Keystones: Tau Prime

by Alexander McKinney

  Yellow Sparks

  Deklan made his way to Serenity’s damaged gravity wheel and into the medical bay. If he didn’t get his suit off soon, he was going to run out of air. He pressed down on the releases for his helmet and heard the atmosphere change. He lifted the helmet with one hand, scraping it against his ear in the process. At least now he wasn’t going to suffocate.

  Having just thrown a bomb into the belly of an alien ship, reflected Deklan, he could deal with his shoulder. “Calm, can you send someone to help me? I’ve got a dislocated shoulder, and my EVA suit is dead. I can’t take it off on my own.” He winced while thinking about what was to come next.

  Jamie burst through the medical bay’s doorway, holding her helmet in one hand and looking terrible. Her face was in flux. It melted to nothing and reformed, her eyes, nose, and mouth disappearing and reappearing. She showed no pain, but when her features were present they showed terror.

  “Hello, Slate,” said Deklan, “or should I call you Annie?”

  Jamie’s voice lacked its characteristic confidence. “Who’s Annie?” she replied.

  Deklan tilted his head to look at her. She had stabilized. Her skin was like fresh snow, and she had just one eye showing over her nose. “You really don’t know?” asked Deklan. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her.

  “No. Who’s Annie?” Her solitary eye burned with intensity.

  Deklan had been sure that she was Slate, but she looked clueless and confused. At any other time he would have paused to work things out. Grabbing her by the chin and looking her in the eye, he instead said with firmness, “Jamie, we don’t have time for games. I need you to focus. I need you to get me out of this suit.”

  She nodded her head and breathed in four times before exhaling. “Okay.” She looked around the room. “It’s harder in zero gravity. We’ll need to strap you in, and then I can pull.”

  Deklan didn’t like the sound of that, but he lay down on the table where they’d drained his blood after the visit to Exo.

  Jamie fastened straps over Deklan’s waist, planted her feet, and reached for his arm. “Deklan, I’m going to do this on three, okay?”

  Deklan nodded, not wanting to say yes.

  Her voice quavered. “One, two.” She pulled.

  All of the pain from every second since he’d dislocated his shoulder revisited Deklan, condensed into one moment.

  “Mr. Tobin, I heard screaming. What’s happening?” Calm sounded harried and tense over the com system. Deklan hadn’t heard him sound like that before.

  “It’s fine. Jamie’s. . . .” Deklan’s voice trailed off. Jamie’s eye and nose merged into her blank face before all of her features came back and her skin regained some of its healthy glow. “Jamie’s here helping me.”

  There was a distinct pause before Calm replied, “Copy that. Call if you need assistance.”

  Deklan rolled his shoulder. It was painful but manageable. Now for his other injury. He closed his eyes and pretended that he was far away. “Jamie, can you look at my leg too?”

  “Your leg?” Her voice was back to normal.

  Deklan stared at the ceiling and divorced himself from his words. “My suit has a leak near my left foot.” He took another breath. “I can’t move my foot anymore.”

  Jamie didn’t say anything but set to work at the console. Multi-jointed robotic arms sprang out from the table, hovered over Deklan’s leg, and rapidly cut his suit with green lasers. The procedure was carried out with such precision that Deklan, even though the smell of his burning suit filled the chamber, felt no heat. The cutting completed, Deklan was surprised to see a trio of secondary arms emerge from behind each laser and snatch up the scraps of material from his leg.

  The arms’ retraction into the table left him with a clear view of his foot. It looked dead. Jamie tapped at the frozen flesh. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You healed from the bullets so quickly.”

  Her words took Deklan to another time and place. Bullet after bullet had been pumped into his chest while Slate tossed a man through the air. “So you are Slate,” he remarked, his voice quiet and low, almost a whisper.

  “What?” Jamie’s eyebrows furrowed.

  “When did you see me shot?” asked Deklan in the same hushed tone.

