by Trevor Wyatt
It’s partly my fault; I’m distracted by the video feed from the galley. The PMFs are flailing around in there, knocking pots of boiling water off the electric burners and generally making a hell of a mess. This amuses me; I hope they cook themselves. But meanwhile I have forgotten about security.
I’m forcibly reminded when the inter-ship channel crackles to life.
“This is TUS Grace Marcus, Captain Lavakusha Sood in command, contacting incoming the Tyreesian collective ship. Identify yourself at once and state your purpose, please.”
A perfectly appropriate request for identification, from the Armada’s flagship.
“Um, this is Commander Anika Grayson from Terran Armada Intelligence in command.”
I remove my spacesuit’s headpiece so that he can see me clearly.
A pause, and I can hear Captain Sood’s surprised intake of breath.
“Who did you say you are?”
I lick my lips. “Anika Grayson, sir. Is this a secure channel?”
“Listen, Grayson, or whoever you claim to be, I—yes, it’s a secure channel. What the hell is going on here? I need proper identification from you. We have too much shit going on today for me not to blow you off the sky.”
I reel off my serial number. “Sir, I have been on a classified mission to acquire some extremely valuable experimental hardware for the Union. I need you to contact TAOIC right away—they’ll verify my identity.”
Sood, a handsome man with a fine head of thick silver hair, looks narrowly at me out of the screen.
“You’re sweating,” he says slowly.
“Well, yay-yuh...I have a ship full of dead Tyreesians and there’s carnivorous plants in the galley,” I say; then I wish I hadn’t.
“You have what? There’s what?”
Fucketty fuck!
“Sir, please, this is a critical. I really need you to get through to Intelligence Command, and tell them—”
He holds up a hand.
“I’m not telling anyone anything until I get this crazy story of yours straight,” he says firmly. “What was your serial number, again?”
Shit shit shit.
I see from my scanners that the Grace Marcus was painting me with targeting lasers. That isn’t good.
“Listen, Captain,” I say, “let me patch through the video feed from the galley. You can see the flora, and the Tyreesian bodies.”
I glance at the galley video, then go cold. The galley’s empty. The PMFs have smashed through the door and are roaming the ship, looking for prey.
“Uh, belay that,” I say. “Just check the general feed...the things are all over the place.”
“I want to know what the hell is going on in that ship!” Sood shouts, getting red in the face.
I say, “Tell you what—I know you have Captain Jeryl Montgomery there on the surface of Perseus. He teleported over not long ago. He’ll vouch for me. If you—”
“How could you know where Montgomery is?” he asks suspiciously.
Oh shit fuck fuck, how obtuse is this twod going to be?
I suck in a deep breath.
“I know he’s because I teleported him there myself,” I say in as measured a tone as I could manage. What I really wanted was to reach through the screen and slap the guy.
“You did what?”
He looks around at someone off-screen.
“I’ll need some verification of this,” he said. “Gibbs—where’s Montgomery?”
An alert beeps unobtrusively to my left. I glance at the sensor screen and gasp.
Tyreesian ships. Coming to the border.
Turning back to Captain Sood, I say, “Sir, I’m going to have half the Tyreesian fleet up my ass in about a minute and a half unless you let me make my approach.”
Another alert beep—and I see several Union ships moving to intercept me. I’m the object of affection of two squadrons, neither one of which has any love for the other.
Fucketty shit fuck shit with balls on top!
“You just hold on, ma’am,” he says. “Let me get this straightened out. I’ve got an expert here who was attending the Four Powers Summit, and I’ll consult him if you don’t mind.”
“Yeah, sure, call in whoever you want.”
Another figure comes into camera view at the Captain’s station: - oh for fuck’s sake. Another fucking Tyreesian!
I groan. What’s he doing there? On board an Armada vessel?
“This is Leader Khargona, of the Tyreesian Navy. He’s serving as a military liaison during the Summit,” the Captain of the Grace Marcus says.
