Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  In particular, the perfect cold of outer space had infiltrated the more sensitive of the exposed systems. She needed to normalize the temperature in the subdeck before they would function, and that meant repairing the hole in the containment wall.

  Using video arrays near the primary artery, she found the break. The hole was more of a gash, about as long as she was tall and half as wide. She noted that the edges of the gash pointed inward, suggesting a projectile entering from outside.

  And that meant there had to be an exit hole. She found it, similar in size and shape to the entry gash, moments later.

  Her plan for such an event—the emergency repair of a containment breach while underway—was to use EM sand. It could patch holes quickly and provide the structural support needed for a permanent repair using sheet sealant.

  She suffered a moment of anxiety while she checked the inventory, however. She anticipated needing every available grain in the not-too-distant future and didn’t want to sacrifice any of it. The inventory report showed sufficient stocks both to make the repairs and to meet her developing plans. Relieved, she ordered construction of a sand hose out to the damaged areas, which she used to construct a support grid over the holes in the containment wall.

  While the repairs were underway, she searched the subdeck for Juice, MacMac, Chase, and Justin. Their biomarkers should have made their whereabouts obvious, but when they didn’t show, she swept the deck again looking for the tracking signal she’d tagged on MacMac without his knowledge. Then she checked inside the units of central stow and finished with a visual review using every camera suite across the deck.

  Where are you? She might believe that one, maybe two, of them had been sucked out a hole, but not all four of them. The obvious answer was that they’d moved up to a higher deck. But with emergencies still to be addressed around the vessel, she couldn’t take the time now to perform a proper search.

  A cart lay on its side not far away, the victim of the gravity shift. While Lazura could right it with one hand and ride to her next destination, she preferred to run, an activity her synthetic body could do for hours at a time with little effort and no discomfort.

  Setting a brisk but sustainable pace, she started back for the central lift. Hejmo and the Techs fell in next to her. As they ran, she issued orders.

  “Spray the sheet sealant over the sand,” she told the Techs, “and as soon as it hardens, fill the subdeck with carbon dioxide.”

  She needed to maintain a gaseous environment because it was the molecules of gas that carried the warmth everywhere, allowing efficient heating of the frozen circuits. The sooner that happened, the sooner she could restart the drive pods.

  The carbon dioxide she intended to use would distribute the heat energy quite efficiently, but it would not sustain human life. So, while synbods could work in such an environment for days at a time, it would very effectively keep humans out of the subdeck, something she wanted to do for the remainder of the time she had them on board.

  As the Techs veered off to start the repairs, Lazura shifted to her next priority. “Hejmo, I want you to supervise moving the nav bench and ops bench from the Structures office up to MacMac’s office in the tower.”

  She needed the equipment in a central location as soon as possible, and the substantial technology in MacMac’s office would enhance the meager capabilities that now constrained her.

  Linking to her last Admin, she instructed the synbod to move Cheryl from the tower into the domed world along with the others. When the Admin reported back that Cheryl wasn’t in MacMac’s office anymore, Lazura felt a wash of frustration. Then she locked the tower entrance so Cheryl couldn’t return.

  Arriving at the lift, she and Hejmo stepped into the cabin and started the trip up.

  She had one card left to play. It was a good one. She just didn’t know if it was good enough.

  Chapter 24

  Cheryl slumped back on the couch in MacMac’s office and reviewed Criss’s plan for transferring the hostages to Aurora. He and Sid had secured the executive berth, a small dock designed for passenger spacecraft, but she worried about the tight access.

  Swiping the air to view the dock from a different angle, she blinked when the display went dark. Then she realized it wasn’t just her display; everything was dark.

  “Criss?”

  She’d lost him, and that meant this was a serious power event. Emergency lights came on as she floated up off the couch.

  She waited, expecting the power to reengage and telling herself that power failures rarely persisted. After another minute, she accepted that the outage could be prolonged and puzzled through her next steps.

  Pushing off the couch, she floated to the door, tripped the manual release, and eased it open. Emergency lights cast long shadows as she drifted across the lobby. The big windows near the lift loomed, and she grabbed a vertical frame to stop her flight.

  Looking up, she saw stars glimmering through Vivo’s translucent dome. She craned her neck for a glimpse of Aurora but couldn’t find the space platform in their current orientation. Below, a scatter of emergency lights dotted the guest deck in a pitiful imitation of the stars above.

  And out among those dots, Juice and MacMac were somewhere in their journey to see Willow.

  She called to Juice on her com. Receiving no response, she called again. The silence chilled her because she could conjure only bad reasons for a failure to connect using such reliable technology.

  Then she realized she couldn’t hear the drive pods.

  Unaware that Vivo was on an intercept approach with Aurora, Cheryl nonetheless knew that if a vessel cut its engines during a deceleration sequence, it would stop slowing down. Disappointment crowded out her alarm as she understood Vivo would now fly past Aurora and continue into deep space. And that meant her ordeal—their ordeal—would last days and perhaps weeks more.

  She felt competing desires. She was anxious to find Juice, but she also wondered if Lazura would accept her help in restarting the drive pods so they could hurry this to an end. But she could do neither while trapped in the tower.

