by Hugh Howey
“We’re under attack by human pirates,” he said. He looked around the lab. “You were not harmed when they netted the ship?”
“Nah, I’m okay.” Sadie stood up. “You guys going to fight them off?”
“If they board, yes. But the Myopsina is a trading ship; we don’t have ship-to-ship weapons.” Chiro poured his way over to the wall of monitors and started turning things on. “If we have injured, stay out of my way, over there.” He motioned with one bonelessly uncurling arm toward the corner near the tank of gel.
Chiro’s skin flashed yellow and red now, except for his crest, which shimmered blue in the dancing emergency lights. Sadie shrugged and walked to the designated corner, sinking down again. Just like most adults, she thought: never lets you do anything to help.
No injured came in, but Chiro waved away all her questions. He stood rigid and read data streaming in on a monitor wholly blocked by his body. Sadie figured she might as well start counting again.
She lost her count somewhere in the seven hundreds when she thought she heard someone scream. It was muffled by the ship noise and the emergency keening, but she knew what a scream sounded like. She looked up at Chiro. He’d turned toward the door, so she guessed he’d heard it too, though she found herself wondering where on his head his ears were, anyway.
Two Crawlies came in through the door, dragging a dead-looking human between them. One of them had a flashing red crest above his large eyes. The one that found her earlier.
“They breached, but we drove off the boarding party. This one wasn’t fast enough.”
“I’ll preserve it for the Arcturi shipping guards. I assume Leader Bato will want to press a complaint to the shipping board?”
“Easy assumption.” The red-crested one looked over at Sadie. Pyro, she thought. I think that’s what Chiro said his name was. “You put a Babel patch on this one? Why?”
Sadie stuck her tongue out at him. She noticed that his companion didn’t have a crest, and figured she must be a girl Crawly—or Teuthiad or whatever. Sadie couldn’t see any breasts though, and felt a stab of envy.
“She’s been no trouble,” Chiro said, “and Leader Bato wanted to know how and why she got on board. Hard to question a human that can’t understand us.”
“Keep her quiet then,” Pyro growled. “We’ve got to get that ship net off or they’ll just keep mounting boarding parties. If they don’t decide to blow us apart first.”
The female gave Sadie a curious glance, then followed Pyro out of the medical lab.
“Was that Pyro?” Sadie asked once the door slid closed.
“Yes, and Omma. She’s one of our mechanics.” Chiro moved to the pirate’s body.
Sadie walked over and looked down at the man. His head had a big gaping wound in it, but his space helmet didn’t look ruptured at all.
She looked up at Chiro. “Need help moving him? I’m real strong.”
His skin rippled a muted green. “He’s dead. This doesn’t bother you?”
Sadie shrugged. “I’ve seen loads of dead people before.” She took a deep breath. She’d only really seen one dead body, but after that, she figured dead was dead. Besides, she didn’t even know this pirate. She’d known Evey. Evey had been nice, and always smelled good, too. Evey had even kept Kip from beating her or making her beg in the shops. Until Evey was dead. Vicky had gotten drunk once and told Sadie that Kip got Evey sick, but wouldn’t say anything more about it. Sadie shoved aside those thoughts.
Chiro was still staring at her. He blinked in his slow way, twice. His fringe hummed, the sound low and oddly soothing. His skin turned to deep purple, and Sadie folded her arms tightly across her chest. His eyes looked sad, and she flushed. Stupid Crawlies.
“You want my help or not? Geez.”
“All right,” Chiro said. He flowed across the floor toward the wall she’d thought was empty apart from a couple of control panels. He keyed something into one, and a wide drawer slid open, sending a burst of chilled air into the room. Sadie grabbed the dead pirate’s feet while Chiro easily lifted the shoulders; together they moved the corpse into the drawer.
“How come they only killed one?” Sadie asked once the drawer was closed.
“The others were contained at the breach point. This one slid through during the fighting there.”
