by Kieran Shea
Piper barked, “You mean we’re trapped in here? And what, we’re supposed to just ride the whole thing out?”
Jimmy looked at her helplessly and shrugged. “Basically. We’ve simulated Code Zulu drills before, but no one has ever ordered one for real.”
The Code Zulu klaxon, an undulating cha-hoo-gah, wailed like a giant strangled goose as Leela’s voice boomed over the PA system again.
“AZOICK FREIGHTER ADAMANT INTENTIONALLY DESTROYED. REPEAT. ADAMANT INTENTIONALLY DESTROYED. PROJECTILE’S ORIGIN—THE DE SILENTO AND HOSTILE. T MINUS EIGHT MINUTES AND FORTY SECONDS TO IMPACT. MOVE TO SAFETY AND SECURE ALL PERSONNEL IMMEDIATELY. ASOCC OUT!”
The Adamant was destroyed?
No wonder Leela was releasing the tenders, Jimmy thought. At first he presumed she was releasing the tenders because she was always deferential to the company’s concerns and was trying to protect the cargo. Her being in management, that would be a lead concern. But now Jimmy understood what she was actually doing. The extra weight of the tenders would hold the hangar spider down, and Leela was trying her best to get the station aloft and out of harm’s way. Jimmy admired her quick thinking, but at the rate the bays were purging their tenders, the math told him there was no way they all could be released in time. If the shipping hangar was too heavy, the other spiders might be able to break off and get up, but that could unleash additional problems. The whole station was designed to operate as a cohesive unit. If one or more of the spiders separated, they could veer off and dervish wildly out of control. All in all, the situation was, as they say, a total Charlie Foxtrot.
Jimmy turned toward the party way down the other end of the hangar. Mammalian survival instincts were taking over, and the gathering shredded apart in a remorseless tumult of full-on panic. Fights broke out as people floundered for cover. Many were lashing themselves down to whatever they could, and in predictable anthropological fear others were frozen in place like red-handed possums caught in a spotlight. Someone yanked the stage skirt from the imaging drone and frantically waved at its indifferent lens. Meanwhile, near the vehicle maintenance area, somebody else jumped inside a crawler. Throwing the vehicle into gear, whoever was behind the controls started plowing across the deck, slamming the crawler into one of the sealed hangar’s exits. When the vehicle backed up in order to ram the exit again, Jimmy heard a horrible scream as someone was sucked beneath the crawler’s gigantic carnassial tracks.
Piper slid to her knees and opened her bulky case. “Oh, great. This is just great. Finally make a Mandelbrot skip out to deep space to pick up some extra scratch and everything goes friggin’ haywire.” From the case she removed two helmets and spacesuits with primary O2 processor tanks attached. She tossed a helmet at Jimmy and he caught it.
“Cripes, what are you doing?”
Piper slipped into a spacesuit, removed a pair of gloves from the helmet, and put the gloves and helmet on. Bending down, she took what looked like a long white cylinder from the large case along with a black duffle. She circled a finger and gestured to the other spacesuit and stomped toward Armadillo Bay X. She called back over her shoulder, “Get dressed.”
Jimmy started after her. “Dressed? Why? What for?”
“There’s no way I’m riding this overgrown lifeboat. I may need an extra hand.”
“Wait, do you think we’re going to head outside until all this blows over? We can’t get out! Everything is on lockdown. The whole station is going to lift off.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Huh?”
She motioned again to the helmet and gloves in his hands. “Suit up,” she said. “We’ve less than eight minutes now. I’m going to blow us a hole.”
Jimmy’s eyes doubled in size. “A hole? In the hangar? Are you out of your mind? It’ll depressurize! There’s still people in here!”
“Relax. I’m only going to blow a hole in this armadillo bay, not the whole hangar.”
“But there’ll be an explosion,” Jimmy insisted. “There’ll be a mammoth sudden release of air and the whole structure could wrench apart. You can’t predict what’ll happen with an explosion. There could be cascading system failures. If the whole hangar depressurizes, it’ll be—”
“What?”
“Mass murder!”
“And your point is?”
“You can’t do that!”
