“Hey Gristle, this is Kestrel actual, over.”
Gristle’s head jerks around to face the Kestrel. “What? Shut up I’m busy!” he barks.
“Just got a priority message from Malapert. Don’t kill any more Allgood people. They’ve made a deal. Repeat, don’t kill anyone. Acknowledge. Over.”
Gristle looks back at me and drops his hand from his wristy. I can feel him shaking with rage. His helmet whips around to face the Kestrel again.
“I’ll kill whoever I wanna kill dammit! I’m the big man here! You tell Nifty Jim you couldn’t reach me! You tell him that!”
“No can do Gristle. These are orders. Stand down. Stand down right now. Acknowledge, over.”
“Acknowledge this Over!” yells Gristle, holding up his gloved middle finger to the Kestrel.
Daytime has crept up again. The sun’s rays beam at a low angle, illuminating everything in their path with brilliant light, and leaving everything not in their path in long shadows. It casts a bright light on the corner of Gristle’s face through his visor as he turns back to face me. “I didn’t finish telling ya. I don’t enjoy killing, but I did enjoy killing your father.”
“Wha…what?” I gasp.
He shrugs. “It was a contract job, nothing personal. But your old man fought back. He hit me in the nose and made me bleed—then he kicked me in the damn crotch! It hurt. It got real personal then, you best believe that.”
“You killed Pops?”
“Well, hell, I was gonna kill him anyway, but he was just nasty. Wouldn’t go down like no gentleman. So first I broke his arms and legs, one by one, crack!” Gristle chuckles with the memory. “Then I took a big dose of Paradise…the drug of angels, the drug of the devil, right in my brain. Ahh…in my BRAIN!” The beam of sunlight highlights the corner of his obscene grin, wide with an excitement. “Then I slit his throat, haw haw, I slit it good, and watched him gurgle through that crack in his neck and bleed and die.” He brings his helmet down in to the dust, his looming rhinoceros face inches from mine. “And I was so high.” he whispers. “I was so high that it was like heaven.”
Gristle sits up straight, his body aglow in the bright sun. “Just like now when I cut you up,” he exclaims. “Like father like son!” He smacks his wristy, releasing the drug. “Ahhh…” he grunts. His body is trembling as the drug does who-knows-what to his brain, his beady eyes about to pop out of their sockets, his eyebrows arched, his quivering mouth open, panting in short breaths. He looks at me, grinning lips thick with the lather of his own saliva, dripping down and smearing the inside of his visor. He holds the slender stiletto in front of my face. He presses the button and a long blade snaps out of its handle, gleaming like a mirror in the new sunlight.
I struggle frantically to get out from under him but his weight is too much. He arches his back, and holds the stiletto high in both hands, its point aimed at my chest. I have one chance. I whip the foam gun up behind him with my right hand and jam it in the joint between his backpack and the fabric of his suit, near the small of his back on his left side. I feel the metal nozzle of the gun penetrate the fabric. My index finger squeezes: the trigger lock clicks on. But it doesn’t faze him—he’s much too high on his Paradise to even notice. Defeated, I drop my hand, but the gun stays stuck in Gristle’s suit. I see a stream of foam through the dust, leaking from behind Gristle, drying and sealing the gun to the suit. Gristle looks down at me with an unnatural grin. “YOOU DIEE NOW,” he says in a stoned slur.
He plunges the knife down. The stiletto stops short—he can’t move it any further. He tries again, but his left shoulder won’t budge. He looks over at his shoulder, blinking his eyes in disbelief, not comprehending what is happening to him. The foam is pumping and expanding into his suit, the gun undulating obscenely within a penumbra of oozing foam as the suit squeezes in reaction to the sudden new pressure. Some of the foam has already reached Gristle’s shoulder and has hardened. Confused and intoxicated, he curses over the radio, his words unintelligible.
I look down and see the fabric around his thighs bulging, then contracting. The foam is coursing through his suit and filling every gap it can find. The programming of the electronic fabric is trying to equalize the pressure inside the suit by expanding and contracting, and with each contraction further spreading the foam against his body. “Hey!” Gristle screams, barely intelligible in his stupor. “Hey! Somebo cu hep! CU HEP!”
