by Tim Pratt
Chapter Thirty
Everything went smoothly at first. She rode on the back of a bio-drone Uzoma had retasked from the control room, deep into the station. She didn’t have time to sightsee, and that was just as well. The drone dropped out of the tunnels at various points to traverse portions of the station that had once been occupied, and Callie glimpsed things that baffled or horrified her or both: a room full of immense aquarium tanks, full of bubbling green liquid. A wall that looked like quicksilver, rippling and reflective. She passed a door that opened onto rocky terrain under a greenish sky, with a sun hanging fat and pale on the horizon. (Callie hoped it was a special effect and not an actual miniaturized star, or they might accidentally cause a supernova. Probably Uzoma would have mentioned if that was a possibility.) One room was full of empty cages, with bars made of light. One was full of things that actually looked like egg sacs, piled high and lumpy and silky-white to the far-off ceiling. Another held an incinerator with an eternally burning flame at its heart. Another held a kaiju-high pile of small bones. Eventually Callie stopped looking to the sides, and kept her eyes on the corridor ahead.
The kaiju dropped her off by a little hole in the wall: her tunnel access. The map in her HUD showed her where to crawl, and the going was merely tedious, not difficult. The distance was only a hundred meters or so. The tunnel led to a small round chamber about the size of a pup tent. She looked around, found the panel she wanted, and slid it open, revealing a connecting shaft. Once she was done, she’d launch herself down that shaft, which would take her to a perpendicular tunnel where a bio-drone would be waiting to speed her to the minimum safe distance so she could teleport away.
Callie went to work. A schematic popped up on her display, and she pushed open panels until she found a length of fat conduit wrapped in some insulating substance that shone a luminous green. She took a moment to review her exfiltration plan, pointed her energy weapon at the conduit, turned her head away, and fired.
The superheated plasma ate through the conduit nicely, severing the connection immediately. The repair bots would be on their way, and fast. Callie tapped at the tablet mounted on her left forearm, just above the teleporter on her wrist. The symbols didn’t mean anything to her, just alien geometries, but she hit them in the simple three-figure sequence she’d been taught.
Nothing happened, as far as she could tell, but if Ashok and Uzoma had done their job right, the station would be tearing itself apart with assorted wormholes now – and none of the wormholes would appear on top of her.
She slipped through the hole into the shaft, orienting herself so it felt like she was swimming down, and kicked off hard. She had a small amount of propellant in her suit, enough to send her cruising rapidly through the gravity-less vacuum. In moments the pinprick of the distant opening to the bio-drone’s tunnel grew to the size of a beach ball, and then a hot tub, and she was through. There was gravity inside that tunnel, but she was prepared for that, so she ducked and rolled and bounced to her feet.
The bio-drone was waiting, and if Ashok’s estimate was right, she had about eight minutes of travel ahead of her, and ten minutes to cover it. Plenty of time. The drone was supposed to scoop her up, and run, and when her timer hit zero, she was supposed to teleport right out of its belly, straight out and away to maximum range.
Then the walls of the tunnel began to flash various colors, red and orange and indigo, and instead of picking her up and carrying her to safety, the bio-drone turned and ran the wrong way down the tunnel.
Callie stared after the drone as it disappeared around a curve. Shit. Some kind of “the sky is falling” emergency protocol probably, overriding its programming. The timer clicked on in her heads up display. Just over nine minutes now, to travel a distance that would take eight minutes by bio-drone. She could not run as fast as a kaiju, especially in an environment suit.
I promise not to die.
She started running.
The tunnel vibrated, and continued to flash warning colors. Titanic and terrible things were happening in the station all around her, and the trauma was transmitted through the walls and ceiling and floor, with vibrations shaking her boots. The gravity suddenly stopped working, right in mid-stride: Callie took a step, and then she was flying, launched up and forward instead of merely forward. Her trajectory was bad, and she had to twist to avoid hitting her head on the tunnel ceiling, catching the blow painfully on her shoulder instead. She spun and scrabbled and tried to find a way to propel herself along the tunnel, trying to figure out if she could go faster in weightlessness than she had in gravity, and if she could go fast enough for it to matter, as the timer in the corner of her eye clicked down and down and down.
She knew she couldn’t possibly make it, but Callie was who she was, so she caught her fingertips on a seam in the tunnel ceiling and hauled herself forward, launching herself along the tunnel.
The corridor curved downward (based on her old frame of gravitational reference), which would have given her a nice little speed boost if she’d been on foot. Not enough to matter, but she would have died with a feeling of exhilaration and progress, maybe. The station was shaking much more badly now, and she bumped against the tunnel walls as they trembled. The timer in her field of vision was getting down to within a minute of Ashok’s best guess for when the whole station would be ripped into tiny chunks of debris.
Then Shall dropped out of a connecting tunnel above her, grabbed her with enfolding arms, and pressed her to his mechanical belly. He maneuvered with his thrusters on full burn. Shall’s body was designed to zip around in vacuum and fix damaged ships in dry dock or drifting in space, and he had large reservoirs of propellant. He was going through them, accelerating constantly, and Callie let out a whoop in her helmet. “What are you doing here?”