  Jamie grew suddenly still. “Well, I. . . .” She shook her head, a violent action that rejected everything. “No! We don’t have time for you to confuse me.” Her hands came up to her face and then ran through her hair. She turned away from Deklan so that he couldn’t see her face. “We . . . we need to work on the ship.” She shook her head again and turned back to him. “There have been glitches.” Her wide eyes held only tiny vestiges of sanity.

  Deklan didn’t like the sound of that. It didn’t bode well for the chance of escape. Still, he needed her to deal with his leg. He patted his upper thigh, unable to reach further. “What can you do for this?” he asked.

  Jamie shook her head. “In the short term? Nothing. You’ll probably heal faster than anything I could do.” She rubbed her chin. “I can give you a local anesthetic to stop the tissue above it from feeling pain when whatever is still alive thaws.”

  Deklan covered his face with his hands, tired beyond words. “Do it.”

  She didn’t answer, but he felt something cool and hard press against his leg.

  He didn’t take his hands off his face. “Glitches?” he asked.

  Jamie’s sigh carried undertones of fear and worry. “The fusion engines went offline and had to be restarted. We’ve also had trouble with the lights, not to mention damage to this gravity wheel from the attack.”

  Deklan didn’t ask for more details. It sounded as though they would only depress him.

  Jamie was silent, and then she groaned. “Your release isn’t working.”

  Deklan looked at Jamie from under a single lowered eyebrow. “Then have the table cut the straps off me.”

  She shook her head. “It’s programmed not to do that.”

  Deklan wanted to get off the table. Slate would be able to help him in an instant. Maybe it was time to test Jamie. “Then you’re going to need to pull the straps off me.”

  Jamie looked confused. “Pull them off you?”

  Deklan nodded. “Give it a try.”

  “No. They’re designed to restrain people struggling to escape. There’s no way that I can just pull them off.”

  “Jamie, we’re being chased by an alien ship. Every second that we’re in here is another second they have to catch us. If there are glitches all over the ship and you don’t help me, we might all die.” His final words came out as angry barks.

  Her hands curled around the strap at his waist and then paused. “This is stupid.”

  Deklan pointed at her and said, “Pull.”

  Jamie shrugged, as though she were about to do something just to humor someone else. With a squeal of tearing steel, the strap tore free of its moorings at the edge of the table.

  Deklan sat up and looked at the table’s sides, where metallic petals were curled up like ruined flowers.

  Jamie now floated in the air, all of her features missing before in another second they reappeared. With her face back she looked shocked. Her hands were still clenched around the straps. “That’s not possible,” Jamie said in amazement.

  Deklan placed his left hand on her arm and peered into her eyes. “It is. You’re a Keystone and a powerful one.”

  Jamie returned his gaze. “The first time we met,” she said remembering, “you . . . you were bleeding on the ground.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I was, but tell me about these glitches.”

  Her mouth hung open like that of a hungry baby bird before it snapped shut. “We can see all the problems on the bridge.”

  Deklan pulled her along with him. “I need an EVA suit. I’ll meet you on the bridge.” He slammed a hand down on the intercom. “Calm, Jamie’s heading to the bridge to lend a hand. I’ll be there as soon as I get a new EVA suit.”

  �
��Skip it,” replied Calm. “You can get the suit later. I need you now. Watch your screen.”

  An image of Serenity appeared with dead systems throughout the ship. A handful of other systems were borderline. Deklan’s eyes zeroed in on an indication of life-support capability, which verged on red. “Calm,” he said, “I need a suit. If life support fails, I die.”

  Calm still sounded curt. “Yes, fine. Dr. Beal, get to engineering and life support. Run some diagnostics. Mr. Tobin, I need you to go with her and run a systems check on our engines. They failed once, and I need them purring right now.”

  Deklan and Jamie exchanged glances, nodded at each other, and bolted for the door. Deklan stopped at the EVA locker, and Jamie hurried past him. He shoved his frozen foot down a pant leg and hoped that he hadn’t snapped anything off in his haste. His shoulder punished him less than he feared when he slipped it into the new suit.

  As a new klaxon blared, Deklan pushed off with his helmet in hand and his seals unfastened. The environmental controls and engineering sections were just down the hall.