Piper threw a switch on Armadillo Bay X’s control panel and an access door retracted with a hiss. A cloud of condensation steam rolled out. “In the Pan-American Legion one of the first things they teach you in survival school is improvisation. Even if this whole shooting match manages to get up in time, the station will move like a beast. Inbound hostiles? I guaran-fuckin’-tee you those suckers are already locked in on their targets. You want to be pulverized and kiss the great beyond at forty thousand degrees below zero? Be my guest.”
This was madness. Jimmy looked behind him again. A clutch of workers had climbed onto the ramming crawler. Others continued to tie themselves down with whatever they could, and some started crawling inside empty cargo containers. Obviously enraged with drink, several strip-bore specialists Jimmy knew had decided to go for broke and were choking members of the ASOCC management team. Goddamn, he thought with despair, for hundreds of years with all our revolutionary and advanced technologies no one ever found a shred of intelligent life beyond Earth. It wasn’t the first time he’d considered it, but maybe it was best that humans were relegated to a galactic backwater. Pushed to their limits, people turned feral and downright savage.
On the flipside, knowing that Leela was already locked inside the ASOCC and trying to do something to save them all gave him hope. At least someone worth a damn had balls. Jimmy wished he could see Leela one last time and tell her that he was sorry for everything. Cutting back to the case, as he picked up the spacesuit he saw two men in blue coveralls pointing at him four hundred meters away.
Piper advised tersely, “Don’t look now, but that suit in your hands belongs to one of those boys. If I were you, I’d get dressed on the amscram.”
The two men in blue coveralls sprinted toward Jimmy and Piper cheetah-fast as the armadillo bays continued to expel their tenders. Jimmy dropped his rucksack and pulled the spacesuit on over his boots. The automatic seals and cinches pressurized to his leather-clad body and boots instantly so he secured his helmet and locked off his visor. The O2 flow was clean—a much-needed mind-clearing rush—and he grabbed his rucksack and met Piper at the access door on Bay X. Piper’s visor was locked off now as well and her voice streamed into his helmet.
“Step aside,” she said.
Dropping the black bag, Piper lifted the large white cylinder she’d taken from the case, pressed a button, and a cushioned shoulder stock extension shot out. A high-pitched whine resonated and a bulb on the business end of the cylinder changed from red to green. Piper then tucked the cushioned stock into her right shoulder like a shotgun as one of the approaching men skidded clumsily to a halt. The second man kept moving, dodged left, and threw himself behind a parked marcher lift.
“Sorry, Østerby,” Piper said.
There was a squelched sneeze as a lasing white twine of light flashed from the tip of the cylinder. Jimmy stared in horror as the halted man, the one Piper called Østerby, took a galvanic hit to his chest and misted apart. Piper then dropped to one knee, swept the weapon and aimed at the second man cowering behind the parked marcher lift’s legs.
“Kollár!” the second man screamed. “What the hell are you doing?!”
“Sorry, Stormkast. Be a dear now and hold still.”
The snout of the cylinder sneezed again and a second twine of hot light shot outward. Like trembling fingers webbed in prayer, the light wrapped around the marcher lift’s legs and fizzled. Piper zapped the legs again and the upper portion of the marcher lift came down and squashed Stormkast like a bug.
Piper rose from her firing position. “Let’s go. We’ve got one shot at this.”
Jimmy swallowed
hard. This was some totally evil shit, but he didn’t want to be her next victim so he didn’t argue. He threw the lever near the stern of the slotted tender and a second hatch in the hull retracted. Piper waved for him to get inside.
Cargo tenders typically were controlled remotely, but with the Adamant gone Jimmy knew it didn’t matter. Once inside and twenty meters ahead down a narrow passage near the tender’s faired bow there was a forward operating console used for backup. The console was covered in a sheet of plastic. Jimmy ripped the sheet off as Piper shouted at him from the stern.
“Standard manual-overdrive ignition is nearly always on the starboard side,” she yelled. “Look for a key covered with a safety cap!”
Jimmy located the key. He flipped back the safety cap. “Fire her up now?”
“You have to ask?”
