Case in point, as I watched the train vanish, Myka clutched my elbow. “Sev Tech.” She nodded back into the crowd.
I had no clue what these Sev Tech mercs looked like, but Myka seemed to. We needed to be elsewhere, quickly.
I fought and twisted through the crowd to follow Myka as she led us further away from the expo. We couldn’t move fast with this foot traffic, and I wouldn’t place bets on us in an open street fight with trained mercs. I noticed a gaping doorway and pulled us into it.
Air conditioning punched us in the face as we entered a large gymnasium complex. The No Pull Zone. One of those zero-g recreation centers. Huge warehouses with a selection of zero-g activities and playrooms. All the rage in the Outer Core. We liked anything that made us feel more colonial.
With Sev Tech vaguely behind us, I followed Myka’s tug into the first alcove off the entrance. It was full of kids bouncing off the walls. Literally. Though the walls were padded with kids wearing helmets, it was still a big room full of children careening into each other. A bright red line on the floor marked the zero-g section.
A holo-greeter appeared as soon as we entered. One of the cheap models, too, with doll-like facial expressions. The greeter turned digital eyes to us and—after an off-putting delay—smiled, raising her eyebrows. It reminded me of some horror vid that had come out recently. Attack of the Hollow Holos.
“Welcome to the No Pull Zone’s child distraction resource. Would you like a tour of our facilities?”
Before either Myka or I could open our mouths, a real human holding a sippy cup rushed right through the holo-greeter. I’d seen a lot of mental breakdowns, and this guy was two snot bubbles away from ramming that sippy cup into his face. An orange stain decorated his shirt, and something green and viscous oozed down his leg.
“You’re the entertainment, right? You’re late.”
Myka stepped forward. “Very sorry. There was an accident on the train.”
She had that lying smile, but I went with it.
The hassled employee hurried us to a corner across from the zero-g section. This area was fully gravitied and occupied by a gaggle of bored children. “These are the ones who can’t handle zero-g,” the employee explained breathlessly. “You gotta entertain them. Please.”
I had many questions. What parent brought their kid to a zero-g place if the kid didn’t like zero-g? What, exactly, was the orange stain on that guy’s shirt? Did it come from the same source that created the unidentified mucus on his leg? What had happened to the scheduled entertainment? But most importantly, how were we going to entertain some twenty kids?
That last one was the most important, especially as the guy shoved an acoustic guitar at us. Myka took it without hesitation.
I whispered. “Can you even play guitar?”
She just smiled at me. That’s it. No answer. She was leaving me in the lurch.
Embarrassing myself in front of a bunch of kids wouldn’t be fatal. It probably wouldn’t even be the most unpleasant part of the night when I tallied things up. But let’s be real: Kids were cruel animals, and they would play with your liver and eat it if you didn’t entertain them adequately.
These kids were restless too. Crawling over each other, fidgeting, watching the cooler kids zoom through the air in the zero-g section. These kids knew they had drawn the short straw, and they hated it. What could make up for not being in the zero-g section? Certainly not Myka Benton with a guitar.
But Myka didn’t seem the least bit worried. She sat on a stool and took the guitar into her lap, holding it like she actually knew how to play the thing. My hand dangled awkwardly near her left hand at the neck of the guitar as I tried not to mess up her…whatever she was doing.
One of the kids at the front raised a hand. “Why are you two handcuffed together?”
Great fucking question.
“That’s an excellent question!” Myka echoed my thoughts. Just without the swearing. “Can anybody take a guess?”
Prompted, the kids blurted out answers. Maybe we’d been arrested. Or Myka was a space smuggler. Or we were best friends and didn’t want to be separated. Or I was a dangerous criminal who couldn’t be let free. The entire time, Myka strummed basic chords on the guitar. I held my right hand like a statue so as to not hinder her.
“Those are all great ideas.” Myka sounded like one of those entertainers in kids vids. “Let me tell you the real reason.” She leaned forward, encouraging the kids to lean towards her. “I need to make sure I don’t lose my Elly.”
Giggles. Giggles everywhere.
