by George Wier
The glass moved perhaps one tenth of an inch forward and then Billy saw what the problem was. There were two small bolts top and bottom that held two small plates down to the plane of the robot’s face. The plates likewise held the visor glass in place.
“Damn,” Billy said. He placed the screwdriver against his chest and hoped it would stay there in case it was needed again, and then bent and changed hands with the wrench. He had never been truly left-handed, but while dextrous with his left, his right was far more accurate. He tightened the head of the oversized spanner nearly closed and applied it to the head of the top bolt. Too tight. He readjusted it and fitted it into place again. It fit, though not perfectly snug.
“What the hell,” he said, and tried to turn the wrench anyway. The wrench slipped free of the bolt.
Billy’s stomach tightened in a contraction. He knew he was turning somewhat green, but then again he’d eaten nothing in the last thirty hours or so. If he threw up in his helmet, he could either lose all vision or possibly asphyxiate on his own vomit.
“Nope,” he said to himself. “The Kid ain’t going out that way. You behave,” he commanded his stomach. The nausea instantly abated.
He tightened the wrench down less than a quarter of a turn and applied it again.
It was a perfect fit.
Billy turned the wrench and the bolt turned once. He moved to the other one and tried it. It turned as well. He continued until the bolt loosened enough that the face plate moved outward past the plane of the robot’s face. He turned his attention to the other bolt and turned it until it was even with its twin. The screwdriver drifted up to bob against his own helmet. He parked the wrench against his chest and replaced it in his hand with the screwdriver and applied it to one end of the faceplate and gave an ever-so-gentle push. The plate popped fully outward. Billy slid the faceplate glass out of the way and regarded the ruby beneath. It was as large as his palm. He removed it from its setting with a delicate tap of the screwdriver and took one of Jay-Patten’s diamonds from his left hand. He examined the diamond. The thing was beautiful as he turned it about in his hands. Something, however, didn’t feel right about it. He let it go to drift away. There was one diamond remaining in his left hand. He had lost the other somewhere—perhaps when he came through the cargo hatch. There was no looking for it now.
He gave the second diamond a once over, felt better about it than he had the first, and moved it under the three placement pins. The damned thing fit!
“Tesla’s monocle,” he remembered, and found it odd he should be stating his thoughts aloud.
He opened one of the fingers of his left hand and peered. Nothing.
The monocle was gone.
[ 107 ]
Ekka Gagarin managed to secure the cargo bay hatch before passing out. She dreamed that she was floating on a strange sea. There were no waves, no tides.
Is this the Black Sea? she asked herself.
No. It’s not the Black. Is it Lake Chapala? The Sea of Cortez? No answer came here in the blackness of night with no stars. Something didn’t feel right about this sea. Still, she was so tired, and the invitation to do nothing other than float was inviting.
If Ekka had been able to see her body from an exterior viewpoint, she would have seen it floating free of the corridor that lead to the cargo area. It was entering the main chamber near the engine room. Her body spun about in the air and her delicate head nearly impacted the railing around the engine room’s entry hatch. Instead, she passed by it and drifted toward the central shaft and the Tesla coil, with its billions of volts of electricity.
[ 108 ]
Tesla stopped his long plunge toward the bridge by grabbing one of the railings that ran along the vast central chamber of the Arcadia. He was almost to the bridge.
“My work is here, not the bridge,” he said to himself. He turned in time to see Ekka Gagarin’s inert body emerge from the passageway four decks below him. He gazed down at her for a moment, judging whether or not he should do something, when he saw the sparks from the central shaft.
Tesla squinted. The shaft appeared to be scored, as if...
He recalled the alien with its sword advancing upon Merkam and himself.
The creature had slashed at the coil during its long flight to the bridge. It did what damage it could before Billy killed it.
If Ekka made contact with the central shaft anywhere within a few feet of the damaged section, there would be nothing left of her. Not even a cinder.
Tesla rotated his body and pressed his feet against the inner hull. Then he sprang.
[ 109 ]
It was time to stop the long, slow spin—not that there was ever an absence of the sensation of spinning while in space. There was no possibility of searching while spinning. Billy decided to remedy that situation.
He kicked out his legs and made contact with the roof of the cargo bay. This propelled him back towards the floor. He held the robot head in front of him so it made contact with the floor first. The impact ignited a dull pain in his wounded shoulder, but he ignored it.
The robot head suddenly turned on—he’d hit the switch at the back of the head with the floor. The light behind the diamond moved back and forth. Billy ducked. The thing cut a swath through the cargo bay and a section of the aft bulkhead was vaporized.
Billy felt behind it with his free left hand, found the switch, and flipped it. The light died.
Billy felt something soft caress his upper leg and looked down. The body of Denys Jay-Patten was curled around him, reminiscent of a lover. Billy laughed.
“Thanks, Denys,” he said. “But not right now. Maybe later.” He gave Jay-Patten a gentle shove and the body sailed slowly into the darkness, following the curve of the ship to disappear from view.
“Monocle,” Billy said.
He began looking. Nothing.
