Love and Other Metals

by K. P. Redmond

  The hatch cracks; silently, thank God. I press my head up against the metal to see through the crack. I’m facing Katya’s engineering station. I see the back of a Kestrel man, holstered gun at his side. He’s talking, his hands moving as he speaks, agitated. He moves to the side, oblivious that he’s being watched. Then I see Louis. His hands are behind him and he’s restrained to one of the saddles, slumped over. His face is swollen and red; a stream of dried blood streaking the side of his mouth. He looks exhausted, and barely conscious.

  Katya is in the other saddle, facing me, her arms also restrained. Her eyes are sunken and half closed, her face white with fatigue. Kestrel man is talking and gesticulating to her. I can’t make out what he’s saying; he’s turned away from me, his words lost in the ambient noise and of the flight deck. I crack the hatch a little wider and look to each side. I see the captain lying on the floor to my left, but I don’t see Nastez nowhere. He’s dead, so they most likely took his corpse outside. Which also makes it likely that the captain is not dead, since she’s still here.

  Katya spots me. Her eyelids flutter open in recognition at first but then drop back down to half open, like they were before, but her eyes stay on me. Smart woman. I crack open the hatch a little wider. I lift up the crowbar so she can see the end of it. Her eyebrows come down and up to signal me that she understands. She looks over at Kestrel Man. She has suddenly developed a wide-eyed interest in his long-running monologue. “Oh, I know what you’re saying,” she says. “Nobody listens to the working man.”

  Kestrel Man looks pleased with himself and speaks up with new authority. “Damn straight,” he says. “I mean I would say to Nifty Jim, I would tell him myself, I’d say why can’t we just make a deal with the Consortium? I’d say why can’t we just do that? Because all this fighting is just costing money, you know, and word gets out, and when word gets out it scares the tourists and they stop coming. They’ll just stop.”

  “Would you really?” asks Katya, a new fascination in her tone. “Would you tell Nifty Jim to his face?”

  “Hell yea I would. I ain’t scared of him. Ain’t scared of nobody. I would tell him straight up, no bull.” His shoulders move back on his frame and he nods his manly head to Katya. I open the hatch all the way. It’s still quiet.

  “That’s very brave of you!” exclaims Katya. “And you are so right.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a woman flutter her eyelashes before, but there it is. Not a myth.

  “So I ain’t as bad as you thought, huh? I ain’t all that bad am I? Just trying to make a livin’ ya know.” I slowly pull my right foot off the ladder and plant it on the upper deck. Katya smiles at the man. Nice, big, friendly smile. She can really be dazzling when she wants to be, and she dazzles me all the more since I know she’s putting on an act.

  “Oh no,” she says. “In fact, you’re the cutest guy I’ve seen from the Kestrel. There are only two young men in our crew, and they’re both such losers.”

  “Ha ha, losers huh? Even the big jock over there?” he says, cocking his head towards Louis.

  “Oh him, he’s really lame,” she giggles. “He writes poetry, for crying out loud!”

  Kestrel man laughs too. They laugh together. Nice. Lots of noise to cover the sound of my feet as I creep slowly across the deck, crowbar now in both hands. Kestrel Man starts to turn my way as he laughs. “Hey, it’s hot in here!” exclaims Katya.

  Kestrel Man turns back to her. “Hot? Oh yea?”

  “Yea. My hands are tied; can you pull the zipper down on my chest? This jumpsuit is very…constricting.” She sticks her chest out for maximum effect. Her eyes look directly into his. Her lips part slightly. I raise the crowbar. I brace my knee against a console to hold me down.

  “Oh, uh, yea, how far down do you want it?” Kestrel Man asks Katya, with a cocky smirk.

  “Ooo, all the way down,” she says. “Bring it down right now.”

  “Huh?” With that, the man knows that he’s been had. He swivels and looks directly at me, his eyes wide, hand reaching for his gun. Too late. I swing the big bar down on the crown of his head. Thud. Home run. Kestrel Man’s body goes limp; he collapses to the floor. I kick him out of my way and whip out a pair of heavy clippers from my utility belt. With a snip, Katya is free. First thing she does is grab her med kit and bind the hands of the thug with biotape.

