by Mel Keegan
“Talk to the friggin’ civvies about that!” Hubler paused long enough to stroke the triggers, and a white-gold flower seemed to blossom against the dark, stormy face of Hellgate.
Comm exploded into a chaos of static and noise for several seconds, and when he heard a trace of the loop again Travers’s ears were ringing with the high-pitched blare. Clinging to the flimsy framework of the Arago sled, he and Marin watched the eruption escalate while alarms began to clamor across Oberon. The whole platform had blown down to near-zero pressure and the AI was routing power and data around zones that had swiftly gone cold and dead. Hubler’s shot had been surgical, just eight missiles which lifted the hangars and service shops clean out of Oberon, and the Zunshu machines with them.
“Harlequin, track the debris,” Vaurien shouted into the audio confusion. “Make bloody-damned sure those machines don’t get back to their pods!”
“We’re on it,” Hubler reported, “but it’s a mess out here. Give me a minute, Vaurien – I’ll get back to you.”
The explosion was fading when Vidal’s voice cut like a knife across the loop. “Wreckage coming your way, Neil. Hang on.”
“Jazinsky said she wanted to test the Zunshulite,” Marin growled as he closed one fist on the sled and the other on Travers.
“Not like this,” Jazinsky said shortly. “Curtis, you’ve got one huge lump of debris coming at you – it’s going to be close. Dodge around it, if you can.”
“I’m seeing it.” Marin turned slightly to get at the sled’s small dashboard, and shifted his grip on Travers’s shoulder. “Perlman, you there?”
The Capricorn was hanging above the Wastrel, loitering there while Bravo Company watched the data and fretted. Every Arago screen the Wastrel possessed was at maximum and overlapped on the starboard side. The wreckage from Oberon plowed into them with white-hot ricochets and large chunks fragmenting into showers of scorching shrapnel.
“We’re safe,” Perlman told him. “We’re in under the shields. We can’t get to you, Curt, not till the blast’s gone through.”
All this, Travers already knew. His left glove was locked to the sled and his right was clenched around Marin’s left arm as Curtis fed what power they had left to the sled’s feeble jets. It was just a maintenance sled, convenient transport to take a tech out onto the hull to work with a gang of drones. It would have hauled them back to the Wastrel a minute before its power cells flattened, but there was no time now. Marin was asking a lot of the sled while Travers tracked the incoming boulder of Oberon debris. The sweat of healthy dread prickled along his ribs.
“Ten seconds,” Marin whispered. “Hold on.”
The flimsy little jets battered, struggling to turn the sled on an angle to the direction of its plummet away from the Wastrel. Travers’s breath snagged in his throat as he watched the instruments redline, watched the planetoid-sized chunk of hull plate and girder come tumbling at them with the speed of an artillery shell. His grip tightened on Marin, and as the chrono counted through two he held his breath.
The boulder of wreckage was large enough to blot out the stars, and he would have sworn he felt it – the glancing clip of a steel spar on the shoulder of his armor, picking him up, wrenching him away from the sled and tossing him away like a toy. His helmet display flared red with howling proximity warnings and he ducked involuntarily as he and Marin, still locked together, lost contact with the sled and hurtled away from the Wastrel. It was like being pummeled in a brawl, and Travers’s senses dimmed. He heard audio as if from a vast distance –
“Neil! Neil!” Vidal’s voice was sharp. “Travers, I’m tracking what looks like the pair of you locked into one sensor mark, but your beacons have failed. Can you transmit? Neil!”
He cleared his throat, blinked his vision clear and forced himself to focus on the instruments. The loudest sound was the rasp of his own breathing, and the stream of cool air wafting across his face told him life support was still functional. But the helmet display told a tale of woe, and Travers muttered a curse as he lifted his head.
Still tethered by the clamped fingers of Travers’s right gauntlet, Marin was at arm’s length. And he was not moving. “Curtis?” Travers heard the hoarseness of his own voice. “Curtis, do you hear me?”
Nothing. Marin was still not moving, and Travers clamped down tight on a tide of dread. “Mick, can you hear me? Wastrel Ops, do you read?”
