Caleb’s jaw muscles clenched in sync with his sphincter as the cops who were still pointing weapons at him all went trigger happy at once.
Missile alert! Missile alert!
His ship went into an automated defense mode, firing to full thrust, blasting out flares to trick the missiles and firing lasers that sought to confuse the hunting hardware on each incoming warhead. He didn’t fire his own missiles for fear of accidentally blasting Jennifer. In truth, all Caleb could do was snug up his seatbelt and scream.
Jennifer didn’t hesitate to go after her savior. She paced in circles in the airlock as she waited for the thing to suck the air out of the chamber. When the light went green, she launched herself out of the shuttle and skipped toward Jook. She saw the light show above right away and realized Caleb was in trouble. She was momentarily torn before quickly calculating that nothing could be done about that. She bounced past blasted bits of the cop and skidded to a stop next to Jook. She crouched and fairly easily, due to the low gravity, hoisted him over her shoulder and bounded back to the shuttle. While laying him down in the airlock, the sky behind her lit up as proximity fuses made their deadly calculations. A quick glance over her shoulder allowed her to catch sight of Caleb’s cop ship taking a glancing hit and spinning wildly back toward the base. She cringed with worry for her new friend and watched through the porthole after she pulled the airlock door shut.
Caleb screamed at his ship, “Land, Mother Fucker! Land! Don’t you smack that dirt! Don’t you smack that dirt!” The ship righted itself somewhat and at the last moment pulled up enough to drag its belly along the ground. Caleb watched straight ahead as one of the landing platforms grew closer and closer. Then his ship shot right under the steel scaffolding, careening like a pinball off the structure’s spindly legs before wedging itself between another leg and a staircase, the wounded bird jolting to a stop. Every possible alert klaxon informed him that the ship was in terminal distress. He smacked the seatbelt release button on his chest, pulled his helmet on and scrambled for the airlock only to see the control panel flash a disabled warning at him.
As the air in the ship escaped, it was vaporizing, causing the interior to fog. Caleb yanked his helmet back off and spastically shrugged out of the spacesuit while finding himself gulping for air. Free of the thing, he turned to the exosuit hatch and leaped like a jackrabbit into a hole. When the hatch closed behind him, he flicked on the cop suit’s life support and slipped his arms down into the sleeves, thanking human efficiency for the universal design of exosuits. He noted that, like the ship, this cop suit was a new model and felt great. His gloved fingers found the release for the outer hatch and hit it. The door unsealed and rose perhaps twenty centimeters before stopping.
“Oh, come on.”
He shoved his right foot under the edge and pulled up, feeling the hatch scrape as it rose another few centimeters against strong resistance on the outside. He maneuvered to press his back against the entry hatch and lifted with both feet. The outer hatch raised another fifteen centimeters and stopped. No amount of force could get it to budge another fraction.
“Shit, motherfucking cocksucking douchedoor!”
The hatch was open at the bottom fewer than sixty centimeters. He kicked it and then looked up in the direction of what must be a clearly entertained deity and said, “Come on!” He kicked the door repeatedly then clicked the release on the back of the suit. With the sound of a metallic thunk, he was free and able to crouch down. He stuck his legs through the gap, turned and shoved his ass out, then the hard part: He knew damn well that the suit around his upper torso was at least forty-five centimeters in diameter, wider in some spots, the helmet at least that much, too. And . . . yeah . . . something behind him snagged. He got his hands down and outside and pulled against the edge of the launch platform. So tight. So don’t want to rip the suit. Squeeze, twist, ah there, a bit more. Snag . . . so snagged. Climb back in a bit. Un-snag. And back out slowly. His legs dangled and kicked outside the hatch. Shoulders, shoulders . . . and helmet. A long scraping sound, the glass visor protesting loudly against metal, a screeching sound inside the helmet, nothing but silence in the dead space outside. Just a little further . . . free!
He stepped back a bit to take in what he had escaped from. The door was jammed along one of the landing platform pilings. If he had stopped another foot farther, it wouldn’t have opened at all. Anyway, he was out.