Sadie chewed on a fingernail and thought about that. Sometimes Kip would stage a fistfight, and Sadie or Collin would use the distraction to swipe cred sticks and other stuff. Once some fat merchanter from Corvus had paid Kip and the crew to set an explosive in the crates of a rival. She remembered him because he’d had rancid breath and a huge birthmark like a bad stain on his face. They’d used the same distraction tactic to get her into the cargo bay with the bomb. It’d been a good haul, too; even Kip had smiled at her that night and ruffled her hair in a way she only pretended not to like.
Chiro’s skin changed from purple to yellow and green again. “You think this is a distraction?”
“What?” Sadie looked up and wiped her hand on her jumper. “Man-o, stay out of my head, okay? But yeah, it could be. I don’t know. It’s what I’d do.”
“And you’re very smart,” Chiro said. His fringe hummed again.
Sadie self-consciously rubbed at her blue-black skin as she realized that his noise must be laughter. “Smarter than you, to let a boarding party on like that,” she said, glaring.
Chiro turned back to the monitors, so Sadie hopped back up onto the smooth table and tried to peer over his shoulder. He appeared to be typing something, but the squiggly symbols meant nothing to her. She pretended she could read them though, and she tried to pick out patterns. She wondered if Crawlies had numbers.
Chiro moved away and went to the wall of drawers. He removed a plastic mask and held it out to her. “Leader Bato and Pyro want to see you. I told them what you said, and they searched the area they found that pirate in. There’s some kind of device there. I’ve convinced them to let you have a look at it. This mask will help you breathe on the ship.”
Sadie jumped down from the table and grabbed the mask. “Why’d you do that?” She was shocked and pleased. This Crawly was nothing like she’d expected.
“You expected to get eaten,” Chiro said, “and Cephalos help me, but if I didn’t convince them to let you out of here I’d have to listen to you try to count past nine hundred and seventy-seven again. Follow me, monkey.”
Sadie slapped her mask into place and shivered as it stuck to her skin. It created a tight seal around her mouth and nose before fading strangely away, so that she could barely tell it was there at all.
She grinned as she followed Chiro through the double doors into a spiraling corridor. Maybe if she was useful they’d pay her something, and she wouldn’t have to return to Kip empty-handed.
She quickly lost track of where they were. It wasn’t too long before they emerged into a room full of machinery. And there it was: the device stood out, grey and green against the shining white smoothness of the Teuthiads’ ship.
Pyro and Omma were there. At least, she thought that the female was the same one as before. Two other males stood with them; one was much smaller than any of the others. He had a harness strapped across his shell, with odd tools poking out of it. The other male had a slender rope of crystal beads around his crest, affixed with a piercing through his translucent skin.
“This is the human child,” Chiro said. “Her name is Sadie.”
Sadie almost expected him to add “and she’s very smart” because of how much his fringe was twitching as he made the introductions, but he retained his control. Chiro introduced the Teuthiads quickly. Walvis was the little one, another mechanic, and Leader Bato was the one with the crest decoration.
“Chiro says you thought the breach was a ploy to get something on board. What is this? Can you tell us?” Leader Bato had a very high-pitched voice for such a big body.
Sadie choked down a nervous laugh and nodded. She knelt beside the device, a dark metallic b
ox, and popped open the control panel. It looked like a pretty simple disruptor of some sort. She looked up.
“What’s this room do? Communications or something?”
“Yes,” Walvis said, dropping low as his tentacle feet folded up into his body. “Why do you ask?”
“Have you tried calling for help? I think this thing is a jammer.”
“We have; we thought they’d damaged our ansible array.” Omma moved forward and peered over them at the device.
“Can you disable it?” Leader Bato asked.
Sadie carefully moved aside some wires and saw a little red light alongside a thin glass panel with what looked like a thermometer inside. “Sure,” she said. “If you don’t mind turning part of this room into slag.”
Every Crawly in the room flashed green and then yellow at that statement.
“See that red light? And that glass bit?” Sadie pointed. “That’s a tamper switch. It’ll go if we move the jammer, or even jostle it around too much, which I’d have to do if I wanted to get at the wires I need to cut to disable it.”
