Ditz was interrupted by the door sliding open and Screwball leaning into the room, his eyes wild with something between panic and triumph. “Here you are! Shit, I’ve been looking for you. Come on, man, it’s set! Come on!”
“What the fuck, Ditz!” Sparks started to slap at his hand offering one of her prosthetics, but she seemed to think better of it and grabbed it. “What’s set?”
“One of those little pocket nukes.”
She made a strangled noise, staring at him in a bug-eyed horror cutting through the remains of a fine high.
“It’s not that bad–”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Ditz? Not that bad?”
“Come on, Spa–”
“You’re out of your minds!”
“Sparky...”
“Don’t you ‘Sparky’ me, you backstabbing son of a bitch.”
“Neha, come on, we’re gonna blow up.”
She stopped suddenly in the process of attaching her leg, and stared at Screwball. “Did you actually set a nuclear bomb?”
Screwball looked sheepish. “Uh, kinda. We really better go.”
Sparks swore and set to work putting her legs on at speed. Ditz tried to help her and she swatted at him.
The other door to the office opened. Raj and–
“Woah, Mary. Holy shit, wow.” Ditz stared. “Did you, like–”
“I’m all right,” Mary said. “But I’m captive. So are you two, so put down your weapons.” She hesitated. “And zip your trousers. Jesus.”
Raj turned to Screwball, holding a pistol on him. “I remember you. You’re the little skidmark I schooled. Where’s the bomb?”
Screwball stood up straight. “I’m not saying shit.”
“Christ, I’m going to lose more IQ, aren’t I.”
Mary interrupted. “Corbell, where is it? This is serious, we have to turn that off.”
He visibly wavered. Ditz sighed. “Jig’s up, Screwy man. This was a dumb idea anyway.”
Screwball seemed to deflate, and Ditz felt bad for him. Dude finally got a chance to really look good for the old man, and it all went pear-shaped. As usual.
“Somewhere near the doors. Dunno for sure.”
They all stared at him.
“Somewhere...” Sparks started.
“Near the shitting doors?” Raj finished. “The holy hell’s that supposed to mean, my brother? How don’t you remember where you put a nuclear sharting weapon?”
“Yeah, but, like,” Screwball coughed. “There was someone in there, that chick with the sword, Mick. So I stuck it in a bot and told it to go to the doors.”
Mary and Raj moved fast for the inner hatch to the chop shop, grabbing Screwball as they went. Ditz followed. Sparks, who’d gotten her legs on, shouted, “Don’t! Gravity!”
Raj swore and managed to pull Mary back. “Boots,” he grumbled, and yanked on a locker door.
“You.” Sparks jammed her finger hard into Screwball’s chest. “Which bot did you put it in?”
“I dunno, it was just a bot. I think it had some blue paint on it, maybe.”
“Did you tell it to stop and stay at the doors?”
He furrowed his brow. “Huh?”
“When you told it,” she said, punctuating her words with more angry jabs, “to go to the doors, did you tell it to stop there and stay there?”
“Um.”
“Bots don’t just do what you tell them. When they finish one task, they get assigned another one and then they do that. When did you do this?”
“Uh, like five minutes ago. I couldn’t find Ditz, I thought he was down...” He trailed off, seeing that he wasn’t going to get a word in between the swearing on all sides. Ditz tried to give him a consoling look, but Screwball wouldn’t look him in the eye.
Sparks pulled up a console on her wall and jabbed at the air in front of it. “How much time do we have?”
“Like twenty minutes still,” Screwball said. “At least.”
She nodded once, curtly. “Go,” she commanded. “If it’s one of mine, I can find it and call it. I’ll just make them all come. Get down to the shop floor, they can’t come in here. If you can’t find it in five minutes, I’m getting out of here.”
Raj and Mary, now booted up, frogmarched Screwball out the office door. Ditz lingered. “Listen, Spa… Neha. I’m really, really, really sorry. I feel awful.”
“Go feel awful at someone else, you turncoat,” she growled, not looking away from the screen.
