Memory's Exile
Page 25
He’d been talking about the serum, about Restore. Why Silverman would come to the station, for him, unless she thought he had something she couldn’t find on Earth? It was funny, because he’d only brought his possessions from the Bends and a few things he’d picked up in the minimal prep time they’d given him. He’d nothing left from the labs, nothing from home, nothing but…oh. He heard her mocking voice in his ear, a memory from long before he’d demonstrated any potential. Foolish little Jacopo.
His mother’s satchel. He was a fool. The nightmare and Con’s presence had shoved it from his mind. He had nothing else from Earth that would serve as a reasonable target for Silverman. Unless her plan had been to cut out Jake’s brain and ferry it back to Earth in a jar. He had to check the satchel.
But they were nearly to the seventh level. Beyond the silvery curve of the station’s base gaped the pure, dizzying blackness in an endless maw, and Jake’s head swam more than ever. It hardly mattered, though. They were so close. His hands, wet with sweat inside his gloves, they were in a remembered groove now and flying, and why the fuck was Santos just dragging on him like a stowaway? “You know, if anyone should be doing the carrying here, it’s you, not me. Huh, superstar?”
She didn’t answer, and Jake turned up the volume. “Santos? Hola?”
“The containment shield. Is it part of Mick’s protocol?”
Just a few more meters. “No, of course not.” He could see the outline of the Level 7 hatch, just beyond the starboard cargo bay docking doors. “Far as I know, it’s never part of lockdown protocols. You’d have to pry off those nodes with your cold, dead…why?”
“It’s gone.”
He grinned to himself. “Yeah, yeah. We’re nearly there, you don’t need to try to psych me out anymore.”
“Jake.” Santos clutched hard at his shoulder. “I’ve been watching. The shielding is gone. We’ve lost the outer containment field.”
“What?” He tried to turn, but she wouldn’t let him. “You know it’s irregular in visibility, are you absolutely sure?”
“What about the meteoroid shower?”
Jake frowned. “That should be long done. There might be stragglers, I suppose—”
“The station won’t last a day in a shower like that. And we won’t last two minutes.”
“So we’ll hurry.” Strangely, he felt his eyes drifting closed. “Lindy’s been …teasing me about those damn…meteoroids…” Almost there. Almost there.
“Jake?”
They were so close. He could rest a moment, couldn’t he? The heat against his skin was unbearable.
“Jake! What is it?”
Her voice thundered inside his helmet. Jake shook his head. Sweat clung to his skin in gritty patches, and the whole damn rig felt immovable, his body shivering and slumping under the sheer ponderous weight of the suit, of space, of heat. It pressed into him like a blanket, wave after wave of it, massive suffocating warmth against his face and neck and over his shoulders. It caressed his face like a lover. It smoothed at his cheeks and slid down his chest and pressed closer, closer, closer. He should’ve been afraid, but he wasn’t. It felt so…congruent. As if the dark ceased to threaten and had instead embraced him.
“Jake.”
Santo’s hand shook his shoulder, pinching hard through the pressure-tight layers, doing something with the grappling wire. She pressed her other glove to his helmet, fingers splayed like a starburst of cracks.
“Santos to Lindy, come in, I need you…we have some sort of suit malfunction and Jake… is… ”
Her voice was like a light, and his consciousness flitted toward the sound, stretching desperately as it dwindled into a wisp, a thread, a pinprick.
If the scorching stickiness had abated when she touched him, it now increased tenfold. The dark choked Jake, enfolded him with many-armed petulance and desire and thick, palpable hatred, and this was not friendly, this was holy shit insane, he was going insane. He could no longer tell the difference between dark and heat and up and down. He could recognize—he, scientist, disdainful of anything proposed without the foundation of cold hard experiential proof, so it was doubly hysterical and horrible that he was under the scanner, he was the object of proof—that he was being slowly snuffed like a burner flame by a malevolent nothing.
