by JournalStone
He grins. “Hell yeah! Can you believe it? Museum-quality. Totally intact.” his face changes. “But it’s mine, you hear? We found it.”
“Not here for the salvage,” I reassure him. A Betty like that’s worth a good ten, eleven figures. Only natural he’d be wary. Especially a guy like Taylor.
“Where’d you find her?”
“Pretty much right here,” he says. “We sort of stumbled on her—a distress call, real weak. Matched speeds and brought her on board. Slid her into the ballroom—that was Linda’s idea. Is she ok?”
“She’s safe,” I nod. “What’d you do after you brought her in? Open her up?”
“Damned skippy,” he says, “You think I’m going to haul her home with a couple of forty-year-old corpses still inside?”
Forty years. Has it been so long?
“Besides,” says Taylor, “I’m as agnostic as the next guy but a man deserves a funeral.”
I respect that. Grudgingly but there it is. It’s more than I would’ve expected from a guy like Taylor. I guess I should do the same for him.
“Poor guys must have been freeze-dried,” I say. Better than the alternative. Bacteria takes a while to get at you in zero-G but when they do, it’s a mess. Taylor shakes his head—the simulated one.
“That was the weirdest thing. We cracked her open and she had full pressure—you could hear the hiss and smell the dust when we opened her up—but there wasn’t anyone inside. I’ve never seen anything like it. Three-quarter fuel, slag topped off, Hopper full of BB’s, safety still on; but nobody home. Linda figured it must’ve been blasted straight out of a hangar, in a blowout or something.”
That doesn’t sit right with me. A Betty at three-quarter fuel? Unlikely. On deck, she’s full, empty or latched onto a pump. And slag? For nanobots? Betties didn’t have bots. Weren’t even standard issue till the end of the war and by then we’d given up on Betties.
“Hang on,” I say, “You had pressure on the Betty? Air inside?”
“Sure,” says Taylor, “She out-gassed when we cracked her open.”
“Fuck.” I swore. I left him there. Left Smitty. Started running. “Smitty go back to the ship,” I shout over my shoulder. I hit the intercom. “Fire her up, Jaz, We gotta clear out.” Nothing. “Jaz, you hear me?” Never mind. Smitty will tell her. Me, I’m bolting for the ballroom, my head ringing with a stupid story I heard in a bar a while back. A story about a set of goddamned Betties.
We stopped building them near the end of the war, it’s true, cause too many men inside never came back out. But it didn’t mean our boys didn’t come up with new uses for the ones we already had.
I take the ballroom stairs three at a time, swing around the Betty to her handholds.
Our weapons crews stocked empty Bettys with all kind of surprises. Sent them out, dead in the water after a battle, usually one we were losing, cause that’s pretty much all we did for the first three-quarters of the war. Set them up to trigger after we all left, maybe when the enemy comes along looking to salvage and BOOM, there’s a nuke or a neutron or grav-warp or some such.
Here are the handholds, giant staples up her spine. Three, four, and circle left for the gunner’s hatch.
But the one story that gave all of us at the bar the willies, was the swarm. A nano-weapon that ate ships alive. Load up a Betty with a slag tank and a swarm of bots that are swapped from repair to consume. Pressurize the cockpit, so when their techs come along to take a look at her guts—puff! A little breath of air carries a microscopic army out and spews them all over your deck, or your hull or wherever you are. You don’t see a thing. Don’t even notice. But silently, methodically, they start chewing through your ship’s systems one by one until nothing is left.
Comms go down, so you can’t cry out. Alarm systems go offline, so you never know it’s coming. So your own bots never even activate. Power shuts off, so you can’t fight back. Thrust and grav so you can’t maneuver. Life support at the very last.
You can’t shoot ‘em and you can’t stop ‘em. Your only hope—so they said at the bar—was to board the Betty and find the control box, shut the swarm down from its command center.
I come through the hatch and see it. A flat black thing no bigger than a toaster, six green lights and bolted to the floor where the pilot ought to stand. No buttons, no switches and no inputs I can see.