He pulled a pair of sandal-like mag boots out of the locker and stepped gingerly into them. They gripped the sides of his feet, felt really weird. He gave Sparks one last mournful look, then went out the hatch and down the gangway.
Ditz struggled to suppress a moment of panic as he looked out over the mechanic’s bay. Wide open spaces like that already creeped him out, and the big half-broken ship looming over him didn’t help, but the sight of dozens of robots converging on him from all directions and above was enough to make him want to bolt. Something made a loud hissing noise away down the end of the bay. Screwball grabbed the nearest bot, twisted it to see its back and then pushed it away.
“Not it,” he muttered. Louder, he said, “It had some, like, blue paint on it.”
Ditz grabbed a robot out of the air, more because it freaked him out than anything, but he turned it over in his hands. It made little plaintive beeping noises and had a green light, but no blue paint. On either side of him, Mary and Raj were doing the same. As they tossed bots away, they buzzed off.
“No,” muttered Screwball, savage in his panic.
Another one had red paint. The third, green. “Hey,” Ditz said, “You’re not like colorblind are you? I mean, it’s cool if you are–”
“I’m not colorblind,” Screwball snarled.
“Cool, cool.”
He grabbed for another bot, but it danced out of his reach. It had blue paint on it. Mary must have heard him gasp; she twisted around and grabbed for it, too. Raj was faster: he got hold of it and shoved it in Screwball’s face.
“Well?”
“That’s it!” Screwball tried to take it, but Raj held it away. He opened its cargo cavity himself. His expression turned grave.
“What are you trying to pull here, brother?” He spun it to show the cavity, empty.
“That’s the one,” Screwball said. “I’m positive, that was the one! I swear to God, Raj, I put it in there!”
“What’s that noise?” Ditz didn’t like the tone of Mary’s voice. He followed her gaze toward the source of the hissing he’d noticed before. The person-sized airlock’s red light was on, and he could hear the grumble of the air cyclers. Next to its inside hatch there were four harnesses for spacesuits. Three suits were slashed open. One was missing.
The airlock clanked once more, and lit up green. All four of them stared at it, and when the inner door finished its cycle and opened, it was empty.
Mary tried once to say something, failed, and then managed in a hoarse whisper, “Run.”
SPACEWALK
The trick to spacewalks was to not think about how stupidly dangerous they were. The Miner hated them under the best of circumstances. These were not the best of circumstances. The suit she wore was made for someone bigger than her, and the positive air pressure blew it up around her so that her fingers didn’t reach the end of her gloves unless she tugged on the elbow with the other hand. She didn’t bother to do that, occupied as she was with moving hand-over-hand with a nuclear detonator stuck magnetically to her chest and her sword swinging so wildly on its tether that it kept knocking on her helmet and startling her.
The rolling tether stayed anchored magnetically to the steel guide strip bolted to the asteroidal rock below the handholds, so she probably wouldn’t go drifting away to a lengthy and unpleasant death. Its bearings skipped and stuttered on the surface and would have been making a horrible scratching noise if she could hear them. That left the more-likely brief and bright death at the hands of the small device who
se timer currently read less than thirty minutes.
When Raj had described the situation, her thought had been that this would be good cover to slip in and blow up the mechanic’s bay herself. That had been, she felt, a good plan. One that she probably should have abandoned when she spied an idiot with a nuclear weapon. She should, in fact, have abandoned the station entirely. Instead, presented with a choice between disarming the device and letting a nice little fight fizzle or letting it go off inside the station, irradiating the lower decks and probably putting enough stress on its systems to kill everyone, she thought she’d be clever and put it outside the station, which was after all designed to take a mild nuclear bombardment without failing catastrophically. She felt decreasingly clever by the minute.
She’d dropped the last bug behind her as early warning, and she picked up some talking on its channel. High power mode, not subtle, but she’d officially crossed the subtlety Rubicon anyway. Three or four people, maybe, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. They didn’t sound happy, but if she could hear their voices, then they weren’t preparing to evacuate atmo and open the doors, so that much was all right. But going back inside wasn’t an option.
