Love and Other Metals

by K. P. Redmond

  I push the button on the display. Nothing happens. Command Authority Disabled, it says. Insert Command Token and Try Again. I look down at the little slot where the captain’s token should be, but ain’t. Only an empty cavity. “What’s going on?” asks Pig-nose. “Why ain’t the drone flying?”

  “Command key is gone,” I reply. “It’s a little chip with a complex code. None of the major functions will work without it.”

  Pig-nose shakes his head. “Oh, Gristle ain’t gonna like that. He’ll kill somebody again. You sure?”

  “See for yourself,” I say, pointing to the vacant slot.

  “Shiz and double shiz,” he says, and motions with his gun for me to move. We pull ourselves back to the galley, where Gristle is sitting where we left him, and Louis and Katya still being held at gunpoint. Nastez is still dead, and the captain looks like she’s maybe gonna join him soon. I am standing near the captain’s collapsed form. She’s struggling to breathe. I fight the urge to bend down to help her.

  “Well?” demands Gristle.

  “Ain’t gonna work boss,” says Pig-nose. “There’s a missing key.” I nod in agreement.

  “That right,” grunts Gristle. “Missing key, huh. I bet that’s the captain’s key, am I right?”

  “That’s right,” I say. “Want me to search her?”

  Gristle’s eyes narrow. “You stay put,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  He maneuvers his massive frame over to the captain, who now appears unconscious. He bends over her and methodically searches through each pocket in her jumpsuit. He tosses pens and bits of loose paper aside as he pulls them out, then a picture of her daughters which he examines and tosses with a dismissive grunt. He pats down her sleeves and pants for hidden pockets.

  No key. He searches Nastez’s corpse. Still no key. Gristle stands his bulk up to full size, nearly grazing the ceiling, then faces the rest of us. “Well, well…looks like we’re playing a little game here.” He smiles. “Key, key, who’s got the key?” He strides over to Louis. Only Gristle’s sticky boots interrupt the utter silence with their ripping sound. He looks Louis hard in the eyes, then as Chinless pushes his gun into Louis’s cheek, Gristle wraps his massive hand around Louis’s neck. Louis holds his head high and struggles to breathe against Gristle’s firm grip but does not flinch and his eyes show no fear.

  “Search him,” barks Gristle to Pig-nose. Pig-nose walks over and pats Louis down, turning out each pocket. The only thing he finds is the folded copy of the poem Louis had written for Katya. He shows it to Gristle, who glances at it and snickers. Louis doesn’t resist, doesn’t blush or squirm; he just watches.

  Done with Louis, Gristle turns and fixes his attention on Katya. She is trembling in rigid terror. He hums appreciatively at Katya’s slim but womanly figure. “Well, now, what a nice, nice thing you got there,” he says, staring at her chest. He reaches down and plants his big hands on her. Both Pig-nose and Chinless watch intently, sardonic grins on their faces. Gristle bends down, his thick lips within inches of Katya’s neck. He inhales deeply of her scent as a predator might when sensing up his prey. “Hmm yes, I’m gonna get to know you real good,” he whispers, “I’m gonna have everything you got. And it’s such a long, long trip back…” Gristle rubs his massive hands over Katya’s breasts. The two lunies chuckle with delight. Katya jerks in involuntary revulsion, her neck stiff with silent fear, her eyes dark with fear and rage.

  Chinless is distracted; he allows his gun to sag from Louis’s face.

  Louis’s left elbow flies out in a blur and catches Chinless across the side of his face, knocking his head back hard. At the same time, Louis’s other hand grabs the muzzle of the gun, and when his left hand comes back from Chinless’s face, Louis has both hands on the gun. In one practiced motion, he twists the gun by the barrel between Chinless’s fingers and the gun is Louis’s hands. Pig-nose catches on to what is happening; he starts to bring his gun around to aim at Louis’s chest, but Louis is operating at a completely different speed. Louis has anticipated the move and uses the butt of the gun in his own right hand to bash Pig-nose in the face—twice, in rapid succession—as his left hand grabs Pig-nose’s gun-hand and pushes it up towards the ceiling. Pig-nose reflexively fires his gun, hitting nothing except ceiling insulation and stainless steel. The blast of the gun is deafening but the bullet shatters upon hitting the steel.