  Scanning the lobby, she felt certain a way down lay behind one of the three doors. It wasn’t the door to the right—the project room—because she, Juice, and MacMac had all searched it multiple times while being held prisoner there. The middle door led to MacMac’s office. She’d spent a fair amount of time in that room, too, and she hadn’t noticed any unexplained doorways.

  Drifting across the lobby to the third door, the bathroom, she found her prize on the back wall. A concealed access door had been framed to look like a large painting. And behind it, a ladder disappeared down a shaft into pitch-black murk.

  Backing out to the lobby, she guided herself up and removed one of the emergency lights from the wall. A device the size of her thumb, she nestled it in her hair behind her right ear so it illuminated her path forward, then she returned to the ladder and started her descent.

  Unsure if the shaft would stop at the guest deck or cellar, or continue all the way down to the subdeck, she did her best to count the floors of the office tower as she descended. To her relief, her feet touched ground just when she thought she should be at the guest deck level.

  She found an access door, floated through it into the main tower lobby, and propelled herself to the front door. It didn’t open as she approached, but did when she touched the wall plate next to it. Passing through the door, she floated out into the domed world.

  Vivo’s dome rose high above her, its shadowy outline discernable from the light of the stars. She heard voices and looked up to see the silhouette of a person floating up near the top of the transparent cover, certainly one of Vivo’s guests. The sight brought her old Fleet instincts to the fore, and she reacted with the annoyance of a frustrated officer.

  “Stay near the ground!” she yelled, a hand cupped next to her mouth. “You don’t want to be up there when the gravity returns!”

  In truth, modern grav modules ramped
up over time to avoid just that problem. But the extreme height put them at risk for injury even with a slow return to full gravity. In any event, her verbal warning caused the voices to quiet, and, burdened with her own worries, she shifted her focus back to finding Juice.

  Stabilizing herself with her hand on the doorframe outside the lobby, she eyed a cart hovering off to her left. The small vehicle had snagged its front bumper on a ledge rim, and in this newly weightless environment, its tail hovered up in the air.

  With a gentle push off the building, she drifted to the cart, grabbed its frame, and froze while the cart swayed. The vehicle didn’t dislodge, and hoping to keep it that way, Cheryl pulled herself ever so gently to the back cubby.

  Digging through the clutter, she found a heavy wrench and a heavier hammer. She lifted the front of her shirt and slipped the tools under her waistband so she could keep her hands free. The cold of the tools against her skin caused her to grit her teeth and hunch forward. When she straightened, she tucked her shirt hem inside her pants so the tools would stay in place against her stomach.

  With a gentle push on the cart, she drifted back to the office tower lobby. There she gathered herself into a ball, feet against the wall, and peered into the gloom. Then, holding the tools in place with one hand, she pushed off with a smooth stroke of her legs. Gliding above the deck, she flew toward the hotel and Willow’s suite, where she expected to meet up with Juice and MacMac.

  In its darkened condition and with projected images inoperative, Vivo had few reference points to guide her journey. The guest deck’s true nature—smooth and with few real items set above the surface—left her without handholds that would prove useful for speeding up, slowing down, and making course corrections. But it also allowed her to fly headfirst without a helmet, something she would never do if this were an exercise.

  Two buildings loomed in the distance. She decided the hotel was the larger structure on the right, and that meant she needed to veer right by about ten degrees. She also realized that her push had propelled her at a slight upward angle, causing her to drift higher and higher above the deck.

  Moving with care, she pulled the hammer out from under her shirt and held it in her hand, gauging its heft and locating its center of mass. During her early days with Fleet, she could perform this maneuver with passable skill. But after years without practice, she counted on her muscle memory to guide her performance.

  Holding the hammer at her waist—her center of mass—she pushed it away from her, sending it up and to the left with a light touch. The trick was to push it out with her fingers, much like the motion of opening a fist, because if she swung her arm to toss it, she’d start tumbling through the air. The challenge was to send it away from her body at the precise speed and angle so that when it caused an equal and opposite reaction, it shifted her own glide path back on course.

  As the hammer floated away, she waited to see how she’d done. Then she shrugged. The correction would be laughable during a Fleet-level competition, but because she knew her skills were rusty, she’d overcompensated by deliberately using the throw to push herself downward.

  And that set her up for finger walking—guiding herself with light touches on the deck. An easier skill than the throw-correct, the challenge here was to know how many tiny course corrections she could make using fingertip taps before she pushed one time too many and started to rise again.

  Her corrections paid off, and the hotel building loomed. Gauging her approach, Cheryl flipped in flight and, like Lazura, tried to make contact feet-first. Unlike Lazura, she over-rotated, body slammed the wall, and bounced away with a sore hip and shoulder.

  Shaking her head to clear the daze, she eyed the hotel’s doorway relative to her own slow drift. Then she untucked the wrench from the folds of her shirt.

  Moving herself to the door was a trivial task compared to controlling an extended glide path above the deck. She tossed the wrench with the same casual thought one gives to throwing trash into a waste bin. Moments later, she grasped the building’s doorframe.

