Alliance Rising

by C. J. Cherryh

  He didn’t want to. He wanted to put Fallan and that paper into a suit and get him out of reach—at which point things would play out with the information available.

  But if Cruz was up there, Cruz might know everything—the coordinates and all. And without Fallan, without his abilities to feel space—God knew—

  Fallan physically shoved him. Drifting, he fetched up against the e-hatch airlock, and he knew he had no option. He wasn’t entitled to pick and choose Fallan’s orders. Two years, Fallan said. And he had no idea what that meant.

  “Go on!” Fallan said.

  The area was warming fast: the systems did that; but surfaces burned, they were so cold. Something melted on his forehead and dripped down. He swiped it away and his hand came away dark.

  God-damned blue-coat.

  He pulled himself into the airlock, turned and backed into the hardsuit, using the low overhead to push down into it—a hundred and more drills, best foot, next foot, best arm, other arm, and let it seal as the helmet settled on. The suit fed air, icy at first, then warm, as the circulation started, and the astringent air filled his lungs on too-fast breaths. Danger there. He took a deep one, let it out slowly to still his nerves as the suit checked its seals. The instant the green light flashed on the HUD, he pulled his arms free of the braces, bent his knees and freed his legs, and tried to turn. He saw Fallan, the old man dead serious, as the door warned of closing.

  “Give ’em hell, Fal!” he shouted inside the suit, and maybe the speaker was on, and maybe Fallan heard it. Fallan raised a hand and the door shut between them.

  In the next moment—no choice of his own—the outer hatch opened and a jet of air blew him backward out the lock into the uncompromising glare and shadow of the mast itself. He had no orientation for a split second, only the vast expanse of Galway’s hull, that he never, ever had seen from any vantage—real, and carbon-spotted, and streaked with sulfur traces, rotating slowly past his view.

  With EH-3 blazoned in lights on the hatch—plain and near, with large arrows on either side, blinking in sequence, beacons to the safe harbor. His vision blurred; he blinked it mostly clear, and for a moment almost forgot why he was . . . where he was.

  Dammit.

  He gave himself a mental shake, then used the jet fixed to his left glove: light jet, to stop the rotation, another to reorient, putting the station rings at his back, and a third to stop. And there farthest out on B-mast, part in shadow, part in sun-glare . . .

  Leviathan.

  Finity’s End.

  Go there. Go there. Go there. Get help, if help can be had. Something about two years. What did Fallan mean, Finity will get her two years? Should he know what that meant? Had Niall said? Had he forgotten? What else had he forgotten?

  God . . . his thinking was muddled. He tried not to panic, held tight to that order from Fallan. Focused on that problem with every working neuron. Get to Finity. Tell them about Cruz. Give them that paper.

  Finity. That monster dead ahead. Get there, sure. A tap of a button, and he’d run right into her. Get aboard? That . . . was a whole other problem.

  He could call for help. There was a frequency dedicated to emergencies. Finity had crew aboard. Finity could hear a call.

  But so could people he didn’t want to notify. Yeah. That was clear-headed thinking.

  Station ops might be on that list. Abrezio might be. They might have been double-crossed up one side and down the other. Or Cruz might have gone rogue. God, he hoped that was so. The whole rest of his family, except for those in the ship behind him, were captives on the station.

  So . . . Don’t call. Aim . . . for an e-hatch.

  His head throbbed. That damned blue-coat baton had whacked him a good one. His nose was bubbling: he didn’t remember that blow. He sniffed it back, then had to sneeze and that was the worst thing to do. The faceplate was all dark-spotted, and his eyes were blurring, gummy with the tiny drops of free-floating blood. He couldn’t damnwell see what he had to see, the detail on Finity’s hull, those all-important cycling arrows.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, wiggling them around, trying to clear them, waiting for the suit’s built-in system to clean the faceplate, trying even harder to sort a mind starting to wander.