“Well, well,” the Tyreesian says in his oily voice. “A human female, piloting a Tyreesian ship. Now that’s a serious infraction of the rules, I’d say, Captain Sood.”
“That’s what I thought, sir.”
Khargona scowls. “There is a fair bit of advanced weaponry on that ship. What are you meaning to do with it, female?”
“Bringing it in,” I say as evenly as possible. “This is now Terran Union property.”
“You are a common thief,” says Khargona. “I demand that you destroy that ship, Captain Sood.”
“But sir, that’s your ship.”
“Indeed, and the knowledge it represents is priceless to my people. Any attempt to hijack or steal it represents a violation of treaties now in place,” Khargona says smoothly. “I cannot allow that to happen. It would threaten the peace between our two great civilizations.”
The face of Jeryl Montgomery appears in a pop-up window to one side of the main screen. I can tell he’s talking from the communication room in the Terran Union Administrative building.
“Stand down, Capain Sood,” he says. “I vouch for Anika. She’s got a vital piece of technology that’ll be crucial to the well-being of the Union. You’ve got to let her dock.”
“Vouching for someone isn’t exactly SOP,” Sood says coldly. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I can’t do that on your say-so.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Montgomery says.
“For once I agree with you, Captain,” says Khargona. He spits out a string of syllables in a tongue I don’t recognize.
Immediately the Eskyuk Tushav’ch quivers and I hear a series of thuds as bulkhead doors snap shut, isolating the various sections of the ship from each other.
Fuckarama. What has the fucking Tyreesian done?
A voice comes over the freighter’s internal commlink: “Self-destruct sequence initiated,” says a calm female voice. “Five minutes and counting.”
“Captain,” Khargona says coldly to Captain Sood, who’s frozen in his chair, “I advise you to tell your ships to stand down. I have remotely activated the Tushav’ch’s self-destruct mechanism with an emergency override.”
My eyes widen. I know why he’s done it, of course; to prevent the second section of the teleportation unit from falling into Terran hands. That he’d sacrifice his own people, who are now on a final approach to the Tushav’ch in order to board it and take me into custody, matters not a jot to him.
I sag in my seat. Where’s the damned bomb? I know where such devices are normally placed on Terran ships, but not on this bucket. I blink twice and at hyper-speed access the sea of data in which my nanites swam, frantically searching for any and all references to Tyreesian self-destruct protocols.
My mind is now racing as fast as the digital net connecting the nanites. It’s a horrible feeling, and I feel my body kick into “fight or flight” mode, squirting adrenaline and cortisol into my central nervous system as the stress mounts. My endocrines will be out of whack for days after this—assuming I survive the blast.
If that bomb is anywhere in the ship, I’ll have to fight my way through the PMFs to get to it. Then my nanites flag an encrypted file, crack it, and project it onto my retinas.
The explosive device is outside the ship, buried in the outer hull.
I check the time remaining until the blast. Four minutes fifteen seconds. No worries; at hyperspeed, that is the equivalent of
almost two hours. I’m sure I can disarm the thing in two hours.
Assuming the Tyreesians or the Terrans don’t start shooting at me.
I grab my head-piece and run out of the bridge at top speed.
I have to get to the outer airlock. The first problem is that the bulkheads are all closed, and I have to slow down to open them manually, one at a time, otherwise I’ll strip the runners and gears in the walls by yanking too hard on them. Slow and steady wins the race.
“Three minutes, forty-five seconds,” the computer says complacently.
“Shut up, bitch,” I growl, wiping sweat out of my eyes. When’s the last time these controls were lubricated?
Two doors, three doors. The outer airlock will cycle in thirty seconds; there’s no way to speed up the sequence.
“Two minutes, fifteen seconds until self-destruct.”
Last door!
Just as I finish turning the hand control, something whips into my peripheral vision and snatches my spacesuit’s head piece, which I’d put on the floor while working the door controls. A questing tendril from one of the PMFs! I turn to look, and see a dozen of them zeroing in on me.