He jumped up onto the slightly mangled external staircase and took the steps four at a time. Up top, as he had hoped, sat the ship that the now blown-to-bits Officer Lannoff had used to land. Caleb stepped on the still-open exosuit platform, backed up to the entry hatch, and felt a satisfying thump as his new cop suit attached to a fellow cop ship.
The Princess Bell continued to orbit Albiorix with Spruck keeping the ship’s path well to the north of the action but close enough to see the fireworks. Natalie said for the twentieth time, “We should just go.”
“To where? To fucking where, Nat?” Spruck pointed a thumb behind them. “Weeks away from anywhere. Not days. The water recycler on this ship will not get us there, wherever there is, without us all dying of toxic overload. Even with enough food, eventually we’ll all be drinking one other’s piss. I’m not telling you again.”
“Well, there must be something we can do to help, then.”
Spruck shot her a frustrated glare. “Go? Help? Make up your mind.”
“Don’t you start with that sarcastic tone. You know I hate that sarcastic tone. Nuh uh, baby, I won’t hear it.”
They’d known each other since before Saturn, before ABE had swept the world in a frenzy. They’d agreed to leave Earth together. Though they were strictly just friends, like many a sexless marriage, the love was strong, but so was the bickering. Spruck scowled and focused on the display. The shooting had stopped for now. Communications were still jammed. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”
The Belle fired her retros and banked hard toward the action. Her cloak disappeared revealing her to anyone looking. Almost instantly, threat warnings blasted across her screens.
“What are you doing?”
“Throwing a Hail Mary.”
As soon as the airlock finished sealing, Jennifer slammed open the inner door and ran for the med kit. She ripped a fingernail trying to unsnap the jammed latch. “Are you kidding?” She got the top open and ran back to the airlock to find Jook trying to get his helmet off with his one good arm. She dove to her knees and blanched at the amount of blood that surrounded the largest tear in the back of his suit. She got the helmet off. His face twisted in pain and frustration, Jook said, “Why aren’t you taking off? You were supposed to take off.”
Ignoring him, she opened the med kit, and hunted around till she found a pair of shears purpose built for cutting away the dense fabric of a spacesuit.
“We had a plan,” he gasped.
“You had a plan. Now shut up.” She inserted the blades into the biggest gash in the spacesuit, and the device neatly sliced open the layered, complex fabric. Jennifer cursed aloud when she saw the shrapnel damage. She unfolded the legs on the medi-aid machine and set it over his now exposed prone body, suspicious whether the thing could do the job. “I can’t take off until I’ve got you belted in, and from the looks of you, you’ll bleed to death in a few minutes.” She pressed start and the machine immediately scanned the victim, then got to work with local anesthesia, shrapnel removal, and gluing. While she waited, she got out a bandage and wrapped her torn fingernail.
The machine paused and a small screen stated, Nicked artery. An arthroscopic arm descended from the machine, entered through an incision in the region of the heart. Clamping. Gluing. The arm came back out, and the external gluing arms did the rest. In another minute, wound seals were applied, and Jook could weakly stand.
“Feels a bit tight.”
“It looked like it used a lot of glue.”
Henry Lo had a flash memory of his mother screaming in his face, spittle splashi
ng his cheeks and lips causing his eyelids to flutter. He was five years old and had been observing his first full solar eclipse. The air had been relatively clear in the massive city of Xian, and from their garden rooftop apartment he could see the event quite well. His mother had told him twice to use the special glasses that they were supposed to wear, but by the time he was three, he had already decided that his mother’s advice didn’t bear taking. So he just stared at the sun. Her screaming in his face created its own eclipse of a sort.
It took him a moment to sort out what was recreating the childhood event for him. Wu’s silhouetted head was blocking the ceiling light. The flustered man was repeating, “Chief Executive, do you hear me?”