He could still see the Wastrel, still hear their comm, but as he called over and over, he realized he had stopped transmitting. Vidal’s voice had dropped several notes now; he was the consummate professional as he spoke into the loop, which was rapidly settling down. Travers had nothing to do but listen, and he focused on Vidal like a lifeline.
“You’re probably hearing me, Neil,” he was saying. “I’m starting to lose you in the background interference off the Drift, but the Harlequin has a track on you. They’re coming to get you. Run your diagnostics – how’s the armor?”
“Already done that, Mick,” Travers muttered as he gave a solid tug on Marin’s arm to spin him around. The hardsuit was pocked and scarred across the back and left shoulder. It had been peppered with fragments of debris shot out of Oberon, pebble-sized projectiles that had hurtled at them along with the massive hunk of plate and girder. The boulder had only struck Travers a glancing blow, just enough to tear him loose from the sled and send him spiraling down and away from the Wastrel, on a trajectory that would eventually feed them into the gravity well of Naiobe. Of this, Travers was not immediately concerned – the Harlequin was no more than minutes away, at most.
But Marin’s suit was dark. The panel on the left shoulder, on the side of the breastplate, where techs could plug in and service a hardsuit while it was working, showed no enunciator lights. His power was out, Travers thought feverishly – little wonder he was not moving. Without power, normal human muscles could not move the mass of these suits. Moving in Marines armor that had lost all power was close to impossible, and the Zunshulite would have defied some hybrid between a Pakrani and a mountain gorilla.
“Harlequin,” he called, hoping he was transmitting some fraction, and both distance and the background noise off the Drift were blanketing him too thickly for him to reach the tug. “Harlequin, can you hear me? Roark, goddamn it!”
Again nothing, and this time he had not expected a response. Instead, he lifted the visor and used his own living eyeballs to scan the heavens, looking for the ship. He saw the Wastrel, receding into the darkness with the firefly lights of the Capricorn’s sternflares scudding around and down to the hangar level. He saw Oberon, still a glitter of lights though the human crew had left and its service bays and hangars were gone. He caught a glimpse of the Tycho, and forced himself to listen.
“All right, Jazinsky, you want to tell me what that was all about?” Danny Ramesh was angry, but fear and reaction had eroded the sharp edges off his fury. He knew, now, how much he did not know.
“Classified,” she said simply. “You want more than that, get over to Velcastra. Take it up with the office of the President.”
“We’re not going to Velcastra,” Ramesh protested.
“You are, if you want access to classified information,” Vaurien said with a tone of finality. “We’ve scanned you, nose to tail – you’re in good shape. You took no damage. You can light up your Weimanns and get out of here at whim, and I wish you’d do it.”
For a moment Ramesh fumed in silence. “Take it up with the office of the President of Velcastra – a rebel colony that just declared war on the Terran Confederation? You’re not shitting me?”
“Straight up,” Jazinsky swore. “Look, get lost, Danny. We’ve got a lot of trouble here – we took some heavy damage.”
“So I see. I’ve been told you Freespacers make enemies among your own ranks. You have your little wars, and if anybody gets between you, intruders from the legit side of the frontier get chewed to a pulp and spat out.”
“Is this what you’ve heard?” Jazins
ky’s temper was frayed to rags. “And you think you were just jumped by rogue Freespacers, what, trying to loot Oberon?”
“Yeah, this is what I just saw.” Ramesh was gradually recovering some small part of his composure and his natural arrogance had begun to reassert.
“Then, of course you must be right,” she said dismissively. “You always were, you little ratshit, even when you were sixteen years old and dead wrong.”
And Vaurien – loudly: “If this is what you want to think, Doctor Ramesh, be my guest. Go home to Borushek and file the complaint.”
“If I do, you’ll never haul trash in the Deep Sky again,” Ramesh said nastily.
For the first time in so long, Travers had forgotten what it sounded like, Richard Vaurien laughed, and it was a genuine laugh. “Go, team, go!” And then he clicked out of the highband comm and returned to the Wastrel tech loop. “Tully, any joy?”
Just then a glimmer of light caught Travers’s eyes and he turned toward it, watched it grow, brighten. He was right. It was the forward cockpit armorglass of the Harlequin catching, reflecting, magnifying the lights from Oberon as the ship braked down and yawed over onto her side to present the docking hatch.