Jimmy engaged the ignition and the tender’s systems came online. From a small lens and projected in a slanted blue haze, gyroscopes, navigational readouts, and callout screens materialized. There wasn’t a pilot seat for the controls as a few thousand meters was usually the most a tender was ever needed to be moved manually, and the fact that the console was still pristine and covered in plastic made Jimmy think it hadn’t been touched since the day the tender moved off the assembly line. Holy smokes, he thought. Burdened with its yield, piloting the tender was going to be like steering an overgrown refrigerator even if they escaped Bay X in time.
Two joystick controls rose from the surface of the console, and a shield just above retracted, revealing a curved forward casement window.
“We’re hot,” Jimmy announced.
“Wait!”
Back at the stern near the access hatch, Piper beavered. From the black bag, she attached a remote seismic detonation charge to the cylinder rig’s snout and adjusted a dial on the charge. A countdown of twenty seconds. Looking right down the ribbed darkness of the armadillo bay, she took aim at the huge doors leading outside. A set of massive friction-toothed hinges just to the left looked critical and from her position it was an unobstructed shot. Piper inhaled. If this plan went tits up, maybe Vik was right. The whole place could blow apart, but with hostile inbounds she figured they’d all soon be dead anyway.
Piper steadied her aim. Goddamn, she needed to salvage something out of all of this. If the K7-A station was destroyed and she survived, there was no way of verifying Roscoe’s liquidation. Her handlers with The Chimeric Circle were a bunch of cold-hearted bastards, and no doubt they wouldn’t take Piper at her word and would fail to pay her fee. She needed the gold and had to get back to her fiancé. This better work.
Piper drained the stretch of air from her lungs and squeezed the trigger. The remote detonation charge flew forward with a sparkle of micro-illuminated tracers and her aim was perfect. The charge hit the middle friction hinge and latched on with scarab-like barbs.
Piper folded back inside the tender and sealed the hatch. Leaving her black bag and cylinder weapon she stormed forward to where Jimmy stood at the backup console. Shoving him aside, she swept a finger through the slanted blue arrays and released the tender’s docking holds. There was a meager, weightless wobble from side to side and she gripped the joysticks. Jimmy moved behind her.
“What now?” he asked.
“Best find something to hold onto.”
Jimmy put a hand on her shoulder. “But wait—”
“Not me, you idiot!”
“No,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t feel anything.”
Piper studied the navigations. She powered up the lift hovers and onboard gravity systems. Using the joysticks, she backed the tender out of its chocks and the tender lifted off of the bay’s internal pad. “The explosive charge is on a timer,” she said.
“So how long ’til it blows?”
“Ten seconds, maybe less.”
Piper and Jimmy braced themselves.
49. THE HARD SUCK
In ASOCC, Leela smeared back her tears with the cold fingertips of both hands.
Cutting the primary station power had worked. The blackout and subsequent temporary loss of artificial gravity had grabbed everyone’s attention. But having to make the call to seal everything off and announce Code Zulu—that really sucked.
Leela studied the readings in front of her. The projectiles’ bearings were still on a direct collision course heading with the station and the estimated time to impact was six minutes and forty seconds. Leg retractions, station-wide, were only at sixty-seven percent, and less than half of the armadillo bays had purged their tenders. The structures’ lower fusion reactors had all of the lift rockets ready to burn, but, damn, Leela knew there was no way the whole station could get aloft in time. Looking up at a monitor on ASOCC’s far wall, she watched a panoptic-visual of the shipping hangar relayed from the imaging drone. Some jackass was attempting to use a crawler as a battering ram. All civility in the hangar was lost. Everybody was going apeshit.
Making sure she didn’t broadcast to the rest of the station or to the panicking hordes out in the hangar, Leela spoke into her bone mic.
“Jimmy? If you can hear me, listen. I’m in ASOCC. I’ve done all I can, but the readings indicate the station won’t get up in time. Even if we do, it looks like the projectiles from the De Silento are going to strike us anyway. I know it sounds bad, but if anyone can survive this, you can, so hold on, okay? Try to seal yourself off somewhere, and before you do, try to grab some water and food. With any luck, maybe wherever you hide yourself, if it’s sealed, could—”
Could what? Get blown clear? Survive certain destruction?
