by Scott Baron
“Daisy, we read a massive spike in your vitals. Are you okay?” Gustavo asked over her comms.
“Do you need me?” Vincent’s alarmed voice added a moment later.
Daisy pushed the floating corpse away from her and quickly put her back against the bulkhead. There were a half dozen of them in there. Dead. Mummified. Floating around the room like macabre jellyfish of centuries past. She swallowed hard and calmed herself.
“I’m all right,” she keyed into the comms. “Just had a nasty surprise is all.”
“I can be there in under a minute,” Vince said, clearly concerned.
“No, keep doing what you’re doing. It’s okay. I just found the crew, is all. Caught me off-guard, but I’m okay now.” She swept the flashlight across the room. Her prize was intact, the conversion coil housing was safely closed, with not a scorch mark on it.
Daisy carefully wove her way to the coils through the floating bodies, noting how effectively the cold vacuum of space had preserved them. Human popsicles that looked just as they did the day they died all those many years ago.
The protective panel opened easily enough, and with only the smallest of charges from her portable battery pack and alligator clips, Daisy was able to activate the release mechanism, freeing the coils for use by a ship that, unlike this one, was still very much alive.
“Okay, I’ve got the coils and am heading back out. You need any help up there, Vince?”
“I think I’m good, but I wouldn’t turn down the company.”
Daisy grinned. “Copy that. Coming your way.”
She shouldered the bag and wiggled back out the doorway into the hall. It had been a somewhat winding route, but since the retrieval line was tailing her like a slender white leash, she had no choice but to go back the exact way she came. Daisy glided down the first hallway and was just through the doorway to a sharp curve in the hall when she felt herself suddenly slammed against the wall, held fast and unable to move.
“Aaaahh!” she cried out as the retrieval line cinched tighter and tighter across her torso. Her fingers fought desperately to find purchase on the line, but her gloved hands couldn’t pull even the slightest loop free.
“Your cutters, Daisy! Grab the cutters!”
Her hands were already starting to go numb from the pressure, but Daisy somehow managed to get the manual cutters into her hand. The problem was by that point, she couldn’t feel them there.
Things started to dim, and she found herself wondering what happened to her flashlight’s batteries. It wasn’t that at all, though. They were fully charged and shining bright, but Daisy couldn’t breathe, the pressure turning her face red as she was crushed up against the wall.
Daisy was blacking out.
When the first two ribs popped, she barely even felt it.
I wonder if he’ll miss me, was her last thought before slipping into unconsciousness.
Chapter Twelve
Daisy woke to the sound of Vince’s voice. Muffled and strange, but close.
“Daisy! Wake up!”
She slowly felt sensation returning to her limbs. Was someone holding her?
“What’s going––” She stopped abruptly as the pain from her broken ribs shot through her as she drew a breath. The blast of hot adrenaline roused her to full consciousness in an instant.
“It’s okay, Daze, just take it slow.”
She was still inside the derelict ship, and Vince had his helmet pressed up against hers.
That’s why he sounds muffled. Contact vibration of the glass letting me hear him, but why—She looked down where the retrieval line had wrapped her up. Her arm-mounted control was functional, but the comms link on her EVA suit had been crushed as the line yanked her to the wall. That’s going to leave a mark, she thought, grimly.
A segment of white line was floating through the hallway. Several, actually. She looked around and realized that Vince had chopped the line to pieces in his frantic rescue efforts.
“Okay, let’s get you out of here,” he said, slightly relaxing his worried grip on her, though only slightly.
“But the coils. And the panels––”
“I’ve got them. And we have enough panels for now. Just hang on to me and we’ll sort out the rest later.”
Vince guided her down the winding path, a long scorch on the wall acting as a burned-in breadcrumb trail.
“Check it out. He used his torch to mark the way back,” Sarah commented. “Quick thinking.”
Something looked wrong when they reached the gaping hole to the outside. When they pushed through it, Daisy realized what it was.
Shit. We’re spinning.
Somehow the ship had begun to spin while she was inside it, yanking Bob’s much-smaller vessel out of position as it pulled the retrieval lines tight.
No wonder I couldn’t move. The whole weight of the ship was pulling against me.
Vince clipped her bag of coils to his suit, and without waiting for her okay, he timed his angle, then pushed off from the dead vessel, sending them both gliding toward the darkness of deep space.
“What are you doing, Vince?” she blurted out.
They were going to fly off into space.
Donovan deftly pulled the ship in front of them, the airlock door open, with Gus waiting inside to grab them. The retrieval line winches were bent out of place, but strapped in beside one of them was a stack of salvaged panels.
Daisy and Vince cleared the doorway, and Gus quickly cycled it shut. As soon as the compartment pressurized, he popped his helmet off as Vince pulled off Daisy’s.
“Is she okay?” he asked.
“Seems to be,” Vince said as the inner door opened.
“Go, go, go!” Gustavo yelled to Donovan.”
The pilot didn’t need to be told twice, and with a few well-timed bursts from the air jets, he set the ship drifting away from the spinning bits of the debris field, but in a trajectory that mimicked other floating junk. Regardless of their sense of urgency, they would only fire up the main engines before they were shielded by the bulk of the moon as a last resort.