“What’s that?” comes the Kestrel voice.
“SHISS IH MA SU! HE!”
“Gristle, stop clowning around and get back to the ship immediately. This asteroid is coming apart. Acknowledge, over.”
Gristle’s arm is stuck up high, as if saluting, while pulsating grotesquely as the foam and battles the suit. His glove inflates cartoonishly as the foam surrounds his fingers. His right arm is forced to extend at the elbow, reaching into the sky, the fabric quivering madly. He struggles in vain, turning right and left, desperately trying to look around his breast plate and find the source of the flow.
I hear a wheezing noise culminating in a high-pitched whistle over the radio. Gristle’s breath is being forced from his lungs as the foam expands mercilessly under his rigid breast plate. He stands up and off of me, the foam flowing down both of his legs, forcing his knees to straighten. Foam bubbles up behind his visor. Gristle shakes his head back and forth in terror as the unstoppable mass covers his lips. I hear one last animal scream, then a gurgling as the foam forces itself into his mouth, down his throat, bursting his lungs and stomach.
Within seconds, his wide, panicked eyes are submerged under the rising tide. He stops struggling. I stand up and look on in morbid fascination. I hear bones splitting. I see a chunk of flesh pushing out against the inside of his visor, and then realize it’s his chin, pushed inexorably by the foam, separating his jaw from his skull, flattening it against the transparency at a freakish angle. Now I don’t see nothing but foam and chin behind Gristle’s visor. I wonder if the Paradise make his death any more pleasant for him.
The team of Kestrel men have walked up while I was down in the dust, but they are as fascinated as I am. They stand in a semicircle around Gristle and don’t even notice me. They don’t try to help as his right and left boots explode. Black foam shoots out, slithering and expanding like massive pythons, hardening and pushing against the ground, lifting his body up a meter from the ground. Gloves pop off. Black foam rockets out from his sleeves and harden into two downward-curved, black tubes extending from his wrists. A black chemical geyser erupts out the top from the top of his helmet, instantly blossoming into an asymmetrical, rigid blob.
He’s finally still. What’s left is a shining black figure, dripping bodily fluids, towering against the distant sun like a bizarre statue produced by an overpaid sculptor at some pretentious Malapert museum.
“Well, he’s a big man now,” says a voice.
I feel the surface of the black monstrosity with my glove. It’s as hard as the steel it was designed to repair. Ain’t no man ever been deader. Ain’t no man ever deserved it more. “That’s for killing Pops,” I say.
The Kestrel men don’t seem to mind that Gristle is a corpse. Maybe he was as much a threat to them as he was to us. But nobody has much time to ponder: there’s a massive quake; I fall to one knee, then pick myself up, keeping my legs far apart for balance; I shuffle my boots into the ground to get them locked in. One of the Kestrel men fell flat on his back but he’s getting up. “Holy crap! We need to get out of here!” he exclaims.
I look over the man and pick out the one that looks like he’s in charge. His armbands are silver and the rest of them seem to pay attention when he talks. I walk over and plant my boots in front of him. “You in charge of these guys?” I ask.
“Yup,” says Silver Armbands.
“So what now?”
“Well we’re not going to attempt to take Gristle back to Luna, if that’s what you mean. He stays.”
“I mean what now with us? With the Allgood crew.
”
He shrugs a little. “Ah…we got word not to hurt you. Some kind of deal has been made. I guess you are free to go, and we’ll find out who pays who when they choose to tell us.”
“Not so fast,” I say. “You killed a member of our crew.”
The man looks insulted. “I didn’t kill nobody. He did the killing,” he said, nodding towards Gristle’s encapsulated corpse.
“We’ll see about that,” I say.
“Do what you want kid,” he says, “but you gotta know by now that Nifty Jim owns the law back home.”
With that, the ground shakes again, hard. I look over the horizon—there are huge boulders flying up into the sky, propelled from underneath by the expulsion of the dark red gas. The materia is too damaged to hold the stroid together no more.
“On one condition,” I say, locking my knees against the tremors.