  Right now, he was drifting slowly in the right direction, but it was a long, long way for a suit-jet. He knew that much. He’d never practiced suit-drill in hard vacuum, let alone in the light of a cranky red sun.

  No panic. No. He was tending in the right direction, he was aimed at one very big target. Problem was, that target had a very tiny bullseye. Little corrections now saved big expense of suit propulsion later. He just had to figure where the corresponding e-hatch was in that huge, huge expanse of dark metal, and hope to God Finity hadn’t taken security measures since the blue-coats’ trial of it, and hadn’t, God save him, turned off those guide arrows.

  Shadow on his glove became blinding ruddy glare. He was confused for a moment, then realized something had moved that had been shadowing him, and that something was Galway, moving out away from the mast.

  Galway. Fallan. Niall and Ashlan and Mary T and all the others. Galway was moving.

  With goddamn Andy Cruz calling the shots.

  Nose clogged again. He choked, and that made the situation worse. Faceplate clearing wasn’t working. He wanted to turn and see what was happening over his head, but it cost the little he had from the hand-jet, and he daren’t. Sun-glare was all, likely, and the faceplate was cleared in streaks—likely he’d run the risk and still not see a damn thing.

  Galway was rotating on her axis, was what. Getting underway. She’d put the big jets on, soon as she’d reoriented.

  She was going. Nobody could stop her. Nobody from outside. And the Monahans inside would be depending on that single Monahan outside to get that message to . . . someone.

  JR Neihart. Get it to JR. Tell him they’d been betrayed. Warn him. He’ll take care of the Family.

  Somehow. Between half-choking on his own blood, with his eyes filming and the mask blurring, that somehow was growing scarily hard. At the rate he was moving, he might not get to Finity in time.

  He risked a small boost, toward where he hoped the hatch would be, and in desperation, when he still couldn’t find it, he tried a call . . . Abrezio be damned. “Finity-com, this is Ross Monahan, outside the hull, needing help. Over.”

  First call he made with some hope. Second, third, fourth and on—with diminishing belief anybody heard him. He told the suit to change frequency, and deliberately called the station. “Alpha Maintenance, this is Ross Monahan, outside the hull, got an emergency. Over.”

  Repeated calls got nothing. Alpha’s sun, Barnard’s Star, cranky old bastard, could be interfering. He tried a third frequency, universal emergency.

  Nothing.

  The sunglare was on him full now. His suit was pumping coolant to his back, and he had nothing but the immense hull of Finity’s End in front of him, red-lit by the star, and growing slowly, slowly larger. There was a tiny shadow on it. His shadow, he realized, through the blur. That was how far he had to go.

  Chapter 14

  Section i

  Undock was complete. Galway was moving out. Abrezio watched the event in his office, courtesy of ops channel 1, which, given the fact no Alpha ship had moved this month, was going out to all the screens. It looked like a return to normalcy on Alpha.

  A reason to celebrate.

  There was an old proverb about calm before a storm. And they were having that. The lift had only delivered a few of the Monahans to the upper mast. The majority would be starting back soon—with the early departure of their ship displayed up and down the Strip. They’d be walking back with their baggage, and checking back into the hotel they’d just checked out of, and probably no few of them headed for their bar to talk about it.

  On the screen, Galway continued its bac
kward push.

  The Monahans were going to be drawing attention and questions all along that path. And they would be clear to explain what ops would not yet have figured, that Galway was on a course other than the one ops had intended.

  Cruz would come storming in on that information front, he had no doubt at all.

  He actually looked forward to that.

  Chapter 14 Section ii

  Slow. Slow. No waste of propellant, no desire for impact with that massive and uneven hull. Visibility was worse. Everything blurred. All the exterior lights on the ship were nothing but fuzzy points in Barnard’s direct and ruddy glare. But there ought to be paint along with the lights. Arrows, to guide an EVA gone bad to a point of safety and rescue.