He glanced toward the blackness and saw the three ships. They were far larger. And then, in his mid-vision, in the center of the three ships, Billy saw the circular edge of something. Tesla’s monocle. It floated in space mere feet outside the ship.
Looking around the room, he spotted the wrench and the screwdriver and retrieved them. There was no going back, only forward.
“I love you, Ekka Gagarin,” he said. “It would have been nice to make you my wife. But The Kid has to go into battle one last time.”
Billy The Kid pushed off the deck and sailed outward beyond the wreckage of the former airlock, and into the black.
[ 110 ]
Ekka came to with a start. She was drifting, spinning slowly. She turned her head and saw the blue sparks from the central shaft and knew. This was the end. Within seconds she would be no more. The central shaft carried two parallel conduits embedded beneath thousands of turns of copper wiring. They ran beneath the ship’s bridge and down the lateral center to enter the engine room adjacent to the hatchway. Along its length, it was coated with nonconductive varnish. She had overseen the ship’s construction in Colorado Springs and monitored the workers as they applied coat after coat of varnish. But, somehow the central shaft had been punctured, and tiny webbed tendrils of blue lightning played out of the cut.
Ekka held her breath. Her body turned and she looked away from it. One more tumble and she would make contact.
She vaguely detected the shadow an instant before impact. The wind was knocked from her and for a moment her body was draped around the dapper Nikola Tesla, who bore her slowly away from her date with death.
The air knifed into her lungs. “Nikola!”
“If I have to save you one more time, I may have to steal you from Billy Gostman, darling Ekka.”
Ekka was at a loss for words, and then she realized the man was attempting levity. Ekka laughed. She turned her face to Tesla and the thin lips below his equally thin mustache twisted into a suppressed smile.
The two came into contact with the railing around the inner hull, and there Tesla placed her hand on the railing and patted it. “There,” he said. �
�Be safe.”
“What now?”
“Why, my dear, I am about to turn the Arcadia into a Faraday Cage.”
“A what?”
“Never you mind. There is a sword from one of the aliens on the bridge. Apparently it is non-conductive, wouldn’t you say?” Tesla gestured toward the central shaft and the cut.
“Ah. Yes,” Ekka agreed. “Otherwise, he would have been turned to so much ash.”
“My thought exactly. I’ll need that sword.”
“What else will you need?” she asked.
“A beam. A metal beam perhaps twenty feet in length. Or two ten-foot beams tied together such that they make contact.”
“We’ll have to wait until Billy returns,” she said. Then she put her hand to her mouth, remembering. “Billy!”
She turned and launched herself aft.
“Just when I thought I was doing so well with her,” Tesla chuckled.
[ 111 ]
Billy Gostman attempted to ignore the oncoming space ships and focus on the job at hand. He was aft of the entire Arcadia. The ship was not otherwise accelerating, so he should not drift far from her. He did realize he had to work...fast.
He fit Tesla’s monocle over Jay-Patten’s diamond and slid the faceplate into place. With Jack Ross’s oversized wrench, he tightened first one bolt, then the other.
Billy glanced at the oncoming ships and saw three tiny winks of light, one from each craft. The three lights separated from the craft and began to converge on him and the Arcadia behind him.
“Oh shit,” Billy stated. “Torpedo!”
The three lights accelerated. They came on with all the inexorable mindlessness of a school of sharks.
He rapidly tapped the faceplate to see that it was secure, turned the robot head away from his body and toggled the switch.
A cone of light leapt from Cyclops’s head. Billy moved the head, guiding the beam to the first torpedo. It disappeared in a brilliant, silent flash. He felt the head of the robot grow hot through his alien suit. He flipped the switch and the beam of light died. There were spots before his eyes. It took a moment for the spots to fade, but then the remaining two torpedoes loomed large before him. They were cylindrical and silvery, both beautiful and ugly at the same time.
Billy marked where they were in the blackness, deciding to do what he had done half a dozen times before when in a firefight, which was to lead them.
He flipped the toggle switch and wiped the dark sky where he suspected the deadly shafts to be. Two balls of flame appeared where they had been, and Billy knew they were gone. He turned the robot head to the lead ship and let the beam of light bathe it for a moment. He averted his eyes, but could tell the first ship was gone in a great gout of flame. His fingers began to burn and the robot’s head glowed with heat. Ignoring the pain, he pointed it at the second ship and turned his eyes away again. A second, far brighter explosion followed.
Gritting his teeth and wincing, he turned to point the robot head at the final ship.
The shaft of light from Cyclops’s head sputtered intermittently, then ceased.
Billy watched as the final ship made its way toward the Arcadia.
He craned his neck and saw that the Arcadia was some forty feet behind him. How did I get so far away? he thought.
But Billy knew. If it had been four feet instead of forty, there was still no going back.
[ 112 ]
“We cannot commence the Faraday maneuver without a metal conduit,” Tesla told Ekka, who floated in front of the cargo bay window.
“But Billy is the only one who can help us, and I think...I think...” her voice began to break.
“I see him,” Tesla said, and placed his arm around her. Ekka patted his arm, thankful for the kind man’s presence.
Even with the extra set of arms and legs of the insect-like alien space suit, they knew it was Billy out there, floating in space.
