by Various
Dennis pointed ahead. “This way,” he said, breathless.
“Where are we going?” asked Sonia, not breathless at all.
“Foxtrot. The foyer. We gotta jump to that Torus.”
“Jump?” She stopped and arched an eyebrow. “Dennis, it doesn’t make sense that they’d just leave us.”
Dennis grabbed her shoulders. They were matched in modest height and build, though Sonia had soaring titanium cheekbones and Dennis had hammocked jowls that jiggled when he breathed.
“It does,” he said. “And they did.”
System support lights dimmed. The temperature plunged. They ran on. Adrenaline spurred Dennis to personal best pace, but Sonia was still faster. She paused to let him catch up under the shaft of Spoke Echo, marked with an unmissable orange “E.”
As he did, the Echo fire doors slammed across their path.
“Dammit!” said Dennis. He tried prying them with his fingers. No use. “I’m such an idiot!” (This was guilt.)
“No.” Sonia reached over their heads for the Spoke Echo hatch. The ladder slid down with a pert shoomp. “We go around.”
She climbed first, lizard-quick, and he followed as fast as he could. They climbed two hundred meters, past sapphire courtesy lights and a gauntlet of goaty alarms. Dennis’s ears rang. Sweat flowed between his shoulders.
Through the shaft porthole should have been the hull of a nice, big regulation-capacity Torus Z3. Instead there were only stars. Pretty, horrifying stars. Sonia peered at the other octants while Dennis paused to suck wind. In 90 octant, the nids were hard at work, knitting black web across the hull rift, making excellent progress until a silent blast of flame tore it to cinder.
“Slow going for the nids,” said Sonia. Smoke belched from a vent near the damage. “They’ve depressurized 135 octant. Working their way around.” Suddenly, directly across the span, the inner rim buckled. “Look out!” she cried.
“What?”
A startling crack. The walls jittered. Sonia yanked Dennis sideways to the mouth of Spoke Foxtrot. They stared down the spoke’s two hundred meter drop.
“Jump!” said Sonia.
“Jump?”
She hurled them both down the shaft. Dennis went ahead and screamed. Above, a big busted piece of hull hurtled into the porthole plyglass and cracked it. They plunged away from it. Eighty meters to impact. Fifty. Thirty-five.
The porthole crack branched. A shard popped out—only a pinhole—but escaping air sucked them sideways and speared Dennis through the ears. He yelled but couldn’t hear it.
Sonia caught hold of the ladder. Dennis caught hold of her foot. Upside-down they dragged themselves hand-over-hand to the hatch. Dennis’s lungs burned. He pushed out his breath. Twenty meters to the hatch. His eyes bulged too big to blink. His muscles seared. Ten meters. Sonia said something, but there was no air to carry it.
Five meters. She grabbed his waist. They made a wild bullfrog jump to the hatch. Dennis caught the wheel. Sonia dug her heels in the seal, locked her arms and heaved. She grimaced. One titanium elbow bent backward.
Dennis’s vision tunneled to cinder.
The seal broke. Sonia wedged in a hand, then an arm, then the length of her body. More air rushed past her. Blinded, Dennis flapped from the hatch like a flag. With her bad arm, Sonia guided his hand to the ceiling rail. He inched inside. Sonia pushed his feet after him. He was clear, but pinned spread-eagle to the ceiling by fleeing air.
Left longways in the hatch, Sonia tried to spring free. No luck. The hatch clanged tight on her ankle and resealed.
Sonia dangled upside-down by the ankle. Dennis hit the grated floor and groaned.
There was a moment of confused silence.
“Hell,” said Sonia. She stretched stiff arms to the wall. Too far to reach. Already smoke crept across the ceiling toward her.
“Dennis!” she called down. “Dennis, look at me.”
Recovering, Dennis balled himself up. He tested bruised eyes and bloodied ears. Blacking out was so peaceful! “What?” he asked.
“Help me out.”
“You’re stuck,” said Dennis, dazed.
“Yes, I know. Unscrew me.”
“What?”
“I’ve got to get this foot off. Quickly, please.”
Dennis stood. One eye wasn’t back in service yet.