“What about those wires you’re touching? What do those do?” Pyro asked.
“Dummy wires.” Sadie shrugged.
“She’s right,” Walvis said as he looked more closely at it. “See how they’re just soldered right to the plate here? Not connected to anything.”
“She’s not a child, she’s a criminal,” Pyro muttered, and his crest turned red again.
Sadie rose up, balling her hands into fists. She opened her mouth but jerked in shock as Chiro grabbed her shoulders. She hadn’t even seen him move. His skin flashed through colors so quickly she couldn’t follow them, but Pyro moved back a pace and his crest faded out to a dusty pink.
“Perhaps we could freeze the jammer?” Omma said into the tense silence.
“I’ll start looking into our manuals and see what we can come up with.” Walvis unfolded.
“Thank you, Sadie,” Leader Bato said in what was clearly a dismissal.
Chiro released Sadie’s shoulders. She realized he’d been touching her and she hadn’t even really cared.
She stared down at her grimy toes. She didn’t want to go back to the medical room and be useless again. She looked again at the device, and a crazy idea started to form in her head.
“Wait,” she said. “They got you jammed right? And in a net? They’re just gonna blow you away if they can’t board. You gotta get that net free and get rid of the jammer. I can do both.” She took as deep a breath as the weird plastic mask would allow and poked her tongue into the thin membrane as it sucked back between her lips.
Chiro placed a hand back on her shoulder. “Sadie,” he began.
“What’s your plan?” Leader Bato asked, cocking his oblong head to one side so that it rested awkwardly along one rubbery shoulder.
“What do you want if it succeeds? And how many of us do you want to put in danger?” That was Pyro, still hunched against the wall and turning red again.
Sadie wanted to stick her tongue out at him again but was pretty sure the membrane mask thingy wouldn’t let her. So she ignored him and looked at Leader Bato.
“I will be the only one in danger. Well, if the first part works out okay anyway. And…” She paused and glanced up at Chiro. One, two, three, four, five, she thought. You can do this. “If it works, if I free your ship, I want to come with you. At least to the next station. But I need to get to Mirzam. That’s where they sign up people for the freighters.”
Bato’s skin rippled through multiple colors as he stared at her. Finally he blinked and straightened up. “We’ll be at Mirzam three stops from now. Tell me this plan.”
* * *
Walvis looked even stranger in his protective suit. His tentacle legs were wrapped in hard plastic, which gave his movements a jerking awkwardness that was almost worse than the usual boneless falling forward. They’d finished building a mold around the jammer. If this part worked, they’d have the thing stabilized enough to move it out of the ship. But if this failed… Sadie peeked around the door and held her breath as she counted, slowly.
Walvis poured the thick gel into the mold. After what felt like eternity—and was certainly long enough that Sadie couldn’t hold her breath anymore—he set down the canister and started unscrewing the mold. The jammer was now completely encased in violet gel. Chiro had explained to her that the gel in the tank was used to suspend injured Teuthiads and take weight off their delicate inner structures in case of injury. Mixed with a compound provided by Omma, the gel would firm up even more, stabilizing the device enough that it could be gently moved around. Sadie hoped that it would be enough to disrupt the circuitry of the jammer without tripping the tamper switch. They’d have to keep the device level, however, which is where the second stage came in.
Omma entered the mechanical room with four slender poles. The two mechanics carefully inserted the poles into each side of the newly formed cube. Then they gently lifted it, keeping the device as level as possible.
Chiro touched Sadie’s shoulder as she backed away from the door to let them through. “Come, Sadie. We’ve got to get you into that pressure suit.”
Sadie nodded, secretly wishing she hadn’t managed to be so convincing. She’d insisted that it was she who had to take the jammer bomb over to the pirate ship. But her logic was sound. She knew what the human technology looked like; she’d probably be able to figure out what panel to open and where to place the bomb. Too smart for my own good, that’s what Kip would say.