  Chinless recovers from the hit to the head and comes at Louis. While holding Pig-nose’s arm, Louis’s gun fires with a deafening bang. Chinless’s head explodes in a shower of skull, brains, and blood. His body does a slow half-somersault before falling. While Chinless is falling, Pig-nose pulls to free his gun hand. Louis knees him hard in the solar plexus; Pig-nose gasps, then falls helplessly, his face red with agony.

  This all happens within a second or so. But Gristle stops leering at Katya and moves. While Louis is bringing his gun to around to point at him, Gristle jabs Louis hard in the kidneys. Louis grunts and staggers back. Before Louis can recover, Gristle punches him in the face with his huge hand. Louis’s gun clatters to the floor and bounces up and over at an angle, out of his reach.

  I move in to help Louis when I feel a tug on my leg. I look down…it’s the captain, looking up at me. She has a finger to her lips. She reaches up to her collar and pulls the key out from a pocket concealed in the fabric. She presses the chip into my hand, then brings up her other hand to close my fingers around it. Her hands are trembling. She is weak; I do not resist. Her eyes flutter and she slumps back against the bulkhead. I am in shock. Why would she trust me with this, after what I’ve done?

  I put the key in my arm pocket and fasten it shut. Gristle is standing over the battered Louis, quietly inspecting his handiwork. Louis is alive but badly beaten. I look for a weapon—there are guns on the floor but I’m afraid I won’t figure out how to work them in time. So I grab a plate.

  Gristle turns his huge face towards me. I’m standing there with a plate in my hand and immediately the fire in my blood fades and I feel really stupid. I can hit him with the plate and be killed, in which case he’ll get the chip and the game will be over for all of us. Or I can run and find a better weapon. “It’s in his collar!” I say, pointing to Nastez’s body. “I saw him hide the chip somewhere in his collar!” Louis looks up at me with his one eye that isn’t swollen shut, looking mystified. Gristle kneels down to Nastez’s corpse and starts feeling through his collar. I dash out of the galley, into the dressing room. I close the hatch and use a crowbar to keep the latches closed.

  The crowbar will slow him down but not stop him; it will only be a few minutes before Gristle finds the other path to the dressing chamber below decks. I whip on my backpack and hiking boots with trembling hands, expecting to see his monstrous face pop up from the lower hatch any second. But it don’t. I tumble into the airlock and start the vacuum pump before I’m even sealed into my helmet. The outer hatch rotates out to a hazy and pitch-dark world. I don’t dare turn on my helmet lights—not sure who’s out here. I feel my way through the dust to the external tools cache, open the door, and frantically pull out everything, anything that might help me in the battle I know is coming within seconds.

  I see a glimmer on the rocks beside me. I look back and see lights, four of them, arranged in a rectangle, coming from the Kestrel, small at first, growing larger. I see bright flashes of thrusters as the lights move up higher. It wanders right, then left, but in my general direction. It’s a drone, I mutter to myself. Not a mining drone, neither. Something bad. And it can move much faster than I can. I ain’t sure if it can see through the dust any better than me. Maybe not.

  I take a step. The drone detects movement and shoots but it’s too far away and the visibility is too bad for it to be accurate. Its weapon is a laser, short burst, very powerful, the invisible beam setting the rocks close to me aflame for a few seconds. I get mad. “Hey you piece of crap!” I yell, and throw a rock at it. That move helps it locate me and now it’s coming directly towards me o
n columns of thruster fire. OK, not the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Stupider even than the plate thing.

  I can’t run faster than my boots will let me, but I climb over a low rocky wall and stoop way down to get out of its line of fire. The headlights continue to follow me, searching for a pocket of warmth to shoot. In the dim flickering light, I see an opening ahead; a black hole in the surface, like the ones I seen before we landed. I commando-crawl to the cusp of it, using the ridges in the wall to hold myself down. I kneel at the edge of the opening, dip my helmet down into it, and look around.

