by Arnot, C. S.
The drone scurried into her room then and climbed the wall to the ceiling hole, going through the same process as in the corridor. Vika watched it for a moment. She turned to the hole in the floor then and prodded the foam with her foot. It was spongy on top, but beneath it she could feel more resistance. Gingerly she pressed some more of her weight down on it, and found that it didn’t budge. It was solid.
She started heading back along the corridor the way she’d come. The ship rolled again and Vika stumbled into the wall, but she kept going. She had a purpose.
Unlike the others, Vika had spent a large part of the few days in Tbilisi studying every document Solomon had on that little monitor of his. One of them had been a full three-dimensional schematic of the insides of the warship, so she knew exactly where she had to go. Her destination was right ahead of her at the end of the main crew corridor.
Getting there, when the ship itself seemed to be throwing itself around just to spite her, was going to be harder than it had looked in those drawings. Part of her wanted to run back to the little sink in her cabin, throw up and then strap herself into the bunk and wait for it all to be over.
But that wasn’t an option. Whatever Solomon was doing with the Enkidu was damaging it. It was damaging her ship. She had to stop that.
Somehow she had fought her way to the bridge door without vomiting. More repair drones scuttled past her along the corridor, and a series of shuddering bangs reverberated throughout the ship. She dreaded to think what the noise was.
The little panel by the door showed green: it was unlocked. Tapping it with her finger slid the door silently open. Then she was inside, at the foot of a short stairway. The tall seat at the top wasn’t facing her, but it didn’t have to be for her to know who was in it.
Quietly Vika crept up the stairs, pulling her pistol out from behind her trousers’ waistband. The bridge was the inside of a huge ball, the walls of which were filled with blurred images that moved and flashed uncomfortably. She blinked them away and focused on the back of the chair.
“Commodore, the Gilgamesh appears to be turning to the north. It is likely that it is attempting to bring its broadside batteries to bear.” It was the same woman’s voice that Vika had heard in her cabin, telling her that the door was locked and that she should brace for ‘manoeuvres’. It was the voice of the Enkidu.
“Thank you, Enkidu,” replied Solomon. His voice sounded strained, like he was forcing himself to be calm. “Hold fire until I say.”
“Yes, Commodore.”
“When the Gilgamesh fires its full broadside, wait until the last possible opportunity to evade.”
“Yes, Commodore.”
The Enkidu was flying fairly smoothly now. The swaying and jolting had stopped for the moment, but the ship must have been accelerating because the stairs suddenly seemed to stretch away from her. Carefully finding her balance, Vika climbed the last few steps to the back of the chair. She reached around the headrest and pressed the pistol to Solomon’s temple. She felt him jump.
“Tell it that I am Commodore, too.” She’d heard it call him that. She needed it to listen to her.
“Vika, it doesn’t work like-”
“Tell it,” she hissed, pressing the gun hard into his skull.
Solomon hesitated for a moment. “All right, okay. Enkidu, this is... Commander Veronika Naroyan. She has... auxiliary command of the ship.”
‘Commander’ sounded like ‘commodore’. Maybe she had misheard the voice...
“Yes, Commodore.” Then, “The Gilgamesh is firing, Commodore.”
No, it was definitely ‘commodore’.
“You rat. You gave me a different rank!”
“No I didn’t!”
She was angry. She had the power here, with a gun to his head, and yet he still defied her.
“Yes you did! I heard-”
The ship seemed to fall away beneath her and she slammed into the ceiling of the bridge, pinned there for a moment. Huge bangs, much louder than before, rocked the ship. Then she fell. She missed the podium and the domed floor below came rushing up to meet her, flickering with nonsense images. She hit it hard, the pistol skittering from her grip to lie in the shadows by the foot of the podium.
She was dazed and everything hurt. She reached for the pistol, but drew her arm back at the stab of pain in her ribs. She rolled painfully on to her side to look back up towards the podium.
“Fire,” said Solomon. The warship juddered and the walls of the bridge flashed white for a moment before returning to a blurred mess of colours. How could Solomon see anything in it? She tried to sit up, but found she couldn’t, and instead lay on her back on the curved floor trying to get her breath back. Frustration seeped into her then. She had been so close. It had all seemed so easy.
“Secondary propulsion ready, Commodore.”
“Take us east, then.”
“Yes, Commodore.”
Suddenly there was a high-pitched howl that seemed to ring from the structure of the ship. Just as it passed out of range of hearing it turned to a deep roar, and the ship seemed to lurch forwards, throwing Vika hard against the rear wall of the bridge. It was as if the direction of down had changed, now somewhere behind her towards the stern, and her own weight pinned her helplessly against the wall. It was crushing her, she was sure. It was so hard to breathe. She managed to lift her hand a pathetic few centimetres before her arm collapsed again.
Vika closed her eyes and waited for it to be over.
It seemed like forever before the weight disappeared. Minutes or hours, she couldn’t tell. In the painful haze left by her fall she could have passed out for all she knew.
“We have reached propulsion cut-out, Commodore. Altitude sixty-seven kilometres, ground-speed six kilometres per second. Repulsion envelope has exceeded maximum altitude: repulsor is set to idle.”
