the impact and the explosion, and Orion could only imagine the havoc that was going on inside with the sudden shift in artificial rotation-generated gravity. Water was pouring out from a hundred broken lines, and people…there were people floating in the vacuum of space, killed instantly in the nothingness and frozen in postures of panic. Orion felt guilty for thinking of them as the lucky ones. Those on the falling arm would die a much more horrible death.
“It’s already at terminal.” He said as he tried to be analytical about what they were seeing. Calm under pressure. It was a requirement of his job, even if calm often came with a lot of swearing. “Even with the auxiliary rotational thrusters on the far end of the arm, there’s no way the arm can maneuver itself to regain orbit after something like that, even if someone could pay enough attention to try, with it in free-fall like that. It doesn’t have the power or the maneuvering capabilities. It’ll go atmospheric at that angle in a matter of minutes. And I don’t see any ships in the area capable of trying to boost it back into stable orbit.”
“So we just have to sit here and watch them die?!?” Mercury was also usually quite calm under pressure but that was when she could do something about it; times when someone’s life was beneath her fingertips, not when something was completely out of her control. They were already looking at dead bodies, but not only that, they were looking at thousands of people who were moments away from their end in Earth’s atmosphere. Mercury felt sick imagining how they were feeling, those who were still alive in the disconnected piece and watching the view of Earth get inescapably closer.
Mercury was having difficulty breathing as she watched, but her mind was also trying to figure out what happened. “There wasn’t an alert. There wasn’t any warning, no evacuation protocols sounded.” They had just vacated that arm. They had barely made it off. Everyone, except the techs, had been calm. They were just going about their lives, and now they were facing certain death. If she and Orion hadn’t hit it off, if they hadn’t rushed through their meeting and been eager to get back to Three…
“That would have been us.” She finally said as if she had just realized that he was still there next to her. “Minutes later, if we had been delayed…”
“Even for a few seconds. I know.” He had obviously been thinking the same exact thing, but he didn’t say anything else for a long while. Instead he just reached around the corner between their two seats to take her hand. It was as close as he could get to her, given the situation, but he wanted her to feel he was there.
“Any kind of structural failure would have generated warnings weeks before it actually failed. The public and loud kind. That was an explosion around the entire junction of the arm itself. There’s no system that passes through that space that could have been responsible for that just by failure. They’re better designed than that.”
She could see him still glancing away at some of the controls, but she could also feel him getting frustrated as he watched. “This pod doesn’t have…I’ve got nothing. I can’t override the arm’s systems from here because I don’t have clearance to their central controls, and physically, there’s no way anything I could do here would make a difference. It would just put us in the debris field and take us down with the rest of the arm.” Even as he talked about the futility of it, he was still flipping through different reports, trying to get a fix on anything that could have been saved, but the arm was in pieces, all of the pieces beginning to arc down toward the Earth.
Mercury didn’t even have enough knowledge of Earth to know where the pieces would approximately land, or what kind of impact that would have on the people down on Earth. Sometimes she was amazed that anyone would want to continue to live on Earth, knowing that they would die young, die slowly and painfully, and live lives that would have little influence simply because they were so short. Regardless, she didn’t think their lives were meaningless, and she hoped that the death toll wouldn’t rise exponentially because of the pieces of the station potentially landing on a heavily populated area. “So this was on purpose. Those people we saw, do you think they stole those uni
forms? Do you think this is something that is going to get worse, some kind of rebellion against the Consortium or something?”
Orion was quiet as he considered that, but he didn’t let go of her hand. “This is Nine. It’s the Jannah Initiative’s headquarters.” By his tone, it was obvious he doubted the correlation was a coincidence. “I’m going to drift us for a minute and do some more scans, see if there’s anything I can pick up that would be helpful. Then I’m going to get us the hell out of here and over to Three as fast as possible. If there was more to come, I doubt they would’ve taken off like they did in that shuttle, but I don’t want to be around to find out.”
