by Alex White
His heart speeds up. Maybe he was right, and someone is dead. He climbs out of bed and pulls on a pair of trousers over his briefs.
“Do I need to alert my crew?” he grunts, rummaging through his baggage for a dress shirt.
“No, they should be fine.”
“Is everyone okay?”
“Yes,” he says, and Dorian’s heart sinks just a little. “… though we’ve got a tricky operation in the works. As the highest-ranking voice of the Company, we need your input.”
“Okay. Be there in ten.” Knowing that it isn’t a matter of life and death, Dorian takes a little extra time getting dressed.
* * *
When he arrives at the SCIF, his bed head is tamed and shirt sharp. He left off the tie, since he’s supposed to appear informal. Daniel is ready for him at the door, failing to hide his displeasure at Dorian’s response time.
“The eggheads are busy inside. They’ll bring you up to speed.”
“And you’re just going to stand here and hold the door?”
Daniel shakes his head. “This is an IT and security problem, but if this door closes right now, it might not reopen without some serious mechanical tinkering. No one inside needs my opinion, and they certainly don’t need me getting in the way.”
“So you might have to take the door off the hinges?”
“Yes, sir, and if that happens, safety protocols dictate that we destroy all of the biological specimens, so we don’t want that.”
Dorian imagines all those incredible creatures, murdered due to sheer human incompetence.
“No, we don’t.”
The Commander punches something into the terminal next to him. A set of wayfinding lights clicks on in the floor—bright green with a white flashing runner.
“This’ll get you to the war room,” Daniel explains. “Please head straight there.”
Nodding without reply, Dorian follows the line through the bowels of the SCIF and into one of the many conference rooms. It’s clear from the layout and affordances that the facility was designed for three times the number of staff. It could easily have housed three hundred people and fifty projects.
When he arrives, he finds a shouting match between Anne, Blue, and a third person—a tanned man he doesn’t recognize. A long edge-lit table runs the room, and screens dot every wall. Blue stands in the back corner, arms crossed, staring daggers at her two colleagues on the opposite end.
“It’s perfectly safe! And if it’s not, I can repair you!” the tanned fellow shouts at her, so Australian that his “you” stretches on for three syllables. “Come on, dag.”
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Dorian says, extending his hand to the new person. “Director Dorian Sudler. I’m here to help, mister…”
“Dick Mackie. Nice suit,” he replies, “but as you can see, we’re all a little pinned at the moment, so if you could stay out of the way…”
“What seems to be the problem?”
“Director,” Blue says, “we’re in an emergency, so we don’t have time to brief you.”
“You want to let them die,” Anne says, “so we’ve got all the time in the world. Director, the Silversmile virus is threatening the cells. We’ve got people working on flashing Juno, but if we don’t lock down the heat shields, it’s going to incinerate our cargo. We’ve got an EVA kit that can be used for repairing the star side of the station, but it takes an android body to survive.”
“Perfect,” Dorian says with a bright smile. “Let’s get this cleared up.”
“It’s not that simple,” Blue says. “If something happens to me, to this body, I won’t be able to lead the project. Silversmile has just jeopardized itself and Rose Eagle. Fucking up Marcus will take down Glitter Edifice.” She looks to Dorian. “Director, we can make more specimens to train. Egg storage is completely intact.”
Dorian is seized by questions about snatcher reproduction, but there’s no time to ask them.
“Yeah,” Mackie says, “except you haven’t had any more reliable births. The past three eggs have been duds. What if something’s happened, and you’ve got only duds in there?”
Blue throws up his… her hands in exasperation. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“You’ve got sixty-three adult specimens in the cages,” Mackie responds, sinking into a chair. “You bloody well better cross it now.”
“Status update, guys,” someone says, the voice coming over the intercom speaker.
“What is it, Javi?” Anne calls back. It must be Javier Paz, the sysadmin.
“The virus has partitioned itself, and it’s doubled down on the kennels. It got one of the shield doors open.”
