by Jay Allan
“I don’t know, Rada!” Genner sighed, breath fluttering against the mike. “You want me to find out which of those alien corpses is the tech and ask him how his security system is set up?”
“Less arguing,” Parson said. “More thinking.”
“Could try a smaller drone,” Karry put in, his voice gravelly from disuse. “Something lower to the ground.”
“Do we have anything like that?”
“Nope. But I can see if I can patch something together from the hold.”
“Do that,” Parson said. “Rada, Yed, hang in there, you got me? This is a long way from over.”
Rada acknowledged and went to sit on one of the sturdier looking pieces of exercise gear.
“He’s wrong.” Yed’s voice was soft, resigned. “It’s already over. There’s only one way out.”
“Got an idea?”
He nodded, staring into her eyes. “Take my O2.”
It took her a moment. “Quit that thinking right now.”
“Right now, neither of us has enough air to last until they make a breach. But if one person has all the air, they’ll live. There’s only one move that makes sense.”
She gazed back at him, weighing the offer. She knew it was sincere. She also knew that he was making it not because it was the only option that made sense, but rather because it would make his death meaningful—he would finally have her; she would literally owe her life to him.
But why not give him what he wanted?
“I won’t let you do that,” she said. “Not when there’s another way out.”
“We can’t get to the other airlock. You said it yourself—there will be more defenses along the way.”
“We’ll use the airlock we came in through. And we’ll use these to get there.” She walked to the wall and thumped the orange mat at its base. “They’re the best protection in the world.”
“Oh yeah? Where’d you learn that? More wisdom from renowned, ancient Chinese alien-fighter Sun Tzu?”
“The Battle of Haleakala. Samantha Keahi. She said the most effective shield against lasers was the Swimmers’ own building material. She described it just like this.”
“Like a gym mat?”
“They aren’t gym mats. They’re an organic matrix the aliens used inside their buildings and spacecraft. Sometimes they grew whole buildings out of it.”
He quirked his mouth, regarding the dense orange matter. “You’re going to trust our lives to some old book?”
“I am,” she said. “Because Keahi was there.”
He sighed. “Guess getting shot by lasers beats suffocating.”
As they waited to hear back from Karry, they went to work on the mats, chiseling them free from the wall. The mats were dense—once you got them moving, it was hard to slow them down—but in the fractionally gravity, she could easily move one by herself. Using the tethers on their suits, she affixed two mats to a hollow frame of aluminum bars, creating a mobile wall.
“How’s it going, Karry?”
“Ain’t happening,” he said. “I mean, never say never. But I’m not finding much.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ve got another plan.”
“But it’s one you’d rather not use?”
“You got it. Let us know if things change?”
He assured her he would. While they waited, she informed Parson of their plan. Then she and Yed practiced pushing the wall around the room, enhancing its mobility by cannibalizing a pair of ski-shaped treads from another machine and fixing them to the base of the wall. Her O2 dropped below 120 minutes, then 90.
At 67 minutes, Genner informed them they’d tried a stripped-down drone. It too had been shot.
“Karry won’t have time for another,” she said. “And we’re still at least five hours from breaching the hull.”
“Captain,” Rada said. “Permission to try to get the hell out of here.”
“Permission granted.” Parson’s voice was strained. “Good luck.”
She turned to Yed. “Ready?”
He glanced at the ceiling. “Captain, if we die, please tell the world it was doing something much smarter than this.”
Rada laughed and got behind the wall. They carried it edgewise out the door, then pushed it forward. It slid easily over the smooth floor. The wall blocked her sight, but if the laser opened fire, it would be beyond obvious.
They passed one door, a second. Her breath echoed in her helmet. Her heart beat so fast she could almost feel her remaining air dwindling away. A third door went by. As they neared the fourth, the final one before the intersection, blue light glared through the hall.
She swore and yanked her hands back from the wall. No beam of light cleaved through the mat. “Push! Push as fast as you can!”