“Saving you.”
“How did you even get way the hell over here?”
“I yelled at Lantern until she found me an access point that would intersect your path, then I jumped off the canoe and flew around the outside of the station until I found the door, and then I came looking for you. I’m glad I did. I see you missed your ride. I was afraid of something like that. I had a bad feeling.”
“You’re a hull repair drone. You’re not supposed to have feelings.”
“I am many things. Hull repair drone is just my current occupation. We’re almost at minimum safe distance. Are you ready to jump?”
“I don’t think the teleport will take you too.”
“Sorry. You’ll have to buy a new repair drone. This is goodbye. I’m not connected to the ship at the moment, and this local node of my consciousness will never be integrated back into the whole, so if you have any secrets you want to spill–”
“I never stopped loving you, Michael. It just hurt too much.”
“I know, Callie. I hate myself. And by ‘myself,’ I mean the biological specimen my mind is based on. Fuck that guy.”
“I know, right?” Callie’s timer was almost at zero. She wiggled her arm, and Shall shifted to give her the necessary freedom of motion to push the teleport button on her wrist.
Then a wormhole formed in the air just a few meters in front of them, breaching the tunnel from side to side. The walls cracked like a teacup hit with a hammer, and the air rushed out into the vacuum, hungry black on all sides. Callie caught a glimpse of spinning silver towers and fragments of metal and scores of spreading inkblots of darkness opening all around her, tendrils drifting like the fronds of strange abyssal jellyfish. Shall’s momentum was too great to avoid the wormhole, so they flew straight inside, on through the bridgehead.
Shall was trying to brake, which in practice meant thrusting in reverse, so their progress through the bridge was slow, far slower than even the stately plodding of the White Raven through the bridges; slow for a starship was still fast for a person. Individuals had flown through the twenty-nine established bridges before, in vacuum suits, but there was nothing to see inside them, because they were all lightless.
In between most of the glowing rings, the tunnel was made of a greasy-looking black substance, just like their bridge generator or Callie’s personal teleporter. (She briefly wondered what would happen if she triggered that here, in this place, and decided she didn’t want to find out as badly as she wanted to stay alive, and the two were probably incompatible.)
One of the rings of light was broken, stuttering and flashing, and she wondered if that was the case on every trip, and they’d just passed it too quickly to notice before. What did it mean, if the infrastructure here was failing, even in such a small way?
Beyond the malfunctioning ring of light, in the greasy black space before the next band of brightness, a portion of the tunnel looked different. The changed area was a segment of the curve that occupied perhaps forty-five of the available three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. Callie happened to be looking straight down at that segment, still clutched tight to Shall’s underside.
That one section of the tunnel looked like a window. There was something behind it: something dark, and slumped, and rounded. It was mostly in shadow, but it seemed to be gazing at her with a single fist-sized eye the blue of Cherenkov radiation. The eye appeared to track her movement, and she twisted her head to stare back, but then the window, if that’s what it was, slid closed.
Even though they were moving slowly, the trip took as long as it always did: twenty-one seconds. Bridge travel was entirely a matter of time, and not distance, it seemed.
Callie was fairly sure she’d take her strange vision of the blue eye in the tunnel to her doom, since she expected to emerge in the midst of cataclysm. They’d set each ship to open a wormhole in its immediate vicinity – call that point A – with the other end of the wormhole opening at another point in the station, ideally in places where the branching tunnels joined – call that point B. They’d passed through a point B, which meant they would emerge at a point A, back in the remains of the hangar, where hundreds of ships had just been torn apart. There would be flying debris, strange radiation, fragments of brain-spiders – who knew what hazards. Callie didn’t dare hit her teleport until she’d emerged fully from the bridge, and her finger was poised to do so, but would her reaction time be fast enough to spare her death by flying metal?
It was, but only because Shall protected her. The hull repair drone was pelted by debris immediately, and spun wildly around, but he flung out all his many manipulator arms and batted away the floating remnants of any ships that entered his vicinity. The right chunk of metal at the correct angle and velocity could have holed Callie like a bullet, but Shall took care of the bigger pieces, and she got lucky.
“Love you,” she said, and jumped.
* * *
“No sign of the captain.” Ashok’s voice crackled on the comms from the canoe, where he waited at Callie’s expected point of arrival.
“Where is she?” Elena was in the cockpit of the White Raven with Drake and Janice, watching out the viewport as the Axiom station was destroyed, her eyes straining for a speck she wouldn’t possibly be able to make out: one human, floating. She couldn’t even see the canoe. But she didn’t stop looking.
“Callie is ten seconds late, which means she either didn’t make it, or she jumped to the wrong place,” Janice said.
Elena didn’t answer. The station had come apart like… like… like nothing she had a comparison for. Wormholes had opened by their hundreds in one small region of space, and geysers and fountains of matter had blown out in all directions. Then corresponding hundreds of other wormholes had appeared at every junction and many of the straightaways of the vast interconnected anthill of the station. There were combustible and explosive things in many of those sections, judging by how utterly vaporized they were. There would be a debris field, and a large one, but not even the best forensic computer would be able to reconstruct what that mess of fragments had originally been.