“One time I lost my Elly, and I had to look everywhere for her.”
Then no shit: Myka began singing a kid’s song about looking in ludicrous places for a lost item. Her voice was like a clear, peaceful day, and the kids fell entranced with intermittent giggling.
Okay, not just the kids. I was transfixed. Myka Benton, personal attaché of Adela Glezos and permanent thorn in my side, was serenading a bunch of children with a playful song that she was just making up on the spot. It was bizarre and, well, a little beautiful.
I couldn’t stop staring, and the room around her blurred in my vision ‘cause it wasn’t near as important as this pretty woman singing a stupid song. Her voice was magical, and it settled inside me like a little bomb of warm happiness.
I startled when Myka glanced at me like I’d been caught out doing something I shouldn’t. She just smiled, though. “Get them clapping, El.”
But if I clapped, I’d interfere with Myka’s guitar-playing. Seeing my hesitation, Myka widened her smile. So I put my trust in her—for some reason—and tried to raise my hand to clap. Of course, doing so pulled at her busy fingers.
Myka abruptly stopped with an exaggerated startled reaction. The kids laughed.
With a glare of put-upon annoyance, Myka began playing the guitar again. I had figured out the plan. I tried to raise my hand again, more insistent. This time Myka struck a run on the strings as she cut off playing. She thrust out her jaw in anger as the kids laughed.
More harshly this time, she began playing, her head whipping around to give me a warning glare. The kids loved it. The exaggerated fight and the musical interruptions and the pure slapstick of it. Kids loved dumb stuff: news at eleven. I ended up bent over, clapping with my face centimeters away from Myka’s. She kept playing throughout, ignoring the wide stare I was giving her.
Until she stopped.
A pair of beefy guys stood in front of the holo-greeter. They might as well have had COMPANY MERC tattooed on their foreheads. The Sev Tech goons had found us.
Myka was on her feet and shoving the guitar at the regular caretaker before the kids even realized the show was over. I struggled to catch up with her as I was pulled along for the ride.
The main entrance was a no-go so Myka ducked us into the first door she came across. It led into a hallway. Probably an employee area. Myka dashed through corridors, seemingly without any particular route. I yanked on the cuffs to force a stop.
“What’s the plan?” I spoke through winded breath, my janky leg aching.
She was already pulling away. “We’re gonna cut across the zero-g area and get up to the roof.”
When had she decided that? “Why the roof?”
Footsteps pounded down the hall behind us. “You got a better idea?”
“Not really.”
“Then let’s go.” She pulled harder against me.
“One more thing!”
She froze impatiently.
I wanted to argue about the plan, but I didn’t have a better idea. I had no idea what I was doing, and Myka seemed way more competent at this whole cat and mouse thing. I didn’t have much choice but to go along with her, especially now that the mercs were behind us.
So I pushed aside my objections. “Where did you learn to play guitar?”
She rolled her eyes. This time when she pulled me, I followed.
The white corridors turned a screaming red, with giant arrows hosting
a digital display that read ZERO-G ACTIVE—the entrance to the main gym. The door, itself, was more modest than the hallway leading to it. Standard door. No lock.
Course not. This was an amusement park, not a top-secret research facility.
Myka opened the door and ran through with me on her tail. We lost gravity over the threshold, and Myka flailed in the air. She waved her arms as if that would affect anything and reached back for a handhold even as her momentum assured she’d keep traveling across the gym.
Some maintenance could only be done in space, so I’d learned to work in zero-g conditions during the war. I wasn’t a zero-g acrobat, by any stretch, but I definitely had more experience than Myka, who was panicking like a bad engineer during a fusion meltdown.
Without thinking, I wrapped my arms around her from behind. “Myka, calm down a sec,” I whispered into her ear.
The gym was cavernous, packed with people zooming around on different courses. The decibel level had to be on par with a Bredfeld 52G engine. I could fit a small passenger ship in here and still have room for the acrobats twirling at the center. A graceful couple wearing leotards swanned perpendicular to us, eyes on each other. As they passed, the man twirled the woman around like an old-fashioned, colonial ballerina.