It was unlikely. If anything, even after all he’d done to her and with the gold, Leela knew Jimmy deserved to be told the truth.
Don’t lie to him.
“God, Jimmy, I don’t know what else to say. I mean, I know I should’ve been, I don’t know, more honest and open with you about how I feel… how you hurt me and all that, but for what it’s worth I want you to know that I love you anyway. You hear me, you stupid jerk? I love you! Hang on!”
There was nothing more she could do.
Clenching her teeth, Leela slapped her bone mic from her ear and made for the Adamant’s transfer module. Passing through the connecting vestibule and grabbing spacesuit, helmet, and gloves she charged up the airlock gangway and entered the parked spacecraft. Locking the hatch behind her, she pulled on the spacesuit and clamped on the gloves. After strapping into one of the pilot seats, she secured her helmet, lowered and locked off her visor.
Five minutes and twenty-five seconds to impact.
She quickly entered her Azoick employee identification number and password.
Screw crosschecks.
Leela fired booster ignitions and a booming rumble beneath her began.
50. BLOWING A HOLE
Jimmy wedged himself along a partition. Piper gave him one last look as the charge blew with a seismic KUH-WHUMP!
As Bay X’s door tore free and outward, a clacking maelstrom of wreckage strafed the tender’s hull in a reverse squall of rushing, depressurized air. The tender shot backward abruptly, lifted and held, and then jerked from port to starboard. Jimmy crashed sideways left and right accordingly, and Piper hung onto the joystick controls.
“C’mon, damn you! C’mon!”
Gong-loud, something hit directly above the forward casement. Pitching downward, the tender bounced roughly off the pad and lifted upward again. The ale Jimmy recently consumed sloshed in his stomach and began creeping up his throat. Surfing the turbulent vibrations in a cowabungastinkbug stance, he watched as Piper engaged the tender’s aft engines at full power. The tender rocketed forward and Jimmy flew backward.
Outside the forward casement, the ferocious gale of swirling apocalyptic carnage churned. Jimmy had suspected Piper’s blowing a hole in the door would cause additional damage and regaining his footing he saw that he was right. The hangar had, indeed, split open like a rotted melon, and all manner of objects were being ripped out into space. Like a giant tomahawk a
marcher lift wheeled past followed by a compound crusher lid, a whipping tumbleweed of thick cables, and a dozen men screaming and clawing for purchase.
Piper groaned, “C’mon! C’mon, you fat piece of junk! That’s it! Fly! FLY!”
Riding the express elevator down to the misery department, Jimmy hated himself. On top of being culpable in a capital one corporate offense now he was an accessory, ipso facto, in the untimely deaths of hundreds. Of course, with the looming projectile impacts moments away, everyone in the hangar was pretty much fucked anyway, but that wasn’t the point. The point was Jimmy hadn’t even tried to stop Piper. Goddamn, if he survived the next few minutes, his doing nothing in the face of all this insanity was something he knew he couldn’t live with. Sooner or later Piper would discover that the supposed gold in the quarantine hold was bogus, and then she’d find the gold stashed in his rucksack and kill him. Oh man—this was bad. This was way, way past sliding into the abyss. This was a lurid hell of his own making and now the only way out of it and doing something at least halfway honorable depended on Jimmy willing himself to do the worst possible thing. But fuck it, he needed to see things through to the end.
It always came down to that, didn’t it? What one was willing to do? Jimmy was willing to steal. He was willing to risk imprisonment and medical experiments. Hell, he was even willing to cast aside Leela, the one decent person who cared for him, and now she was going to die too. Yeah, her death wouldn’t be his fault, but why not push the chips all the way across the table? The wry old adage mocked him.
In for a penny, in for a pound…
Jimmy had to do something.
Hanging back as the tender soared forward and rose, he loosened the buckles and pressure seals on his spacesuit and removed his helmet. Still busy at the controls, Piper wasn’t paying any attention and when the top half of Jimmy’s spacesuit was down and folded back around his hips, he gingered his legs out of the rest of it. Taking two steps forward he reached out for Piper’s helmet. Snicked free of its locking clasp, her visor rose automatically and all surprise vanished.