"What's going on in there?" Parson said over their comm.
"The ship's defenses!" Rada found the doorway and piled into the dark room. "They just kicked in!"
"That's not possible," Genner said. "It's been frozen for centuries."
As Yed neared, Rada snaked an arm into the hallway and yanked him inside. "We just watched Stem get cut down. By a laser."
"I saw the light." Parson's voice shook. "We're not seeing anything on our sensors. From here, the ship looks completely cold."
Rada turned for a look at the room they'd holed up in. It was about sixteen feet deep and thirty feet wide, festooned with metal furniture that resembled medieval torture devices or plumbing as art. She believed she was looking at exercise equipment. An alien gym.
"What is happening?" Yed pressed himself against the wall, arms spread wide, gazing in horror at the ceiling fixtures. "Are we safe in here? Why didn't it shoot when the drone was here?"
"It must be keyed to biologicals." Genner's tone was confused, musing. "But how has it stayed active so long?"
Rada kept both eyes on the ceiling, wary of movement. "Stem had the gun. The cart, too—all the supplies. How do we get out of here?"
"We could cut our way in," Parson said. "But it would be through the hull, not an airlock. Could take hours."
She checked the device on her suit's arm. "We've got about five hours of air. Is there another way out of this ship?"
"There's another airlock on the starboard side. But it's under about twenty feet of ice."
"And we'll have to cross half the ship to get there. Could be more defenses along the way." Rada moved to wipe her eyes, but her glove bounced against her faceplate. "Better start cutting a new way in. As close to us as possible. In the meantime, we'll work on finding a way past the intersection."
Yed swung to face her. "How do you propose we get past a laser? Run really, really fast?"
"If you don't want to help, you can go first."
"We'll get the machines on the move," Parson said. "Sit tight, okay? We've got plenty of time."
"Copy." She wasn't so sure about that. Her readout had already adjusted its estimate downward by nearly an hour to account for the extra oxygen she was burning with her heavy breathing. She forced herself to inhale through her nose and exhale gently from her mouth. "Think. Did Stem do anything to trigger the defense?"
Yed gazed blankly at the ceiling. "He was just standing there. Maybe it took a minute to warm up."
"Or maybe it only activates after multiple targets have passed through."
He laughed harshly. "Testing that theory sounds like Plan Z."
With nothing better to do, she searched the room and found a bin of fist-sized balls nestled in a foam crate. She went to the door and lobbed them down the hall one at a time toward the intersection. The laser didn't fire once.
"Great," Yed said once she ran out. "So it's not firing on them for the same reason it didn't fire on the drone."
Within half an hour, Parson had the machines down in the pit. Rada couldn't hear or feel them go to work on the hull.
"Okay," Parson said twenty minutes later. "I'm not going to sugarcoat this. You're going to run out of air before we get inside."
"What are you talking about?" Yed bolted to his feet, gaping up at the ceiling, as if Parson were watching from above. "I thought we had top-end gear!"
"That equipment is designed to handle rock. Ice. Not the hardened hull of a spacecraft."
"So try something else! Use the mole!"
"We don't have the strength to punch our way in. We have to slice out a hole. Unless you can find more oxygen, you won't have time."
"Where are we going to get more air?" Yed's voice was nearing a screech. "Should we take it from the guy who was just cut in half by a sentry laser?"
"I don't have a solution," Parson said calmly. "I'm defining the problem. We can find an answer together."
"Easy," Rada said. "Send in a drone with more supplies."
"Damn, you're good," the captain laughed. "We'll get right on that."
She killed time wandering around the room, poking at the walls. The lower halves of them were covered in an inches-thick, mat-like orange substance. Its surface was pebbled like the skin of a toad. In places, it had peeled from the wall when it froze, leaving it free-standing.
"Sending in drone," Genner said.
Rada moved to the doorway, standing just inside it. A minute ticked by.
"Approaching intersection," Genner said. "Entering. Crossing—"
Blue flashed down the hallway. Rada shut her eyes. A second burst followed, pure white.