God damn, God damn!
My hand flies to my belt but I don’t carry a sidearm anymore. But here, yes, above the door, the pry-bar, standard issue as an engineer’s concession the machine would probably be busted all to hell, before we landed it and wanted to get out.
Thank God.
I plunge the pry-bar down between my feet—no room in here for a decent swing at the thing. One-two. Three-four. I-have. To-kill. This-God. Damn-box.
I stop, sweating, breathing hard. Bits of electronics lie scattered around the tiny cabin. The six little lights are dark.
I sigh and lean back against the fuel column, tipping my helmet back into the familiar cradle, letting relief wash through me. God, it’s just as sweet as it used to be. Coming away alive and kicking.
“Like old times, hey Randy?” I say to no one in particular. Randy hated it when I did that. When we’d pulled out of a battle that was mostly over and I’d lean back, relax my intensity while he drove us home.
“God damn it, Pepper,” he used to say, “Fat lady ain’t singing till we hit the deck!”
And I’d close my eyes and just float off, while Randy juked us back to the carrier. Drove him nuts.
I can’t help but look over at the mirror—the only sightline between gunner and pilot, just a small thing, size of a credit card.
Eyes stare back at me. I freeze. My breath catches in my throat and my mind reels off in six directions.
Taylor said the cockpits were empty; I know those eyes; the pilot’s dead; get out, get out; the pilot’s dead—it’s Linda.
I twist round to look but that’s dumb. There’s no better way to see the pilot’s side than the mirror. She’s still staring at me. She’ll stare forever. She’s dead.
The thought slides around my mind like an ice cube in an empty tumbler; I feel its touch but it won’t sink in. It’s not real.
I guess I’ve known for a while now that I’d find her body somewhere aboard. But here she is, looking at me. Me, I just look back. I think about the way her hair tosses when she runs. Tossed when she ran.
I have to go around. Come at her through the pilot’s hatch.
I shake off her gaze, push through the hatch and swing around. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Take her away I guess. Put her to rest.
I open the door and there she is.
She’s buckled the harness across her chest; her head leans against the cradle. What’s left of it anyway. Linda never was the type to wait around for suffocation to set in and I don’t have to look for a pistol on the floor to know what happened here.
The world blurs for a while as I cling to the handholds outside the pilot’s hatch.
A million half-regrets flit through my head.
If only I’d kept her happier.
If only we hadn’t fought.
If only that goddamned Taylor-
If only-
But all that slides away and my eyes run dry as they catch sight of the floor at Linda’s fleet.
Six green lights blink away atop a small flat box that shouldn’t be there.
My God.
The pistol’s there too, and a wax pencil, and the pilot’s crowbar, chipped and a little bent from hard use.
God damn.
I look up again at Linda, at her light brown eyes with nothing behind them.
Something is written on her arm, big letters in red wax pencil.
They regrow, it says.
God damn, God damn. How long have I wasted? I’m such an idiot. A lazy, sentimental fool. Fat lady ain’t singing. If there are two control boxes, there could just as easily be three or four. I could hunt a
ll day and never find them all.
I drop down from the Betty’s side and dash for the stairs. God damn, God damn. Randy always told me this would happen one day. I let my guard down too early and the enemy kept moving. Probably by now, the one I killed has respawned.
I’m up the ladder and slinging down the hall, hollering into my Comms. “Jaz! You there? Smitty?” The empty ship echoes, a clatter of shouts and my own sharp footfalls but nobody chatters back.
And now here’s Smitty, jogging up to meet me.
“We got to go!” I shout, waving at him to turn around.
“No good,” he says, “Hatch is locked, and I can’t raise Jaz.”
I shoulder past him without explaining. Round the corner and bang on the hatch with my fists. “JAAAAZ!”
“Shhh!” says Smitty, “What’s that?”
There’s a clank. Another.
