by Rob Boffard
And why not? It’s all very well for her, sitting in this cockpit and issuing orders, but Hannah’s the one who’ll have to carry them out. She’s the one who’s going to have to face the passengers again. How can Volkova expect her to do that? Expect her to know what to do?
Callie would know. Callie would do it before the captain even asked. She’d have everything under control, and isn’t that the real reason you’re angry, Hannah Banana? Because someone expects you to be like her?
“Tell them yourself,” she says, through gritted teeth.
“What you say?”
“You’ve got a mic. You tell them what’s going on.”
Volkova swivels in her seat, eyes bugging out. The cigarette butt waggles furiously. Hannah expects her to shout, maybe even to finally snap, but she doesn’t. She gets control of herself, exhaling hard through her nose as she looks back out through the cockpit viewport, satisfying herself that there’s nothing coming at them. For the first time, she doesn’t look like she wants to kill someone.
“If I tell them,” she says, looking back at Hannah, “I will have every passenger in the cockpit yelling a million questions at me. I must stay at the controls. Focus, you understand?”
“But why? Why turn off the power?”
“You’re not seeing what I see,” Volkova says, pointing to a gap in the hotel’s outer wall. Hannah can just see another metal sphere cruising past. “They’re not stupid. They hunt light and thruster signature. Sound and heat. So we have to be dead, like a destroyed ship.”
“Will that even work?”
Volkova exhales, shrugs. “If humans control the balls, then maybe they think it’s impossible for a ship to be inside the hotel. Maybe they don’t even look for us. But if an AI controls them, they’ll look everywhere. So we must be like … what is word, oblomki sudna. Wreckage. Dead. We do that, maybe they …” Volkova waves her hand in the direction of the sphere, giving an up-down whistle.
“But without air—”
“Our CO2 filters can last one hour. We will be cold, but OK. Now, please, go and tell the passengers. Understand?”
There’s a blush rising in Hannah’s cheeks, and for the second time in ten minutes she wants to sink into a hole and blink out of existence. She takes a breath, then nods, heading back towards the cockpit door.
As she pulls it open, she stops. “How’d you even get us in here? How’d we fit through that gap?”
For a second, she’s not even sure Volkova heard her. Then the captain half turns, a strange smile on her face. Several of her teeth are gold, glinting in the light from the cockpit controls.
“The gravity well on the bottom of this ship is super-dense reinforced alloy,” she says. “Foot thick. Has to be, so we don’t float around. I went as fast as I can, pulled up, used the alloy to smash through the hole. I made it bigger.”
Hannah gives a dazed nod. Just before she pulls the door closed, Volkova calls out. “Remember: after the lights go off, no movement, no sound. The ship must be dead!”
Chapter 7
“Can anyone see …” says the woman with the ponytail, squinting up at the viewing dome.
Jack wishes people would finish their sentences. It seems like no matter what anyone says, they lose track of their thoughts halfway through. It’s unbelievable just how annoying it is. Even as the thought occurs, the boys’ mother says. “We should maybe …” and then trails off.
Nobody’s screaming any more. Nobody seems to know what to do. The shock has collapsed over them like a wave.
The explosions outside the station are fewer now, but there’s no way to really tell how bad it is out there. In a way, that’s the worst part. One of those metal spheres could be heading right for them, and they wouldn’t know about it until they were blown out into space.
Jack is twisting the hem of his shirt in his hands, doing it automatically, hard enough to leave the fabric stretched and kinked. That stupid trick the shrink on Europa taught him, the little trigger mechanism to get his mind off things. He yanks his hands away like they’ve been burned. What a crock of shit. It’s never worked. Not once.
A surprisingly lucid thought burns through his mind. No leadership. That’s the problem here. No one to take charge. No one to take responsibility. Got the tour guide running off every five seconds, insane pilot putting them into all kinds of dangerous situations, and no one’s held accountable. When he tries to suggest something sensible, like getting the hell out of here, he gets shut down.