“Thank you Enkidu.”
Vika heard Solomon unbuckle himself from his chair.
She pushed gently from the wall then and her head swam at the sudden feeling of freefall. She floated there, not falling, just gently drifting away from the back wall of the dome. It was horribly disorientating. Before, the direction of down had changed: now there was no down, no up. She clenched her throat tightly against the wave of nausea that washed over her.
What is happening?
Her trousers rustled against the bottom of the dome where she’d landed after the fall. She tried to bring herself to rest by thrusting her knee down into the floor, but instead of stopping she managed to knock herself into a tumbling spin along her length. She flailed her hands out and slowed the spin, eventually managing to plant them far apart and firmly enough on the cool wall to come to rest. Then, slowly getting her bearings back, she turned to look back at the captain’s chair.
Solomon was clinging to a railing, looking at her. His legs floated ridiculously above his head. With a smile he pushed off of the railing, legs first, towards what used to be the top of the dome.
He kicked from the top of the dome and came flying straight at Vika.
Even as he hurtled towards her, she could see the murder in his eyes. He wanted her dead. There would be no negotiations now.
Panicking she kicked out with both her legs. They found something solid and she slid across the floor of the dome, stopping herself with her hands once she was sure he would miss. Solomon landed in a crouch as if he’d expected to stop. Instead he just bounced, and finding nothing to grab hold of flailed back into the air.
The smile was gone. Now he snarled as he kicked off from the bottom of the podium, coming for Vika again.
Vika curled her legs underneath her body. She knew Solomon was too strong for her. She couldn’t let him get close. Her best hope was the pistol she had dropped, which now floated from the shadows beneath the podium. Waiting until the last moment, she kicked off.
Solomon flew past her, his outstretched hand missing her ankle by only centimetres. He collided hard with the wall, swearing.
&nbs
p; All around Vika on the walls the confusing images still played. They were softer and steadier now, and seemed to either be deep black above or blue-green below near the bottom of the podium. Still they made no sense, too blurry and shifting to show anything recognisable. But there, hovering in the blue-green light was the pistol. Its muzzle was pointed towards her, so she caught it as carefully as she could, making sure to keep her fingers far from the trigger. She knew it was cocked and loaded.
Though she couldn’t see what Solomon was doing behind her, she kicked from the floor anyway, not wanting to stay still in case he was already onto her. As she pushed she twisted too, coming around to face backwards while she flew towards the black ceiling. There was Solomon, crouched and ready to push off after her. She aimed and started to squeeze the trigger.
The nausea came back just as she finished the trigger pull. The pistol barked and kicked but she saw the bullet went wide, ricocheting from the curved floor with a puff of dust. The kick had pushed her even faster towards the wall, so much so that when she hit it back-first she cried out at the sudden winding pain. It felt like somebody had driven a knife between her ribs. They must have been broken by the fall.
Fighting to clear the nausea and pain from her head, she aimed the pistol at Solomon again. He pushed himself sideways, ducking into the cover of the podium.
He was too slow. The second bullet caught him in his lower leg. Blood fountained from the wound, spreading out into a mass of shimmering round droplets that reflected the light of the wall-images. The sound of the shot echoed madly around the bridge, but Vika heard Solomon make no noise. He was hidden from her now, beneath the podium. She didn’t dare move to get a better view.
Then she saw Solomon’s own pistol floating in the air at the far side of the bridge, half-hidden by the blackness of the wall. He must have tucked it away under the chair or something, but now it was loose. It was closer to him than it was to her. She would have had to get very close to him to reach it. She stayed put, preferring to cover the second pistol and Solomon’s hiding place from where she was. Vika didn’t think she could face hurting her ribs like that again, either.
“It looks like you have me,” said Solomon, as if through gritted teeth. “Congratulations.”
“Come out slowly and I’ll let you live,” Vika found herself saying, though she didn’t rightly know how she would manage that. To simply kill him and be done with it would be much simpler.
“Vika, we both know that can’t happen.”
“It’s your choice,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt.
“Yes,” his laugh was threaded with pain, “I do believe it is. Enkidu, zenith evasive now!”
There was a loud, sharp bang and then Vika was falling to the floor again, fast. As she fell she saw the other pistol fall too, straight down into Solomon’s waiting hand. It all happened so quickly and yet Vika found herself pointing her own pistol and firing, again and again, her shots battling with the louder bark of Solomon’s pistol. Something white-hot sliced the side of her thigh just before she hit the floor and all went black.
She came-to in a blur of hot pain all over her body. It felt like every muscle and bone she had was on fire, and as she opened her eyes she saw she was floating again near the level of the captain’s seat. Below her, near the floor, Solomon’s body hovered in a shimmering cloud of crimson droplets.
She’d hit him. Somehow, she’d hit him. He wasn’t moving or even breathing. He was dead.
Somehow that numbed the pain a little.
Now she had nothing to kick off from. She was floating almost perfectly still in the centre of the huge spherical room, and the closest thing to her was the captain’s chair, though it was still a long way out of reach. Stretching her arm out had the same painful result as before, so she drew it back and searched about for another solution.