“What? Who are you to give me conditions? You little punk—you see how many men I have? Do you see the weapons?”
“Stop shooting the red stuff,” I say, “Stop shooting it right now.”
Silver Armbands smiles and shakes his head. He looks like he’s going to laugh when another voice breaks in. “Prescot, this is Kestrel actual, over.”
Silver armbands answers: “Kestrel, Prescot, over.”
“Stand down from shooting the red mineral. Hold your fire and bring the rover back. Prepare to launch ASAP, over.”
“Wha…what? Repeat Kestrel, over.”
“Hold your fire. Retrieve your men and leave the red mineral alone. Bring the rover back to the hanger, we’re launching soonest. Orders from Malapert. Acknowledge, over.”
“Roger Kestrel. Prescot out.” He switches his radio over to talk to me. He don’t realize I heard everything that was just said. “Well, this is your lucky day,” he says, with an undertone of frustration. “We just got orders to hold fire.”
I nod. Structure has done his job well. Every desire I express will come back to them as a command from their boss, with all the authentication protocols perfectly intact. “We’ll be going then,” I say. “When we get back, we’ll see who goes to jail as an accessory to murder.”
He grins behind his visor. “Oh, you think so?” he says with a chuckle. “Nifty Jim will take care of you, one way or another. You got no idea.”
I pivot in the dust to head back to the CM. “See you soon, Prescot,” I say as I’m walking away. No reply. He’s got to be wondering how I know his name.
PART III: BACK TO SHACKTOWN
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”–George Eliot
“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” –W.C. Fields
The whole CM is shaking now. I don’t know how long the ground below us will hold, but it feels like it’s gonna break apart any minute. Katya and I work together to get Captain Jemison and Louis onto cots below decks, doing our best with the wounded even with the bulkheads shaking randomly. Poor Katya has been working tirelessly; I help best I can.
The captain regained consciousness for a few minutes. She asked a few groggy questions, but she was real shaky so Katya sedated her and the captain fell back asleep. Katya says at least the bleeding is under control. She’s has also been working on stabilizing Louis, pumping in IV fluids, painkillers and antibiotics. She left him asleep on his cot too, on the heavy pain medication. I go back out and bring the body of Officer Nastez to the decontamination tent. I clean him up in a big hurry, zip him into a body bag and strap him down back in the unpressurized section of the CM.
Katya don’t have time to pack up all the mining drones and beneficiation unit, and I ain’t checked out enough to help. Once her patients are stable, we start preps for launch. I keep an eye the captain and Louis, and on the Kestrel too just in case, but I figure they’re no longer a threat. Their communication to Malapert has been hacked so thoroughly that we effectively control them. I ain’t sure if Nifty Jim even knows they’re coming back. We could crash them into the Sun if we wanted to.
Katya and I breathe a sigh of relief when we see the other ship blast her moorings and fire thrusters for home. Good riddance, ya stinkin’ stinkroaches. As for us, things are getting scary. It’s a race to get airborne before the ground swallows us or a boulder slams us from the side and breaks us like an egg. The ground shakes constantly and violently now—I look out the windows from the flight deck and see huge chunks of Hrothgar breaking off and tumbling into space on top of massive plumes of black dust. There’s a series of rapid tremors and a huge fissure opens up right next to the CM, swallowing the decon tent.
With all the bending and twisting of the ground below us, will we be able to separate from Hrothgar? The pyros could be damaged or an electrical wire could have snapped. If even one of them fails to fire, we’ll be stuck here, and who knows what will happen then. Katya and I strap in to the pilot and co-pilot’s saddles. Katya flips through the launch sequence as rapidly as she can, her hair matted and eyes bloodshot with fatigue. I can see the fear in her face, and to be honest I feel the same way. She has redo some of the commands—the displays are shaking so violently that she’s having a hard time pressing the soft buttons on the screens.
She looks over at me. “It’s been great working with you Straker.”
Is it really that bad? “Thanks, Katya. It’s been great working with you too,” I say.
She sighs. “Here goes,” she says.