The bay doors, bearing a giant black number 2, loomed large above her head. Somewhere off to her right was a single working floodlight, bright enough to see by, but whatever her arm cast in shadow was so black it was erased from the universe. Hand over hand she dragged herself along sideways to the middle of the bracing hull below the doors where it overlapped the dark gray pockmarked asteroid. She hazarded a look up, contorting her whole body to see where she was relative to the doors and the rest of the station. She steeled herself and then looked down into the star field below her. Nothing habitable nearby except the mechanic’s bay itself, set in a big crater with a nice thick rim around it.
She leaned carefully away from the rock, letting the tether gently tense until she was far enough away to see what she was doing. Her breath assaulted her in her helmet, warm and humid while the rebreather struggled to keep up with her dry-mouth near-panic. Moving deliberately, she pulled the device away from her chest, felt it tugging on the ill-fitting suit until it released. She turned it over in her hands, pushed aside the shock of seeing its timer at nineteen minutes, and pressed it against the steel guide strip to the left of her rolling tether.
Allowing herself only a moment to exhale the breath she hadn’t noticed herself holding, she started hand-over-hand again, away from the airlock. There wasn’t time to cycle through and still get away from the blast. So she had under twenty minutes, at spacewalk speed, to get away from the immediate blast radius, out of range of any chunks, and behind something thick enough to block radiation. A lot safer without atmosphere, but still not remotely safe. It occurred to her that this might have been the dumbest thing she had ever done.
Hand over hand over hand over hand. The tether skittered and lurched on its bearings, and she had to stop twice to reattach it. She lost her grip once, surprised by the sound of shooting coming from the bug’s broadcast, and the tether swung away free. It traced out an arc, and she had to stop and suppress a sensation of panic before she could make herself reach for it and plant it on the guide strip. She was only a few body lengths away from the armed device, after all that scrabbling.
Taking a deep breath and trying not to feel stupid, she pushed gently off and twisted herself around so that the handholds became footholds. She grabbed the tether’s end in one hand and ground it against the steel strip as she pulled with her feet. Her sword bucked and swung wildly on its own tether as it bumped against her, and her feet in the oversize boots kept slipping, but at least she was moving.
It was too slow-going with the tether; she pulled hard and dragged it to the edge of the steel strip until it released. That was stupid, but hoisted by her own atomic petard was worse. She looked at her new up: the rock jutted out a fair ways. If she could get to the other side, she’d be clear.
The hand-over-hand scrabble resumed with her feet to assist. The rock protrusion didn’t seem to get any closer, and that stupid suit made her feel like she was swimming in fabric. Ten minutes. Her arms and legs ached, her fingers burned from the strain of squeezing the inflated gloves. She kept them like claws and just hooked at the handles. Her head swam in a swamp and her brain felt hazy from breathing her own carbon dioxide. She could still hear the distant high-pitched popping of a firefight somewhere inside near her bug. Five minutes. Three.
The rock was upon her before she recognized it, and she scrambled up and over it on the mere half dozen handholds someone had bolted haphazardly into the asteroid. Her arm reached for the next one – and missed.
Somersaulting in the void, the Miner’s body twisted away from the rock, propelled by her own momentum. The promontory drifted by and she couldn’t grab the handhold, only brushed it with her foot to send herself slowly tumbling. Handholds went by her visor, out of reach. Twisting her body, hyperventilating herself into a stupor, her hand knocked against her sword and then grabbed it. She lashed out with it like a boat oar, bounced off one handhold and then hooked the next. She pulled it with all her strength, levering herself back onto the rock. Her knees hit hard and jolted her, but her hand shot out and grabbed the loop of steel hard.
Her left hand trembled as she held fast. She found the tether and swung it around. She didn’t see where it attached, but when she pulled it was taut. The muscles in her hands screamed at her, and finally, with all her senses rebelling against it, she had to let go. The tether held, and she untensed all the muscles she’d been clenching in fear.