The lock was open; dim blue cascaded from within and Travers saw a shape outlined against the backwash of illumination. A suit of industrial armor knelt there, tethered on with two cables the thickness of a man’s thumb. Roark Hubler was fishing with an Arago remote, and a moment after a red laser spot began to dance on his breastplate, Travers felt the solid grasp and pull. Tractors had hold of his and Marin’s combined weight, and the Harlequin came up fast as they were reeled in like trout.
He hit the deck right inside the airlock with a heavy blow through every large bone he possessed, and did not wait for Hubler. Worklights flickered on, painfully bright, and he was up at once. The side of his glove hit the green close/lock bar, to the right of the open hatch. Marin’s armoured legs were in, and in the instant the outer door slammed, the lock began to pressurize.
At eighty percent, Travers’s hands were on Marin’s helmet seals, even before he touched his own. Hubler was on Marin’s other side, keeping out of the way as Travers broke the seals, twisted the helmet ten degrees left and lifted it away from Marin’s shoulders. The weight of it was astonishing under the Harlequin’s normal one gravity, and he passed it to Hubler.
Marin was pale as a wax effigy, not even his eyelids stirring, and Hubler groaned over the comm. “Christ, we got a casualty. Make it quick, Asako – Wastrel, fast. Get Bill Grant and a crash team.”
The Harlequin was moving before he finished speaking – Travers felt the faint shimmy through the deck of powerful engines, and as he broke his own helmet seals he heard Rodman calling ahead. The Harlequin’s air was cold, a little acid with the tang of new electronics. She had been gutted and refurbished after the Battle of Ulrand and the newness would wear off her slowly.
Still, Marin was not moving and Travers shoved his own helmet at Hubler, not caring what he did with it. The gauntlets followed, and Travers set his bare hands on Marin’s face, feeling only a faint chill from his skin. “Get me a combug,” he said without looking up at Hubler. “I wasn’t transmitting, but I could hear the loop.”
“You want to talk to Grant,” Hubler guessed as he came to his feet and stepped out of the lock.
In fact, Travers was searching his memory, hunting for the information he had read months before. This part of the Dendra Shemiji study was so low on the agenda, he had only skimmed it in passing as he looked ahead to see what was on the horizon. His own heart hammered painfully at his ribs, but he knew this. Or thought he did.
The armor was intact; the helmet had not taken a hit, and only the power had failed. The helmet itself contained a standard two-minute oxygen cartridge, but how long the emergency supply might have to stretch was another question. Even Marines conscripts learned biofeedback techniques, to be calm, breathe shallowly, slowly. A thousand years before, the Resalq had taken such disciplines to startling extremes.
Back of the skull, behind the ears. The mastoid process, low on the temporal bone, where the big neck muscles were anchored into the skull itself. Both middle fingers tapped there in an even, staccato rhythm.
And then he waited, dry mouthed, while Hubler reappeared with the little blue-gray shell of a combug. It slipped in, cold and hard, and he heard Bill Grant at once, calling his name.
“Hey, Neil – they told me Curtis is hurt. Tell me what you’re seeing.”
“Give me a minute.” Travers heard the croak of his own voice. “The hardsuit lost power. No heat, no air … no break in the armor.”
“They’re not coming home hot,” Hubler added. “Rad count’s only a tad over normal, just garbage from Oberon.”
“How long?” Grant wanted to know. “How long was he cold? Any sign of cyanosis? You know what it looks like, Neil – blue around the mouth, blue tongue.”
But Marin was simply pale and cool, no sign of injury or suffocation. He was just not breathing; or if he was, each breath was so shallow and so far apart, Travers could not see any of them. “No blue,” he told Grant.
“Get me a pulse,” Grant said sharply. “They’re bringing you right to lock 3, and I’m coming to you. I’ve got a cryogen tank prepped.”
His skin was cool as a lily petal. Travers tucked his fingertips up under the jaw, looking for the pulse in the big arteries and waiting for it, one beat, anything to tell him Marin was alive.
“Travers!” Grant shouted. “You got a pulse, or not?”