The dead pirate’s pressure suit seemed to be in good condition. Chiro had pulled it off the body while she was busy with the mechanics, and she was grateful for that, though she’d never admit it aloud. Unfortunately, the suit was way too big for her. She adjusted what parts of it she could and decided that it would have to do. At least the helmet fit her okay. Chiro must have washed the blood out of it—she could smell chemicals, and there were a couple of streaks on the visor as though from drying water.
As she stomped down the white hallway after Chiro’s color-changing shell, she poked at the wrist display until she got it to show in binary. She had over a standard hour of air, which was good. She hoped this wouldn’t take that long.
They reached the airlock where Omma and Walvis waited with Pyro and the jammer bomb. Sadie pressurized the suit, turning on her air and starting her countdown. The suit made disturbing squeaky noises as the loose folds around her shoulders and knees shifted around. She hoped this thing was actually going to work. Otherwise, her head would probably explode.
“Your head won’t explode, though your eyes will likely—” Pyro started.
“Pyro, hush,” Chiro said.
“Ready?” Walvis asked her.
“Tip top, Walvis.” Sadie smiled at him and wished that he could smile back. She thought she could really use a big smile from someone right about now.
She checked her tether as Omma finished securing it to the suit. The suit had thrusters, but the battery was low and she wanted to save it for moving into position once she figured out where the net was extending from.
She shuffled into the airlock and gripped two of the handles on the jammer bomb. The airlock gently depressurized. She thought she heard someone, maybe Pyro, ask “Is she counting?” and then the outer doors slid open and she pushed off, drifting out toward the pirate ship.
The first thing she noticed was how dark the sky seemed. Space, dummy, she told herself. She’d expected it to have more stars in it. The pirate ship wasn’t too far above the Myopsina. It loomed there, a dark shape just out of reach of the running lights on the outside of the Teuthiads’ ship. She looked behind her and was surprised. She’d expected the Myopsina to be white on the outside like it was everywhere she’d been on the inside. Instead, it had a dull silvery tint to its oblong exterior. She watched cargo containers started to drift outward from the ship. They’d been released just before she was. This was a distraction they’d planned so that she’d have time to attach the b
omb without, hopefully, the pirates noticing her presence.
Sadie knew that a ship-catching net wasn’t really a net but actually an energy field, but she’d still hoped that there’d be some obvious physical manifestation she could trace back to its source. But she could see nothing, just the dark shape of the pirate ship looming above her. There’s no up in space, she thought, but it felt like up. Her stomach twisted around the water she’d drunk earlier, and she was suddenly glad she’d decided not to eat anything before this mission.
She was very close now to the pirate ship hull. She could see different arrays along its surface as it grew to fill her vision. Sadie watched carefully for any sign of the net, futilely hoping that they’d have handy binary signs painted next to each array. Man-o, she thought, no such luck.
Her tether spiraled out behind her, nearly invisible in the dark emptiness. She couldn’t go back, not with the jammer bomb. She supposed she could just let go of it and hope she pulled herself far enough away before it hit the pirate ship. She didn’t think it would do any damage to the hull, though. She bit her lip, hard.
Sadie was only a few arms’ lengths away from the ship now. She punched in a command on her suit and her helmet lamp flicked on. She hoped she was close enough that no one would notice a light down here.
She guessed that one array was the communications equipment, and two others looked an awful lot like gun portals of some sort. She wasn’t even sure the array for the net would be on the underside of the ship, but she didn’t want to try to crawl around the hull and find more. She looked at the bomb floating just in front of her.
“I’m sorry, Chiro and all the Crawlies,” she whispered. “I guess I’m not so smart after all.” She’d been so sure she could figure out the net. Morrisey’d always said she was a natural; she had a gift for tech. He wouldn’t have taught her otherwise. Even Kip had her fix stuff all the time, and he’d let her help with loads of jobs that needed breaking or rewiring.
She shifted the bomb to prevent it from bumping into the hull. Her body rested against the pirate ship and she blinked away more tears. It wasn’t fair. She couldn’t let them all be blown to bits because she was too stupid to figure this out. She took big deep breaths and started counting. She could solve this. Somehow.