She couldn’t see a thing around the bulge in the asteroid. She wouldn’t have felt the blast at all if her hand hadn’t been resting against the rock. It lurched under her palm like it was alive, and she looked out into space to see in the cone of floodlamp light a fine glittering spray of molten rock and metal.
KABOOM!
“Ow!”
Screwball stopped. Ditz was heavy as fuck, and carrying him by dragging him backwards with two arms under his armpits was hurting them both, but he had to. “I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry.” He sniffed hard, trying not to lose it. “But I got to get you out of here. We’ll get to the doc’s, I promise.”
“Shit,” Ditz said softly. His limp weight hung from Screwball’s hands, and his own hands were clenched over his belly where that fucking idiot Carter had shot him. They’d gotten away through the fight – Feeney’s crew had come down on the bay just as they were fleeing. They’d lost Raj in the confusion, but they’d also lost Mary, and he didn’t know if she was even alive, and–
He gritted his teeth. He was not going to lose it. And he was not going to lose his buddy.
“I know it hurts, but we got to get out of here. It’s not far,” he lied. They’d only come up half a flight of stairs, passed by a bunch of fleeing assholes who hadn’t helped, and his arms and legs burned with the effort.
“Let me down,” Ditz said, his voice terrible and calm. “I’m dying, man.”
“You’re not dying, you’ll be fine.”
“It’s cool, man. It’s my time.” His face looked waxy. “I fucked it all up anyway. I let them take Nuke away and probably kill him. Raj hates me. Sparks hates me too, now.”
“No.” Screwball shook his head. “No way.”
“It fucking hurts when you carry me, and the doctor’s higher than I am, so I can either die here or there.”
He peeled a blood-covered hand from his wound, winced, and reached for the thigh pockets on his pants. Failing twice to get the flap open, he closed his eyes and said, “Dude. Dying guy trying to get his drugs here. Lend a hand?”
Screwball hesitated, then dove into the flap. He pulled out a crumpled little package, which Ditz took from him. Scrabbling at the paper with blood-slick fingers, he dry-swallowed all three tablets. Then he closed his eyes, resting against Screwball’s legs.
“There we go,” he mumbled. “If I gotta leave this world, man, then tripping ball
s through a nuclear blast is the way to do it. That’s style, yeah?”
Screwball sniffed. “I’m sorry, man.”
“De nada. Get out of here, all right? If I’m worried about you I won’t enjoy the ride.”
“I don’t even know your real name, man.”
“George.”
Screwball blinked. “George?”
“My parents were assholes, all right? Steven?” He chuckled. “Goodbye, dude. Stay alive.”
“I’ll...” He coughed to clear the lump in his throat. “I’ll miss you, man.”
“You too, buddy. Now fuck off.”
Screwball tried to gently rest Ditz’s heavy form against the stairwell wall, but he was really limp already and thumped his head. The beatific look on his stoned face barely flinched. Screwball bit his lip and tried to think of something to say, and when he couldn’t, he fled up the stairs.
He took them two at a time, scrabbling and stumbling and slipping sometimes and banging his shins hard. He kept running all the way to the top, where the toffs lived and where Feeney always said McMasters’ goons would beat him to a pulp, but he didn’t care. He stood at the top landing and panted.
Screwball felt it in his knees and his guts before he heard it: an all-shaking bass thump like God’s foot up his ass. He stood numb as the floor rumbled, as the roar echoed in the stairwell around him, and then as it subsided he sank to his knees and cried.
FIDDLING
The Miner stood in the dark of the viewing bay, watching the big science ship emerge like an iceberg from the broken hangar, propelled by a hangar-full of air in which it moved slowly, almost regally. The main explosion had only weakened the rock and partly blasted the doors in. Air pressure and metal fatigue had taken time to do their thing, but the chop shop’s now-gaping doors had become a lazy geyser, pushing tools and blinking bots on streams of evaporating air as the badly-maintained emergency systems struggled to clamp down on the burst flows of atmosphere, water, and sewage. It all glittered prettily in the navigation lights.
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