“Jake—wake up—”
Pale, grey-yellow sunlight warmed his face. Something soft brushed his cheek, and Jake rolled his head to see grass, and beyond that, trees. The leaves whispered and shook in the breeze, showing their silver undersides in the dappled light.
“Come down here. Open it, or you’ll die.”
Dream-Con was leaning over him, glass-eyed, remote. Something awful was happening to his face: the bloody glass filling his eye sockets had leaked out to cover his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose in a thin, glistening mask.
“So I’ll die,” Jake agreed. “Not too much of a hardship right now.” A rumble in his ears surpassed the breeze.
“No,” Con said. He looked like he was trying to smile, but the glass crept down his cheeks and stiffened his lips. “You all will die. Maybe. Hard to see. Hard to trace.”
Sounds great.
Con reached out. The glassy substance froze his face into an uncertain smear, crawling down over his neck and chest and arms and onto Jake’s hands and arms. It sank hot and liquid into Jake’s flesh, blazing and comforting and demanding and triumphant, and he flailed backwards.
Get it off me
Con clasped him more tightly. Jake closed his burning fists and smashed at Con, and the glass was hard and soft and clear and dark and screaming under his knuckles, screaming in his ears—
“What are you doing?”
When he came back to himself, Jake was thudding between the station wall and the grappling wire, back and forth; his fists thumping mechanically against the metal, the wire binding him from flying out through containment—no—he had to remember, the containment was gone. The tiny hair-thin wire was keeping him from flying out into open space. Santos had secured him.
Panicked, Jake thrashed for a few moments. The grapple wire was patient, though, and held him on a short leash. Finally he managed to calm down, and let himself drift against the station. As his eyes focused, he could see where he was. Beneath his nerveless fingers was the framework of the Level 7 hatch.
“We made it.” His breath was still ragged to his own ears. “And with no containment protection. I can’t believe we made it.”
The numbing blurriness in his mind was persistent but no longer overpowering, and he realized that something was different, something bad. He felt sore all over, as though he’d run himself through the station’s trawler recycling press.
Santos was no longer whaling on his shoulder. In fact, she wasn’t holding on to him at all.
“Rachel?”
He was alone at the bottom of the station.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“…although he crushed the memory gem on genetics and would not speak for three days – we used gentle prods to bring him out of that state – I am happy to report that, overall, Patient Jeong is responding extremely well to implantation. Today he requested more books, a standard response in 43 percent of our successful implanteds. We gave him a variety of texts as part of the testing schedule: physics, history, mathematics, folktales. He seems particularly drawn to folklore. We believe his undesirable responses will reduce with time and repeated positive/negative reinforcement, and while he may continue to experience memory gaps, his overall memory should normalize. I have high hopes that, despite the required ERPIC sentence length, he will join our pool of corrected felons.”
Progress report, post-ERPIC implantation
Day 34
Enhanced Recall Chip Implant Technician daily log
Carlsbad-Bendis Subterranean Correctional Facility
[the Bends]
Western Hemisphere Dome 0023 NM
Earth, Sol System
[Archived: United Governance Board, correctional
facility reports, Earth]
1 November 2242 AEC
21:42
It took several frantic moments to unwrap himself from the hasty tangle of grappling wire, but once he was free, Jake scanned the immediate area for biotags and suit trackers. Nothing.
The heat had vanished from his suit.
Jake shuddered. He could still recall the intense fever and the slick, frozen surface of Con under his fists. They were grimy thoughts, like his brain had been encased in oil, or cobwebs, or mud…
He turned up the suit’s volume as far as it would go. The heavy breathing: it was still there over the comm, harsh and quick. Was it him? “Santos! Rachel?”
She was gone.
“Rachel! Answer me!”
He scanned the open space around the station, as far as his suit’s pathetically limited range would go, and he screamed her name into the comm until he was hoarse.
The blackness of space yawned out before him, dizzying and immense and implacable. Jake closed his eyes. He fancied he could almost feel the infinitesimal turn of the station beneath him, and it did nothing for his equilibrium, nor for the slow kindle of panic in his belly. But he didn’t have time for that. Think.