  His own shadow had arms and legs now, a shape made irregular by the troughs in Finity’s hull, the projections folded, tucked out of the way for docking. Craft needed occasionally to move about on inspection or repair.

  Suddenly, his shadow . . . dived, sharply warped by something sticking out. He wasn’t sure of it, in the hazed faceplate, but to the side, about a quarter of the way across the blurred faceplate, there was something. He tried to angle his whole body to bring that area to one of the clearer spots on the faceplate, near the edge. His eyes were tending to jerk, strain of trying to focus, trying to scan everything through the haze—that and outright terror of trying not to miss, of having chancy old Barnard’s misbehave, of thinking about what was happening behind his back, up above him—Galway pulling out with God knew what hand on the controls.

  Damn Cruz. Damn them all. Abrezio might have screwed them. Have told Cruz. Lied to them. Set everything up.

  Or Abrezio himself was screwed. And Cruz might have the coordinates, which would screw Fallan’s plan.

  He couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t wonder what was going on on the ship, or what that plan was. Two years didn’t matter, only right now. One job. He had one simple job. Hit the surface of a ship that could practically swallow Galway whole, hit it soft enough not to bounce off. He’d need enough propellant to adjust trajectory: contact the surface at an obtuse angle, minimize the force of impact.

  He remembered that from training.

  And handholds. He needed to find a handhold. Surface should be covered with them.

  Find a handhold. And crawl over that surface, trying not to push himself off it, with hands grown increasingly numb, for reasons he dared not ask. Try not to push off, not to use his propellant. Not to miss a man-sized hatch and not to lose his nerve and break down out here.

  Beyond Finity—there was nothing. Top of the mast, bottom of the mast, no difference out here, just . . . the end of everything. There was ahead of his trajectory, Finity’s End, and behind, Alpha. Beyond Finity’s hull was a whole lot of black. Deep black. Forever black.

  Couldn’t think of that. His half-turn risked losing his orientation to the hull. He got it back, slowly, carefully.

  That projection could be a streak on his faceplate. There were a dozen film streaks that changed location and opacity every time the clearing mechanism tried to handle the problem. He didn’t want to know why it was having so much trouble. He could use propellant and set the most critical course in his life toward that place on the side of the hull. Using it now—used least. If he waited, it might use it down to the last and still not get there.

  Damn. He couldn’t breathe without breathing down bubbles of whatever-it-was, couldn’t get a firm fix on the target, and if he coughed or jerked while he was using the hand-jet, he could throw himself on a trajectory there was no returning from. He had to make a decision, whether it was even there. And what it was.

  He was close enough now. If that was the e-hatch, he should see the lights. Or the paint. But there was nothing, only that strange warp of his shadow. Except . . . a memory. A piece of information. The customs inspectors. A utility pusher. Had it damaged something? Drifted up against the hull? Was it maybe obscuring the very lights he hoped to find?

  Was it that place on the hull?

  It was at least a place, that projection. It was something he could get hold of. Barring some hiccup from Barnard’s Star, a wave of radiation that would cook him despite the suit’s insulation, he could last out here a while. Maybe work his way toward a second bet, the e-hatch on the mast itself, the location of which was beside every docking port.

  He committed. Fired the hand-jet—

  And choked and coughed.

  Dammit. His greatest fear. He cut the jet off. Fast. And only hoped he’d aimed anything near right. He struggled to see his direction, worried about his speed. If he bumped the hull too hard, with nothing to grab, he’d rebound. Equal and opposite.

  He was going faster than he liked. He tried to estimate the lineup with the side of the hull. Still couldn’t damned well see.

  Couldn’t see. Couldn’t feel his hands. Couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe worth a damn—Didn’t want to think what he’d done to himself with that convulsive cough.

  But he was still going in the right direction.

  Chapter 14 Section iii

  It was an uncommon stir on the Strip—the Monahans, together, walking back, carrying their own duffles, the stronger carrying them for the weaker.