Her pistol still had rounds in it. With the pistol pointed away from the chair, she squeezed the trigger.
The gunshot pushed her right into the seat. Grabbing it tightly and slowly moving herself around, she strapped in, though loosely to avoid hurting her ribs. She left a little trail of droplets from the long bullet graze on her leg, but it was much less blood than had been gushing from the holes in Solomon. She took some reassurance from that: she was losing less blood than the dead man.
“Enkidu, the Commodore is gone,” Vika announced. “I have command now.”
“Yes, Commander Naroyan. Welcome to the bridge.”
Suddenly all the images on the walls were thrown into staggering clarity and depth, as if she were sitting on top of the warship instead of deep inside it. It must have been how Solomon had seen it, when all it had appeared to Vika was a messy blur.
And the view took her breath away.
All around and above her was the blackest night Vika had ever seen. Countless stars shone from the great dome, and right above her was the sun. But beneath her... beneath her was the Earth. It filled much of the lower half of the bridge-sphere, and through the blue haze of atmosphere she could see white cloud and the faded green outlines of landmasses. She recognised the huge peninsula beneath her as Denmark. Somehow she was over Denmark already.
Suddenly the stories her father had told her of the satellites and rockets, falling endlessly through the void, were real. She was in space, she knew. There was no other explanation.
“Enkidu, where are we going?”
“We are currently on a sub-orbital trajectory terminating in the vicinity of Beijing, China. ETA twenty minutes.”
Vika thought for a moment. “I need you to change course.”
“Certainly, Commander,” said the Enkidu. “Where to?”
Each shield will overlap the next, and my shield will cover them all.
39. Light and Dark
Aiden fired through a blurry haze of blood and tears. He could only see a red glow where his tracers burned, and he fired indiscriminately at everything that moved outside his turret. The gunsight was gone. He couldn’t tell if he was hitting anything. He doubted he was.
Trying to protect the Iolaire was keeping his mind off of the burning sensation in his brow, but when the blood filled his vision and trickled into his mouth it became hard to ignore. He hadn’t even taken a hand from the control sticks to feel the wound: it didn’t matter right then. What mattered was getting the Iolaire and its passengers out of there alive.
An explosion somewhere above the Iolaire jolted Aiden in his seat. That was when he noticed the damage to his leg. The sudden stab of pain in his thigh was almost overwhelming. He groaned aloud.
“Aiden! Are you okay?” shouted Fredrick.
It took him a moment to respond. “I’m hit in my leg, Fred. It hurts bad.”
“Jesus. Hammit, go and check him.”
“No, I’m okay. I’m fine.”
“Aiden-”
“I said I’m fine.” He wasn’t sure he really was.
He wiped the blood from his eyes as best he could.
That’s better.
The gunsight was still gone, but at least now he could see. He could aim with the tracers if he had to.
Outside, the scene was still chaos. Though there were fewer aircraft still flying, the survivors were fighting all the more fiercely. Aircraft spiralled and dived, rattling off bursts of tracer now and again. The mountains below were littered with the burning pyres of downed aircraft, belching out great columns of smoke that were carried east by the wind.
Fredrick had been unable to escape the melee. Every time he made a run, something would attack them and he would have to break and turn back towards the fight.
Fuel had to be getting low, too. All this time at maximum throttle would be draining the tanks fast. There probably wasn’t enough to reach a city any more. They’d need to settle for whatever options presented themselves, assuming they could get away from the bloody dogfight.
A little interceptor streaked diagonally across Aiden’s vision, followed closely by a drone. He loosed a burst at the
m, unable to decide which he’d prefer to hit. He clipped the drone, tearing off the tip of one of its wings. It spun then, losing control and arcing back down towards the ground.
“Got one,” he said.
“Can you see anything following us, Aiden?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll try to make another run to the south. Hold on.”
The Iolaire banked sharply. Nothing seemed to follow it through the turn. It stayed low, undulating with the terrain.
Slowly the fighting seemed to fall behind them. The huge, burning form of the Gilgamesh hovered in the north, just beneath the black clouds. It was fading now too, behind curtains of rain.
The turret was getting very cold. The holes in the glass were letting in a violent little breeze that made Aiden shiver. The sky was getting darker too.
It was so very dark and cold now. He let go of the control sticks and drew his arms across his chest for warmth. The darkness filled his vision.
He was fading then, he realised calmly. Fading away, burned and spent like the ‘nol in the tanks.
As his mind teetered on the brink, his last thoughts were of the Iolaire. She would keep flying. He’d done his duty. He’d done his best for her.
She was safe now.
She would forgive him, he knew. He could see her face, just, through the rain, and she smiled. Everything would be okay. Now she would carry him on. She would carry him home.
Something half-remembered whispered to him from the edge of the dark, something she used to sing to him. He let himself fall.
Fhir a' bhàta, na hóro eile,
Mo shoraidh slàn leat 's gach àit' an déid thu.
Oh my boatman, na hóro eile,
My farewell to you wherever you go.
*
“What do you want to do, now?”
“I... I just want to fly.”
“You don’t want to go back? I mean, I’m not sure exactly how you would do that, but...”