Most compartments were open to space, fittings frozen solid and brittle. The silence as Cavers led the time marines through the ship — and it was a huge, spacious vessel — was oppressive, as if the ship itself was watching their every move. Spider, still getting used to the odd sounds and smells of the suit, asked Cavers, “Permission to look for Molly?”
“Take Mr. Raspa with you.
Raspa was tall and imposing. His equipment, as baffling as it was impressive, made him look twice the size of a regular human being. He told Spider, “Call me Ray.”
“Spider.”
They shook hands; Spider’s gloved hand was almost lost within Ray’s grip.
“One thing,” Cavers said before they took off.
“Sir?” Ray said.
“Don’t spare the stasers as you go.”
Raspa grinned. “Sir, yes, sir!”
“There’s still a chance Dickhead is aboard, waiting for us somewhere.”
“Yes, sir,” Raspa said.
“And godspeed.” He met Spider’s eyes for a moment, and in them Spider saw a glint of the same cold horror he himself felt at the scene before them, then looked away and started snapping orders at the rest of his troops. “Meet you back here in one hour. Wait five minutes. If we’re not all back by then, head back home.”
Soon Raspa and Spider were alone in the freezing dark, watching where they stepped to avoid tripping over bodies, their breathing loud inside their suits. “You okay, Spider?”
“Oh,” he said, still weirded out by every single thing, “never better, mate.”
“So which way?”
Spider had a graphic display lit up on the faceplate of his helmet, indicating where they were on the map of the ship; the path to Molly’s likely location was marked out in red. He pointed. “Um,” he said, turning this way and that, anxious to make sure he was reading the map the right way, “that way.”
They set off, through cold, dark, airless compartments, their boots crunching tiny ice crystals, Raspa leading the way. Spider said, “Nice of Dickhead to leave the gravity on for us.”
“He didn’t. G like this is a property of the ship’s structure.”
“Oh,” Spider said, looking around, trying to imagine the sort of physics that must be at work here. “Okay, then.”
Before entering a new compartment, passageway or room, Raspa made Spider stand well back and fired a quick, silent burst from his staser rifle. Then Raspa would go in, check the area, and make sure it was safe to proceed. Spider asked what the staser was for. He thought it was a tool; Soldier Spider had wanted Spider to go and fetch him one.
Raspa said, “Freezes local time for a while. Anybody hiding in there in ghost mode? They’re busted. Leaves ‘em standing there like statues!” Spider nodded, impressed, but worried about what would happen when the freeze wore off. Not that it seemed to matter because, for all the shots Cavers used, none revealed anything other than a vast deathscape.
Spider was thinking about Dickhead. Two moves ahead of the game. “Bastard knew we were coming, he bloody knew it.”
“Where would he go?” Raspa asked.
“He’s only got a million other ships, remember?”
“Yeah.” Raspa sighed.
“For some folks,” Spider said, keeping his voice down as they crept through the dark, “there’s no such thing as ‘enough,’ whatever it might be. Cars, troops, money, women, power, connections. You name it.”
“Shh,” Raspa said, so quietly Spider nearly didn’t hear it. He stopped, locked up with sudden cold tension, listening hard despite the silence of vacuum and the noise of his suit, hair on the back of his neck standing straight up. His hand wrapped around the butt of his pistol. He felt exposed, useless: the time marines were covered in gear and armor and all manner of spooky protection; Spider, though wearing the same suit, did not have all of the same gear. Where Raspa would blend into whatever background he might be near, Spider would not. It was starting to occur to him, as he watched Raspa, that he might be in a lot of trouble. Raspa brought up the staser rifle, and fired three careful shots into the next area. They were in a large, open area, perhaps a dining room: there were plenty of tables, chairs, a serving counter, beverage dispensers, an inert media wall, rows of crew photos, ship insignia — and something that told Spider this was definitely Dickhead McMahon’s operation: those annoying bloody motivational posters on every wall, huge, like Nazi propaganda, only with slogans like SERVICE; LOYALTY; SACRIFICE; LEADERSHIP; COURAGE; and DOMINATION. “Such a dickhead!” he muttered, chilled to the bone.
