Seeds of Gaia

by Rick Partlow

  “She should be meeting us in the control room,” Sam told him. “Let me try to get ahold of her.”

  The perceived weight was increasing and Sam knew they were close to the level for the control room, but he decided to use the intercom in the elevator.

  “Telia,” he called after touching the correct control for the cargo bay. “It’s Sam. Are you on your way to Control? Minister Gage would like you to meet us there.”

  He waited a moment but received no response.

  “Guardian Proctor, this is Captain Avalon,” he tried again, wondering if maybe she was being stubborn about their proper titles in the presence of her Consensus superior. “You hear me?”

  He shared a glance with Priscilla and she shook her head.

  “The intercoms have been giving us trouble,” she told Gage. She nodded to Sam. “Try the station-wide, maybe it’ll work.”

  “It’ll piss off the people trying to sleep,” he muttered, but did it anyway. “Attention all hands, if you have seen Guardian Proctor, please tell her to contact Captain Avalon.”

  The lift came to a halt and the doors slid aside, but Sam didn’t move, something pulling his mouth into a hard line.

  It might just be the intercom but…

  “Something’s wrong.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Telia Proctor felt something punch into her left leg, not in the way she might have felt pain from an injury to her biological parts, but more the way someone might be aware they’d stepped on a rock. She hadn’t heard the bang of a gunpowder-based slugshooter, hadn’t seen the plasma flash that accompanied a weapons laser, just heard a sharp hissing crack and saw a faint smoke trail.

  She’d had her gun out, had been about to fire, but the impact of the mini-rocket round sent her spinning head over heels and deflected her away from the bulkhead for which she’d been aiming. More rockets snaked out, searching for her, and she had the dim sense, through a haze of nauseating disorientation, of the streaks of smoke passing wide and impacting against the far bulkhead with tiny, petulant cracks.

  Her vision was a blur of shapes and colors her mind couldn’t quite process fast enough to act on, but she had an impression almost subconsciously that she was spinning in a general direction into the hub of the station, following the cargo belt. She knew she had to move, had to gain purchase somewhere, had to call for help…

  She twisted her upper body with power drawn from the isotope reactor implanted in her side, with torque possible only because of the alloy reinforcements of her spine and shoulder blades and it still hurt like hell. She couldn’t propel herself, not without tossing something away from her, but she could and did slow down her spin and alter its angle…just enough to swing her pistol into line with the lead gunman.

  She touched the trigger pad gently, a lover’s caress; and if she wasn’t a fast-draw, she was a dead shot. The pulse pistol snapped with the electromagnetic discharge of the miniature coil inside its cooling jacket and a projectile of sintered metal met an energy pulse at the end of the barrel, flashing instantly to plasma. She hadn’t taken a risk they might be wearing body armor; the round punched through the man’s head, a burn-through the width of a stylus in the front and a steam explosion of superheated cranial fluid out the back, scattering a cloud of bone fragments, blood and brain matter out behind him.

  The cloud of biomatter shocked the other two. She knew it would; even a veteran would be taken aback by the feel, the taste of a man’s brains blown into their face, another reason she’d aimed for the head. The shot had another benefit, Newton’s laws being what they were: it sent her floating back towards the overhead, her feet magnetizing just in time to set her in place, the pulse gun still aimed down at the remaining gunmen.

  They were firing blindly, wiping at their faces, spitting bits of their friend out while what was left of him stood there, headless, anchored to the deck by his magnetic boots. Mini-rockets blasted this way and that, but nowhere within five meters of her and she ignored their harmless fireworks-show eruptions and focused on the targeting reticle in the pop-up rear sight of her weapon.

  There was no time for head-shots, not when she had two targets. She held the trigger down and pumped four shots at the closest of them, transitioning to the second target while the plasma flares were still burning afterimages across the vision of her biological eye. She emptied the rest of the magazine into the last one, switching it out for a full one with rote motions, not even looking down at the weapon.