“What happened?” Daisy asked through clenched teeth.
“A small meteor shower,” Donovan answered from his pilot’s seat. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it just bounces off harmlessly, but this one time…”
“This one time,” Vince continued for him, “a big piece impacted the wreck we were on at just the right angle, and rather than moving us in line with Bob, here, it spun us away.”
“We tried to maneuver quickly, but it was just too sudden. Then your line went tight and yanked us out of sync.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said, gingerly prodding her ribs.
“Vince managed to unclip and push his line free, but you were deep in the ship. If he hadn’t acted so fast, we might have wound up being just another piece of debris out there,” Gus added.
“Indeed, it was very quick thinking, Vince,” Bob said. “Thank you.”
“All I care about is that Daisy is all right,” he replied. “How you feeling?” he asked with tender concern.
“As good as you’d expect to feel with a couple of broken ribs.”
“Shit. Donovan, get us back to––”
“No, cancel that, Don. Going back to Dark Side isn’t going to heal my ribs any faster, and we’re already all the way out here, so we may as well finish the scanning run while we’re at it. Just let me sit quietly and I’ll be okay.”
“You sure?” Vince asked, looking at her with a deeply concerned expression.
“Aww, look at him, Daze. He’s genuinely worried about you. I think you gave him a real scare back there.”
She looked into his eyes, and damn if it wasn’t true, but there was an edge of loving panic to them. For a minute, she almost forgot that she didn’t love him anymore.
Three hours later they had listened to enough static-filled, high-tech comms garbage to call it a day. To everyone else it sounded like mere noise, but to Daisy, it sounded al
most like scrambled language. Static, but not. An observation that gave her an idea.
“Hey,” she said, “why haven’t you guys ever sent pulsed radio signals to Earth instead of a ping if you’re trying to reach it?”
“We’d be picked up,” Donovan replied. “Plus, if they managed to embed the AI virus in a reply signal, they could take out Sid and Bob in the process.”
“But you could just send it from a relay point well past the moon. You know, set up a remote satellite and bounce it to and from Earth. And if you built in an automatic delay, you could even mimic a far-distant location. Make them think it’s from way out in space.”
“Huh. Hadn’t thought of that,” Donovan conceded.
“But, Daisy,” Bob’s disembodied voice interjected, “even if we did arrange a system like that, they could still load the virus into it. All we would buy ourselves would be a few minutes.”
“Don’t you get it? You set it up like a kill-switch. If the relay receives the virus, it breaks the connection before it is ever transmitted to you. And besides, if you use scrambled terrestrial radio waves, odds are minuscule they’d even notice it.”
“A rather astute observation, considering you have no interest in returning to Earth,” Bob replied.
“There you go, Daze. Can’t help but solve a problem when it’s put in front of you.”
I didn’t mean to, she grudgingly replied.
“Yeah, but now you got them thinking. And that’s good. I mean, just because we’re not going back to the surface doesn’t mean we can’t be helpful.”
“Hey, you guys will want to see this,” Donovan said excitedly. “Looks like you’re in for a show.”
Far in the distance, a heated glow formed around a large alien transport ship as it powered through Earth’s atmosphere carrying its payload of salvaged materials. As it drew closer, just how massive it was became apparent.
Donovan began powering down their ship even further.
“Have to go to bare minimum power. The scans from the surface won’t see us in low-power mode, but a passing ship might. Everyone put on your helmets and buckle in. I’ve gotta turn off the life support and gravity too.”
Everyone did as the pilot requested, then settled in to watch the approaching craft.
“Okay, Bob. Your turn.”
“Powering down to standby,” Bob replied. “Be safe, Donovan.”
“You got it, buddy. See you soon.”
Moments later the ship dimmed further as the AI went to sleep.
“It should start in another minute or so, though it’s not always exactly––”
The transport ship suddenly began to shimmer.
“Here it goes!” Donovan said.
Daisy noted that ‘shimmer’ might not have been the best word for it. More like the light around it was bending and warping in tiny ripples. Almost like—
Oh my God, she nearly gasped. It’s a warp bubble!
Sure enough, the shimmering bits slowly joined together until they linked up and formed a continuous bubble enveloping the entire vessel. A barely visible silver-blue glow that settled around it, then in an instant, it flashed and the ship was gone.
Donovan flipped the power back on and started Bob’s wake-up cycle.
“And that, my friends, was a warp jump.”
Daisy was flabbergasted and fascinated. She had no idea how it worked, but something about the way the smaller fields merged into one large one gave her ideas. In short order, the gears in her head were turning, and at high speed, at that.
By the time they reached Dark Side, she was spouting ideas about how the mysterious drive system worked.
“The shimmer. What if it was the bending of space just before it entered the warp?”
“Thought of that,” Donovan replied to her umpteenth theory. “But it still doesn’t explain the ripples.”
“Maybe they’re how it builds power.”
“Nope. We scanned a bunch of times, and the power build seems uniform.”
“Then maybe it’s somehow linked to the priming cycle.”