“Not yet,” Travers murmured. “Standby, Bill … just wait.”
“Neil, let it be, old son. He ain’t gonna get any deader,” Hubler remonstrated. “Let Bill do his thing. You still have a minute and a half.”
Ninety seconds more before Marin was brain dead, and all the technology in any world would not bring him back. Travers’s chest squeezed. He took a breath to call Rodman’s name, ask how soon she would dock – and then Marin’s nostrils flared; and again; his lips parted, a pulse beat faintly beneath Travers’s fingers – a second time, a third, slow with extreme bradycardia. Travers sagged back onto the deck, only then feeling the tremor in his limbs, the hot sting of tears.
“Jesus,” Hubler said. “Is he alive? Bill – he’s breathing. Damnit, he’s actually breathing!”
“He’s breathing,” Travers rasped. “Thanks, Bill. Go grab yourself a coffee.”
Marin’s lids fluttered open and dark, dilated hazel eyes looked up at Travers, narrowed in the glare of the worklights. He coughed, the tip of his tongue flickered over his lips, and his voice was a bare murmur. “I guess we made it.”
“Semcaram.” Travers knew the term, though the Resalq did not roll off his tongue – yet – as it did Marin’s. The language was utterly alien. It translated badly, and the nearest sensible paraphrase Mark had been able to find was ‘the death that is not death.’
“Semcaram,” Marin echoed, starting to breathe deeply now. A flush of color had returned to his face and his pupils were contracting properly. He glanced at the mesh of their gauntleted fingers and gave Travers a wry little smile. “And I’m very glad to rejoin the living … but this hardsuit doesn’t have a lick of power. I’m glued to the deck here.”
The truth was, Marin could not have moved if he had wanted to. Travers let go his hand, and as they felt the slight shudder through the whole airframe of the Harlequin as the electromagnetic docking rings took hold, he beckoned Hubler. “Give me a hand here, Roark.”
The look on Hubler’s face was odd. “Some Resalq bullshit?”
“Some,” Travers affirmed, deliberately vague. “Don’t ask me how they do it. He’s had ten years to learn this stuff.”
“It’s not that hard.” Marin ouched as the seals broke and between them Travers and Hubler lifted off the pieces. Beneath it he was clad in the familiar Tai Chi pants and mesh shirt, and he was cold enough for the chill of the airlock to make him shiver visibly.
Wit
h no Arago function the Zunshulite armor was lethal, Travers thought as he set down the last segment. His own suit was still under power, so his own mass felt entirely normal; but if the power were to fail without warning he would go down like a bunch of linguini. He doubted Sergei van Donne could carry this weight – or if he could, it would not be for long. This also would be among the data Jazinsky must process, and they could expect the second generation suits to be modified accordingly.
Just as Marin sat up and began to rub his bare arms the hatch ground open, and he hissed at the rush of chill air. Bill Grant’s face appeared a moment later, and he lifted one brow first at Travers, then at Marin. The Australian was thick in his voice.
“I heard something on the loop about Resalq bullshit.”
“It’s called –” Marin clambered stiffly to his feet and hugged himself “—Semcaram. A way of shutting back body function to conserve oxygen. I had no power, no comm. I knew I had two minutes of O2 in the emergency capsule, and it might have to last a hell of a lot longer than that. What else was I going to do?”
“Biofeedback,” Grant said sagely. “Dario Sherratt told me a lot about this.” He aimed a handy at Marin and took a swift set of readings. “You’re still a little cold, pulse is way too slow, and you’ll be dizzy for a few minutes. You feel all right?”
“Freezing,” Marin corrected.
“That’s because it’s bloody cold in here.” Grant put away the handy and tossed him the thermal blanket from the gurney which had followed him from the Infirmary. “You want my professional advice? Get yourself a mug of Irish coffee and candy bar.”
The pieces of Travers’s armor were stacking up by the lock’s inner door. “Call a drone in here, Roark,” he said as he set the boots aside, “get these back to Jazinsky’s lab.”
“Will do.” Hubler was halfway out of his own suit, delaying taking off the lower segments, and Travers knew it was because the powered armor took the weight off his legs and the effort out of standing, walking. The biocyber prostheses still hurt him, it was no secret.