Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

by Stephen Moss

  Chapter 51: Tight Space

  Squeeze through. Damn it, woman, squeeeeeeze.

  She held her breath, grunting and trying to pull herself through one last time. Shit, she thought a moment later, what if I get stuck here? She shuddered.

  “Rob, it’s no good. Pull me back, I need out.”

  It was his turn to heave and grunt as he wrapped his hands around her legs and pulled. She came loose with a resounding thud, popping backward in the minute gravity, and instantly they were both scrabbling for purchase to catch themselves before they span out across the main space.

  “Grab that … shit … Birgit … get a grip …” Rob was already too far out, and so he resorted to barking self-evident orders at Birgit as she thrashed about trying to grasp something. Her hand closed around a length of piping, the third she had tried to grab hold of, but the first two had been too thick to wrap her fist around.

  She did connect now, though, her fingers and thumb closing over each other as the strain came on. Rob was not so lucky, so as she brought herself back to the wall of piping she had been trying to squeeze through, she turned and watched as Rob tumbled away, trying to reorient himself so his feet would connect with the far wall of the big, black space rather than his head.

  She laughed as he flogged around, without purchase, and said mockingly, “Grab it … shit … Rob … get a grip …”

  He was almost there now. He would land on an exposed part of the outer shell, the thick, armor-plated carapace of the beast they had infested with their presence. He connected with the smooth surface with a thud that echoed across the space they had managed to lightly pressurize, and careened away again.

  “Oh, for God’s sake …” he said as he was sent spinning off again, slower now, ridiculously slow, lazily turning over and over as he fell across a spotlight beam in the IST’s cavernous core.

  They had managed to remove a significant amount of the IST’s guts, not disconnecting them, but disemboweling the big machine where possible and laying its innards outside the shell to leave room for them to explore further. They dared not disconnect anything fully, even when they were certain that the piece in question was vestigial, part only of the drive system, now defunct as the IST lay in the last home it would ever know.

  Instead they had slowly and carefully, after painstaking analysis from outside the IST’s broad exoskeleton, removed systems through one of the three openings they had managed to find. The partial disembowelment had not, at times, been pretty, and indeed, the IST had been left looking a little like a punctured pumpkin, its innards spilled over the plain it had anchored itself into, but it had been essential to gain access to its inner-workings.

  “I don’t suppose you are going to help me out here, huh?” Rob said, as he rotated indolently across the voided stomach of the IST.

  “No, I don’t suppose I am going to, either,” laughed Birgit.

  He withheld a series of creative epithets. He would get his revenge … eventually, once he stopped rolling. For now he suppressed a minor wave of nausea and settled in for the minute or so it would take him to cross the room.

  “If we can’t get through there,” Rob said after a moment, getting back to business, “then I don’t see how we can get at the actuator core.”

  She was brought back to the task at hand, and replied, “That is simply not an option, Rob. We have to get at it. Even if that means …” she trailed off.

  “Another cut?”

  “A cut, yes. I know we have done more damage than we had intended anyway, but if we reconstruct some of the outer supports we were forced to bisect earlier, then maybe we can support the central mass enough.”

  It was a question rather than a statement. One that no one would answer for them, not even Minnie, the real one now, able to listen now in glorious real-time since they had hacked an ancillary comms system. It would be a gamble. Not as dangerous as the ones they had taken to get here, perhaps, but a bet whose downside could include the collapse of the internal orb, and the loss of access they had spent years getting.

  They all thought about it a while longer, Minnie and Birgit bouncing comments back and forth inside Birgit’s head about how close they were, and what they now felt almost certain they could do if they could fully plug their systems, and Minnie’s long gestated algorithms, into the interstellar grade subspace tweeter at the heart of this beast.

  Birgit was brought back to the moment by the ever-eloquent Rob, as his frustration at his slow, unaided passage across the space built, and he added helpfully, “You know, Birgit, my sweet, maybe you would be able to fit through there … you know, if your hips were a little less gargantuan …”

  He had his back to her now, as he approached the other side, and was more surprised than he should have been when she careened into him. Over the last years they had slowly removed what they dared from the core, and had then sealed it up once more and attached the crew module to one of the larger openings. It had allowed them to pump a small amount of air into the space, just enough to delay suffocation should they damage their aging exo-suits while in the tighter spaces.

  It was not much, to be sure, but it was more air than Rob had in his lungs after she bowled into him, laughing. He span, trying to grab hold of her as they now bounced around the space, scrapping as they went. While he focused on overpowering her, she focused on sabotage, and as he got his arms around her, she was pulling his hood and faceplate over his head, leaving him exposed to the cold and sparse air in the space.

  He stopped fighting as the air departed him, but held on to her as they spun in place, between the walls once more, still moving, but without a great deal of specific momentum. Suddenly, demasked, he was so vulnerable, so pliant in her arms. He could beat her, of course he could. He was a trained astronaut with many years of military service before that. But he was hers now, in her grasp, and seeing him give in as he dragged in a long, unsatisfying breath, her hold changed as well. Still strong, still vital, but fueled by affection now instead of competition.