"Shit." Genner's voice was clipped.
"What was that?" Rada said. "Did it just shoot the drone?"
"Drone's dead."
"Why? How did the first one get through?"
"Don't know. Maybe the system hadn't warmed up yet."
Rada pressed herself to the doorframe, willing herself to look around the corner. "What about the balls I threw down there? Why not shoot them?"
"I don't know, Rada!" Genner sighed, breath fluttering against the mike. "You want me to find out which of those alien corpses is the tech and ask him how his security system is set up?"
"Less arguing," Parson said. "More thinking."
"Could try a smaller drone," Karry put in, his voice gravelly from disuse. "Something lower to the ground."
"Do we have anything like that?"
"Nope. But I can see if I can patch something together from the hold."
"Do that," Parson said. "Rada, Yed, hang in there, you got me? This is a long way from over."
Rada acknowledged and went to sit on one of the sturdier looking pieces of exercise gear.
"He's wrong." Yed's voice was soft, resigned. "It's already over. There's only one way out."
"Got an idea?"
He nodded, staring into her eyes. "Take my O2."
It took her a moment. "Quit that thinking right now."
"Right now, neither of us has enough air to last until they make a breach. But if one person has all the air, they'll live. There's only one move that makes sense."
She gazed back at him, weighing the offer. She knew it was sincere. She also knew that he was making it not because it was the only option that made sense, but rather because it would make his death meaningful—he would finally have her; she would literally owe her life to him.
But why not give him what he wanted?
"I won't let you do that," she said. "Not when there's another way out."
"We can't get to the other airlock. You said it yourself—there will be more defenses along the way."
"We'll use the airlock we came in through. And we'll use these to get there." She walked to the wall and thumped the orange mat at its base. "They're the best protection in the world."
"Oh yeah? Where'd you learn that? More wisdom from renowned, ancient Chinese alien-fighter Sun Tzu?"
"The Battle of Haleakala. Samantha Keahi. She said the most effective shield against lasers was the Swimmers' own building material. She described it just like this."
"Like a gym mat?"
"They aren't gym mats. They're an organic matrix the aliens used inside their buildings and spacecraft. Sometimes they grew whole buildings out of it."
He quirked his mouth, regarding the dense orange matter. "You're going to trust our lives to some old book?"
"I am," she said. "Because Keahi was there."
He sighed. "Guess getting shot by lasers beats suffocating."
As they waited to hear back from Karry, they went to work on the mats, chiseling them free from the wall. The mats were dense—once you got them moving, it was hard to slow them down—but in the fractionally gravity, she could easily move one by herself. Using the tethers on their suits, she affixed two mats to a hollow frame of aluminum bars, creating a mobile wall.
"How's it going, Karry?"
"Ain't happening," he said. "I mean, never say never. But I'm not finding much."
>
"It's okay," she said. "We've got another plan."
"But it's one you'd rather not use?"
"You got it. Let us know if things change?"
He assured her he would. While they waited, she informed Parson of their plan. Then she and Yed practiced pushing the wall around the room, enhancing its mobility by cannibalizing a pair of ski-shaped treads from another machine and fixing them to the base of the wall. Her O2 dropped below 120 minutes, then 90.
At 67 minutes, Genner informed them they'd tried a stripped-down drone. It too had been shot.
"Karry won't have time for another," she said. "And we're still at least five hours from breaching the hull."
"Captain," Rada said. "Permission to try to get the hell out of here."
"Permission granted." Parson's voice was strained. "Good luck."
She turned to Yed. "Ready?"
He glanced at the ceiling. "Captain, if we die, please tell the world it was doing something much smarter than this."
Rada laughed and got behind the wall. They carried it edgewise out the door, then pushed it forward. It slid easily over the smooth floor. The wall blocked her sight, but if the laser opened fire, it would be beyond obvious.