“No, no no no,” I say. “We’re right here, Jaz, just open the door. Open the door!” But there’s the hiss, the rumble and that little jolt severing one ship from another.
I swing over to the nearest window. God damn. There she goes, drifting away. Did she know?
“Suit up,” I snap at Smitty, pulling my visor down. It’s not too far, between the Lancer and us yet. Our suits will stand up to the vacuum; Jaz can swing around and pick us up. It might even be better this way; less chance the weaponized bots will leap the distance, from the Hannah Lee to the Lancer.
But then the running lights flicker and I see a touch of tumble in her flight path. That’s not Jaz’s hand at the controls. The lights wink out. I can hardly see the ship at all, lit by nothing but stars and the backwash of the Hannah Lee’s windows. A ghost of a ship.
“Well shit-” says Smitty, his voice small and tinny through the speakers.
“C’mon,” I say, snapping the seals back off my helmet again. “We got to finish talking with Taylor.”
There’s nothing else to do.
Taylor’s still awake on the screen when we get back. He’s quiet, till he sees us.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” he says, straight off. It’s not really a question, so I nod.
“Linda, too?”
I nod again. He bites his lip.
“You remember?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I wait.
“It was awful,” he says. “Me and Linda were so excited. So happy. We found the Betty,” he smiles, bitter. “We were rich,” he shakes his head. “We went upstairs to celebrate. Had a few drinks. A shower. Had a good time.”
I don’t meet Smitty’s eye.
“We didn’t even know anything was wrong, till Linda went back up to the controls. Nothing worked. No thrust. No attitude. Nothing.
“Figured it was a fuse,” Taylor’s resurrection shakes its head again. “I started down to look and I—I just stepped through the door here when the blowout sounded, the doors clapped shut.”
“I put on my mask. Ninety minutes I figured, plenty of time. We’d be fine.” Taylor breaks off for a minute. I wait him out. “I tried to fix it. God, I tried. I rebooted everything. Soft, hard, all of it. I couldn’t get a damned thing working.”
There’s something he isn’t saying. He’s looking at me now. Deciding.
“I think I might’ve killed us,” he says, “Cause every time I tried to fix something, it only got worse.”
He wants me to tell him it’s not his fault. But it is. It’s his fault she was here at all. I didn’t want her to go. God, we fought about that.
“Linda said she thought it was the bots. That they’d turned against us.”
I nod. “She fought back.”
“That’s Linda.” Taylor bites his lip. Neither one of us says anything.
Behind the forty-four I can see Smitty’s eyes get big. His hand goes up to his mouth and I can see the nickel drop as he works it all out: the bots, the failures and the Lancer. He leans back against the bulkhead. Doesn’t say anything. A good kid, Smitty.
“There was nothing I could do,” says Taylor, almost begging. “I tried everything. Hard reboots. Manuals. The shit just didn’t work. Didn’t even respond after a while.”
He’s hit a groove; he can’t stop talking. I can see sweat standing out on his simulated skin.
“The air went out. The grav turned off. The power went down. Then the backup. I was just floating in the dark. Just floating. Till you came. Just floating in the dark and wondering if Linda was going to make it, if she got down to the lifeboats, if she got away.”
I can’t look at him. Can’t look at Smitty. I stare at the orange gauge on Taylor’s empty air tank. Usually by now a resurrection’s gone off kilter, got so wrapped up in its own thoughts it can’t function and goes silent for a final time. I wonder if that might be better.
“We were going to get married you know.”
“I know.” I say. It shuts him up. I force myself to meet his gaze.
Taylor looks at me for a while.
“You’re her father,” he says.
I nod.
“I’m sorry,” he says. There’s nothing more to say.
The lights go down. His face flickers out.
“It’s okay.” I say, to the empty space in the forty-four.
I flip down my faceplate and check my gauge.
Less than two hours left.
“So now what,” says Smitty, “We’re just going to sit here and wait to die?”
I turn and start to unclip.
“Here,” I say, pulling the hose free from my air can. “Take it.”