Henry Lo felt a pulsing ache across the back of his head and shoulders as he recalled the events that had put him to this very unseemly position. He reached out and let his VP pull him up. The woman that Gunderson had assigned to the flight control room was pulling herself back into her chair. Overlapping voices of cops in the sky were blaring out of the speakers in the ceiling. The flight controller waved her hand over the 3D display of the moon that was suspended in front of them. The POV pulled away from the moon by some twenty kilometers, allowing them to see the relative position of each ship. One ship was flying in a low straight line directly toward the flight control room with five cop ships vectoring in from all sides in pursuit. Another cop ship was lifting off from a platform. A flashing indicator let them know that the Hanson shuttle was going through a preflight heat up. A glance at movement outside the window had them all instinctively ducking as the Princess Belle pulled up into a hover right above the roof, making them just as much a target as the rogue ship.
“Hold fire!” yelled Henry Lo and the flight controller in panicked synchronicity.
As Caleb lifted off in his new-newly acquired cop ship, he observed the renewed Mexican standoff. A broad smile crossed his face and he calmly called out to flight control. “Ahem. This is . . .” He paused and looked for the ship’s ID on the dashboard. “Cruiser 4509’er QXT, commanded by former officer 1st Class Caleb Day. You will note that the situation has returned to roughly where we began.”
Caleb’s ship slipped over to hover up next to the Belle. He waved out the windshield at Spruck and Natalie with a childish grin and continued speaking, “You will clear all communication channels and allow my friend driving the Princess Belle here to land next to our shuttle. We will then make a personnel transfer, and all three ships will be on their way.” He hovered in a way so that he could look straight into the observation window of flight control. He offered a little wave and said, “Nod if you agree. If it’s a no, I will take the whole base down with us.”
Henry Lo stared at the monkey-ball-sucking mother of a three-legged buffalo and felt his color coming up fast. He would get this bastard of a Shanghai whore’s bastard. Someday. In the meantime, he touched the flight controller’s shoulder and said, “Let the fleet know that they should stand down and lift the local jamming. Maintain full surveillance and get Gunderson up here. I want some kind of tracking established on these three ships.” He looked at Zheng. “They will not make landfall again. Is that understood?”
“Loud and clear, Chief Executive.”
Henry Lo willed his blood pressure to go down, and he felt his heart rate return to a somewhat normal state as he slowly exhaled through his nostrils. Satisfied with his self-control he said, “I am going to grab a shower. Have a change of clothes set out for me. We will convene in the conference room in one hour to go over the arrangements for the new acquisition. We will be hungry and cranky, so have Chef Hu make something to lighten the mood.”
“Yes, Chief Executive.”
Henry Lo began to step away, then paused once more. “Tell Gunderson, no further funny business. I don’t want to risk any additional losses. This has been a very expensive hostile takeover.”
“Yes, Chief Executive
Part Three: Birth of a Space Gang
Chapter Sixteen: Harpoons Away
“Ijiraq?” asked Caleb with deep skepticism, then changed his tone in an effort to be more friendly. He was struggling with the solitude and was grateful for a call. Saanvi stared placidly back at him on the holograph screen. She was looking quite rested, beautiful . . . gorgeous, smiling so warmly . . . Shut up, jerk.
Without further incident they had made their escape from Albiorix. Jennifer was still on the Hanson Shuttle with the transferred survivors and that whack-job stoner, Jook. Spruck, and Natalie remained on the Belle along with Saanvi and Bert. Now, a week had passed, and though they had talked a lot and argued endlessly on day one about where else a bunch of fugitive people could go in the system, the conversations had tapered off (via holo chats anyway) and Caleb found that he was doing all the reaching out.
Saanvi replied, “Let me let Bert explain. He’s the one who thought of it.”
“No, I don’t want to talk to the freakin’ bot.”
Bert stepped in front of the camera. “Hello, sir.”
Caleb scowled. “Hello, Bert.”
“Based on my personal database, Saanvi asked me to explain the known status of Ijiraq.”
Caleb scratched what was becoming a very itchy beard and for the hundredth time cursed the lack of a hygiene kit on his rig. “Fine. Spit.”
“Pardon me, sir?