  Abrezio wasn’t surprised at all. He wasn’t surprised when the calls began. It was time to release the story to the station feed, rather than let rumor carry it.

  He was about to do that—had his finger on the button when his secretary came to the door and laid a physical message on his desk.

  It had the Rights of Man logo on it. Cruz’s signature in facsimile above it, in blue ink, above his name in type.

  He unfolded it. It said:

  In my capacity as director of the Rights of Man project, I have commandeered the ship Galway. I am on my way to Sol at this hour to personally ensure delivery of the coordinates to the proper authority. Having tracked your secret dealings with the Monahans and the Neiharts, I have every reason to believe that Pell will have advance notice and possibly its agents have the data. Your loyalties have become increasingly suspect, constituting more than sufficient justification for my current actions. I will definitely be reporting that matter, and an assortment of other actions not to your credit.

  Depend on it.

  [signed] Andrew J. Cruz

  Chapter 14 Section iv

  Coming to it, coming to it. The shape was the lit side of the utility pusher, and he was going to hit it too fast. It was possible it was just drifting there, not clamped, and hitting it could send it off in one direction and him in another and neither in toward the hull.

  Worst time for a coughing fit. But another one happened. Ross struggled to suppress it, which only made it worse, and when it finally quit, he couldn’t see a damn thing. The cleaner made a pass and gave him a single thin streak of blurred vision.

  He saw a bar of some kind. More than just a handhold.

  He gave the hand-jet a little burst, aiming for that bar, whatever it was. Finity. The abandoned pusher . . . at this point, he didn’t damnwell care.

  Going too fast.

  Dammit!

  He put out both hands, blind, and hoped not to rebound.

  Contact. He was rebounding. A moment of panic . . . then his right elbow caught, stopping him cold, and he wrapped that bar with both arms, hugging it close, gasping for breath as another coughing fit happened. When it was over, he just held there, eyes closed, giving the cleaner a chance to work.

  The slit of vision he finally got showed metal, showed a white patch, part of an arrow, the universal symbol for rescue, and he handed his way along the antenna, or rail, whatever it was, to reach the area outlined in white.

  Another cough, and even that slit disappeared.

  He brushed his hand blindly, felt another bar, a handhold. He pulled himself to it, searched again, and found a depression. At the center was a la
tch. The latch. His chest tightened. Relief, he thought. He hooked his feet in the universal clamps, braced his other arm with the handhold, and pulled.

  The area sank inward, slid aside. He felt for a bar that ought to be there, and found it. Pulled. Light flooded the far side of the faceplate.

  He hauled himself toward that light, shaking in every limb, no help to his coordination. He tried the suit com again.

  “Help. E-hatch. I need help.” Not the most coherent message. So hoarse he hardly knew his own voice. “Anybody? I’m inside Finity’s End e-hatch. I need help.”

  A red light, just a brighter glow in the general blur, started to blink in three-pattern. The hatch was going to shut.

  That was all right. He was pretty certain he had all of him inside. He reached for the lighted button and shoved it with the palm of his glove, still holding onto the hand-grip, drifting, otherwise. He coughed. Choked. Things were happening now that he couldn’t affect. The hatch had shut. The red light had stopped and the blinker was blue now. Lock was cycling.

  Suddenly it was green. He thought maybe he’d been out for a moment. He wasn’t sure. But the faceplate was clearer. Vague shapes appeared. A single small hole of clarity showed a hatch identical to the one he’d left behind.

  Then the inner hatch opened, and a man in work blues was there, looking at him, pulling him in by the arm, both of them drifting.

  The man said something. He couldn’t hear it. “Mike on,” he said, and the suit produced the blessed, wonderful sound of a human voice saying, “Where’d you come from, fellow?”

  “Galway,” he said. “Monahan.” He choked, another coughing fit, fought for breath. God, had he made it here just to die? He tried to say, thought he shouted: “Cruz is aboard.”