“Give that back, asshole!” I yell, then dive through the opening doorway. The PMFs crowd into the gap, trying to get at me. The airlock is dead ahead. I blink twice and run for it.
The PMFs come to a relative halt, of course, as I shift into hyper speed. But they still have my headpiece: it’s somewhere in that twisted mass of vegetation. I shudder. I hate the things; I can’t bear the thought of digging into a pile of their slimy bodies.
I smack the airlock controls and watch as the thing began to close. At my current rate of speed, it will take ten relative minutes for that to happen.
Back in the “real world,” there’s a minute left until self-destruct.
People can survive in a vacuum for about 15 seconds before passing out from lack of oxygen to the brain. Being enhanced, I can do a bit better than that—maybe I can last a minute. At hyperspeed that will be maybe twenty relative minutes, which might be just long enough for me to find the bomb and disarm it.
I spend some time calming myself and hyperventilating, getting as much oxygen into my body’s cells as possible. The outer door cracks, and I feel the air being sucked out. At my rate of speed, it’s like a summer breeze. In real time, it would be almost explosive.
Explosive. Bad choice of words.
Outside the airlock I can hear—well, feel; I can’t hear anything now, as there’s no air to conduct sound—dull thuds as the PMFs try to hammer their way in. That isn’t going to happen; but I’m effectively trapped in here. The airlock has only one other exit, and that’s currently set to space. Even after I have the bomb defused, if I get the bomb defused, if I get safely back to the airlock and cycle it shut, I’ll still be trapped inside it.
That, however, is a problem for later.
The door is wide enough now. I step out.
Space is beautiful, in its way, if one has the luxury to enjoy it. By “luxury,” I mean sitting in a starship’s observation lounge with a stimulating beverage and a philosophical attitude in place.
Those things are in short supply just now. My spacesuit is magnetically charged, so I can use every part of it to stick to the ship’s outer hull. Plus, it has small emergency jets installed at the wrists and ankles, so if I accidentally come loose from the hull I can maneuver myself back into contact with it.
Space is also silent. Dead silent. I know that I’ll soon start bleeding from my nose, mouth, ears and eyes due to the lack of atmospheric pressure around me. Medically, I know precisely what will happen. They teach us well in the Academy, and Intelligence training is even more thorough. Sometimes being highly educated can be a disadvantage.
I inch along the hull toward the spot where the bomb is hidden. I know it’s just beneath the outer skin, with its charges aimed inward. Theoretically I can punch through the hull, grab the thing, and if I can’t disarm it quickly enough I can toss it far enough away that maybe the blast won’t kill me.
Maybe.
Five seconds, ten...forty seconds until self-destruction, my inner clock tells me.
There’s the spot! I kneel, bringing more of my “sticky” suit into contact with the hull, and dig my fingers into the metal. I can’t do this at hyperspeed because I’ll knock myself off the hull and into space and no one nearby will have a good day.
But the stars are smiling at me, because the thing is no bigger than a dinner plate and it’s right there, and I carefully extract it from its nest of diodes and look at it through ice-rimmed eyeballs.
Two buttons, one yellow, one blue. Beside them, an LED of strange blue shapes, each one getting smaller. Time ticking down.
Tyreesians use blue for danger. I push the yellow button.
The shapes on the display flash yellow and stop shrinking.
I’m cold, so cold...the device floats away from my nerveless fingers and ice closes in around my vision. I can’t breathe.
The darkness of space...
No One
...and yet. there are dreams. Or, not dreams exactly, but impressions. Something, some consciousness, some spark of me is still receiving information from outside.
Some of them could be called memories: I hear my parents arguing, probably about money (that was the only thing they ever argued about) while I hid, afraid, in a closet listening. I’d been playing with my mother’s shoes. I could not have been more than three years old.
I loved her shoes, the different colors, the textures. The size alone of them was more than I could take in at that age. How could anyone have feet that big? It was impossible to think that my own feet might someday be that big.