  She took a long, deep drag inside her own mask and then pulled it aside and connected with him in a kiss, interlocking and pressing herself to him as she pushed a flow of thicker, lusher air into him. As they parted, she helped him replace his mask. Intertwined as they were, she could now feel the press of his desire for her, irrepressible even in his skinsuit. They had made love in here before, with urgency, like lovers in the snow, but they both knew that much more fun was to be had if they were back in the module proper.

  Whether they were the first people to have sex in zero gravity they could not be certain. Birgit certainly hoped that someone over the years of shuttle missions and international space stations had taken the opportunity, and kudos to them if they had. But Birgit felt confident that over the last years she and Rob had elevated the art to something greater than any secretive hump in a corner of a spacelab.

  “Watch out!” she called out, suddenly, as they came to ground once more, quickly writhing against, no, with each other, to protect their heads and other vulnerable parts.

  Clasping a length of piping each, they wrangled their combined mass to a halt, and then he said, breathlessly, inches from her, “I don’t suppose you are going to agree to taking a quick break?”

  She smiled wickedly and replied, “I have no need for a quick break,” and there was real mischief in her eyes. She opened her connection, routed now through the jury-rigged adjunct they had managed to port onto the peripheral systems of the IST. An adjunct that had satiated a long felt desire, and reopened Birgit’s link to Earth, and to her daughter.

  Birgit: ‘minnie, you have the latest data. ¿can you take a look at further cuts for us and model them for probable failure rates? we are going to take a little break.’

  Minnie:

  Birgit: ‘no, no, minnie, you take your time.’

  They smiled big, smug grins at each other. Birgit pressed her faceplate agains
t Rob’s and pulled him to her, saying, “There, now you can have my undivided attention.”

  “Undivided?” said Rob, as she pushed away from him toward the makeshift corridor back to their tiny living quarters.

  She laughed through their comms, “Yes, Rob, every last inch of it.”

  He leapt after her.

  Chapter 52: New World Order

  “Moving on …” said Jim, then added more forcefully, “if we can move on?”

  The room did come to order. This was the committee. In the wake of the coup that had seen Minnie buck her riders, the gathered room now made up what had come to be called her round table. While the triptych of Minnie, Mynd, and Remy worked to bring the many orders of the world’s representatives to fruition, this was the room that informed that process. Not a decision making body, not by a long shot. By carefully worded constitution, this room could only offer advice.

  But it was good advice, fed by the combined experience, knowledge, and passion that had brought all the gathered personages down their varied paths to this place.

  Jim sat at its head, so to speak, though not by vote, simply by nature. He was an organizer, a rallier. And he did that again now, stemming, or rather damming, the tide of opinion on the current topic so it could be focused into a more productive flow.

  “We remain at peak production at District Two; closing in on the hundredth completed unit there, thanks to Mynd’s diligence. Lunar, Hekaton, Shenzhen, and Osaka are doing gallant work to catch up. But no matter what we do, we have not been able to get even close to capacity at São Paulo, Vladivostok, or Jubail. Quavoce, once again you have given more time than we could spare of you down in Brazil. Do you have any updates?”

  “I do and I don’t,” Quavoce responded after thinking a moment. “São Paulo suffers more from our high expectations than anything else. The simple fact is that no amount of effort on the part of our Brazilian friends—and there is no lack of enthusiasm here, I am certain of that—will make up for the fact that we have started competing with ourselves for resources.”

  At that, Peter Uncovsky’s voice burst forth once more, more confident now as he grew accustomed to the role he had never wanted. Peter was the only person at the table who was also a national representative to TASC, but it was admirable how rarely he reminded people of that. Now he looked indignant at Quavoce’s comment about the lack of resources, as his own nation’s Dome was also struggling, and said, “I have to say I find it interesting that the Brazilians are complaining about raw material access with three new polyacrylonitrile contracts …”

  “Peter, Peter!” said Jim, using his patrician tone to stop his Russian friend from saying something he might regret. “We are all friends here. Quavoce is not accusing anyone of anything. He is merely pointing out an undeniable fact, the closer we get to capacity, the more we are inevitably seeing diminishing marginal returns from our efforts.”

  “So? Do we say this is the best we can do?” said Madeline, firmly.

  Several people’s eyes came suddenly to her to see if she was being serious, Jim was not among them. He waited for her to add something more salient to justify her strident tone. She delivered. “It seems to me that if we seem to be reaching peak capacity with current treaties and agreements, then maybe it is time to revisit those agreements.”

  Her eyes were on Peter as she said it. He took in a long gulp of air, then nodded. “Of course you are right, Ms. Cavanaugh, but how much further we can test the limits of eminent domain, I do not know.”

  The economy of the world was in a place it had not seen since the dark final years of the Second World War, and maybe not even then. It was a strange place to be. They were in the height of a war larger than anyone had ever known, and yet not a single shot had been fired for years.

