by M. D. Cooper
Andy said.
Tim said.
Andy chuckled.
Andy directed Fran to move Alice below the airlock so that he could effectively fall onto her. She stopped two meters below, and he double checked that there was at least that much play between him and Tim so he wouldn’t yank his son out into space.
He fumbled with the harness on his chest until he found the short length of tether with a coupling hook on one end. Gripping the hook in his right hand, he held onto the edge airlock’s frame with his left and stepped out into the space beyond.
He ‘fell’ toward Alice and slammed into her with more force than he expected. He got up on his knees, reaching for the anchor point on the robot’s top. He almost had it when Alice jerked to the side, avoiding some piece of junk that sped by.
He slid across the back of the bot, and Andy’s heart nearly stopped as he realized that without power he didn’t have magboots. He scrambled to hang onto the bot, frantic at the thought of the forever-nothingness below him.
Then he slipped free.
He jerked to a stop, and Tim cried out over the comms, and across the Link as the full weight of his father pulled at him.
Vertigo swam behind Andy’s as he looked up and saw the mottled plain of the ring stretching away on all sides. He hung four meters below the tether stretching up to the airlock above
Fran said, panic entering her voice.
Andy realized that in his mad scramble to stay atop Alice, he must have broken a seal somewhere on the suit.
Lyssa said.
Alice’s station keeping burn ceased and the bot dropped like a rock, right for Andy.
As Alice rose up toward him once more, Andy managed to hook an arm around a protrusion and made a weak attempt to attach the coupler. Lines were blurring around him. He was growing sleepy.
Andy saw Tim hit Alice on his side and somehow not slide off. Magboots, he thought.
Her voice retreated. Andy wanted to help, but his arms had grown too heavy. He took a deep breath and slid off Alice as a heavy blanket settled down over his shoulders, sinking into a warm cloud.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.14.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mars 1 Port Authority Terminal 983-A4
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
Lyssa experienced Andy going unconscious in the same way she watched him fall asleep. His thoughts slowed and the electrical activity across his brain shifted. But rather than the familiar storms of dream, his mind went dark. His eyes closed and she lost his visual perception. She had a moment of panic before shifting back to her controlling Link with Alice the drone.
Abruptly, she saw Andy from the outside, dangling below the bot as Tim struggled to stay on top, the weight of his father pulling him forward.
Lyssa decreased Alice’s thrust slowly. Too fast and Andy would fly above the bot. As she slowed the bot and Andy rose up beside it, Tim stretched out, reaching for his father’s shoulder. He didn’t seem to understand yet that Andy had passed out from lack of oxygen.
Lyssa said. She pulled Alice back and rolled the drone Tim’s hand was touching his father’s chest, brushing the coupler. All Tim had to do was grab the coupler and attach it to the hook on his feet. He was still trying to wake his dad.
Lyssa attempted to get a visual through Alice’s sensor systems. Tim’s face was burning on the infrared but the rest of his suit looked to be holding proper integrity. The puppy was a brighter spot of orange against his chest. Andy was still mostly yellow but fading.
Beyond Tim, a burst of orange light appeared in the now-distant airlock door.
Tim’s helmet turned as he looked back at the person in the airlock with him. Alice’s sensors picked out three weapons systems in the form of pistols and a projectile rifle, harnessed to a standard Protectorate environmental suit. Behind the soldier, more suits appeared in the infrared.
A projectile few past Alice and Lyssa spun the b
ot and fired its jets, moving it away from the ring. Tim was bent over backwards as the tether at his waist snapped taught, his father trailing four meters behind.
Then something unimaginable happened. Tim’s boots detached from Alice. Lyssa didn’t know whether they had failed under the load—the suit was ancient after all—or if Tim had panicked and deactivated them.
The two humans, father and son fell behind the bot, through space with the tether still taught between them.
Fran’s stream of fear-driven profanity filled the Link as Lyssa spun Alice around and spat steam to give chase. She quickly calculated their velocity, rotational speed, and plotted an intercept course. The problem was going to be that their combined mass greatly outweighed the drone. She had no way of stopping them without breaking bones in the process.
A beacon light on the back of Tim’s helmet blinked in the darkness as they spun away.
Not knowing how to respond to Fran in any way that might calm her down, Lyssa said simply,
Alice was equipped with two articulated arms on either side of its body. The arms were designed more for fine repair work than brute force. Lyssa calculated how much force the arms could take, then adjusted her braking thrust as she reached the intercept point with Andy and Tim’s spinning bodies.
Unable to grab his father, Tim and Andy had ended up at either end as counterweights where they now stretched the tether to its full length, with Tim effectively orbiting his father’s larger mass.
Far beyond were the safety nets at the outside of the docking area, but these were designed to catch small ships and cargo. Two small humans would most likely pass right through.
Lyssa said.
Fred said.
Fred answered.
A wave of emotion Lyssa recognized as frustration and irritation washed over her mind. She was also aware of Fran screaming worry across the Link. Separating the various tasks she needed to monitor, Lyssa was almost not paying attention when Alice’s belly skidded across the taught tether and it locked into the coupling ring. She braked with the knowledge that she wasn’t going to slow enough to stop Tim and Andy from slamming into each other as she exerted force on a the middle of the tether. She slowed Alice, attempt to decrease the force with which they would collide—either with each other, or with Alice.