“Daisy,” Donovan said, “I was chained to a monitor for weeks trying to figure this out and didn’t get anywhere. Neither did any of the AIs, and they’re smarter than all of us put together.”
Daisy wasn’t listening.
“Daisy. Chain,” she said, a thought blossoming in her mind. “What if the shimmer isn’t a single warp drive powering on?” She was beginning to get excited. “What if it was a network? A daisy chain of smaller warp units working in sync to build a warp bubble far larger than any single unit is capable of?”
Donovan looked at her with a stunned expression. “I-I don’t think we ever thought of that.”
“And then,” she continued, picking up steam, “if that were the case, we could logically reason that their warp technology, while beyond anything we’ve ever devised, is nonetheless far weaker than anyone believed. I mean, if I’m right, that means it might take dozens, or even hundreds, more warp jumps to cover the distance you previously thought would only take one. Do you see what that means?”
“Holy shit!” Donovan was getting excited too. “So they couldn’t just warp to their fleet, but rather, they’d have to spend months, or even years, playing catch-up. Daisy, you’ve got to explain this to Chu and the commander.”
Daisy’s enthusiasm quickly waned. “I’ve got at least two broken ribs, Don. Why don’t you tell them instead? I’m going to go straight to the med lab and see what I need to do to get these set and healed up.”
Bob handled the docking process, while Donovan went over his old scans of prior warp observations before going to meet with the commander. Daisy stepped into the hangar and winced at the pull normal gravity had on her ribs.
“Hey, you think you’ll be up for a video later?” Vince asked as he joined her as she walked to the med lab. “Might be a nice way to decompress from today’s fiasco. I can even bring popcorn, if you like.”
“Sure,” she replied. “I think after today I could use the distraction.”
“Cool, I’ll swing by in a couple of hours. Sound good?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
Vince flashed a grin and turned back to the ship to help unload their salvaged booty.
“See you, Space Cowboy,” she called after him, then headed to get her ribs looked at.
Vince turned and watched her go with a longing stare, then returned to his work.
Halfway through the movie, Daisy felt something warm on her neck and shoulder. She turned her head, knowing what she’d see. Vince had draped his arm around her, like he used to. Like she missed. Like when they were still lovers.
“What are you doing, Vince?” she said.
“What?” he innocently replied.
“You know what. That’s not us anymore.”
Vince sighed in frustration and pulled his arm away. “Why not, Daisy? I mean, come on. I love you. Never stopped. Not even when you cut off my freakin’ arm, which is that one, by the way.”
“Really?” she said, eyebrow raised.
“Yes, really. Sure, I was pissed about it, but I also understood why you freaked out when you found out I wasn’t entirely organic.”
“You’re a computer-powered man, Vince.”
“No, I’m not! Jesus, Daisy, how many times do I have to tell you? The AI processor doesn’t make me who I am, it’s just an enhancement.”
“It’s a computer running your brain. I wonder if you even know how much of what you say is actually coming from that thing stuck in your head.”
He took a deep breath and forced the anger back, though a red flush remained on his face.
“Daisy, I thought we were making some real progress here. We’ve been doing good, haven’t we? I mean, we see each other all the time, and we always worked well together. And now we’re able to hang out and watch movies like we used to––”
Her cheeks flushed red.
“Is that what this is?” she shot back. “You think tha
t everything you’ve done in the last four months is paving the way to fucking me again? You can’t nice-guy your way back into my pants!” she shouted, then winced in pain.
“You shouldn’t yell with busted ribs,” he said. “And you know that’s not what this is about.”
“No, if that was all, I would almost accept the motivation. That’s just normal man behavior. But trying to embed yourself back in my life like that? No, Vince. I am never going to get back together with you. You’re not a real boy, Pinocchio, no matter what that machine in your head may tell you. It’s over. Just accept that.”
“I still have hope for us,” he said, dejectedly.
“I don’t.”
“Look at those sad puppy eyes, Daze. How can you be so cold?”
Fine.
“Look, Vince. I like you, I really do. But you’re not the man I fell in love with, and I need you to accept that.”
He stiffened a little, then seemed to make a self-preservation decision, getting to his feet to leave, ignoring the video playing in the background.
“I’m still me, Daisy, and I wish you could just see that.”
She said nothing.
“Okay. I don’t think I can be here right now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Moments later, her door closed behind him.
“Making a mistake, Sis.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. I just hope you realize it before it’s too late.”
She groaned as the door chime sounded.
“Come on, Vince, give it a rest!” she lamented as she opened the door.
“Sorry if I’m disturbing you, Daisy,” Captain Harkaway said. “May I come in?”
“Oh, shit. Sorry. I thought you were Vince. Of course––please, come in,” she replied, gathering herself as she sat back down on her bed. “What’s up, Captain?”
Harkaway groaned as he lowered himself into an empty chair.
“Damn hip,” he grumbled. “Donovan reported your findings, Daisy. Amazing work you did there. It’s opened up a whole new avenue of research, and we’d not be on that path if not for you.”
“Thanks, but it was just a theory.”
“And a damn good one. Then there is the matter of your communications relay idea.”