  The pit is as black as it can be. I barely see an initial drop of maybe 3 meters, then a craggy, lopsided door to a deeper passage. If I turn on my lights, they will surely attract the drone. I stay dark and switch the helmet’s camera to infrared, but that just shows a meandering path leading deeper down. I can’t see how far it goes.

  The lights come around the rocky corner, casting long, moving shadows. I have seconds before I am hit by a heat beam that will either kill me or melt a hole in my suit and drain my air and then that will kill me. I got no choice: I plunge into the pit.

  The initial drop weren’t bad, not in the asteroid’s light gravity. I look back up the hole; so far the drone ain’t following me in, but its dim light plays over the rim of the mouth of the pit. I got a bad feeling about this place but I try not to let fear affect my judgement. What to do? It’s either forward into the deeper cavern, or wait for the drone to pass on and go back to the plateau where the ships are.

  Is the drone smart enough to figure out where I’ve gone? I climb up a ways and poke my helmet back through the hole I came through. I look past the rocky exterior best I can, but I don’t see the murderous lights. I drop back down and peer into the opening to the deeper cavern. The opening is big enough for me to enter, although sharply pointed rocks protrude from the lip like fangs. The cavern ahead looks stable enough to enter. But I can’t see very far. I maneuver past the jagged stones, scraping my backpack and chest piece against their dangerous edges and hoping like hell that I don’t slice any of the exposed hoses sticking out of my suit. I come to a roomier spot and flip on my helmet lamps to look over the way ahead.

  It goes on a few meters, then veers off to the side. The ceiling is low but the cavern is big enough for a man to navigate. But then what? I’m thinking maybe I should chance heading back to the ship and do what I can to help the crew—and help myself, since I’ll run out of atmo sooner or later down here. On the other hand, I’ll probably get shot going back. The cavern could be worth investigating. Maybe it would pop me back on the other side of the CM, where they’re not expecting me. But that don’t seem likely.

  I’m stuck trying to make a decision when I hear a familiar voice in my headset. “Ciao, Straker,” says Sophia. Her voice surprises me and I jump up a little, hit the hard roof of the cave with a grunt, and ricochet back to the floor in the light gravity. I wrap my arms around a rock to keep from bouncing up again.

  “Were your friends glad to see you?” she continues. “Did you have a pleasant reunion?”

  “Look,” I say. “They are not my friends. They ain’t even who I thought they were. And I wasn’t sending them information because I like them. They said they were government. Turns out they’re Alliance, I think. I don’t know about highfalutin politics—I’m just a worker. And I thought I had a deal with them. It was supposed to be a good thing.”

  “Oh. You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Well I’m telling you now. My life is complicated and I don’t gotta tell you everything.”

  “But I like to hear about your life! I want to know all about you! Don’t you know that? I so look forward to talking to you.”

  “OK, you like talking to me. I’m gonna ask you a question. Did you know that ship was coming before you told me?”

  Pause. Finally, she responds: “Yes, I knew it was coming.”

  “When did you know?”

  Another pause. “I knew when they left lunar orbit.”

  “What? What kind of scope have you got? How could you know that?”

  No answer. It’s aggravating—she’s always gotta be the mystery woman. She’s really starting to torque me off. “OK, never mind,” I say. “Let me tell you what you’ve done. If we’d a known they was coming, we could have packed up all our crap and left before they got here. But we didn’t know because you couldn’t be bothered to tell me about it. And now a man is dead, and maybe the captain too. Maybe all of us. Murdered. Because of you.”

  “Murdered?” she asks. “Somebody was murdered?”

  “Officer Nastez. He stood up to them, and I actually agreed with him for once. But they killed him for it. They hurt the captain and probably killed her too. The other two are captive; God only knows what’s gonna happen to them. And you’ve probably killed me too, cause I’m on the run with a machine chasing me. Hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  “Straker, I’m sorry! I can’t tell you everything about myself, I just can’t, you wouldn’t understand. Telling you about that ship coming before I did is…it’s saying too much about me.”