“Clockwise,” said Sonia. She curled to grab her knees, making a graceful U-shape. How many systems engineers did it take to unscrew a lightbulb? Dennis held her waist and turned a tiny circle in place like a drunk uncle at a wedding. Sonia’s lustrous hair dusted the top of his head.
The threads of her ankle joint squealed. She popped free and dropped into his arms. They hit the floor together.
“There!” she said. “You all right?”
“Sure, sure,” he said. He helped her up. Now from one pant leg jutted a titanium cuff and suspension-socket connector.
“Sorry about that,” said Dennis.
“That was my original,” said Sonia.
A third explosion knocked them into the wall. A roaring sound came from behind them. Something sucking. Something coming. They bent under the smoke and limped together up the rim.
The smoke piled high and tripped a new alarm. Dennis covered an ear.
At last they reached the alcove just off the 280 marker and scrambled down its ladder. The foyer! They stood on the airlock: double plyglass floors, just over two meters apart. Below them the starfield reeled.
The Torus slipped in and out of view as they spun past it.
“Sixteen degrees off our axis,” said Sonia.
“How can you tell?” asked Dennis.
“Didn’t you see it?”
Tangerine space suits lined the foyer wall. Dennis found his size. Balanced on one leg, Sonia helped him pull it on. They set the backing seals. They hooked in the boots and gloves. They fit the O2 tank. They lined up the helmet latches.
“I’m sorry I broke the sink,” said Dennis.
“It’s not your fault,” said Sonia. She glanced at the streaming smoke. “I’m forty percent sure it’s not your fault.”
Smoke streamed through the ladder chute.
On went the helmet. Sonia checked the clasps, front and back. She put her face to his visor so he could hear.
“Ready for airlock?” she asked.
Dennis looked down. Only two layers of plyglass kept them in, kept them from that tiny Torus target and infinite hostile void. His heart pounded. Time irised down on him. This was his Toyota brake pedal dropping straight to the floor his junior year. This was the high dive at Wellington Mission Center summer camp. This was stepping on stage as The Grasshopper in his kindergarten play.
He had no choice. “Ready,” he said.
Sonia pried open the first airlock safety and hit the red release button. They braced themselves. The system counted down in “boops": boop, boop, boop.
The first floor slid open. They jumped through and ducked as Sonia hit the matching red button on the ceiling. The lock slid shut above them, sealing out smoke.
Only one portal left. They looked down together. They watched the universe spin past the floor. The Torus slipped into view. It took all of four seconds to slip out again.
“Tough vector,” said Sonia. “Not getting a good read on their speed.”
“Understandable,” said Dennis.
“Surely we don’t have to be exact. Surely they’ll see us.”
He gave her a dead-eyed smile. This was denial arriving just in time. “Surely,” he said.
She wrapped her good arm around his neck. “Jump when I say. We have to lead the target. It might look wrong.”
“I’m not gonna look.”
“Do look. We’ll only have one chance to grab it.” She flipped the second airlock safety. Her hand hovered at the button. “Hold on to the rail,” she said.
Dennis did.
Sonia stared down into the stars, counting, calculating. Dennis watched her. He was calculating odds of h
is own.
“Sonia,” he said. “I want you to know something.”
“One moment.”
She smacked the second button. Boop, boop, boop.
“Sonia…”
The floor sprang open. Suction yanked them forward, but Dennis kept his grip. His suit puffed. Sonia locked her bad leg around his hips. The Torus was nowhere.
Sonia mouthed the words for him. “On three,” she said. “One… two…”
They flew: a bullet with two backs.
At 9.8 m/s, more or less, across the azure first light of Demeter’s lesser sun, they hurtled into nothing. The sound of Dennis’s own panicked breath reflected off his helmet and scared him worse. Sonia adjusted her grip. He locked his arms around her. No more chances. Even her poreless face was too close to bring to focus.
After all the spinning, the stars were suddenly still.
This was it. This was the yawning barathrum of death.
Suddenly the Torus surged into view! They converged on an unknown point, soaring, sailing, bullet and doughnut, creature and shelter. One chance. Seconds away.