Another unseen vibration rumbles through the ship, making the lights flicker. The old woman has started to sob, the sound coming in huge, hitching gasps. Jack grips his shirt again, tighter this time, the action automatic.
The parents of those two boys are arguing, hissing at each other in sharp whispers that needle the edge of Jack’s hearing. He wants to tell them to shut up. Instead, he just twists his shirt tighter, gritting his teeth. His hands are shaking. A drink would fix that – and why the fuck shouldn’t he go down to the bar? If they aren’t going to let them onto the escape pod, why should he –
The guide comes hurtling out of the cockpit passageway, red hair flying out behind her. She slows to a jog, then to a fast-paced walk, arms pumping. “OK, everyone, listen up!”
The man in the leather jacket gives Jack a knowing look. The old woman sits up straight, and the boys’ father gets to his feet, fingers gripping the back of a chair. His wife sits stock still, her mouth a thin line.
“We’re going to shut down the main systems,” the guide says. “The whole ship. So if you could find a handhold and—”
“What?” says the woman with the ponytail.
It opens the floodgates. The parents are on their feet, the man with the metal arm, everyone talking at once. Jack’s voice is the loudest. “How are we supposed to breathe?” he says.
The guide is still trying to speak, her hands raised, desperately trying to get everyone to calm down. She doesn’t look at him, and that pisses him off even more. “Hey. Miss. Talking to you,” he says. “What are we supposed to do about air? And heat?”
“We’ll be OK. Now would everyone please just listen!”
“How do you know they haven’t gone already?” says the boys’ father. “It looked like it was—”
“Of course we don’t know, Ev,” his wife says, her voice shaking. “Just listen to her.”
“We can’t take the risk,” the guide says, shaking her head. Her voice is strong, but she looks like she’s about to pass out.
“Who are these people?” the old woman manages to say. “Why are they doing this?”
“I don’t know,” says the guide. “But we can either stay online, and hope they don’t find us, or we go dark and wait it out.”
“But for how long?” Mom has her arms around her boys, holding them close. They look extremely uncomfortable, although Jack can’t tell if it’s from her tight grip, or from what the guide is proposing.
The guide licks her lips. “An hour, no more.”
In a voice that she almost manages to keep from shaking, she tells them what the captain wants to do. When she finishes, nobody moves. They all just look at each other, frozen in shock.
Jack’s thoughts tangle together. There’s got to be something else they could do. Some other way. But in the end, he moves when the rest of them do, making their way to the edges of the deck. The old woman has gone white, and the guide has to help her, leading her to a nearby hold.
Jack sticks an arm through one, pulling the inside of his elbow into it, cursing himself for going along with this stupidity. The handhold is as thick as a man’s wrist, made of metal that’s been painted over one too many times. When he puts his other hand on it to brace himself, the sweat on his skin nearly makes him slip.
The couple in the leather jackets are one handhold down. Jack catches the man’s eye again, shaking his head in bewilderment.
“We’re ready, Captain,” the guide shouts, as she grabs a handhold of her own. She’s on on
e a few steps from the family, all of whom are clustered around a single strut, holding tight to one another.
The captain’s voice comes through the speakers, so loud it nearly blows Jack’s head off. “OK, shutting down the gravity well. Hold on.”
Briefly, Jack wonders what the hell she’s holding onto. Probably strapped herself into that nice, comfy seat. Then there’s a rolling whump, the floor shifts beneath his feet, and he’s floating.
It’s not a pleasant sensation. His natural instinct is to keep his feet planted, but they’re being teased upwards, pulled off the ground by a gentle, implacable force. He extends his legs, but that just makes it worse, and in seconds he’s parallel with the floor, his arm aching from holding tight to the metal bracket.
His stomach is expanding and contracting: a slow, sluggish motion that makes him feel like he wants to throw up. There’s a gentle tightness in his sinuses, an insidious pressure inside his skull. How long has it been since a ship went zero-G? It’s certainly never happened to him. Gravity wells existed long before he was born, and he’s never heard of them failing, not once. The idea of dealing with no gravity is absurd, something from the very earliest days of deep space travel, when people didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.