“Do not write him off yet, my dear,” Tesla said. “Your Billy is a marvel.”
[ 113 ]
In a final act of defiance, Billy Gostman lobbed the great head of the robot Cyclops at the oncoming dragonfly craft, and with that gesture saved his own life.
The robot’s head out-massed Billy Gostman by a factor of four to one. An onlooker seeing the scene from a distance would have detected the lumbering slow motion of the metallic robot head as it moved away from the overall bulk of the Arcadia. At the same time, the onlooker would have seen Billy Gostman fly back toward the exposed cargo hold of the Arcadia much the way a circus acrobat is catapulted into the air by his safety net.
Billy entered the outer airlock backward. His helmet grazed the girder he had turned to slag minutes before, and that corrected his fall so that his feet entered the main cargo hold first. The wall rushed up to meet him and Billy bent his knees to absorb the impact. His helmet struck the wall and spider web cracks blossomed and grew across his vision.
He turned to see Ekka and Tesla looking at him in wonder. Billy raised his right hand and gave a thumbs up.
Ekka began gesturing and pointing. Billy turned and looked, but couldn’t see what she was gesturing about. The cracks on his faceplate were everywhere. It could shatter from the inner pressure at any moment. A cough, a sneeze, a too-hard breath could be his undoing.
Tesla made a gesture by making inverted vees with his hands and drawing them apart.
“A beam,” Billy whispered to himself. He pointed at one of the spare beams close by and shrugged.
Tesla shook his head and pointed again.
“A longer beam or a rod,” Billy whispered again. He pointed at a stack of metal poles tethered to the wall. Originally, the rods were meant for the erection of temporary structures on the Moon’s surface.
Tesla nodded.
Billy held up one finger.
Ekka held up two.
Billy nodded.
He floated to the rack and carefully removed two of the metal poles. After a minute, he stood before the doorway, poles in hand.
Behind him Tesla and Ekka could see the alien craft slowing to pull alongside the Arcadia.
[ 114 ]
The moment the hatch opened and the whirlwind began, Billy’s faceplate erupted in a spray of glass.
The poles came first. Tesla stood in front of Billy, and Ekka held Tesla from the side. Tesla grasped at Billy and pulled him and his load of metal poles in against the terrific wind.
As the poles cleared the hatch, Ekka slammed her fist into the switch and the doorway came down.
Billy pushed with his legs against the doorway and he and Tesla drifted back down the corridor. The whirlwind ceased.
Billy expelled air from his lungs.
“I...suspect,” Tesla said. “That we now...have one quarter...the air...we had before.”
“Enough?”
“Possibly.”
Billy stopped their forward momentum by rotating the poles and bringing them to a shrieking halt against the bulkheads to either side.
“Thank you,” Billy said.
Ekka came up beside them. “The alien ship,” she said. “It’s alongside. We have to hurry.”
[ 115 ]
Tesla gestured toward the midship cargo hatch window when he reached the central atrium of the ship. There, plain as day, the alien vessel noticeably slowed and parked itself next to the Arcadia. Its solar sail slowly began to fold. Its gauzy material shimmered, like so much flimsy, see-through silk.
“Tell us what to do, Nik,” Billy said.
“We need wire of some sort to tie the poles together. Quick!”
Ekka launched herself toward the engine room hatchway.
“I’ll fetch the alien sword from the bridge,” Tesla said quickly, and made ready to spring forward toward the bridge. He turned to Billy and said calmly, “Place one pole touching the main cargo hatch doorway. The other, tie it to the first such that both together reach to the central shaft. It must come within the length of an alien swordblade from the spire. Do NOT touch
the shaft with the pole, nor place it anywhere near...that.” Tesla pointed to the spray of sparks further along the shaft length.
Billy nodded.
“There’s no way of knowing whether there is free current running along the outside of the gash from where it is leaking. Believe me. Electrical current can go anywhere water can. I’ll be back!”
Tesla sprang and flew through the air with the greatest of ease.
[ 116 ]
Ekka could not locate any wire in the engine room. She did, however, recognize the one item that might do in a pinch. The thing must have come unattached during Jack Ross’s final moments. Or perhaps the dying body had ultimately rejected it in a final defiance of nature over technology. She clutched the large robot arm of Jack Ross and formerly of Cyclops, pushed off from the forehead of the gargantuan transmogrifier, and flew upward with it.
[ 117 ]
Ekka emerged from the engine room and fought the urge to scream. The large window beside the main cargo hatch revealed the floating figures of four eight-limbed alien spacesuits. But these wore armored spacesuits.
Billy noted Ekka’s open-mouthed expression and shot a look out the window. One of the creatures bore a large barrel-shaped object with a set of triangular steel teeth protruding from one end.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Billy said. “Alien marines. And they brought their pet shark.”
“Tesla!” Ekka shouted.
As Billy and Ekka watched, the business end of the barrel began slowly spinning, and as it did, the outermost row of protruding steel teeth began spinning counter to the direction of spin of the head of the thing. Then the row inside it began spinning the other direction.
Billy turned to Ekka. “Um. Shit.”