  “Get Louis!,” she says as she’s wrapping the tape, then: “Oh my god you’re covered in dust!”

  “Sorry,” I mutter, as I clip Louis’s bindings. He starts falling from his saddle, but I catch him before he hits the floor. “How’s the captain?” I ask. Katya shakes her head I don’t know. She kneels over the captain’s prostrate body and lifts her eyelids.

  “Unconscious,” says Katya. “But alive.” Blood is dried on the captain’s face and she looks whiter than I’ve ever seen her. Katya gently palpitates the captain’s abdomen, then pulls the captains zipper down to expose her belly. It’s purple. “Internal bleeding,” she grimly whispers. “She needs blood right away.” Katya whips around and starts pulling out the contents of the medical stores cabinet.

  I’m cleaning Louis up, best I can, until Katya can get to him. He comes to. “Hey Straker,” he croaks through his bloody lips. “Glad you could make it back.”

  “My God Louis,” I say, “Gristle really beat you up.”

  “Ugly dude ain’t got no sense of humor.”

  Katya has retrieved a med kit and sits cross legged on the floor by the captain. She slams her first into the emergency blood bag to break the internal barrier and mix the oxygenator with the blood-substitute, then slides the needle into the captain’s arm and starts the tiny pump on the bag. “Hold this,” she says, handing the bag to me. “Up high!” I grasp the bag and hold it above my head as the little pump churns away. Katya starts on Louis, wiping down his wounds and looking him over, checking for lacerations and broken bones.

  “You took on two guys and nearly whipped Gristle too!” I say to Louis. “I ain’t never seen nobody fight like that. Where did you learn that?”

  “Long story,” he says. “Maybe I can tell you about it someday. If we live.” He looks up at Katya through his swollen eyes. She’s carefully cleaning the blood from his temple with a small pad. “You OK?” he asks her. No answer, just wiping and cleaning. “Did they hurt you?” he asks, this time with more concern in his voice.

  Katya shakes her head no. She swallows hard, then speaks in a soft voice, not meeting his gaze. “So, those missing years after high school…”

  “A medical thing,” he replies.

  “And the workouts. And the black-belt fighting I saw. And knowing all about military lasers.”

  “Just stuff I do.”

  “And the jock-talk and the stupid jokes.” Katya looks in Louis’s eyes. “It’s all cover, isn’t it? It’s all some big secret, isn’t it?”

  Louis gazes at her with total devotion, lifting his eyebrows, causing a single drop of blood to flow from the gash above his eye and meander down his cheek. His face is broken and bloody, but even in his pathetic state a blind man could see how much Louis wants to tell her everything. But he can’t. He silently shrugs his shoulders, and even that looks painful. Katya wipes the fresh blood from his skin, but her lower lip is trembling. She stops and puts her hands over her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Louis asks, his eyebrows knitted in concern. Katya’s face turns red behind her hands. She is shaking. Louis reaches up and puts his hand on her arm.

  “I’m…I’m sorry,” she blurts out. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “What? Why?”

  Katya pulls her hands away from her face. “I was…I was such…I was such a bitch to you!”

  Louis struggles but sits up next to her, propping himself against a console. He looks into her face. She drops her hands and looks up at him with big, sorrowful eyes, her shame welling up and spilling from the lids. Louis simply smiles at her. Katya breaks up and sobs openly. Big tears part from her face and float s
lowly towards the floor. Each is a perfect sphere, transparent and lovely as glass, glinting with the reflection of the ceiling lights. Louis gently embraces her, stroking her hair. That moment seems to last forever: the woman, the man, and the tears. I believe I ought to be somewheres else right now. But then I hear a squawking coming from the unconscious man’s headset. I walk over, grab the set, and put it on my head.

  “Ned?” says the headset. “You there? Need your status, over.”

  I look at Louis and Katya. “What should I do?” I ask.

  Louis shrugs. “If they want status, give them status.”

  There’s a jolt in the floor, I nearly stumble. I grab onto the console to steady myself. I tap the headset talk button. “Ah, yea, Kestrel,” I say. “This is Ned. Ah…situation under control, everything is A-OK, over.”

  “Yea well your telemetry says you’re unconscious, over,” says the voice.