He’s going to die here. They’ll write a little obituary for him on the feed, and then they’ll hire another hotel critic, and that’ll be it.
“Please stay calm,” says the Red Panda. “There has been a disruption in localised gravitational forces. Be sure to secure yourself before assisting other—”
The voice cuts off with a squawk. The lights go next, clicking off in sequence across the cabin. A second later, the engine shudders to a halt, and all Jack can hear is deafening tinnitus. He floats in silence, trying to ignore the nausea and the ache in his arm and the squeeze in his sinuses, wishing he was anywhere else in the universe. Anywhere else at all.
“Can we—” someone says.
“Shhhh,” says the guide.
Jack has a sudden urge to laugh. There’s no way this is going to work. No way. He looks over his shoulder. Like him, the Red Panda’s passengers are all trying to stay in one spot, arms and hands clutched tight to their holds. And outside …
The hairs on his scalp prickle. It doesn’t look real. When the Red Panda’s interior was lit, the outside was a world of shadows. Now, he can see just how bad the damage to the hotel is. It’s like a giant monster slashed at the wall, rending and tearing, speckling the wounds with cold stars. There are things floating out there – bodies, some of them, their shapes unmistakable. From somewhere beneath them, there’s a burst of fiery light, hot and silent.
White vapour puffs in front of Jack’s face as he breathes. With the engine shut off, the ship is bleeding heat fast. The metal against the crook of his elbow is already growing cold, biting through his jacket fabric.
They’re not going to last an hour. They might not even last ten minutes. They’ll freeze to death long before they get out of here.
But ten minutes go by. Then twenty. Jack’s stomach is a bubbling cauldron, and his lips are going numb with the chill. He squeezes his eyes shut for a few seconds, and, when he opens them, one of the metal spheres is right outside the ship.
It’s tracking past them, inside the hotel, moving on puffs of vapour that make Jack think of his breath condensing in front of his face. Up close, the multiple sensors on its body stick out like pimples. They turn towards the Panda, dark eyes flicking left and right. Thrusters on the sphere’s body activate, slowing its course, bringing it to a stop in the middle of the viewing dome. Jack doesn’t know if the sensor is a heat scanner, a camera, or something else entirely. He just stays as still as he can.
For three whole minutes the sphere hovers in front of them. Jack is starting to shiver – the cabin’s temperature is below freezing now. How long will it be before someone does something stupid? Makes a noise, or sneezes, or triggers that sensor in some way that none of them will see coming?
The war between the Colony and the Frontier might have taken place in distant systems, away from the Core worlds, but plenty of Jack’s colleagues reported on it, and there was no lack of feed footage. The battles were fought with missiles and plasma and kinetic impactors. These? He’s never seen anything like them, not even that one time someone in Frontier Defence leaked a bunch of weapons schematics to Ajit on the news crew.
The spheres aren’t like missiles. They don’t have a single method of propulsion – there are multiple thrusters, all across the body – and they move like they’re sentient, tracking targets relentlessly, changing direction in a split second, defying the physics of space travel. It makes his skin crawl.
The word alien creeps into his mind, settles there, refusing to budge.
The sphere’s thrusters come to life, slowly moving it away from them, heading towards one of the holes in the module’s outer wall.
That’s it. Keep moving, you son of a –
There’s another bang as something collides with Panda – a chunk of hotel floor, just visible through the viewport. It hits so hard that it starts them moving again, drifting sideways, the world outside the dome spinning on its axis. The muscles in Jack’s arm spasm as he fights to hold onto the bracket.
From the other side of the ship, there’s a panicked gasp. Jack looks up to see that one of the kids is floating loose, the younger one, arms moving in frantic windmills, trying to grab hold of anything he can. His mom is reaching for him – their fingertips brush, but he slips away, moving towards the centre of the main deck.