They passed one door, a second. Her breath echoed in her helmet. Her heart beat so fast she could almost feel her remaining air dwindling away. A third door went by. As they neared the fourth, the final one before the intersection, blue light glared through the hall.
She swore and yanked her hands back from the wall. No beam of light cleaved through the mat. "Push! Push as fast as you can!"
She drove herself into the wall. It swept forward. Top-heavy, it began to topple backwards; the hall behind them flared as more light spilled over the top. She grabbed a horizontal bar and bore down, arresting the fall, then hunkered down to push from the bottom while Yed applied pressure nearer the top.
The laser flicked off. They reached the intersection. Past the wall's edge, she glimpsed Stem's suited arm. It was already frozen solid. The laser lashed out again. She angled the wall to keep its broad side toward the sentry gun, then pulled the contraption toward the tunnel they'd entered the ship through. Once they were ten feet out of the intersection, the laser shut off.
"Confirm something for me," Yed said. "We're still alive, right?"
"For now." Rada grinned across the darkened tunnel. "Keep pulling."
Foot by foot, they withdrew. The laser stayed off. Only once they reached the intersection did she move from behind the wall. Its front was scorched and pocked, deep holes scored across and bored into its surface. Outside, she ran to the cart and piled inside, letting the autopilot bear them back to the ship.
As soon as the Turtle's airlock spat them out, Parson swept her up in a hug. "You're amazing. Do you know that? Amazing."
"Thanks." She shifted in his grip. "Now can I get out of this suit? It stinks like a marathon in here."
He laughed huskily. She shed the suit. On her way to the shower, she swung by the galley for a tall glass of pig. She downed it and got into the water. Only then did she break down, leaning against the plastic wall of the shower as she sobbed, seeing him curled on the ground, burnt and frozen, too dead to bleed.
~
Parson had to debrief her. A person had died, and although Nereid was under no formal jurisdiction, it wouldn't be good for business to have murky deaths on the Box Turtle's record. Her statement was brief. He had video, too.
When they were done, he told her to take all the time she needed.
She filled a jug with Plain Grain and returned to her bunk. It smelled like Stem and this made her unbearably sad. Grief and desperation crashed over her in waves. It wasn't fair that she had wanted to leave him—had resolved to put in action the events that would break them apart—and yet she still felt this way about losing him.
Then again, this was a hell of a lot more than a breakup. He had been killed. Cut apart by a Swimmer laser. A thousand years after the invasion, and they were still managing to murder humans.
On a trip from her room for food and pig, she bumped into Parson. He told her the defenses had mysteriously gone dead and they'd retrieved the remains. She nodded numbly and went back to her bunk.
Much of it was the shock, she knew. By definition, shock tended to fade quickly. It felt like something had cracked inside her, though, like a fault she'd once patched over had been knocked open. She wanted to be alone, but on a ship on an uninhabited moon, there wasn't much opportunity to get away.
That evening, someone knocked on her door. She got up, opened it.
It was Yed. "Can we talk?"
She wanted to close the door on him, but she lacked the energy. She turned, leaving the door open, and sat on her bunk. He closed the door and stood there, picking at the cuticle around his thumbnail.
"What's up?" she said.
"I just wanted to talk."
"So talk."
"I mean…I can't believe it." He shook his head as if to prove that this were so. "I just can't believe it. It could have been any of us, you know? If it had snapped on five seconds sooner, you and I would be gone, too."
She shrugged. "But it didn't."
"That doesn't make you feel spooked? Creeped out? I don't know if I should be horrified or thankful."
"There's no meaning to it. We might have died. We didn't. That's all."
Yed rubbed his mouth. "That's a mighty big 'all.' I feel…lucky. Like I've got a second chance." He watched her a moment, then moved to the door. "Well, if you do feel like talking, I'm here."
The door clicked shut. She might have been happy for him—he seemed different, more aligned with his place in the world—but it only made her feel resentful.
On the second day, they left her alone. She spent most of it staring at the walls, sipping from a cup of straight Plain Grain. She slept when she was able.