  Oops. Busted. Gotta improvise, fast. “Kestrel, this is Ned again…ah…some kinda malfunction…anal thermometer fell out my butt…well, uh, yea. Over.”

  “Anal what?”

  I drop the headset on the floor. “They’re coming,” I say.

  “Can’t we just blast off?” asks Louis. “Propulsion is ready to go, ain’t it?”

  “Yes,” answers Katya, wiping her eyes. “We can lift in 20 minutes or so, if we start now. But what about Romeo over there?” She nods towards the unconscious Kestrel thug.

  Louis ponders for a moment, then responds: “We can put him in his suit and leave him out on the surface. Let his own goons come get him.”

  “OK,” says Katya. “His suit has plenty of O2. I’ll make sure he’s stable and get him out of here.” She hands Louis a cold compress. “Hold this on your face; it will help with the swelling.”

  “Wait,” I say, “What’s to keep them from just blasting us with their laser?”

  Louis nods, holding the compress painfully to his swollen right cheekbone. “Right…right. They could put a hole in our hull. They could do it either now, or anytime on the trip back. The Kestrel is much faster than our ship. They don’t have the fuel to steal our cargo outright, but they could wait until we’ve gone through our first big burn and expended most of our delta-V, then kill us, then just take our cargo in tow.”

  After all this. Is there no way to get away from these freaks? The three of us are silent for a moment, pondering what to do, when the floor suddenly drops a couple of centimeters. A ceramic sippy falls the top of a console onto the floor, with a crash, and I hear the clatter of things falling in the galley. Louis looks up at the films. “Don’t know what’s going on out there, but I got a feeling the sooner we’re off this rock, the better.”

  “We need to smash that laser before we go,” I say. “We need to do it now while they’re still chasing their drone.”

  “They’re chasing a drone?” asks Katya, leaning over the Kestrel man and pushing an injection into the sliver of neck exposed by his helmetless spacesuit. Something to help with concussion, I reckon.

  “Yea, they’ll be chasing it for a little while,” I say. “So now is a good time, if we’re going to do it.” Never mind how I know that. Louis’ eyebrows go up in a question. But then he nods.

  “So how do we disable the laser?” asks Katya.

  “Wouldn’t take much,” says Louis. “Break the main lens, or even just scratch it up. They’re actually pretty fragile.”

  “I’ll go, I say. “I’m already suited.”

  “Na, I’ll go,” says Louis. He struggles to get up, unsuccessfully trying to suppress his moan from the pain.

  “No!” says Katya. “Don’t be ridiculous! You are in no condition to go. You can’t even get into your suit.”

  Louis pauses, then nods, looking like he nearly blacked out from the pain of that small movement. It’s just the truth. He would be the best person to go, since he’s obviously a trained fighter, even though he won’t say how. But his face looks like it’s been through an ice mill, and that’s just the part I can see. Probably has broken bones that we haven’t had the time to find yet. “Could I use your gun?” I ask. “Blast the lens with it?”

  Louis thinks for a minute, then shakes his head. “Na, that gun is really tricky. Without training you’re more likely to blow a hole in yourself than in the laser.”

  “Then I can use the crowbar,” I say. “Take a good swing at the lens, maybe break it, or at least scratch it.”

  Louis shakes his head again. “That might work, but better use something heavier if you can. Like a hammer. There’s that big one in the tool bin outside the hull. One big hit should do it. Lock your boots down tight first.”

  “Roger that. OK, hammer it is.” I say, arranging my own headset back over my hair. “Once I do this, they’re going to come after us like mad hornets. We better be ready to go.”

  “I’ll spin up the nav and pressurize the prop system,” says Katya. “Louis, you can help me with the checklist. We’ll blow the moorings and launch as soon as Straker is back in the airlock.”

  “All right. That’s it. I’m going.” I stand up and start for the hatch.

  “Wait,” calls Katya. “The key!”

  “Oh, right. I have it.” I pull the chip from my arm pocket and hand it to her.

  “Good luck, Straker,” she says. Her face is white, her tone fatalistic, like this is the last time she’s going to see me alive. Maybe it is.