Jack looks over at the receding metal sphere. It’s not receding any more. It’s starting to turn, coming back towards them, the sensors on its body swivelling like eyes.
Chapter 8
Corey Livingstone isn’t really a big reader.
He’s got a few books on his lens – the Quasar Lizard trilogy, which is pretty crash, and a couple on the history of the Great Expansion, which are really crash. But, mostly, he digs comics and series and messing around with Jamie and Allie. Books always have these weird expressions in them. Like: his heart was in his mouth.
He’s never understood that one. How’d they even come up with that? Why would being scared mean your heart climbed all the way up into your mouth? It seemed kind of icky, more than anything else – he’d mentioned it to Jamie one time, and they’d spent more than a few minutes wondering what it would be like.
Jamie had remembered an old expression about eating your heart out, and that had sent them on a tangent that left the series they were watching forgotten in the background. Eating your own heart, they concluded, was both really hardcore and really, really gak.
But as Corey drifts into the open space above the main deck, as he watches the sphere approach, it really does feel like there’s something in his mouth. His tongue feels like it’s grown to five times its normal size, clogged with gummy, sour saliva. He can’t stop himself spinning, no matter how hard he tries – every movement he makes is exaggerated, sending him in unexpected directions.
He’s upside down now, head pointing towards the floor. His mom and dad are reaching out for him, silent terror on their faces. His mom tries to spring after him – she’s pulled back by his dad, who is looking desperately for another way to help him. And Malik – Malik is filming him. Holo up, eyes glued to the screen, tracking his movements. Corey stares at him, stunned, wanting to rip the holo out of his brother’s hands and smash it against the wall.
Everyone else? Everyone else looks like they want to throw up, pass out, or just die right there. They can’t get to him – and they don’t dare try. He’s too far above the chairs to grab hold of one of them, and he’s not close enough to the dome to use that, either. He’ll reach the other side of the cabin soon, but it’s not going to happen before the sphere gets there – it’s closing fast, only thirty yards away now, navigating smoothly past a floating chunk of debris, coming right at them. And Corey isn’t sure he’ll be able to land quietly.
He can’t stop shivering – he’s so cold that he’s not even sure he still has all his fingers. And in the middle of his terror, there’s a bright core of shame. How can he be a pilot if he can’t even control himself in zero-G? You can’t fly a Scorpion fighter into deep space if you can’t even figure out how to move your arms without gravity.
Twenty yards away. Corey can see the sphere’s sensors scanning left and right. Any second now, he’s going to collide with the wall, and collide hard. He could try to spin himself around, but the movement might alert the thing’s sensors. For a second, his toes are pointing at the wall, and he thinks he’ll be able to cushion the landing. But he can’t hold the position, turning head over heels in midair, the wall getting closer. Corey braces himself, closes his eyes, his heart climbing back into his mouth, squatting there …
But when he hits the wall, there’s no sound – and it doesn’t feel like a hard surface. Corey looks down, confused, only to see something between his feet and the wall. An arm. The old woman’s arm, covered in soft, grey tracksuit fabric. He hadn’t even realised she was there. Her right hand is holding tight to the wall bracket, but she let her other arm drift into Corey’s path, her armpit at his left toe, her wrist at his right knee, muffling the impact.
In a smooth, effortless movement – one that looks like it should come from someone much, much younger – she pulls Corey in, wrapping the arm tight around his legs, holding him in place. She’s looking up at him, and it’s pretty easy to figure out what she’s trying to say.
He stays as still as he can, only breathing when it feels like his lungs are about to explode. Relief floods through him. And not just him: he can feel it coming from everyone on the main deck. He glances across, to Hannah, and sees her close her eyes, exhale a long puff of white vapour. He tilts his head back: his mom looks like she’s doing everything she can not to shout his name. His dad, too. Malik, of course, is still filming him, and Corey feels another burst of stupid, pointless anger.