  Engineering was a no-frills room filled with screens and bulkheads. Deklan had spent hours there trying to familiarize himself with the equipment in the case of a disaster like this one, but none of it felt like enough preparation. Jamie stood there by a console. Her head was craned back, and her hands flew over a keyboard. A green leaf lit the top left of the screen. When systems were running at their optimal levels, it spun inside a blue-tinged bubble. The leaf on Jamie’s screen was inside a bubble that flashed red.

  Deklan sealed his helmet and ran a pressure test on his suit. Blue bars stacked to the side of his faceplate informed him that all its systems were functioning at optimal levels. Reassured, he turned to the engine console with the intent of running a diagnostic. When his gloved fingers touched the screen, a burst of yellow exploded from the console, slamming him against the far bulkhead.

  A line of yellow light arced from the station, hit the floor, and curved away before streaking out the door. Deklan clutched at the wall, his jaw agape.

  Jamie backed herself against a hard surface. “Deklan,” she said, “please tell me you know what that was.”

  He could only shake his head as the lights in the hallway went dark. “No, I don’t have the faintest idea.” Despite what Cheshire had told him, he wasn’t going to confide to the others that the ongoing glitches were the result of a parasite that lived inside wormholes.

  When he floated back to the diagnostics console he’d been using, the screen was dark and cracked. Shards hung in the air, but he pushed them aside to touch what was left. There was no response. The console was dead.

  You could run diagnostics from any station if the equipment was still functional. Deklan didn’t dare breathe as he tried another screen, only to receive an error message. Deklan didn’t know what to do.

  Jamie dashed to where he was standing and ran her fingers down the sides of the diagnostics console to pry open an access panel. Underneath it was a simple setup: three dead lights and a large red lever. She pulled the lever down and let go of it. Heartbeats later the lever went back to its starting position, and the lights flickered to life in a sequence from green to yellow to red. The lights stopped on red.

  The screen that Deklan had used a moment earlier stopped displaying an error message and showed a schematic of the ship’s engines. The twin engines were both functioning in the red zone because they were being operated at speeds beyond their design parameters.

  Deklan punched the com system. “Calm, I’m seeing red-zone activity from the engines. You’ve got to ease off.”

  Calm didn’t answer, but another screen in the engineering bay lit up with a view from the ship’s rear. It showed a stream of icebergs being left behind one at a time. And they were far away. Most had vanished behind a curve in the wormhole.

  Then the screen zoomed closer, focusing on the bend of the wormhole. Iceberg after iceberg shot from the hidden portion of the tunnel and flew into the pulsing wall. Each disappeared into the purple with a flare of bright light.

  Calm’s voice again sounded harried, but no worse than before. “We didn’t program the probes to do that,” he said.

  Deklan understood his implication. If they weren’t moving the icebergs, the aliens were.

  “Do what you can for the engines,” added Calm. He was right: all that mattered was that the engines kept running.

  The screen flashed red, and the port engine went black. New error messages appeared: “Port Engine Coupling Failure,” “Port Engine Coupling Failure.” Deklan could see that Calm was redirecting energy to the starboard engine. Red warning lights flashed on the schematics, and the engine dipped further into the red zone of its operating parameters.

  “Mr. Tobin, I need you to. . . .”

  Deklan already knew what Calm wanted. “I’m on it,” he replied. Deklan then turned to Jamie. “Forget life support. We’re all in suits.” He jerked his head to the left. “Let’s go.”

  For once Jamie didn’t argue but just followed him down the hallway. Deklan was glad they were in zero gravity; otherwise his foot would have been a major problem. The engine rooms were on the port and starboard sides of the shuttle bay. They had to go there and see what could be done.

  In the shuttle bay Deklan found Jonny clinging limply to a wall. An iceberg hung in the vacuum nearby, and the bay’s doors were open to space. “Jamie, help him,” Deklan directed.