He opened his eyes. Selas was now to his right. Far, far out sat the Harmon, long and grey and silent, red and white running lights blinking at intervals, ringed with her own containment shield. Between the ship and himself, there was nothing visible. No space suit. No drifting Santos.
He didn’t know how long he’d been out of it. He checked the suit’s O2 reserves: sixty-eight percent and holding. So unless he’d had a surprise asthma attack, he couldn’t have blacked out for more than ten minutes. Probably less. The hatch beneath his right hand was missing its outer blast door. He didn’t remember blowing it.
The grapple wire floating next to him was his own, still suctioned firmly to the station wall. Wherever she was, she still had her own wire. Little good it would do her if she was floating through open space. She needed contact. But the comm reach was limited, and demonstrably, she wasn’t responding to his hails. She’d probably activated her emergency beacon, and Heart could pick that up, but his suit scanner was low in power. He needed the push of Heart.
What the fuck was he thinking? He didn’t need the other suit systems. He was at the door to Level 7. A minute away from station air and pressure. And if his suit’s O2 system drained, he had at least that much air left in the tubes. Snarling, he tapped up the suit’s mainframe and cannibalized the support and comm systems with abandon, then rerouted until he had a scanning reach all the way to the silent bulk of the Harmon. The rings of the scanner flickered, and then bled outward in invisible waves.
Wave. Nothing. Wave. Nothing. Wave. Nothing.
Wave—blip. Wave—blip.
There was something between the Harmon and the station, something small and human-sized, something moving.
Jake tapped up the suit’s comm system and threaded it along the scanning wave. “Rachel?”
Silence.
“Rachel, can you hear me, are you there, gods, please—”
A word reached him, whispered so faintly as to be almost inaudible.
“Jake?”
Jake whooped. “Rachel! You’re there! Hang on—just—”
The suit’s system juddered, and the comm link fizzled out. The arm controls began to flash bright orange, and a warning message scrolled in red across the face of Jake’s helmet.
WARNING
O2 levels depleted to past critical
2:00 remaining
Activate e-beacon / End EVA
Two minutes. He had a luxurious two whole minutes. Jake slapped the docking hatch’s entry keypad and it bleeped at him.
Please enter code.
He tapped in his personal code, cursing his slow padded fingers.
Error 692-UFC
Access denied - Protocol 55924
Please enter code.
“You want a code? I got a code right here for you.” He could try the Gemini hack, if he wanted to suffocate while typing complex coding with his huge mitts. Jake dug inside his bag, found nothing but the solid, heavy blocks of the magnetic overrides. They were no good for the external doors. But Santos had given him half the dissolvers, hadn’t she?
His belt, she’d stuck it on his belt. Gritting his teeth, he groped around his waist until his fingers closed around the small brick of the wave pack. He pulled it free as sharply as he dared, stuck it to the center of the hatch, and realized he had no damn clue how to initiate the thing. He needed a tightly directed signal. His faceplate flashed again.
WARNING
O2 levels depleted to past critical
1:00 remaining
Activate e-beacon / End EVA
The e-beacon! His last bit of auxiliary oomph. Jake flicked the safeties button to ARM, then shuffled through the suit mainframe options until he found the e-beacon’s activation parameters and focused them on the center of the hatch. He erased the emergency text and replaced it with the dissolver activation code.
Send e-beacon?
“Yes already,” Jake snapped. Seizing the grapple wire, he pushed back from the hatch. The suit hummed with action as he floated backward. The wire pulled taut.
E-beacon sent. Successful receipt of -
The dissolver pack swelled ever so slightly, and then the hatch door rippled…and disappeared as the dissolvers sank in. A thin film of processing gas issued from the hole. The dissolution came within a handbreadth of Jake’s suction wire, slowed, and stopped.