  Louis nods gravely to me and holds his bloody hand up in farewell. Then he gives me a thumbs up. “Good hunting,” he says.

  With my trusty crowbar in hand, I head past the galley for the dressing area. I feel my heart pumping in my chest, knowing that I will soon be in mortal danger once again, not knowing what form it will take. But I’m getting used to fighting. Besides, it’s time for doing, not feeling. My adrenalin will get me through. I’m in the dressing room. I step into the backpack and put on the chest piece. My helmet is on the floor, where it must’ve fallen after that last quake. I grab it and take a couple last luxurious breaths of free air. I latch it down over my shoulders, step into the airlock, and slap the switch to pump out the air at max flow rate. My suit reacts to the vacuum like a living thing, bulging out, then pushing in on my body, until it finds equilibrium. The suit’s function is to maintain a programmed volume within limits, so sometimes it responds to sudden pressure changes like that. “Structure, you still there?” I say to my headset.

  “here” text appears on my visor, then fades away. The suit-to-suit conversations of the Kestrel crew start coming over my headset again.

  “Where is this stupid thing leading us?” says one nasal voice, exasperated, judging by his tone.

  “I can’t keep up!” comes another voice. “The ground is shaking like hell, my feet nearly broke free a minute ago! Over!”

  “Keep going dammit!” says the nasal guy. “Without that key we’re going back empty handed!”

  I open the outer hatch and look around. We’re back in daylight, but the shadows are already long again as the sun is moving down into the yellow ground haze. Won’t be long before night comes again. Nobody is patrolling at the moment; I reckon the liberated drone is still keeping them in the busy. I keep low and close to the hull of the CM, trying to stay out of view of the Kestrel’s cameras. I feel ominous vibrations in my feet—the ground is trembling almost constantly now.

  The unpressurized tool compartment hatch is just ahead; it’s a big space on the side of the hull where we keep the tools for outside work--in this case, a yellow-handled engineer’s hammer, just right for knocking hardened rocks out of a mining drone’s digging teeth or smashing laser lenses. I pull the handle on the latch and the bin door swings open and down. A corpse tumbles out. It bounces once in the low gravity then settles, the body disappearing into the billowing dust that covers the ground. I lift up its head: It’s First Officer Nastez, still in his bloody jumpsuit, his glazed eyelids staring at the alien sky above, mummified from the vacuum.

  I shudder and take
a step back and for a second I think I’m going to heave in my helmet. But I grit my teeth and grunt and fight the urge with everything I’ve got. I should have expected this. The feeling goes away. My initial shock over, I examine the body and my revulsion is replaced with cold fury. Nastez was not my favorite but he deserved a more dignified end. For now, I’ve got to get him out of the way. I slide him in the dust a few meters around the side of the hull. “Sorry,” I say.

  I go back to the tool bin and poke around, looking for the hammer. First I have to get through all the other stuff in my way: ratchets, drills, wrenches, the foaming repair gun—I throw them all to the ground. I find the big hammer, held in place by straps against a bulkhead. I release the toggles holding the straps and yank it down.

  Even in this low gravity, I can feel the heft of the big, long-handled hammer. Its raw power makes me feel like a Neanderthal. Nice. The oldest weapon of war known to man against one of his newest. I can’t help but grin—it seems so ludicrous—but whatever works, works. Holding the hammer in both hands, I creep around the side of the CM, keeping my body as close to the hull as possible, sliding my backpack against the smooth steel. I come just to the point where I can see the other ship squatting in the dust. I stay there and wait.

  I don’t have to wait more the five minutes. The night slides in and I find myself standing right in the beams of CM’s floodlights. The Kestrels lights have snapped on too, glowing through the haze not far away. Now is the time. I can’t stop them from seeing me as I trek across to the other ship but they still don’t know how fast I can move on foot; so maybe they’re not paying close attention to their displays.

  I see two suited figures leaving the Kestrel’s airlock, slowly trudging towards the CM, no doubt to check up on their man Ned. I hear the patter between them in my headset; concerned about the quakes and complaining about the ‘Big Man’ bossing them around. They’re talking about Gristle. Wonder where he is. Thankfully, they’re going around the other way to the CM’s airlock, so I just have to wait.