“What are you saying?” Dorian asks, letting an uncomfortable edge sink into his voice.
“We’re down one specimen,” Paz says. “I’m sorry.”
“I have every confidence in our ability to impregnate,” Blue says. “As strong as your opinion may be, Dick, I’m the ranking scientist and—”
“Go out there and lock down the heat shield,” Dorian says. “Now.”
“Director, you’re not listening—”
“No. I’m not. Either you will go out there and lock down the shields, or Marcus will. If it’s Marcus, you’re fired. I hope I make myself clear.”
Everyone gapes in stunned silence. Anne’s mouth hangs open.
“The project won’t work without me,” Blue says. “I’m the only one with—”
“There are other, smarter people in the galaxy. I’m sure we can find them. Now, I expect you to get out there and do your job.” He looks them over, his eyes scouring theirs for any sign of insubordination. No one speaks to him.
No one fights back.
“Good choice,” he says, his glare boring into Blue. “I want him suited up and vacuum-packed in five minutes, Anne.”
7
WILD DOGS
The “Turtle” fits Marcus’s body a little too snugly. It might as well have a sign that says “ultra skinny people only.” Blue pulls the five-point restraint into place and does a final system check. All green.
The Turtle isn’t much of an EVA suit, just a mirrored shield on the back and plates along all the edge surfaces. A pack stores propellant on her back, the same as the EVA suits of old. Unlike the old spacesuits, however, this one is composed of many of the same highly reflective composites as the Cold Forge itself. So was the defunct repair pod, before Dick Mackie fucked up a docking procedure. Blue will be able to face Kaufmann for two minutes before her android body begins to suffer melting temperatures. It will take her ten minutes to reach a catastrophic failure.
A normal human would be fried, or develop cancer if they were lucky enough to live.
“Okay, mate.” Dick’s voice is raspy over the radio. “I’m going to close the blast shields inside the kennels now.”
In spite of herself, Blue is glad to have him helping. If he didn’t close the interior doors, the snatchers might’ve figured out the heat shields were locked, and charged the glass until they broke through. Blue knows their awareness. She’s seen them test the limits of their cages almost every day.
Sitting inside the SCIF airlock, Blue can feel the clanking of the interior doors locking down. Like the composite glass cell doors, the kennel blast doors are manual and air-gapped, requiring human in the loop operation. Silversmile cannot hack them open.
“Interior doors secured,” Dick says. “The puppies aren’t going anywhere.”
“Copy,” Blue responds, pressing the button to cycle the airlock. “Heading outside.”
Blinding light slices into the chamber as the hatch slides open, revealing the fires of Kaufmann below. Blue grunts and shuts her eyes, hoping she hasn’t done any damage to Marcus’s optics by looking into the star.
“Remember, Blue, these are just easy games,” Dick says. “You’ve got an extra life.”
So says you. Blue positions her back to the star and pushes out of the airlock, dragging her tools with her
. She can’t look back again, or she might be damaged. Glancing right, she sees the brilliant, golden hull of the SCIF, its latched grid of modular heat shields dotting the decks. The only articulating heat shields are positioned over the kennels cells. It was Blue’s behavioral modification routines that created this vulnerability. If she hadn’t given her program the authority to access the beasts’ heat shields, she wouldn’t be doing a spacewalk over a star.
She reminds herself that she isn’t really here, that she’s resting comfortably back in her room. Whatever occurs, she’ll still be alive at the end of all of this, though if she fails… maybe not for very long.
“I’m on the outer hull,” she breathes, grabbing onto a handhold, but searing pain forces her to release it. She moans and clutches her hand, spinning slowly backward.
“Talk to me, Blue.”
“It’s too hot to use the handholds!”
He laughs.
She could kill him for that.
“It’s a bleeding star beneath you, you fucking wanker! Of course the oven rack is hot!”
She stabilizes herself with the Turtle’s polished boosters. Her silhouette against the hull is like a slithering blob of pitch against a surface of solid gold. Jets of air bring her closer to the hull. The pain in her hand recedes.