Myka had stilled, stiff in my arms. And yeah, it hadn’t escaped my notice that I was embracing Myka Benton. It was necessary for our escape. It meant absolutely nothing. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of her warm, soft body pressed against mine. Not at all.
A kid floated past with a grav board. Thinking fast, I snatched it from him like an asshole. He squawked as he fell in the opposite direction.
Also necessary. The grav boards had some magnetic thing going on. It made them cautiously pull you to the closest wall. Helpful for beginners to be able to retreat to the hand supports. It would get us oriented.
I turned the grav board on, still holding Myka as we were tugged back to the wall. Two mercs poked their heads out of the employee entrance and tried to get a visual on us, but their focus was at the center of the gym, not the edges.
At the wall, Myka clutched onto the hand support as if it were a rope dangling over a cliff. I turned the grav board off.
“First time?”
Her mouth was tight, eyes wide. She was transitioning from panic to embarrassment. We didn’t have time for that.
I ignored her embarrassment. “Show me where we need to be.”
With a heavy breath she pointed upwards at roughly a seventy-five degree angle from where we were. A red-bordered door dotted the wall. Another employee entrance. I resisted the urge to ask how she knew this. Myka knew shit. That’s just what she did.
I snaked an arm around her waist. “Okay, hold on and don’t move, okay?”
She didn’t say anything. Just nodded and clutched me without hesitation, breathe shuddering and soft hands curling around my neck.
I eyeballed it as I pushed us away from the wall in the direction of the employee entrance. We floated towards the center. The Sev Tech goons would probably see us soon, and I could only hope they were as useless in zero-g as Myka. Which, yeah, she was clinging onto me, and fine. I liked it. It was a good feeling, having her snuggled up against me like that. I’d mentioned she was pretty, right? And her body was…a good body. It was a good body.
I spotted a problem as we approached the center. A crowd of people—all wearing bright pink shirts—floated in a dense cloud, drifting in unison on a trajectory that would definitely intersect ours. Like a big cluster of mines. Or slow-moving grenades.
“Don’t let go of me,” I warned Myka. Only way out was through. Her fingers tightened at the back of my neck.
The straggly edges of the cloud engulfed us. A woman’s voice, location unknown, hollered through the swarm. “Come on! We’re supposed to be forming a Y, folks! Simon, you’re the vertex, remember?”
We passed a woman rolling her eyes, her arms crossed to cover her bright pink shirt. A giant Y marked the front to brand them as Yexy Corp employees. Some team-building exercise, then.
The formless voice rose to a shrieking pitch. “Do we not want to show our Yexy Corp pride?” A few pink-shirted people half-heartedly tried to navigate themselves to position. “Team! Janez is waiting for our Y at the bottom! ARE YOU GOING TO DISAPPOINT JANEZ?”
I’d been distracted by the pinkshirts and only saw the collision coming moments before it happened. A gloomy-looking guy with an inside-out Yexy shirt lagged his peers. The opening theme to Core Bores squeaked from his handset. Myka and I bowled right into him, knocking the handset away. I struggled to keep my arm around Myka, but the guy whipped his arms back and forth while yelling in one of those annoying business dialects.
Myka and I lurched in different directions, remaining attached only by our handcuffs. Our trajectory skewed off course as we whirled to a spin. Gloomy handset guy drifted back the way he’d come.
“Simon! That’s the wrong direction!” A valiant effort from the supervisor, though ultimately futile.
Centrifugal force spun Myka and me like a rogue top. The gym twirled around us, and Myka squeezed her eyes tight. Spinning out was fucking brutal on the inner ear. But someone had to get us back on course, and that had to be me.
I narrowed my focus to take stock of bodies and trajectories. Concentrating on objects kept my stomach steady. First order of business: Stop the damn spin before Myka puked on me. I had to be an asshole again.
Along our path: Stocky guy. Leotard. Beginner movements but with a smug expression. He was overconfident. He’d do.