Sonia stretched both arms. Dennis gripped her waist. The Torus loomed bigger. They might collide. They would collide. Its nylon docking lattice hovered loose on their side. Closer… closer…
Close enough to see bewildered faces staring at them from a porthole.
Their velocity spiked them on the Torus. His vision sparkled. Sonia’s fingers raked nylon for purchase. They slid across the hull. Dennis caught a fistful of net. So did Sonia, but her bad arm splintered off at the elbow. She tumbled over him. He caught her by the waist. His shoulder creaked like rope and made him gasp, but he held her fast. Sideways. They made a teal and orange starfish on the hull.
Torrid HCl burbled up Dennis’s throat. He fought it down. His eyes were streaming. Sonia insinuated her way parallel to lay against him. She tapped his visor and smiled.
“Nice!” she mouthed.
Gradual, assiduous, they crept across the lattice to the doughnut hole. Dozens of gawping faces pressed against the portholes now. Dennis and Sonia, side by side, climbed upside-down to the airlock.
Sonia banged on the window. “Open up, jerks!” she mouthed.
Boop, boop, boop. The lock doors parted. The two climbed in, clinging to the side rails. The outer lock rushed shut behind them. In this quiet room, unfettered by gravity, Dennis and Sonia bobbed together as the airlock pressurized. She clutched his collar in her remaining hand and swung beneath him like a sleek synthetic remora.
“Good work,” he said.
“You too,” she said.
There was the promise of future things in her smile. Wonderful, horizontal future things.
She hit the internal button. The inner lock parted. Strapped-in passengers and a few floating gray-jackets stared. Sonia launched herself inside, shooting dagger-eyes at everyone.
“Head count!” she shouted, pointing at her own head to illustrate. “Hea-ea-ead cou-ou-ount!”
Dennis drifted in. Some gray-jacket closed the lock while Dennis detached his helmet. There was that smell of space, scorched and metallic, like a penny’s burp. It made him giddy.
The gray-jacket sailed over to wag a finger at Dennis.
“What were you doing out of sector after curfew?” he barked.
“What happened?” asked Dennis.
“We had a debris collision with our radiator. You could have cooked!”
“Easy, shoulderpads.” Dennis executed a lazy no-hands backflip. The other passengers murmured and moved aside. He thought of Sonia. He thought of her courage and her splendid face. Also, much earlier than expected, he thought of what there might be to eat. He still had a craving for grilled cheese.
SHAKA BARS
by Tory Hoke
First published in Luna Station Quarterly (May 2013), edited by Jennifer Lyn Parsons
• • • •
WHEN BREE read the nutrition label, she cussed out loud. Eight in the morning. Middle of the vitamin aisle. Couldn’t help it. She cussed and startled a lady browsing insoles.
Twenty grams of fiber, twenty grams of protein, two hundred calories? Maybe that wouldn’t raise most eyebrows, but Bree, girth balanced on cane and booted broken ankle at the ripe old age of twenty-six, was looking for a miracle. Sweat threaded down the back of her neck. Just standing there made her bones groan. Her fat strained her heart and her dignity but she hadn’t found a way to get free of it.
Sure, she’d squirreled away $3000 for gastric bypass, but she was afraid she’d just botch it like she had everything else: whole boxes of graham crackers on WeightWatchers, whole roast chickens on South Beach. Atkins and veganism two months apart. Nothing worked more than a month. The eating was part of her, like strawberry hair and fragile ankles.
She just needed the right thing to eat.
So what was in these things? The ingredients were surprisingly few: some oligo-fructo fiber substrate, some crumbled nuts and something Hawaiian-sounding she didn’t recognize.
The flavor was “Maui Bliss,” illustrated with coconuts on a black sand beach. From the corner of the wrapper smiled a surfer-Santa type: sixties, bald, bushy silver beard, lean muscle in folded forearms. It gave Bree a pang. Her own arm muscles hadn’t been seen in ages, her weight “adding twenty years” despite a “perfectly good face,” in her mother’s words. Bree, with her freckled face and drawn-on eyebrows. They say men are crazy for redheads; she’d never seen it herself.
Bree took two.
At checkout, the slender teenage clerk held one up and asked, in Dixie drawl, “Are these any good?”