“As it is, they are going to want to question us.” She knew that authorities would want answers about why they were departing an arm that was destroyed only moments later. “I’m just glad we’re not dead.” Mercury said softly as she held onto his hand. “If I believed much in signs or omens, that’s quite a sign. You saved my life.”
“I’m not much for signs or omens myself, but I have to agree.” The scans he had initiated chimed completion, and he sighed as he saved them, transmitting them back to his personal storage quickly before he started to work on their flight path from there. “If I had been matched with anybody else in creation, that hypothetical person and I would both be dead right now. I could just as easily say you saved my life, just by being you.”
Mercury gripped his hand tighter. “Let’s just get away from here. I can’t watch any more of this. I’m a doctor, I can’t just watch senseless death and not feel sick.”
“On our way.” He certainly wasn’t going to blame her for that, and he squeezed her hand just to let her know it was alright. He worked quickly, even just with one hand, and soon the thrust from the pod was pushing them at a steady acceleration away from the station and the destruction behind them, keeping it mostly out of her field of view, in favor of the moon far in the distance and the stars beyond that. The nose of the pod was pointed almost directly at the sun along their path of orbit to get to Three, but the glass darkened automatically to protect them, leaving them in a shaded, darker world, pressed into the backboards at just slightly greater than Earth-norm gravity while they accelerated. Mercury was left on the side of the pod facing the stars, while Orion faced the Earth, looking down at the fragments of the station that were already beginning to turn into lights burning up in the atmosphere.
His mind was already doing the math on the rotation of the planet against the trajectory of the fragments, entering at a shallow enough orbit that they wouldn’t entirely burn up on entry. Nine orbited along with most of the major stations, west to east around the Earth’s midsection. They had been coming up over the Pacific Ocean at the time of departure, but they had moved in the meantime to pass over the District of California and the western districts of North America. The pieces of the ship would come down in the plains. Sparsely inhabited, as far as Orion was aware. That was some comfort, at least.
His eyes followed the path he knew the fragments would take, and he wondered who would be under the pieces when they crashed to Earth. Whoever it was, he hoped they saw it coming and had the good sense to get the hell out of the way.
5
Anna hoped for a better day when she woke to the sound of soft knocking on her door. She couldn’t think straight through the fog of waking, and she certainly wasn’t thinking about the fact that she’d slept in her bra and underwear instead of actually digging for clean clothes the night before. She hadn’t wanted to bother, she had just fallen into the bed and fell straight to sleep.
When she opened the door, she was yawning and attempting to tame her hair, but she wasn’t blind to the shirtless Logan standing in front of her.
Holy shit! That was better than any coffee for a wake-up call.
“Uh, hi…I, um…” She wanted to run her hands across his abs so badly. No, hands weren’t enough. “I forgot to set an alarm. I’m sorry.”
“No worries. We’re not on a schedule. Wheat’ll still be out there whenever we get to it.” He seemed more than a little taken aback when she got to the door in her underwear, but he wasn’t complaining. He looked her over a few times before he managed to get his eyes back up to hers. “Your, um, your clothes are washed, unless you’d rather stay in your underwear for the day.” He held her folded clothes out to her in one hand, the other still braced on the door frame. “Sleep alright?”
“Yeah, I slept alright. Your house is a lot quieter than mine, though. The bed’s a lot bigger too.” She took her clothes with a nervous smile. “Thanks.”
“Larissa has plenty of clothes if you need to borrow any of hers. The girl’s one vice, online shopping.” He rolled his eyes and stepped back from the door to let her get situated. “I packed up some breakfast for us, I’m gonna take it up the tower with some drinks for the day. I’ll see you whenever you get up there.”
Anna nodded, then looked him over thoroughly, drinking in the sight of him shirtless. He seemed completely unaffected. Usually her breasts could garner at least a little attention. “I’ll be right out once I get dressed.”
He looked her over again and shrugged with an attempt at a smile. “Do or don’t. It’s gonna be just us and the pigeons up there for the day. Nobody that needs impressing or the wearing of a bra if you’re not feeling it.”