  Alarms were sounding, smoke alarms, fire alarms, security alarms from discharging her high-signature firearm, but the three gunmen would never hear them, or anything else. They hadn’t been wearing body armor, or at least none capable of stopping the spears of accelerated plasma. They wavered in the air currents like wind chimes, stuck in place as their life’s blood streamed out of multiple wounds. She nearly put a round through the forehead of each of them just to be sure, but decided it would be looked upon dankly by her superiors and refrained. They were dead anyway, there was no doubt of it.

  But what the hell had they been here for? What had they been looking for?

  She decoupled her magnetics from the overhead and pushed off back down to the deck, making a face as she passed through the orbits of microglobules of blood. It had to be the cargo, she thought. She slammed her palm down on the emergency stop for the belt, another insistent buzzing alert on top of three or four other warbling klaxons, and retrieved her hand scanner from where it still floated, tumbling gently in place as if it had been waiting for her return.

  She hit her personal ‘link control and cursed as it rewarded her with a dull tone indicating it wasn’t able to get a signal. She should have gone to the intercom speaker, but she had an intuition time was short, a vision in her head of a clock counting down. She made a decision and started with the containers farthest away from the lock, the ones about to head into the hub. The scanner was Resolution tech, but she’d been given a thorough familiarization with it and understood the readout.

  The first five polymer cases showed nothing, just the raw foodstuffs the labels advertised, and she had sudden surge of fear that whatever it was wouldn’t show up on the scanners and she’d have to go back and inspect every container by hand. Then she reached the eighth case and saw the red flashes on the holographic readout, the signal from the computer analysis that there was something anomalous within. She tossed the scanner aside, bouncing it off the deck and sending it spinning away, then ripped the container’s lid off.

  It was risky, maybe even foolhardy; whatever they’d been looking for might have safeguards, booby traps. She went with her instinct, as she always had, as she had that fateful day when she’d stayed to pull her friend out of the wreckage of the shuttle even though she knew the fire was going to reach the maneuvering thruster fuel tanks.

  It was the right thing to do, she insisted mulishly.

  Inside the container was something that was definitely not packaged soy paste. It was featureless and blank, a rectangle almost a meter long and half as wide and deep, massing somewhere around fifty kilograms, she estimated. She swallowed hard, her eyes widening.

  “Gaia’s tits!”

  She turned at the exclamation and saw Sam Avalon emerging from the lift station, a pulse pistol in his hand, followed closely by Priscilla and Minister Gage. There was horror on their faces at the bloody carnage, gasps of disbelief even from the rock-steady veteran John Gage.

  “Are you all right?” Sam asked, stepping cautiously across the chamber toward her, eyes on the charred tatters of her pant leg.

  “What is it, Proctor?” Gage asked, his instincts keener, his gaze fixed on the open container.

  “I believe it’s a bomb,” she told him. “Scanner-resistant casing, sealed, probably tamper-proof. Maybe a hundred kilograms of chemical hyper-explosives if I had to guess. They,” she indicated the dead men with a jerk of her head, “were here to put it where it could do the most damage.” She snorted. “It’ll do some impressive
damage right where it is, of course.”

  “I…,” Sam stuttered, face blanched. “I can try to get the engineering crew to look at it…”

  “There’s no time,” Telia insisted, shaking her head. “We have to assume it has some anti-tampering measures.”

  “The escape pods!” Priscilla said, snapping her fingers with the realization.

  Telia nodded to her, a look of respect in her eyes. She leaned over the container and touched the control to deactivate the electromagnetic anchors holding it to the belt, then grabbed the bulk of it and heaved. It had no weight here in the hub, but it still had a hell of a lot of mass and it wasn’t easy to change its momentum. Luckily, she had a hell of a lot of power to play with.

  “Get one of them opened!” she snapped.