She punches the last button and grips the sides of her saddle. The pyros blast, one after another, sounding like shotguns when they fire. There’s a racket of pots and pans and electronics falling to the floor—we didn’t have time to batten everything down. Katya and I sit tight and hope silently for the best.
We both breathe a sigh of relief when the displays say the CM is free. Katya energizes the prop drone. The smooth rumble of powerful thrusters fills the room but the ground shaking stops. I feel the acceleration pushing me into my seat as we lift off, see the horizon and the haze fall away in the windows. Once we get up to altitude and mate the CM with the loitering cargo section, the Allgood is complete once again.
Katya wants to be with her patients when the ship’s big thrusters perform the first, long burn, so she sets up the ship’s nav and prop systems and leaves it to me to man the flight deck. All I have to do is push one button. Katya goes below decks.
Now, I am alone under the dim lights of the flight deck, sitting in the captain’s saddle, listening to the quiet drone of the ventilation ducts and cooling fans, watching the busy displays as the computer sequences the systems for the return trip. Hrothgar is breaking up below us—there is a chance that Allgood could get hit by one of those boulders, so the sooner we fire the main engines, the better. I am exhausted and every bone in my body aches. The meds Katya gave me help to keep me awake and dull the pain. But I feel intensely alone. The main challenge in space travel is spiritual, like Sophia said.
I haven’t heard from her since our time together in the red room. What a strange, wonderful time that was. But the memory is sad. I can’t get her out of my mind. How I wish she were human. But a gnawing fear nags me like a dust rash on raw skin. I run it over and over in my head: the size of the stroid, the amount of materia, the rate at which the lasers from the Kestrel were burning through the stuff, and Hrothgar coming apart. Estimates and guesses, but they’re all I got. I have to assume Sophia is dead. The thought of that puts me into a dark pit; I find myself sobbing at odd moments.
The countdown sequence is down to zero. I sound the Klaxon and press the ignition button. I hear the huge thrusters respond with a low, distant hum and feel the deep vibrations in my feet, pushing the lumbering ship away from the expanding pile of rubble that used to be Hrothgar. The acceleration pushes me softly back in the saddle. Me, Straker Yuuta, pushing the button that sends this huge ship on its way. At another time I might have been happy about that. Anyways, we’re headed home.
* * * * *
One thing leads to another. Something happens
, then that changes the way you see things, then that causes you to do other things that you wouldn’t have otherwise done. Cause and effect. The cue ball hits the stripe ball hits another ball, until something falls in the pocket.
That’s the kind of thing that occupies my mind lately. You gotta think about something when you’re bumping over rocks and slogging through an ocean of gray regolith. It was a long, lonely trip back to Luna. The captain spent the first several days in a drug-induced daze. Katya slowly weened her off the medication, and within a week the captain was back in her ready-room filing reports. She looked pretty awful but she is a pretty bad-ass lady.
After Louis recovered, he and Katya would share meals with me, and we would all exchange small talk, but for the most part they just wanted to be alone together. What started out as Katya performing her duties as medical technician turned into something else altogether as Louis started getting better. His convalescence apparently required a lot of personal attention, which involved a lot of giggling and loud noises. I stayed out of that part of the carousel.
I’ve never seen a guy, so beat up, look so happy. I’m glad for Louis, glad for them both really. But they definitely left me out in the cold. On the good side, I had lots of time with my guitar to practice my song. Every time I put on my headset to hear the strings, I thought maybe this time Sophia would interrupt, like she used to. Maybe I will hear her sweet, crazy voice again. But she didn’t talk to me. Not one time. I put as much heart into the song as I could, hoping it would stir her and get her talking. But no.
On one of my lonely days I got to thinking about what would happen when the Allgood got back to Luna. I was expecting we would be boarded by ProvGov people. I was expecting them to impound all evidence of possible murder, and I was expecting them to try to pin it all on me somehow. After all, like Prescot said back on Hrothgar, Nifty Jim owns the law south of the equator. They might, I thought, grab all the data storage from my suit. They would say they needed it so they could review the logs and video files that the suit recorded during the time of all the killings. Then who knows what them logs would say. Probably whatever ProvGov wanted them to say. Anyways that was my thinking.
Love and Other Metals Page 28