“Spit it out. Use your words.”
“Yes, sir. The Saturn satellite Ijiraq is named for an Inuit spirit or mythical creature that steals children and abandons them in the frozen Canadian north.”
“Stop. I don’t give a shit about who named the moon or why or what. Can we land on it, and will we find supplies?”
“Yes, sir. I mean I understand, sir. The satellite is roughly ten kilometers in diameter. Landing in such low gravity should be quite elementary with grappling hooks. My data history informs me that during my work at Phoebe station I had taken note—”
“You mean you remember.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Just say you remember rather than something robotic and stupid like my data history informs me.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you for the suggestion.” Bert noted a feeling of irritation, briefly marveled at it, and moved on. “I remember that a claim had been made on this satellite by a German firm with the purpose of creating a factory for specialized glass and optics. Apparently, Ijiraq has significant deposits of aluminum oxide. The claimants sought to contract with the same company that provided liquid helium to our lab on Phoebe and had reached out to the Phoebe lab in the person of Kyle Lunberg, who was an acquaintance of the primary claimant, one Siggfried Winter, who wished for an introduction to the helium contractors on Titan, a concern known as Material Industries LTD—”
“Aw, for Christ’s sake, get to the fucking point. Will there be supplies there?”
“The fucking point. Yes, sir. A test mine had been established, and the contracts for more permanent structures had been arranged for through another Hanson-based operation on the Titan surface known as Permastructure LLC, A Danica Corporation—”
Caleb heard Saanvi say to the bot, “Bert. Excuse me. May I speak to Caleb?”
“Of course, Ms. Badami.” Bert politely pushed away from the camera to make way for Saanvi.
Saanvi said, “Sorry. The bottom line is that nine months ago a mining operation with the intent to build a glass factory was established on this itty-bitty moon that nobody likely cares about.”
“So it could just as well be an abandoned operation or just pile of unfinished carbon extrusions.”
“Could be.”
“What do Spruck and Natalie think?”
“They think we are out of options, that we still need a place to lie low, and that this is the place.”
“Then so be it.”
“Do you want to tell Jennifer or should I?”
Caleb thought about the last time he had spoken with Jennifer. The stoner dude, Jook, was tickling her foot or something off camera. What the fuck kind o
f douche bag name is Jook? Caleb finally had to hang up when he realized that she had sort of forgotten that she was on the line with him. Why answer a call if you can’t even look at the camera? She hadn’t even called back to apologize or anything. It was damn rude, and he had been stewing about it for two days. “I’ll call her.”
When she answered, Jennifer had once again completely forgotten that she was naked. She and the Jook dude had basically taken over the pilot’s quarters on the shuttle. To make matters worse, the Jook dude was naked, too. Caleb’s eyes found themselves in the equivalent of a ping-pong match as he looked back and forth between Jennifer’s spectacular breasts and the Jook dude with his hairy junk akimbo as he floated by behind her. What the fuck?
“Oh. Hi, Caleb.” Jennifer followed his eyes and looked down at her own nakedness, offering an apologetic smile and an arm across her breasts as a solution.
Jook gave a wave. “Hey, Caleb,” he called as he floated out of frame.
Caleb chose to look at his own ceiling while scratching his beard. “Uh, we are going to limerick . . . lijrick . . . Ijiraq. The folks on the Belle seem to think it’s the only place we can go for now.” He looked back at her eyes. “Naked? Both of you? Are you guys a thing or something?”
Jennifer chose to ignore this. “Um. OK. Ijiraq. What’s there?”
“A mining operation. Maybe.”
“What does Bert think?”
“First of all, Bert doesn’t think. He. It. It is a machine. It spouted a bunch of drivel that amounted to the moon might have as much as a glass factory on it. It’s a tiny little rock. I doubt there’s water, but we’re going.”
“And we’re sure we don’t want to go beg for mercy on Hanson?”
“The Hanson police tried to kill us. What mercy are they possibly going to show? I’m not having this conversation again.”
Bastion Saturn Page 15