  The faceplate of his EVA suit was lit with instructions on how to proceed with basic repairs, but first he had to reach the port engine room. The access hatch to it could be sealed if the shuttle bay was open to space. Because it was sealed now, he had to activate the override to vent the atmosphere or otherwise close the bay’s doors.

  Deklan activated the command that sealed off the shuttle bay. After its doors closed, the room pressurized. Deklan hoped that it didn’t overtax the environmental systems. Controls for the port engine room recognized the environmental change and cycled open its entranceway.

  The room had two levels. The engine itself on the lower level was long and cylindrical, with a surface covered in pipes and moving parts that Deklan didn’t recognize even after hours of reading manuals. The room’s higher level overlooked the top of the engine. Besides a multitude of handholds and storage cupboard for spare parts, there was little else.

  Deklan’s faceplate lit up with a red overlay showing the problem. The coupling where the cylinder mated with the reactor cable was a melted and charred mess. That wouldn’t have occurred if the room had been open to a vacuum. The charring was limited to a single part, less than four times the width of Deklan’s hand, but without it the engine couldn’t run.

  If this had happened to the first engine, the second couldn’t be far behind. “Calm,” he yelled over the intercom, “vent the atmosphere in the starboard engine room.”

  An engineer would have known where to find a coupling. Deklan tore open every cupboard, ignoring the complaints from his shoulder. Hundreds of parts were there, but none resembled engine couplings.

  “Jamie!” shouted Deklan over the com system. “Help! I can’t find an engine coupling.”

  Jamie’s reply was terse: “Busy here.”

  Deklan grabbed the side of the engine and swung past it to the lower level. Like the upper level of the room, it was stripped of all but the essentials. There were three screens and lots of cupboards. Above him was the engine. From below the damage didn’t look so bad, the blackening not extending beneath the coupling.

  “If you can’t find the part, jury-rig something,” advised Calm.

  Deklan was at a complete loss about how to jury-rig a coupling. “I’m a lawyer,” he replied, “not an engineer!”

  “Do something fast. We’ve slowed down.”

  None of the cupboards were labeled, and Deklan flung all of them open. His faceplate highlighted something, giving it a red overlay. Couplings! There were three of them, small and unremarkable-looking. It was hard to bel
ieve that the fate of the ship rested on them. Deklan took one.

  As he pressed off from the floor, he felt something give way in his left boot. He ground his teeth. Some part of him had just chipped off. A second later he gripped the engine with one hand and held the replacement coupling in another. His fingers pulled him to the top of the engine and the site of the scorched part. Repair instructions and schematics on his faceplate showed a manual release process. He let go of the new part and let it float next to him. With two hands free he gripped the coupling and pulled. Pain flared in his right shoulder, tearing and sharp. He knew that he should stop but continued anyway.

  Nothing happened: the burnt coupling stayed in place. Deklan braced his feet against the reactor cable and pulled until the tendons in his neck strained against the skin. When the coupling finally gave way, its release sent Deklan tumbling head over heels to the room’s ceiling.

  Deklan abandoned the ruined coupling and dove back to his replacement part. The mounting for the coupling was blackened but looked still functional. With steady hands he aligned the coupling and locked it into place.

  Deklan felt the hum of energy begin its flow into the damaged drive. A yellow light flared at the coupling and suffused the gyroscopic portion of the engine. This was not how the drive was supposed to function. The yellow grew brighter and brighter. Then the sensors in his faceplate started to compensate and failed.

  Blinded by the light, Deklan fumbled for the coupling as warnings sounded in his ears. With both hands wrapped around the coupling, he pulled. The coupling came out of place with almost no resistance, and the yellow haze in the room diminished but didn’t vanish completely. An arc of pulsing yellow light connected the coupling in Deklan’s hands to the reactor cable.

  Calm’s voice shouted, “Incoming!” It was the first time that Deklan had heard him yell.

  Deklan had just enough time to see the tip of one arm loom large on a screen before the whole ship shook and the walls around him dimpled. Black hooks shrouded in green light pierced the walls and ripped the room open to space. Atmospheric venting carried him out, and he hit one of the invading entities.