“If they are,” said Bree. “I’ll never buy anything else.”
• • •
At work, she hobbled to her desk, mopping sweat and fishing for the first Maui Bliss. Then the “Team Meeting” alert popped onto her monitor. She knew better than to eat something strange in public. Instead, she made breakfast of scalding coffee and half a bagel, eaten slowly, pining for more.
Roger announced the new project. The team’s men argued over what device, what network security, what long-delayed database overhauls. Bree zoned in and out. From across the table, developer Shanti got in something about a new web framework she’d just read, but Edgar interrupted her with the same idea. It was Edgar that Roger told, “Sounds good. Let’s investigate that further.”
Bree saw it all happen, but she didn’t dare interfere.
So Bree left the meeting, hungry and irritable, to discuss the new feature set with Jack, the easygoing internal customer with the year-round tan and curly hair. She mellowed under his warm gaze and his chuckle when she called herself his “bug zapper.” A good office crush could be sustaining as steak.
For lunch, the company ordered in clammy sandwiches from Bernie’s. She was desperately sleepy an hour later, hungry an hour after that. A granola bar did nothing to improve either, but she white-knuckled, committed this time. It sapped her. She didn’t accomplish much else.
• • •
At home, she settled down for Greek salad dinner, beyond reproach. Then her mother called, opening, per usual, with “I want you to do something for me, if you lo-o-ove me.” Computer problem, natch. Bree agreed to look into it, and with no transition her mother launched into the tale of her workday ("that woman is a sociopath"), her date the previous Friday ("he’s a law professor") and her upstairs plumbing ("never buy a house, Bree.")
At last her mother asked, “So, what are you up to?”
“I’ve been drawing again.”
“Oh? Drawing what?”
“A comic book.”
“Ugh,” said her mother. “Like the world needs another one of those.”
Here Bree zoned again, pushing salad around the plate. Her mother concluded in sing-song soprano: “It’s so nice to talk to you. I wish you called me more often.” Click.
Bree felt rattled. The beast in her was alive—wrapped in damp newspaper and buried deep, but alive. She lasted three minutes. The
n, methodic as a wood-chipper, she annihilated a whole box of packet oatmeal, dry; four shriveled burger buns with jam; half a cereal box. It took mere minutes. The beast was still at large. There had to be something else in the house with the power to put it back down.
The Shaka Bars.
To the handbag—she tore open the first one, biting bar and wrapper together. It was sweet, sure, and buttery, with a pinch of salt. It crunched like real sugar. Just a food bar, like all the rest.
She swallowed.
She felt a chemical change. An easy feeling flowed through her, like wine on an empty stomach. The Shaka Bar gave her a feeling she couldn’t put her finger on. The beast? Asleep. The frenzy? Over. Bree turned her full attention to the bar.
The second bite confirmed findings. Maui Bliss molecules streamed through her blood. Her world turned warm, sharp, panoramic, like a high-speed photo of a flame.
She put the remaining bar back in her bag. Saved it. Unprecedented. She didn’t eat anything else.
• • •
In the morning, Bree shot to work early, bought four more Shaka Bars and got a jump on her assignments. The work seemed so easy. She researched. She tested. She switched her database admin tool from the dog of an app she’d been using since 2009.
While running tests, Bree pulled up the Shaka Bar website. Between cartoon palm trees reappeared Surfer Santa (Shaka Bob, founder and “Chief Tasting Officer") and more flavors. Mai Tai. Bananas Foster. Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. Bree ordered two sample boxes and splurged on expedited shipping.
She searched through “Shaka Bob’s Story” and “Who We Are,” looking for the catch, the pucker factor, the inevitable dolphin foie gras and children’s tears. But Shaka Bars boasted American labor, an “innovative Community Worx™ program” and a “Top 25 Green Companies” mention from Wired. She wondered if the company took visitors. Alas their mailing address was in Hawaii and a PO Box besides.
She hunted for details about the Hawaiian-sounding ingredient: a natural sweetener, as it turned out. If it bothered her that the results for “momokeleki extract” were limited to science journals (initial studies optimistic) and Shaka Bars (press releases), or that the sidebar ads suddenly bristled with private investigators, she gave no indication.