As I plotted my impending action, Myka did the dumb thing of grabbing the handcuffs with her free hand, trying to get the spin to stop. Basic zero-g error. Spin increased in angular velocity as you pulled the paired masses towards each other.
“Let it go!” I snapped, hoping she’d hear me over the din of the gym.
She shook her head as sweat dewed her face. Her jaw clenched as she grasped the handcuffs for dear life.
No time to explain. Mr. Leotard was within proximity, and I had to do a little physics. I came around the arc of rotation, aligning on a perfect course to just pass him by, like a considerate gym-goer. He even gave us a little smile.
Then I grabbed him by the stretchy chest and shoved him away from me. Opposite direction.
He fell backwards with a startled look before trying to make it work with a weird pirouette.
And thus ended the spin. I dragged Myka to me and held her as she panted into my shoulder.
“Please don’t puke on me,” I whispered.
She didn’t answer, which probably meant she was fighting that puke down. I left her to her struggle to figure out my next move: correcting our trajectory. We were way off course, and we couldn’t waste time wall-crawling up to the employee entrance. Shoving Mr. Leotard had halted the spin, but it hadn’t changed our path. We were at a sixty-degree angle from where we needed to be.
I scanned our path and noted the bodies that would intersect it. I needed someone big to give us enough mass to push off of. Thank the gods Myka was tiny.
During the war I’d worked with an engineer named Delice. She had run circles around me when it came to jury-rigging a new axial rotator coupler for a dodgy Goddard R/Evolution engine. She was also moon-size. Completely massive. During wait times while doing off-ship maintenance, we would fight boredom with that mass. I’d push off her, barely making a dent on her trajectory. Then me and Dabby—the other mechanic—would cling onto each of Delice’s plank-like shoulders and shove away. We were all tethered, so no risk of flying out during these exciting physics games.
If you wanted to change direction in zero-g without a pulse firer, you had to use another mass to push yourself off of. Walls were useful, as were ship hulls. People? Trickier. You could shift your trajectory, but the extent to which you could do so would be determined by your relative masses. On the fly, easiest way was to find a similar mass and push off them in the opposite direction from where you wanted to go.
And right now, the mass I needed to shift consisted of two people: me and Myka. So I’d need a two-person-sized person to get us rerouted.
I needed Delice right now.
I found her spiritual twin. A guy who was large enough to roughly equal the mass of Myka and me. Downside: His trajectory was slightly off, and we wouldn’t intercept him on this course. Not good enough.
I had to nudge things. I flicked on the grav board, counting down to get just the right moment, and our path shifted to even out in a straight line to the nearest wall. Then I turned the grav board off. Perfect. This was perfect.
“What are you doing?” Myka was recovering from her bout of motion sickness, but her voice was drained.
I shushed her. The stocky guy had two kids with him—one old enough to be a teen, the other at the child side of puberty. I was about to be a real piece of shit.
My Delice stand-in noticed our impending collision, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He waved his hand in an attempt to shoo us away. “We’re gonna hit each other,” he said, as if that were an undesirable outcome.
“Why are those two ladies handcuffed together?” The kid innocently asked before I grabbed his dad and shoved him in the inverse direction from my desired trajectory.
“Kids, take care of each other!” The dad called out as he fell into that Yexy Corp cloud.
“That’s our dad!” the teen cried after us, revealing crucial information.
Unaffected by their family tragedy, Myka and I headed straight for the employee door. Fast. We hit the wall a few meters away. I was gonna brag about that precision next time I was at the bar. Now the uncertain bit. The roof. What were we gonna do on the roof? Why do people always go to a roof? The only option there would be to…
…jump to the next fucking building. Dammit.
Myka scrambled through the door, hitting the gravitied floor on her hands and knees with a weird grateful moan. I handled the transition more gracefully, though the return of gravity was rough on my janky leg. A large lost and found bin was piled with all the refuse you’d expect. Multiple handsets, shoes, jewelry, a melted ice cream cone, two anti-grav pogo sticks…
The Henderson Helios: A Sci-Fi Adventure Novella Page 5