“Keep your tools in front of you,” Dick says. “It’ll keep them cooler.”
“Okay.” Marcus’s husky voice is cracking. She hates how frightened and small he sounds. Compared to everyone else, she’s a creature of incomparable grace.
Everyone except the snatchers.
“We’ve got an ongoing code injection against the kennels,” Lucy says. “Juno is trying to close off all of the data ports, but Silversmile keeps opening them.”
“Can you flash Juno back to her init state?” Blue asks. “Just restore her to factory?”
“If we do that, Rose Eagle goes down, and you lose your protein folding,” Lucy says. “We’ll lose all of the SCIF data.”
Falling silent, Blue steers her pack toward the nearest heat shield portal and stops in front of it. She clicks the locking wrench into place, positioning it against the bracing bolts, and presses the trigger. The panel secures to the station with a grinding chunk she can feel through her arm.
“Better than losing Juno altogether,” Blue says.
“You know what?” Lucy replies, an uncharacteristic edge in her voice. “I’m the genius programmer, and you’re the geneticist, so how about we both stick to what we know?”
While Lucy will forfeit her experimental data, at least she has a functioning product that’s easy to store. She can simply connect a drive to Juno, and she’ll have a working version of Silversmile in captivity. Blue feels badly for Josep, though. He can’t possibly be insulated from this failure.
No time for that.
Blue snaps her wrench onto the next panel and ratchets it down. She’s burning up in the suit, and all of Marcus’s pain receptors are firing signals straight into her brain. She wonders what her real body’s heartbeat must be like. When she’d configured the brain-direct interface, she’d told it to keep pain intact, to pass along those critical messages. She thought she’d need pain to stop herself from accidentally cutting off a hand or incinerating her surrogate body.
But with each passing second, her skin grows hotter and her head grows lighter. The stress can’t be good for her. She begins to wonder if she might die out here, after all.
“You all right?” Dick asks. “You’re breathing pretty hard.”
“I’m fine.” Blue latches onto the next bolt. Two down, sixty-one to go. “Just hot, is all. I’m not sure I can do all of these.” She clicks the button. The locking bolt spins. Her head swims.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I got attacked by wild dogs?”
Blue shakes her head inside her helmet, Marcus’s thick blond hair brushing against the sides.
“Attacked… by wild dogs.” She has to catch a handhold and sears her glove.
“Yeah, me and my brothers got into a bit of a scrap out on my dad’s farm. Let me paint a picture for you. Deep in the Outback, south of Amoonguna, just red dust and hardscrabble. We raised emus on a hundred acres of land. Every day, either you shot something to eat or you ate some fucking emu. We had some chickens and such, but not much in the way of veg.”
She spins down another heat shield. “Do you ever get tired of being such a fucking stereotype, Dick? You really expect me to believe you were a subsistence hunter?”
“One of the first Mars colonists was from the Outback—my great, great, great grandmother. She’s buried there. And you know what? Bush Aussies are perfect for space work.”
“How do you figure that?” she grunts, working her wrench loose.
“In the Outback, you see the same thing every day. Nothing is easy. Everything is trying to kill you, and everywhere you live has a stupid name,” he says. “I don’t think I’d ever seen a tree until I went to school in New Zealand. So tell me, how is that different from space life?”
“The sunsets are probably nicer.” Blue vectors herself toward the next target.
“Listen, mate, you’re above the raw fury of a star. No view on Earth can compare.”
“Don’t remind me.”
The radio crackles for a moment. “So can I finish my story or what?”
When Blue locks to the next door, she feels scratching and scraping through the metal. The creature underneath senses her, and is desperate to get out.
“Yeah… yeah, sure.”
“So I was scrapping with my brothers and I threw a knife at Dylan and got him in the arm. He threw it back at me and missed by a mile, but he was crying and madder than a cut snake. Him and my other brother, Dalton, decided to hike back to the ranch without me.”
“Your names are Dick, Dylan, and Dalton?”