  As TASC’s efforts had moved toward the almost single-minded production of Skalm fighting craft, with an additional subsidiary focus on fixed orbital weapons platforms, the attentions of its political arms had moved toward the difficult job of sustaining economic contributions to the war effort without grinding what was left of the world economy into dust.

  Like sweet and sour, balancing hope and fear in the same pot was not an easy job even when the guns could be heard over the horizon, but now, when it was all still so distant, still more than a year away, they had to fight to suppress apathy even within themselves.

  Hollywood certainly helped, as did Bollywood and Hong Kong, creating films that brought the Mobiliei threat to life, while also providing happy endings to inspire the equally important warm fuzzies. Only the month before Jim had been quite disturbed, though, by the accuracy of a more speculative Danish movie on the topic.

  The movie had spoken of the work of an elite but now debunked TASC leadership. What was perhaps even more worrying than how close they had gotten to the truth behind Neal’s resignation, was the fact that the film had then skipped forward to a post-apocalyptic world populated not by surviving humans, but by victorious Mobiliei, with a unnervingly close reproduction of the look and gate of that alien species, something that was far from public knowledge.

  The movie’s writer and director was now living at District One, but not because she had been imprisoned. After a thorough but legal investigation, they had discovered no wrongdoing, but had hired the perceptive woman so she could apply her creativity and insight to helping avoid the ending she had so ominously predicted.

  “We may have pushed the governmental powers to their reasonable limit,” acknowledged Madeline, “but I am not talking about encouraging or empowering further cooption of raw materials. I am talking about looking more to existing stores of them.”

  In the information world that underlay their current virtual meeting place, she reached out her tentacles, seeking permission to show them an image. They acquiesced by almost universally automatic mandate, with only Jim and the two Mobiliei Agents retaining direct control even in this trusted place.

  She took the gifted control and began to change their meeting place, evaporating the evocative round stone table they traditionally met around and replacing it now with an image that appeared far below, and then surged up and around them, until they were all standing on its deck.

  They looked around. Whatever ship they were on it was a leviathan, vanishing forward and aft with a domineering central bridge towering above them. The deck, such as it was, was puckered with wide, peaked doors covering what they did not know, though it looked as though they were prisons for some strange breed of flying beast, waiting below to be released.

  It was not like anything that most of the group had ever seen before, but one among them recognized it immediately, and others soon followed as memory, synthetic or natural, came to them.

  “The Pyotr Velikiy. Last of the Kirov class,” said Peter, nodding with growing understanding. “A quarter of a kilometer long, if I remember correctly, and … how many tons?”

  “Twenty-five thousand,” replied Madeline, with a smile, “give or take.”

  “And not, actually, the last of its kind,” said John Hunt, surprising the Russian, who looked at him with a question in his eyes. John elaborated, “There were four completed. Two are out of service, but still afloat. Another, the Admiral Nakhimov, is half gutted, its refit having been cancelled when the war started.”

  Peter smiled at John and nodded. “I stand corrected.”

  Madeline waited for the Russian to look back at her, then said, “A hundred thousand tons of steel, brass copper, and plastics just sitting there.”

  “Well,” said Peter, with more than a touch of indignation, “not just sitting there. The Velikiy remains the flagship of the northern fleet, and a mighty warship even now.”

  They looked at him, certainly not wishing to cause offense, but also not willing to concede that these once mighty ships, and all those like them around the world, still maintained any real relevance in their new age.

  After a moment, Madeline, using a gentle smile that softened the blow at least somewhat, p
opped the Russian leader’s bubble. “Secretariat … Peter, I am afraid it is a fact we are all too aware of that a single Skalm would probably be able to sink the Velikiy before it could take it down, and a squadron would be more than a match for her.”

  The Russian looked hurt, and Jim stepped up to him and patted him on the back while the others looked around them, taking in the scale of the huge warship. “Not to worry, my friend, last time I saw the USS Reagan at Rolas Island, she was being used as little more than a floating barracks.”

  Peter sucked up his pride, sheltering his bruised ego inside his thick coat of Russian resilience, and said, “So, Madeline, you are suggesting that we put these ships, and I hope the equivalents from other navies, to the axe?”

  “I am, Mr. Secretariat, I am. Those that can still sail, like the fine Velikiy here, can make their way to the nearest Dome facility by sea. Those that are less … independent, like the Velikiy’s three decommissioned Kirov-class sister ships, and many equivalents from those other navies, like the USS Enterprise, among others, even the four Iowa class battleships, can be helped along by EAHLs.”

  Peter looked around. He knew this would not be a popular decision among his leadership, but if he positioned it right with his people, as a reduction in wasteful military spending, he could use public sentiment to force the politicians’ hands. But there was another issue, he now thought, saying, “These ships, they are not so easily dismantled, you know. While a Skalm may well be able to cut through this armor, I do hope you are not planning on using one of them as a breaker’s saw?”

  John Hunt laughed at the image. “No, I imagine that would be a less-than-controlled way of getting the meat off this bone. But I am sure Madeline has already planned for that, and knows that the Domes can do that work for us.”