Lyssa told Fran.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.14.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: M1G shuttle, approaching Sunny Skies
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
There was no way the shuttle could outmaneuver a swarm of attack drones, so Petral claimed she was going to overwhelm their sensors and then plow through them like a bull in a China shop. Cara didn’t understand the reference, but figured plowing through anything sounded like a desperate last resort.
Sergeant Pierce kept chuckling sadly, like she believed they were going to die.
“They know you’re on board,” Petral said. “Calm down. If they blow us up, I’m sure your family will get some kind of payout. Isn’t that what they do for you soldier-types when you die a glorious death for the mother land?”
“Shut up,” Dina said, eyes fixed on the holodisplay. The shuttle appeared as a blue square in the middle of the display, surrounded by darting green triangles—only the green triangles should have been red since they were trying to kill them. The shuttle’s system couldn’t accept friendly craft as hostiles.
“That’s an interesting software flaw,” Petral mused. “I wonder what we can do with that? What do you think, protégé?”
Cara started, not realizing Petral had been talking to her.
“W-w-what?” she stammered.
“We’ve got a glitch in the software. Hostile spacecraft keep showing up as friendly. How can we hack that to our advantage?”
Cara swallowed. She ripped her gaze from the holodisplay and met Petral’s piercing blue eyes. Again, Petral didn’t seem to be taking any of this seriously. Weren’t they about to die? Sergeant Pierce certainly seemed to think so.
“Maybe they’re seeing us the same way?” Cara said.
“We have limited AI on this shuttle,” Petral said. “Now, I’ve already laid in our course across the Ring for the port scaffold where Sunny Skies was docked. If I was to activate the AI, it would find itself in an interesting situation. It has instructions but its friends are trying to kill it. Which directive will prevail? Self-preservation?” She grinned at Dina Pierce. “What do you think, Sergeant? You do maintenance on these things.”
“I don’t work on the AI.”
“You ever see one get caught in a logic trap?”
“They don’t get caught in logic traps. That’s a myth.”
Petral glanced at Cara. “Maybe it’s a myth, but pilots all believe it. They’re superstitious fools. Oh, maybe not your dad. Well, probably your dad, too. You need to take him off that pedestal, kid. Anyway. The reason pilots don’t like AI is because they think they’ll trip themselves up on things humans take for granted. Like our little glitch here. It didn’t take much for you to recognize the problem and adjust your way of thinking. But your average pilot, they think an AI is too rigid. If they had any idea how many contradictions your average non-sentient computer deals with by the second, they’d huddle in a corner and never come out. It’s self-importance.” Petral put her free hand on her chest. “Personally, I also think it’s self-preservation. They know what’s coming and they look for any reason to make themselves seem better than the thing that’s about to replace them. Hold on for another year.”
“Look,” Dina Pierce said. “Unless you’re going to do something, will you shut up and let me fly this thing. They aren’t firing yet but they keep acting like they’re going to make kinetic attacks.”
“You mean suicide runs,” Petral said. “Which is ironic because they aren’t alive.”
Cara’s eyes were drawn back to the main holodisplay where green triangles continued to loop around the blue square. It was hard to connect the icons with reality until, at the edge of the display, a long yellow cylinder with a wheel near one end appeared. It was Sunny Skies. The display showed the registry name of Worry’s End, which Cara found reassuring even though it was wrong.
“There’s your ship,” Dina said. “You know we’re leading these drones directly into it, right? You’d be better off if we went back. You turn yourselves in and your crew gets away without getting wrapped up in all this. This little girl obviously doesn’t have anything to do with whatever it is you’re doing.”
“She’s wrapped up in it,” Petral said, giving Cara a dazzling smile. “She’s the mastermind.”
Cara felt her stomach drop, not knowing if she should feel pride or nausea. She bit her lip, focusing on the
problem at hand—without Petral’s distractions. It didn’t matter what the AI did. They needed to reach the ship. She supposed they could land the shuttle in the cargo bay. It was big enough. The drones might damage the doors and then they’d need EV suits to make the inner airlock.
“Wait,” Cara said. “Sunny—I mean the Worry’s End has cannons. Fran can shoot the drones.”
“Excellent point,” Petral said. “The Mars Protectorate might log that as an act of terrorism but I think we’re already skirting that line as things currently stand. We did overwhelm their barracks fire suppression system with cleaning supplies.”
Petral’s face grew distant as she appeared to get a message over her Link. When she came back, she pushed Pierce away from the holodisplay in the center of the console and started zooming in on different areas around Sunny Skies.
“What are you doing?” Pierce demanded.
“I just got word that we have friends between us and the ship. There.” Petral pulled the display, magnifying a spot that looked empty at first then became three yellow dots.
“What is that?” Cara asked.
“Your dad, Tim and Alice the drone.”
Pierce whistled. “A full kilometer spacewalk. That’s…something.”
The three dots moved closer to the Sunny Skies as they watched. A green triangle swooped close to the icon and Cara gasped.
“Don’t they see them?” she demanded.
“We could send an alert but that’s not going to be a priority until they recover this shuttle,” Pierce said. “You give up and standard rescue protocols take effect.”
“Of course they do,” Petral said.
A cracking noise came from the back of the shuttle. They all looked at the same time to find a vertical column of holes climbing from the bench where Kaylin had been sleeping. An identical row of exit holes marked the other side of the shuttle. The projectiles had passed completely through the thin-walled craft.
“Huh,” Petral said. “Guess they don’t care much about you if they’re firing on us now.”
Sergeant Pierce’s eyes went wide. She seemed to be trying to communicate over her Link for a few seconds until her face clenched in anger.