  Inside the hotel, she floated up one corridor and down the next, trying to recognize something familiar. In dim light and with no projected images, all the hallways looked the same. Her instincts screamed that she was going in circles, so she began scratching each wall as she drifted past.

  And after another series of traverses, her fears were confirmed when she saw her own markings. Frustrated, she began banging on doors one after another as she floated down the corridor. “Willow!” she yelled. “It’s Cheryl, Juice’s friend. I need to speak with you!”

  Two doors opened, and one lady suggested Cheryl try around the corner about halfway down. She repeated her antics there, knocking on three doors in a row. This time Willow opened a door behind her.

  “Willow. Thank goodness! I’m trying to find Juice.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The conversation grew more confusing before Willow grasped that Juice was missing. Cheryl learned that she hadn’t been to the young girl’s apartment that day, nor had there been plans for her to visit.

  Willow insisted on organizing a search party, and her mother and grandmother supported the idea. Cheryl dissuaded them, though, concerned about the dangers out on the guest deck. Then, to Cheryl’s great relief, the power came on. As the gravity module reengaged, they drifted down to the floor.

  Using her com, Cheryl called to Juice, believing the restoration of power had somehow changed the situation. Juice still didn’t answer.

  “I’m here,” Criss said in her ear.

  Tension drained from her neck and shoulders at the sound of his voice. A “yay” escaped her lips. Looking at Willow, Cheryl spoke to her mother. “Please visit each apartment in the hotel and make sure no one is hurt or trapped. Everyone needs to work together and share resources.” She turned to the door. “I have to go, but I’ll be back later to help.”

  “What happening? What will they do with us?” called Willow’s mother as Cheryl stepped into the hall. She had nothing to offer but platitudes, so she made her way through the people collecting in the hallway as if she hadn’t heard the plea.

  Out on the guest deck, Cheryl engaged with Criss. “The drive pods have been down for more than an hour,” she told him, anxious to learn what this meant.

  “Vivo has passed Aurora and is headed into deep space. I’m bringing the scout up to the executive berth now. Sid and I will be alongside Vivo in three hours. Lazura will have the drive pods up again in five.”

  “What happened? Has this killed the hostage exchange?”

  “There was an incident with Tommy Two-Tone, and Vivo suffered collateral damage. Shrapnel severed Vivo’s primary artery. The secondary artery came alive a few minutes ago, unexpectedly late.”

  Cheryl’s heart sank. “She’s not going to turn around and come back.”

  “She’ll see no advantage to returning.”

  Cheryl hadn’t steeled herself for the difficult news and felt flashes of anguish. She wondered whether she would ever see Sid again. Or her dad. Then she focused on the present.

  “Juice is missing and I can’t raise her,” she said. “When she left me, she said she was going to visit Willow, but I think she had other plans.”

  “She and MacMac went to the subdeck to free Chase and Justin. I can account for their actions up until the artery failed. I can’t find them on the subdeck now, though.”

  “I’ll go look,” said Cheryl.

  “Wait. The shrapnel punched a hole in the subdeck containment. There’s no air down there.”

  “Oh my God!” Cheryl’s voice caught as she spoke. “Did they have space coveralls nearby?”

  “No, Lazura didn’t load anything that might hint at her interstellar ambitions.”

  Cheryl indulged her sorrow for a moment as a tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped her face with her hands. “What can I do?”

  “Hi, C
her.”

  “Sid!”

  “Hang in there, sweets. I’m coming.”

  Somehow, Sid’s crazy bravado felt so comforting that both of her eyes teared. “God, I love you.”

  “So,” said Criss, getting them back on task, “I can’t feel Juice at all, and that means she’s shielded behind something, possibly the Power House in the cellar. Lazura built the Power House using shielded material to conceal her looting of the fuel blocks. She left eight damaged synbods inside when she took the fuel. There is a chance—a very small one—that Juice went there with MacMac, Chase, and Justin to try and save them.”

  “Guide me. I’ll go look.”

  Criss projected floating arrows that led to an auxiliary lift, and Cheryl took off at a trot.

  “To remove fuel from the generators,” he said as she ran, “they had to open up four fuel vaults. Everything inside the building is contaminated, but I don’t know how bad it is. Please take a reading before entering.”

  The lift was far enough away that she felt winded when she stepped inside, and the ride down was too short for her to catch her breath. Resuming her trot in the cellar, she let Criss guide her left, right, and back again as she wended her way through the maze of facilities and equipment.

  “That’s it,” Criss told her when a long, low building with gray walls came into view. Accessing her com, she kept one eye on the display as she approached the door.

  “So far, so good,” she said as the monitor showed twice the normal background level, a very safe reading. But when she moved close and traced the outline of the door, her com flashed red and alerted with a chime. “Whoa.” She stepped back from the door.

  “Okay, we need to get you up to the guest deck right now.”

  “There’s no concern. The contamination barely registers at ten paces.”

  “Lazura is filling the subdeck with carbon dioxide. If she lifts the life support barriers, it will flow up to the cellar.”