“That’s yours Sir,” Smitty says.
“I don’t want it.” I say. Everything I love is dead already. Without the tank connected, it’s already getting hot and stuffy in my suit. It’s much better this way. Better than waiting all that time.
Smitty will have twice as long now. Maybe long enough to outlast the attack. Maybe long enough someone will come by and rescue him.
“Fuck you sir.” Smitty says. He’s shoving the hose back on the can.
“Come on Smitty,” I say, but I’m too lightheaded to fight him.
“Respectfully, sir, I don’t intend to outlive you,” he says. Somewhere in my suit, a valve opens and I can feel the cool air rush up past my face. “You want me to live; you gotta save both our asses.”
Smitty stands up and strides out into the hall, leaving me sitting alone, watching the spots in front of my eyes. I follow him, jogging to catch up.
“Feeling better sir,” he says. It’s not a question. I don’t answer. He moves on. “Lemme get this right: the nanobots are bad.”
“Yes.”
“They’re killing the ship.”
“Yes.”
“And we can’t fight ‘em.”
“No.”
Smitty nods, once.
“Then we’ll run.”
“Taylor and Linda played this game once already,” I say.
“Yeah, but we’re gonna win.” He’s headed for the ballroom.
“Lifeboats won’t go,” I remind him.
“Not taking them.” We bust through the doors. “We’re taking that.”
The Betty.
Smitty pulls up his visor, seals in.
“Can you fly this thing?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, hesitating. He cocks his head, asking what gives. I flick my chin toward the ship. “Linda’s in there.”
He nods. Climbs up to the pilot’s hatch. My stomach flip-flops, watching him lean in and haul her body out. It’s not till she floats out into the room and hangs in the air that I realize the gravity’s gone out, engines cut. We’re all freewheeling now, my feet whispering up off the deck unbidden.
I hold the banister and watch her drift—Linda—revolving slowly in the air, her long hair wrapping carelessly across the cavity at the back of her head. Peaceful.
“You coming?” Smitty calls back, voice distant through the faceplate.
I sling out across the ballroom, muscle memory taking over. I twist in the air and wh
eel one hand to swing my feet around and I slide past Smitty right into the cockpit.
He grins and shakes his head, muttering something too low for me to hear.
“Gunner’s back there,” I hock my thumb. “Back door only.”
Again, he gives me that grin and hauls hand over hand back to the other hatch.
“Hey Smitty,” I shout as he goes, “You thought about how to get out of here?” The doors aren’t open and I’d bet those were the first systems the nanobots shut down. Betties aren’t loaded with explosives—it was always pure ballistics, basically ball bearings at high enough speeds to melt through hull plating.
“What,” says Smitty, “Don’t the Navy teach you kids how to punch your way out of a paper bag?”
It’s obvious then what he’s going to do. I don’t need to hear the whir of the turrets warming up.
The inflatable walls aren’t meant for any kind of impact; you’re expected to deflate and shut the lid when there’s trouble, rely on the plated stuff and fold up the polymer walls behind a couple of bulkheads.
Smitty rakes down the length of the wall with his first salvo. A second won’t be needed—it’s tearing open under the interior pressure. It looks like one of those slow-motion clips of bursting water balloons, with polymer strands rippling back from the slash Smitty’s opened.
Air surges forward into the vacuum and it crystallizes, hurling Linda’s body out past us into the night, and sweeping us with it in a swirling, screaming snowstorm.
I punch the engine once, hard and get us clear of the debris. Outside sounds fall away and all we’re left with is Smitty’s hollering, “Oh hell yeah! I like them apples!”
I let him whoop for a moment but now I know how Randy felt—we’re far from safe just yet.
“Ok kid, bring it back for a sec,” I say, “You see a box on the floor? Six green lights?”
“Yeah,” says Smitty. “So?”
“That’s the brains for the bots. I killed it once but found another over here, so that one grew back.”
“Can we kill them both at once?”
“That’s the idea,” I say, “But I want to get away from the other ships first.”