On the third day, Captain Parson called a crew meeting. Rada showed up with a drink in hand and slopped into a seat. Parson eyed her cup but said nothing.
"First," he said, "I want to thank you, Rada. And you, Yed. You stayed calm and you did the job. Because of that, you prevented a tragedy from becoming a calamity."
"Hear hear," Karry said.
Rada took a drink.
"But it was a tragedy," Parson went on. "We lost a member of our crew. A member of our family. There aren't words for it. What we're here to do today is to decide whether we're going to keep working on the dig."
He clasped his hands and put them to his mouth, gaze flicking between Rada and Yed.
Yed leaned forward at the table. "There's no undoing what's been done. The ship, it still means as much today as it did three days ago. If everyone else is okay with going on, I am as well—but if we want to walk away, I'll do that too."
And then they were all looking at her, waiting for her response.
"Let me get this straight," she said. "If I said the word, you would all agree to quit operations. Fly away. And leave behind billions of dollars and the most significant discovery since artificial gravity."
"Yes," Yed said.
"I agreed to no such thing," Genner said.
Parson frowned at them both, then turned back to Rada. "If you wanted to quit, we would discuss it."
"What are we doing now?" Rada said.
"Seeing if we need to have that discussion."
"If this is some misguided effort to honor Stem, know this: he'd call you a bunch of god damn idiots for even considering it."
Parson laughed, bowing his head. "I think you're right. Any objections? No? Then let's move on to logistics. The fact of the matter is that, sooner or later, we're going to need a partner on this mission—if only to sell it to them."
"How you figure?" Karry said.
"We're not exactly set up to start manufacturing reverse-engineered lasers."
"Suppose not."
"Then there's the matter of security. Where do we take this thing? How do we keep it safe?" He spread his palms. "I know so
meone who knows someone. This second someone is as big as it gets. He'll be able to handle everything."
Rada laughed. "Then it sounds like he's more likely to screw us. Take it and leave us with pennies."
"I don't think so. The second someone I'm referring to is Toman Benez."
The crew shot each other a flurry of glances. Genner was first to recover. "You know Toman Benez?"
"I don't—my friend does. Benez runs the Hive. He's spent the last decade gathering up everything related to the invaders. Oh, and did I mention he runs one of the largest naval yards in the system, too?"
"Two birds with one stone," Yed said. "Sounds good."
Parson nodded. "Any objections?"
Rada set down her cup. "Only that, this time, you encrypt the messages."
The captain laughed. "My friend and I already have a system. And once Benez is involved, it would take a thousand years to crack the codes he'll slap on it."
After the others left, he caught her in the hallway. "Rada, we may be going back to work, but if you don't feel up to it, there's no pressure. Take all the time you need."
"Thanks," she said. "But I think it would be best if I got back to it."
"Anything's better than the four walls, isn't it?" Parson chuckled wryly. "You let me know if you need anything."
In the morning, feeling queasy and wrung-out, she made sure the galley was clear, then poured herself a shot of pig. Just enough to cut the phlegm. It wouldn't interfere with her duties: they were digging the lower layers of the ship from the ice in preparation for a deal with Toman Benez, and Rada's job was to babysit the cart as it hauled detritus from the pit. After making it to lunch without incident, she made herself another drink. She felt much better, less apt to scream or to fracture her metacarpals punching the inside of the cab.
That afternoon, on break, she found herself the only one aboard the Turtle; even Genner had gone down to the pit to assist with the vessel's excavation, exploration, and cataloguing. Rada stared at the dispenser. Sometimes, she was in the carts for hours at a time. Drying out all the while. Body and mind growing irritable. Pained. In that state, she was more likely to make a mistake than if she maintained a steady buzz. Problem was, the cart had cameras. Parson had overlooked her drinking earlier, but now that she was back on the job, he seemed to assume she had cut herself off. If he caught her, she'd be suspended. Maybe until the dig was over.
Rebel (Rebel Stars Book 0) Page 5