She just laughed. “Well, alright then, Bickford. If I’m going bare chested, so are you.”
He stepped back and looked down at himself in nothing but jeans and boots, and shrugged. “Looks like I’m one step ahead, then.” He winked and turned around to head back down the hallway. “See you up there, bra or not.”
The wink made her roll her eyes and turn back into the room to get dressed. It wasn’t very nice of him to get her started and then wink at her. That was mean.
The watchtower for the Bickford property was on a hill a few hundred meters from the mansion. The simple structure climbed nearly two hundred meters straight into the air, with bare metal stairs and a rudimentary lift to carry people to the top. The platform was covered above, but otherwise open to the air, giving an unobstructed view of the expansive Bickford farm for several kilometers in every direction. There was even a small restroom enclosed to one side that rendered bathroom breaks to the ground unnecessary on long days of monitoring the harvesters.
By the time she got up there, Logan had all the harvesters lined up around the base of the tower, finalizing grids for them to cover the entire farm. Much as he tried, though, he was incredibly slow at it. He was better at building the contraptions than driving them. He was still bare-chested and there was an entire cooler sitting between the two lounge chairs near the controls.
“You said something about breakfast, right? Your abs can be distracting.” She went to the cooler first without looking at him again, since she was feeling more embarrassed about him seeing her in her underwear than anything else. It wasn’t like she’d been trying to seduce him, even if she wanted to. Not that he was seduce-able. Nor was she his type, if Melanie had been any indication of type. “There better be something good in the cooler to make up for it.”
“I got a variety, and I got your favorites. Even the non-alcoholic ones.” He looked back at her and pointed to the smaller cooler beside the big one, which had freshly made eggs, bacon and waffles in it, with all the needful fixings and a few sets of flatware on the side. “Help yourself, we’re gonna be here a while.”
Anna plated some food for him before she got herself a plate and a beer, regardless of the hour. She sat down next to his seat to get a couple bites in before she started helping him. “Sorry about this morning. I was still pretty out of it. Still am, a little.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” He smiled over at her and thanked her for the plate, grabbing a bite here and there between working on the layouts for the harvesters. “Normally the only other company in the house is whichever one of Liam’s girlfriends he feels like having over every night for dinner, so I’m a little out of practice with oth
er houseguests. I should’ve called up first on the com or something, given you some warning.” He shrugged, clearly not all that sorry about it.
“Still, it was nice to sit around and have a decent meal with people I actually like for a change.” Dinner the night before had been a lot of fun, as they had spent most of it making fun of Liam and the various stupid situations he got himself into. Logan had only left to go to bed with the greatest reluctance, and even then, he had stood just inside his door for the worse part of half an hour contemplating whether to go to sleep or go find Anna.
She smiled over at him and ate a few more bites before she jumped in to help, since she didn’t need to let him do all the work with mapping the harvesters. “Well, I always figured between you and Liam, you’ll fill the house with kids eventually. That’ll make for a full table of people you hopefully like. That’s still possible.” She wanted him to have hope for his future, even though she knew he didn’t like to think about the future most of the time. “My dad tells me it’s possible for me too, but he also doesn’t know I’ve been accepted to go to Jannah, so I’m sure he’d say something else if I told him that information.”
“Well, Jannah could still be full of kids for you one of these days. I’m fairly sure I saw something like that on the brochure.” He got the few harvesters in motion that he had finished programming, glad to have the harvest finally, really under way, and even more glad to see that they didn’t completely shut down with the first few meters of harvested grain they took in. “News this morning was talking about the reports they’ve gotten on folks who’ve admitted to being accepted. They only got data on a few dozen, but they’re almost all young. Some even Emily’s age. So they’re definitely planning to give us time to do some multiplying and replenishing.”
A single mention of ‘us’ and all Anna could think about was ‘multiplying and replenishing’ with Logan, which wasn’t going to help her get through a long day next to him. She nearly choked on her sip of beer and tried to cover it up with a cough. “Well, no one has knocked me up yet.”