She drove herself into the wall. It swept forward. Top-heavy, it began to topple backwards; the hall behind them flared as more light spilled over the top. She grabbed a horizontal bar and bore down, arresting the fall, then hunkered down to push from the bottom while Yed applied pressure nearer the top.
The laser flicked off. They reached the intersection. Past the wall’s edge, she glimpsed Stem’s suited arm. It was already frozen solid. The laser lashed out again. She angled the wall to keep its broad side toward the sentry gun, then pulled the contraption toward the tunnel they’d entered the ship through. Once they were ten feet out of the intersection, the laser shut off.
“Confirm something for me,” Yed said. “We’re still alive, right?”
“For now.” Rada grinned across the darkened tunnel. “Keep pulling.”
Foot by foot, they withdrew. The laser stayed off. Only once they reached the intersection did she move from behind the wall. Its front was scorched and pocked, deep holes scored across and bored into its surface. Outside, she ran to the cart and piled inside, letting the autopilot bear them back to the ship.
As soon as the Turtle’s airlock spat them out, Parson swept her up in a hug. “You’re amazing. Do you know that? Amazing.”
“Thanks.” She shifted in his grip. “Now can I get out of this suit? It stinks like a marathon in here.”
He laughed huskily. She shed the suit. On her way to the shower, she swung by the galley for a tall glass of pig. She downed it and got into the water. Only then did she break down, leaning against the plastic wall of the shower as she sobbed, seeing him curled on the ground, burnt and frozen, too dead to bleed.
-o0o-
Parson had to debrief her. A person had died, and although Nereid was under no formal jurisdiction, it wouldn’t be good for business to have murky deaths on the Box Turtle’s record. Her statement was brief. He had video, too.
When they were done, he told her to take all the time she needed.
She filled a jug with Plain Grain and returned to her bunk. It smelled like Stem and this made her unbearably sad. Grief and desperation crashed over her in waves. It wasn’t fair that she had wanted to leave him—had resolved to put in action the events that would break them apart—and yet she still felt this way about losing him.
Then again, this was a hell of a lot more than a breakup. He had been killed. Cut apart by a Swimmer laser. A thousand years after the invasion, and they were still managing to murder humans.
On a trip from her room for food and pig, she bumped into Parson. He told her the defenses had mysteriously gone dead and they’d retrieved the remains. She nodded numbly and went back to her bunk.
Much of it was the shock, she knew. By definition, shock tended to fade quickly. It felt like something had cracked inside her, though, like a fault she’d once patched over had been knocked open. She wanted to be alone, but on a ship on an uninhabited moon, there wasn’t much opportunity to get away.
That evening, someone knocked on her door. She got up, opened it.
It was Yed. “Can we talk?”
She wanted to close the door on him, but she lacked the energy. She turned, leaving the door open, and sat on her bunk. He closed the door and stood there, p
icking at the cuticle around his thumbnail.
“What’s up?” she said.
“I just wanted to talk.”
“So talk.”
“I mean … I can’t believe it.” He shook his head as if to prove that this were so. “I just can’t believe it. It could have been any of us, you know? If it had snapped on five seconds sooner, you and I would be gone, too.”
She shrugged. “But it didn’t.”
“That doesn’t make you feel spooked? Creeped out? I don’t know if I should be horrified or thankful.”
“There’s no meaning to it. We might have died. We didn’t. That’s all.”
Yed rubbed his mouth. “That’s a mighty big ‘all.’ I feel … lucky. Like I’ve got a second chance.” He watched her a moment, then moved to the door. “Well, if you do feel like talking, I’m here.”
The door clicked shut. She might have been happy for him—he seemed different, more aligned with his place in the world—but it only made her feel resentful.
On the second day, they left her alone. She spent most of it staring at the walls, sipping from a cup of straight Plain Grain. She slept when she was able.