It looked as though someone had taken a hefty spherical bite out of the station’s hull. The hatch entry was completely gone, and the airlock doors had closed and bolted automatically at the loss of pressure. Jake let out a breath. He’d need the mag overrides.
WARNING
O2 levels depleted
WARNING
O2 levels depleted
End EVA
With the grapple wire he drew himself in through the scarred cavity, his faceplate flashing with such bright angry red that he could hardly see to place the mag discs correctly. He fumbled them against the airlock.
WARNING
Yes, I know. He felt a tad light-headed. Consider me warned. The air inside his suit was beginning to taste stale. So soon? Jake had expected a little extra time, a built-in failsafe. He pressed down hard to seal the mags, and wrenched at the doors.
With a weighty groan, the doors jolted open a crack.
Jake forced them apart and slithered through into the airlock anteroom. Gasping, his heart rocketing, he collapsed against the wall and waited for the sucking seal of the doors before he undid the clasps and let his helmet clunk across the hatch floor. He was in, it was okay, the anteroom had repressurized. He could hear the humming rush of it. Two more steps and he’d be in the corridor outside the cargo bay. But first—he ran to the general comm console in the anteroom wall and opened the secure channel to sickbay. “Lindy? Doc?”
“What the hell are you two doing down there? I’ve been trying to raise you for the past ten minutes.”
He flicked through the comm options and tried to change the parameters for open comms. The console screen blinked the same unhelpful message.
Access denied - Protocol 55924
Please enter code.
Jake bashed at the wall. His suit gloves muffled the blow. Cursing, he started stripping. “Look, Lindy, I need you to raise Con on the Harmon, use the emergency channel. Get Kai to do it. Have him patch me through down here or something, my damn console let me raise you but I’m locked out otherwise. I’m on level seven outside the bay, console number L7S422g.”
“What? Wait, slow down—”
“Meanwhile he needs to unlock this thing for me.” The damned gloves clung, sweat-soaked. Jake kicked his way out of the rest of the suit and boots, and tugged the gloves off with his teeth. “Or you do. Somehow get me in so that I can raise Santos. She’ll have possible oxygen deprivation, hopefully nothing else.”
“Jake, do we evac? I need more info and we’ve got our own situation up here—”
“Doc, did you miss the whole ‘don’t argue with me’ bit?”
“Nope, just ignored it.”
“Doc. Rachel went out into space and time is incredibly goddamn imperative because her O2 isn’t gonna last forever and considering radiation and any stray debris, the oxygen is really the least of her problems, if she’s still alive to give a damn—”
“All right already,” she shouted in his ear. “Kai’s on it, he should be coming through to you now.”
“Thank you.” Jake disconnected from her. Almost instantly, Kai’s voice was in his ear.
“Go, go already, it’s open. Yours is the only viable comm console down there, though, so watch out? I think that means Mick is definitely on that level. He’ll hear anything you say.”
The console screen flashed again, and then:
Code accepted.
Access granted - Protocol 55924
“Kai, you wonderful, horrible bastard, I’ll never wish you dead again.” Jake cleared all the options, dropped the ‘cast safeguards, and sent an open comm. “Rachel? Rachel, are you still there?”
Silence.
“Rachel!”
“Jake?” Con’s voice came over the comm. He sounded uncertain and far away. “Talk to me. What’s happening?”
“We had an accident. Rachel’s out in space, and she’s coming your way. I need you to shut down your containment field and pull a scan search-and-rescue and a tractor net for Santos. Do you hear me?”
The comm line crackled.
“Con, did you get that?” Jake closed his eyes and steadied his hand against the airlock wall. “Respond, buddy.”
Silence. Then a new, quiet voice crept over the comm.
“Jake.”
“Rachel!” Kai’s code had split the database open wide. Jake shredded through Heart’s arrayed space-scanning options until he found the one for tight focus. He sent the scanning rings out toward the Harmon. “Rachel, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay. I’m on level seven, and we’ve got a scanner on you. You’re between us and the Harmon, so Con’s going to tractor you in, okay? Right, Con?”