“Quit interrupting. You’ve got heaps to do out there.” Without waiting for her to reply, he continues. “I wasn’t about to go back and get a hiding from my da, so I picked up my knife and went for a walkabout in the other direction. I just headed for the western sun. It was a big property, and you could go for a nice long time without ever seeing anyone.”
She tries to imagine the baked clay earth and the drought-starved brush.
“I finally linked up with the highway, and it was getting late, so I figured it was time to head home. The sun started going down, and everything got a little cooler, thank God, and I’d started to enjoy myself when I saw them—a couple of coyotes pawing after me.”
“Shit!” Lucy hisses into the mic, and one of the heat shields on the far end of the cell block yawns open.
Blue grabs onto the station instinctively. She feels a pop rumble across the deck as the interior glass gives way. Black smoke pours from the open cell, contaminated air sucked into the void. She stares at the opening, wide eyed, hoping it doesn’t come out. Blue can’t hear it, but she knows the beast is screaming and shrieking, clawing and biting.
“Lucy, do you have control of Juno, or not?” Blue says, her breath coming too fast.
“We’re doing our best here!”
“Your best isn’t good enough.” Blue nearly drops her locking wrench as she pulls away from the hull. She’s hyperventilating. “Oh, Jesus. Okay, Lucy, I expect you to—”
“Oi. You. Stop interrupting,” Dick says, his tone authoritative. Her breathing slows. “Now do you want to hear my coyote story or not?”
She catches hold of the wrench and grits her teeth. She still needs to lock down more than fifty cells. She’ll be out here for hours at this rate.
“These coyotes aren’t like what you Americans have, all scrappy and healthy. Outback coyotes don’t turn down a meal, especially when that meal is a little boy all alone.”
“Even if that meal tastes like Dick?” Blue asks, voice quavering.
She locks in the wrench.
Another cell down.
“Clever girl.” Dick chuckles. “My first thought is to run. That’s
what any sane person would do. We Aussies aren’t known for our sanity.”
“You’re in the top ten for quality of life and medical care on the planet. You can spare me the tough Aussie routine.”
“You’re thinking of the cities, dag. Sydney and Brisbane in particular. Not Alice Springs. Certainly not Amoonguna. Those are places nobody wants. Mars is more fucking hospitable than my hometown. If you wanted to eat, you had to kill, and you could just as easily wind up on the menu.”
She latches a few more cells as he pontificates about the conditions of the Outback. It’s working, keeping her mind off the intense heat and fear of failure, until another shield opens up next to her. This isn’t like her behavior mod routine, where it flaps open and closed again. The door comes open slowly, the air inside rising to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit as solar winds buffet its particles.
She vectors backward toward the star, careful not to go too far. Oily smoke fills the chamber, then erupts outward as the interior glass bursts like a bubble. The snatcher scrabbles out of its cell onto the golden surface of the Cold Forge. This marks the first time Blue has seen one with nothing between them. It doesn’t appear to be dying.
“Shit,” she says, repeating it over and over into her comm like a prayer. “Shit, shit shit shitshitshit.”
“Steady. Steady on, mate,” Dick says. “I wasn’t going to be some victim. I’d read about the French Foreign Legion.”
Smoke wafts from the creature’s form like steam as the last air particles trail away. Its lips curl and claws flex. It’s getting ready to jump. It shouldn’t be functional. The solar loading on its black carapace should be boiling its guts faster than its skin can expand.
To Blue’s horror, the other heat shields begin to open. They waft aside like the fronds of a fern in a gentle wind.
“When they’re outnumbered,” Dick says, voice rising above Blue’s swearing, “they fix bayonets and charge.”
“Silversmile has control of the shield!” Lucy says, she’s way too late.
The creature explodes, yellow acid blood and shrapnel spraying in every direction. Blue watches the others break free from their cells before a smear of sulfurous yellow smacks against the lens of her helmet. An acrid stench fills her suit. Blue screams as the electropolarized plastic begins to fail, blown glass bubbling away from her.