And above me, her clothes: a Narnia of skirts, dresses, slacks...I loved being in Mommy’s wardrobe, being surrounded by all those things that smelled so comfortingly of her. But she and Daddy were arguing outside, and the air was closed...and cold, so terribly, bone-chillingly cold. And I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t breathe and it was after a school track meet. I had run my heart out but still came in third. The disappointment jabbed at me even through my gasps. I’d let the team down. We’d lost the regional. It was all on me. I leaned over with my hands on my knees and with the focus of exhaustion watched my sweat drip onto the dirt beneath my head.
The drops form the exact same pattern as when I’d shudder outside the bulkhead to Engineering. I stare down at them, wondering how that could be.
Strange radiation sluices through me, the outpourings of the star energizing a nebula not many light-years distant. Perseus’ atmosphere shielded the planet from the radiation, but out here in space—wait, what? Space? Yes, I am in space! Floating all but naked in space, and my nanites laboring to keep me alive, staving off cellular damage, trying to get oxygen to my organs, reducing my core temperature to slow my metabolism.
How long has it been? How many hours have I drifted helplessly out here, alternately lit and shadowed as my motionless body slowly rotated into and out of Perseus’ light? I’m dead now, or soon will be.
It is, I decide, peaceful. I no longer feel the cold. Like a mummy, I’ll be preserved here in space, desiccated, lifeless, drifting forever between the stars, a message to future space voyagers that my species existed once upon a time. They’ll wonder who I am, what I had been doing, how I had come to be floating sans protective headpiece here in the vacuum. Was I a criminal, tossed out the airlock? Was I a hero? Was I a careless idiot?
Shapes loom all around me. The gods of the galaxy, coming to harvest my soul. I never believed in them...never believed in a soul. Now all I know is the silence of space, a faint slug-slug-slug from my faltering heart, the brittle feel of the outer layers of my skin as they freeze and flake off.
All right, if this is it...if this is how I am to die...it ‘s okay. I can live with that. I would have chuckled at the feeble joke had I been able to. But the vast shapes around me loom closer, almost comfortingly, and I want t
hem to gather me in and take me away to whatever unknown Valhalla awaited me. Even oblivion would be fine.
Everything slips away, and I’m dead.
Noises. Sounds, annoying sounds: rhythmic, a repetitive one-note beep beep beep worming its way into my awareness.
Go away, let me sleep. I’m dead, I don’t need this shit. Let a poor dead girl sleep, would you?
There’s a light out there. I swim toward it, slowly aware that there’s a tube down my throat.
Beep beep beep.
The tube is withdrawn. Surely they don’t mean for me to be conscious during the process? Thanks for nothing, nanites. You brought me back too soon.
Beep beep beep.
You can stop that now, please.
I open my eyes.
Mistake.
Harsh fluorescent illumination picks highlights off the fairings of any number of weapons pointed at me by a cadre of military-grade robots, all nicely polished gleaming steel with red and white carapaces. Numbers stenciled on them. Standard issue security iron.
Jeez, who did they think I was?
Someone steps out from behind one of the bots.
“No, don’t try to talk,” says Jeryl Montgomery. “Just relax.”
Seeing my eyes flick around, he says, “You’re in the TUS Seeker’s sick bay.”
He takes a seat on a plastic chair to one side. I am, I understand, lying in bed, hooked up to machines.
Guarded by military-grade security bots.
Beep beep beep.
“Nice work out there,” he says conversationally.
“You almost bit it, though...I’m sure you know that. You were out there for just over two minutes. A few seconds longer, and we wouldn’t have been able to save you.”
He smiles.
“As it was you were kind of a mess, Grayson. The docs don’t think there’s any serious tissue damage, but you’ve had a boatload of alveoli implanted into your lungs. That took a while, so they intubated you and kept you in an induced coma while they cleaned you up. Oh, and you lost a lot of skin. You’ll have full-body dandruff for a while, they tell me.”