  “Jeez. Is that your excuse? What the hell am I even talking to you for?”

  “No, Straker, please! You don’t understand! I’m sorry! You are so important to me…”

  Enough. I pull the headset connector from my chest piece and everything goes quiet. I sit for a good minute or so, marinating in my own anger, trying to control my breathing and calm down. I’m determined to turn this situation around, one way or another, and breathing up all my gasses ain’t gonna help matters. Gotta make it frosty again. I think about that secret paradise that I often visit in my dreams: the water, the sunshine, the beautiful tall buildings, the warm air all around me…

  And in the corner of my eye I see a yellow light flicker across the rocks at the pit entrance. The drone is zeroing in on me. No choice but to go deeper. I pick myself and, stooped over in the low space, shuffle my way farther in, then down, down, deeper into the dark abyss. The passageway opens up a little; I am able to stand up straight, much to the relief of my lower back. The path meanders to the left, then downward. It looks like it leads deep into the asteroid, formed maybe eons ago by water vapor boiled out by passing close to the sun.

  There ain’t no straight lines in the cave; I must make my way through turn after turn, climbing over mounds, ducking under rocky dips in the ceiling, lowering myself into ever deeper, darker pits. The light behind me is not giving up. The labyrinthine branches of the cave work to my advantage to evade the drone but I ain’t sure I will ever find my way out. I’m trying hard to memorize each turn but there are so many. Eventually I give up.

  My only hope is that I’ll find a branch in the cave system that will lead me to another exit, out of sight of the Kestrel and her killing machines. Maybe when I get out I can find a way to block the exit and trap the drone. Then I can find my way back to the ship on my own terms. I can find a weapon, kill whoever I gotta kill, and free Louis and Katya—and the captain, if she’s alive.

  The drone is getting closer. I can see shadows behind me cast by its lights, sweeping back and forth. The machine is searching for me, robotically checking out every crevice and passage. I disable the claws on my hiking boots—they’re only slowing me down in here. Then I shut off my helmet lamps again. Now I am engulfed in the utter blackness of the cave.

  Step by step I shuffle along in the absence of light, guided only by hints that show up in my helmet display. The suit’s infrared cameras work off of differences in temperature, but this far down the temperature of the rock is nearly all the same. And it has probably been that way for a very, very long time. I come to a straighter section of the tunnel and realize that the roof is low again and that I can touch it with my outstretched hands. I move with my arms above my head, hand over hand, stumbling on the rocks at my feet. But I’ve got a rhythm going and I can pick my path by feeling the ceiling. I don’t have to worry about bouncing up and hitting the ceiling in t
he low gravity. I pick up speed by walking this way. I still bash my head a few times but nothing my helmet can’t handle.

  I come to a big fork in the tunnel and I pause, not sure whether to go right or left. I look behind me. The drone is relentless, its lights coming up from behind, dimmer but still searching. I choose the left branch. I think it’s more likely to lead me to an exit. The ground is more uneven here, slowing me down. Plus, the farther I go into the tunnel, the less effective my infrared is. It’s to the point where I’m moving almost entirely by feel. The blackness is disorienting and claustrophobic. I hum a favorite old western tune, Red River Valley, although with my breathlessness and trembling the sound of my own voice is not very reassuring. But it’s better than panicky silence.

  I try to concentrate and move forward best I can, stumbling, falling, picking myself up and moving on. There’s a hollow feeling in my chest, increasing with every step that I take, as I wander deeper and deeper into this strange place. Turning around, I can still see the flash of the drone’s headlamps behind me, moving into each branch, shining lights, no doubt checking for the infrared signature of my footsteps at each turn. I have to keep going. I come to three-way fork; this one with a branch heading up and another two heading left and right. I grunt and curse in my exhaustion, pulling myself into the upward leading branch, hoping it will lead to the surface. But instead the new path veers left and then after a bit it continues back down.