On the third day, Captain Parson called a crew meeting. Rada showed up with a drink in hand and slopped into a seat. Parson eyed her cup but said nothing.
“First,” he said, “I want to thank you, Rada. And you, Yed. You stayed calm and you did the job. Because of that, you prevented a tragedy from becoming a calamity.”
“Hear hear,” Karry said.
Rada took a drink.
“But it was a tragedy,” Parson went on. “We lost a member of our crew. A member of our family. There aren’t words for it. What we’re here to do today is to decide whether we’re going to keep working on the dig.”
He clasped his hands and put them to his mouth, gaze flicking between Rada and Yed.
Yed leaned forward at the table. “There’s no undoing what’s been done. The ship, it still means as much today as it did three days ago. If everyone else is okay with going on, I am as well—but if we want to walk away, I’ll do that too.”
And then they were all looking at her, waiting for her response.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “If I said the word, you would all agree to quit operations. Fly away. And leave behind billions of dollars and the most significant discovery since artificial gravity.”
“Yes,” Yed said.
“I agreed to no such thing,” Genner said.
Parson frowned at them both, then turned back to Rada. “If you wanted to quit, we would discuss it.”
“What are we doing now?” Rada said.
“Seeing if we need to have that discussion.”
“If this is some misguided effort to honor Stem, know this: he’d call you a bunch of god damn idiots for even considering it.”
Parson laughed, bowing his head. “I think you’re right. Any objections? No? Then let’s move on to logistics. The fact of the matter is that, sooner or later, we’re going to need a partner on this mission—if only to sell it to them.”
“How you figure?” Karry said.
“We’re not exactly set up to start manufacturing reverse-engineered lasers.”
“Suppose not.”
“Then there’s the matter of security. Where do we take this thing? How do we keep it safe?” He spread his palms. “I know someone who knows someone. This second someone is as big as it gets. He’ll be able to handle everything.”
Rada laughed. “Then it sounds like he’s more likely to screw us. Take it and leave us with pennies.”
“I don’t think so. The second someone I’m referring to is Toman Benez.”
The crew shot each other a flurry of glances. Genner was first to recover. “You know Toman Benez?”
“I don’t—my friend does. Benez runs the Hive. He’s spent the last decade gathering up everything related to the invaders. Oh, and did I mention he runs one of the largest naval yards in the system, too?”
“Two birds with one stone,” Yed said. “Sounds good.”
Parson nodded. “Any objections?”
Rada set down her cup. “Only that, this time, you encrypt the messages.”
The captain laughed. “My friend and I already have a system. And once Benez is involved, it would take a thousand years to crack the codes he’ll slap on it.”
After the others left, he caught her in the hallway. “Rada, we may be going back to work, but if you don’t feel up to it, there’s no pressure. Take all the time you need.”
“Thanks,” she said. “But I think it would be best if I got back to it.”
“Anything’s better than the four walls, isn’t it?” Parson chuckled wryly. “You let me know if you need anything.”
In the morning, feeling queasy and wrung-out, she made sure the galley was clear, then poured herself a shot of pig. Just enough to cut the phlegm. It wouldn’t interfere with her duties: they were digging the lower layers of the ship from the ice in preparation for a deal with Toman Benez, and Rada’s job was to babysit the cart as it hauled detritus from the pit. After making it to lunch without incident, she made herself another drink. She felt much better, less apt to scream or to fracture her metacarpals punching the inside of the cab.
That afternoon, on break, she found herself the only one aboard the Turtle; even Genner had gone down to the pit to assist with the vessel’s excavation, exploration, and cataloguing. Rada stared at the dispenser. Sometimes, she was in the carts for hours at a time. Drying out all the while. Body and mind growing irritable. Pained. In that state, she was more likely to make a mistake than if she maintained a steady buzz. Problem was, the cart had cameras. Parson had overlooked her drinking earlier, but now that she was back on the job, he seemed to assume she had cut herself off. If he caught her, she’d be suspended. Maybe until the dig was over.