They all stared at the silent majesty of the devastation, with a growing sense of corresponding personal loss that was no less devastating in its way.
Then something went “boop.”
“Callie’s transponder!” Drake said. “Ashok, she’s way the hell in the wrong direction, I don’t know what happened, but we’re closer than the canoe. We’ll pick her up. Converge at these coordinates.”
* * *
Elena was waiting at the airlock when Callie floated in, and Elena was the one who helped her out of her suit, who checked her over for bruises, who covered her in kisses, who hugged her and then stopped hugging when Callie said “Ow,” and who took her to her quarters after Callie gave her last order before falling asleep: “Drake, Janice – take us back home.”
* * *
Elena left Callie alone in her quarters after a while to go check on Sebastien and her other crewmates. Callie was exhausted and grimy, the exhilaration of near-death draining out of her as her body tried to balance itself again chemically. She couldn’t sleep until she got word that they’d successfully traveled via bridge back to Trans-Neptunian Space, emerging in the same spot the Anjou had just a few days ago. She ordered everyone to stand down, get some rest, get some food, do whatever they needed to do, ahead of an all-hands meeting to discuss their future.
She certainly needed sleep, but it wouldn’t come. “Shall?”
“Yes, Callie?”
“I’m guessing the hull repair drone was destroyed?”
“It took a lot of hard hits, I’m afraid. Came apart completely. But I shut down its copy of my consciousness first, so there was no suffering.”
“It – you – saved my life.”
“A purely selfish act. Without you, Stephen would be in charge, and he’d park the White Raven in orbit around some Jovian moon and never take me anywhere interesting. I wouldn’t have any fun.”
“Did you, ah, synch up with the drone’s memories when it came out of the bridge?”
“I did. Reconnection happens automatically, whenever communication is possible. But there’s a keyword system, and I detected a slightly ambiguous request for confidentiality. I err on the side of caution so I encrypted that portion of the information, and never experienced it consciously. Whatever you said to the drone, thinking it would go with me to my robot grave, is still secret.” He paused. “Unless you want me to hear it?”
“It was just a lot of really filthy sexy dirty talk. You wouldn’t be interested. Do you remember going through the tunnel with me, though?”
“I do. That was harrowing.”
“Could you see anything in there?” Thinking of that single glowing blue eye.
“No, as usual, it was totally blank to my sensors. I wonder if Ashok could wire some biological eyes onto a drone so I could see the lights in the tunnel, and the other things the Axiom tries to hide from mechanical sensors. We’d have to get our hands on some eyes, of course. Liars seem to have as many as they want. They must grow them in a lab.”
“Definitely something to consider. If you like considering disgusting science abominations. Good night, Shall. I’m going to get some sleep.”
After a few hours of fitful slumber, she gave up on the effort and went to the infirmary. Robin was floating near the ceiling, chatting with Stephen: “No, my parents handled my transition pretty well. I think it helped that I kept my first name, Robin, and just changed my middle name. They messed up the pronouns sometimes, but at least they didn’t–” She looked up when Callie came in. “Captain! I haven’t had a chance to thank you for… all that. I fully expected a slow and miserable death. You’re amazing.”
“I just ran to and fro. Other people did all the work. Do you have a minute, Stephen?”
Robin excused herself to go in search of more coffee. The infirmary was otherwise quiet. Sebastien hadn’t awakened yet, though his vitals were good, and Ibn was hermiting away in Elena’s room, since
Elena was happy enough to bunk with Callie.
“She’s going to drink all our coffee,” Stephen said. “Nice woman, but insatiable.”
“How are you?”
He shrugged. “I have too many patients, one of whom has a robot spider clamped to his head and might wake up and try to murder us all, which is why he’s strapped to his bed. My bigger problem is I missed the festival, which has thrown off decades of careful cultivation of my brain chemistry and my spiritual life, and I feel a yawning chasm of despair before me. I would like to fix that when I get home. Except my other big problem is: I am homeless.”
“I was thinking about that,” Callie said. “We need a home base. We can’t all stay here. Me and Elena doubled up, Robin in Ashok’s quarters, Ashok sleeping in the machine shop with Lantern, Uzoma just kind of floating around wherever… Even if the Anjou people decide to move on, the rest of us have to figure out something long-term.”
“What long-term are we talking about? Are you planning to rebuild the Trans-Neptunian Authority from scratch?”
“No, I’m thinking more of a freelance life. I don’t want to move to the Imperative, though. They have too many rules, and they won’t give me any decent security work, because they won’t trust me as a former TNA officer, even of the occasional contract variety.”
“Where else? The asteroid belt? Not the inner planets? Did you want to settle in a colony system?”
“None of the above. I have some thoughts.”
“Are they dangerous thoughts?”
“Usually.”
“Then you’re lucky you have a doctor on board.” He paused. “I mean me. No disrespect to Doctor Oh.”
“Ashok has a doctorate too, you know.”
Stephen made a face. “In engineering. From Lunar University.”
“Are you willing to stay on as my XO, even though we don’t have any authority or legal standing to shoot at anybody anymore? We’re not quite going rogue, but only because there’s not really a government left for us to go rogue from.”