  Priscilla had come up with the solution, but Sam was the first one to leap into motion, a military man who would act immediately once a plan of action had been chosen. She knew it was insanely hard to run in magnetic boots, but he was athletic and graceful, obviously practiced. It was a stride reminiscent of ice skating, and Telia had a sudden and overwhelming recollection of the last time she and her mother had gone ice skating, when she was twelve. It had been a frosty January morning, the first day they’d been sure enough of the pond’s surface to give it a try. She remembered falling and bruising her knee, remembered being absolutely frozen afterward and her mother making her a huge mug of hot chocolate to warm her up.

  She didn’t bother to shake off the memory, didn’t care to lose it. Not now, not carrying the bomb, knowing it could end her life in the space of a half second. If she was to die, she would die thinking of her mother, and perhaps, if the priests hadn’t been lying to her, she would see her again in a place where she would be whole and there would be no pain.

  It was a shame Mawae couldn’t be there with her; it might have been a good place for him as well, a place where no one would force him to be something he wasn’t.

  The unthinking part of her brain, the one operating on instinct, followed Sam across the compartment, through the hatchway back to the passenger bay. It was a portrait of chaos, with cargo crews flying from one place to another, all of them heading back to their ships, spurred into panic by the dueling alarms. She ignored the confusion and the chaos, ignored the goggle-eyed stares of the cargo crews, and walked in a steady, controlled pace, pushing the massive cargo container ahead of her, counting on the sheer bulk of the thing to push the others out of her path.

  It worked most of the way, until a lanky, impossibly tall Belter managed to slam right into the side of the polymer box, smacking into it so hard she thought she heard the man’s ribs crack. The container tried to torque away from her, tried to twist its handle out of her grasp, but she froze her mechanical joints in place, gritting her teeth as the bionics seemed to rip at the flesh and muscle where they blended into her biological parts.

  She let out a breath, trying to keep herself from hyperventilating; there was already enough hysteria unfolding around her; one more screaming idiot wouldn’t help. The Belter was moaning, ricocheting off to the side; she didn’t watch him go, not caring whether he was injured or just winded. He was stupid and clumsy and that was all she needed to know about him.

  When she shifted her attention again to the front, Sam was across the compartment, fifty meters past her, moving like an acrobat as he ducked and slid around bodies flying at him from three different directions, some awkwardly running on magnetics and others simply pinwheeling across the chamber. He reached the escape pods set in the curve of the hull between the docking umbilicals, simple rounded hatchways attached to the most basic, no-frills lifeboats a contractor could get away with putting on a station like this. Each had a solid-fuel rocket motor designed to take it out away from the station in a straight line, with no steering jets provided, and just enough shielding to keep the poor bastards inside alive for perhaps fifty or sixty hours in the hope they’d be picked up by a ship that happened to be passing by close enough to reach them in time.

  Sam attached the sticky plates on his ship boots to the deck and yanked the locking lever of the closest pod hatchway upward. It shrieked in protest, resisting him with decades of disuse and lack of lubrication, but Sam was a strong man and he pulled the hatch open with an explosive exhalation of breath. He looked back and she heard him curse under his breath as he realized the same thing she did, a moment earlier.

  The hatch was too small for the cargo container to fit through it.

  “Damn,” she murmured.

  She dug in her heels and scraped to a stop, feeling a shuddering up through her bionic legs and into her reinforced spine as they arrested the momentum of the unruly mass of shielding and explosives.

  “Set the automatics to eject,” she told Sam, letting loose of the container and moving around to the front of it. “I’ll get the bomb out of the case.”

  Sam looked at her askance, hesitating at the opening, one arm and one leg partially inside it.

  “That could set it off,” he warned, shaking his head.

  “Thank you,” she snapped in irritation, “I am perfectly aware of that. Would you rather leave it here in the hub and wait for whoever planned this to set it off remotely when they realize what we’re doing?”

  She bit back the anger she felt coursing through her, realizing he didn’t deserve it.