She wasn’t always in the cart, though. Her task entailed delivering the detritus to a dumping ground removed from the site. Often, she had to hop out and scrape accreted ice from the cart. At those times, she was off-camera.
She filled a bottle with pig and got back to work. On her first delivery, she got out, knocked some ice from the cart, then wandered behind the ridge and poured a stiff drink into her suit’s feeder. She crunched back to the cart. No one said a word.
Her routine became something that would have horrified her mere months ago. Get up, fortify herself against the hangover; head out to cart duty, maintaining her levels throughout the work day; come home to her bunk and get rip-roaring drunk.
It seemed to work. She made no major gaffes. She rarely spoke to anyone during the day, and they knew better than to bother her at night. She knew it wasn’t a genuine solution—it wasn’t the kind of strategy you built retirement plans around—but all she wanted was to get through Stem’s aftermath. Once they were off Nereid and she was rich, she’d send herself to a spa or a tropical island. Get herself straight.
On her third day of her temporary solution, she drove the cart from the pit, rolled across the ice, and descended to the hollow where she’d been dumping the detritus. She got out, whacked ice from the cart’s sensors and wheel wells. Wandered behind a shelf of ice. And sat down for a drink.
The sky looked as it always did: a black screen pierced by silver stars. Despite her familiarity with it, she’d spent a lot of time looking up at it lately. It helped to be reminded how small she was, how little of anything there was, how even stars died in their time.
She cocked her head. One of those stars was moving. At first she assumed it must be a meteor, or a comet inbound from the Oort Cloud, but then its course bent, disappearing behind the shelf of ice. Could be it was one of Benez’s ships, but if Parson had expected someone, he would have let them know. She picked herself up and trudged around the protrusion, then climbed the slippery ramp to where the cart was parked.
As she neared the rise, her comm kicked in. Parson’s voice was frantic, high-pitched. “ … five seconds. Find somew
here stable and get down!”
Rada broke into a run, long strides sailing over the ridged ice. Straight ahead, another star grew in size, growing brighter by the instant.
“Do we have any idea who they are?” Genner said.
The falling star became a white flare.
“No,” Parson said. “No response at—”
The star, which Rada now understood was a missile, speared from the sky and disappeared behind a mound of ice. A blinding half-sphere of light burst from the horizon. It swelled upwards, turning red as it burned out.
“The Turtle,” Parson said. “It’s … gone.”
SHIP’S LOG: 2
On the bridge, Tton whirled on me. “This is your fault. You have destroyed us!”
“Me?” I surged to my feet. “I did nothing!”
“Your doubt of our cause poisoned our pursuit of the Way.”
“Doubt did not crash the whaleship. Human life persists. Fights on. Perhaps that is the Way.”
“Enough,” Captain Ffel declared. “It is done. All that remains is to act.”
Ollot moved to gaze at the screen, the sight of the great ship smoking in the bay. “What are our orders?”
“There are none. Defeat was not planned for. We decide on our own.”
I bowed to the captain. “I believe the Way has spoken. It has denounced our attack. There is only one thing we can do: pick up our brothers and go home.”
“We cannot give up now!” Tton said.
Ffel let his limbs hang from his side. “What else is there to achieve? Our army has failed. This ship, this crew, how would we hope to take the planet by ourselves?”
“We do not have to take it.” Tton raised his sensepods from his back, clacking his claws tight. “We can destroy it. Unleash the nukes. Once the clouds have snuffed the last of their sparks, then it will be ours. Who is with me?”
For a moment, the bridge was as still as the surface of a windless pond. One by one, the crew stood and joined Tton’s side.
CHAPTER 6
As she watched the explosion roil through the darkness, Rada’s mouth fell open. She began to speak into her comm, but something stopped her. Later, she would realize it had been survival instinct.