  “You’re the commander,” she assented by way of apology. “What would you have me do?”

  She could see his eyes flickering back and forth between her and the bomb casing and the men and women coursing through the bay, then his face firmed up in decision.

  “All right. Get it out. I’ll set the controls.”

  She nodded acknowledgement, both of his decision and the fact he was the one to make it, then leaned over the open container while he disappeared inside the pod’s hatchway. She used the infrared and thermal filters in her cybernetic eye to examine the edges of the case, but saw no connections to the inside of the container. That didn’t mean there wasn’t anything there; they might have an electromagnetic sensor or something else just as undetectable.

  “Shit,” she snarled, carefully running her fingers between the case and the container. The bionics could detect magnetic and electrical fields, but not from a distance.

  Still nothing. There was no use putting this off; either she was going to die or she wasn’t. She grabbed the casing and guided it carefully out the open top of the container, judging by eye that it would just fit through the hatch for the pod. She stopped it just above the box, moving around it, beneath it, checking for anything and seeing nothing but a solid, grey case. The thing was either on a timer or on some sort of wireless signal and either possibility was bad.

  “Okay, it’s done,” Sam told her, squeezing out of the hatchway, forehead covered in sweat. She wasn’t sure if it was hot inside the pod or he was just nervous. She was betting on hot; Sam didn’t strike her as a nervous sweating type. “It’ll launch automatically when we shut the hatch.”

  She put a hand on the end of the casing and pushed it gently, the barest of pressures, just enough to start it floating forward but not so fast she couldn’t control its course. Sam stood to the side, hands extended just in case she needed help adjusting it towards the hatch, and she felt an irrational irritation at the idea he might think she couldn’t handle the mass.

  Stop that, she chided herself. These people aren’t like the others, they trust you. Then, Dear God, woman, don’t you have more important things to think about right now?

  She let the dull grey metal case float, not daring to push it again, more terrified it would strike the other side of the lifepod and detonate than she was impatient to get it off the station. It seemed to mock her as it crept forward a millimeter at a time, edging towards one side of the hatchway then another, and she barely tapped it with her fingertips to bring it back to the center. It slipped through, only a centimeter or so to spare on any side, still heading for the opposite bulkhead of the escape po
d when Sam swung the door shut and jammed the latch down before she had the chance to yell at him to do it.

  There was a solid thunk, the sound of the inner hatch sliding closed and the breath hissed out of her, relief that it was all out of her hands now. Something went bang, loud and metallic and jarring, and she thought for a moment the bomb had gone off before she realized it was the launching charge for the escape pod. She’d never heard the sound before---probably very few people had, at least those who’d lived to tell about it. She imagined the case jolting back against the inside of the little lifeboat and subconsciously braced herself for the blast, but there was nothing.

  She looked over to ask Sam what was happening, but he had kicked away from the bulkhead and was sailing across the compartment, heading for a small, auxiliary control panel wedged in-between a pair of docking umbilicals. The viewscreen mounted in the bulkhead above it was small and two-dimensional, but Telia lunged toward it as if it displayed all the truths of the universe. By the time she reached it, Sam already had the view up from the exterior cameras and was adjusting them with a small joystick, cycling through each to focus on the escape pod.

  He paused to touch a series of buttons on the communications panel and she recognized the sequence: he was opening a line to all ships in the area and all the shuttles docked with the station.

  “This is Gateway Station Control to all vessels in the area,” he said urgently. “Do not approach the escape pod! I repeat, do not approach the escape pod! Secure for possible incoming micrometeorites and raise deflectors if you’re ship is so equipped.”

  There was a buzz of responses, transmissions stepping on each other, barely understandable, and Sam shut them down with a swipe of his hand back across the comm panel. His eyes were locked on the screen and so were Telia’s. She could see the pod, twinkling in the external lights of the station as it rode the launching charge to a safe distance, still less than a kilometer away, still too damned close.