Nothing appeared out of ghost mode. Raspa waved his light around, trying to see hidden details, without finding anything.
“Strange,” he said, moving around, peering at everything through his infra-red and night-vision visor. “There’s nothing here. I was sure I’d heard—”
Spider was trying not to wet himself. How did these maniacs keep so bloody calm? he wondered. He certainly did not feel calm. He was terrified out of his mind. “How much farther to where they’re holding Molly?”
“You know McMahon might have taken her body with him, right?”
Spider thought about what Soldier Spider had told him. It seemed to him, though, that Dickhead McMahon, prince among men, legend in his own lunchbox, would be more inclined to leave her dead body behind for Spider to find, a special, personalized message just for him. “No, she’s here. Bet you anything.”
“Just through here,” Raspa said, indicating a door leading out of the dining area. “There’s a corridor, some steps down—”
Spider told him to lead on, and found himself, despite the heated suit, rubbing his arms for warmth. That would be why he was shivering: because he was cold, right? You shiver when you’re cold. He kept telling himself this, and wished Raspa would get a bloody move on!
At last they reached an area that reminded Spider of civilian police lockups: holding cells, meeting rooms, a control desk, and so forth. According to Spider’s map, the second of the row of holding cells was Molly’s last known address. Raspa got the door open, checked the room with his light, and paused, standing there, staring.
“Ray, what’s the—”
Raspa waved him over and showed him.
Spider, doing his damndest not to panic, not to freak out, his stomach in painful knots, wanting only to get it the hell over with, show him her dead body already, show him the error of his ways, rub his face in his own mess—
Raspa shone his light around the room. Spider, seeing it all, thought he was going to be sick inside his helmet, and he had to sit down on the frozen floor, staring at nothing, numb with shock.
The timeship Destiny had a human crew of perhaps two hundred people, not counting Dickhead, who came and went, going about his business back in Spider’s time, and traveling around the fleet. Spider had already seen most of those crewmembers, dead and frozen, on the way here. But in this cell, carefully stacked up like the piles of corpses he’d seen in grainy black-and-white documentary footage taken by Nazi filmmakers at Auschwitz during the war, were perhaps fifty more bodies. Were they Dickhead’s personal executive staff, deserving of the great honor of such a dubious end? Or were they would-be rebels, and Dickhead needed to make an example of them? It was impossible to know. All Spider did know for sure, if Raspa’s readings were accurate, was that Molly’s body was in there with all of those others, their bare feet marbled and rimed with frost that glinted in the light.
“Oh, God, Molly,” Spider managed to say, falling to his knees, staring at it all, taking in the full, horrifying extent of Dickhead’s victory. This, Spider thought, was Zeropoint, the Dickhead way. This was the fate awaiting anyone who worked for him, who gave their lives to him to play with. It was more than monstrous, more than shocking. And Soldier Spider had persuaded him, a stupid time machine repairman, to get caught in
the grinding mechanism of Dickhead’s machine, entirely so that “the good guys” could come here, and see all this.
There was nothing else for it. Spider and Raspa set about trying to move all of those bodies into the passageway. It was heavy, fatiguing, disgusting work. One of these people, Spider told himself, fighting to keep his gorge down, was Molly. He had to find her.
Raspa called Cavers and the rest of the marines, who joined them promptly; they reported finding no trace of Dickhead anywhere, and one of the ship’s smallcraft was missing. Cavers said his team had also searched for little surprises Dickhead might have left for them to find the hard way: booby-traps, bombs, and so forth. As far as they could tell, the ship was clean. And, strangely, there was no sign of a Dickhead-led attack formation of other ships converging on this location. “So far, anyway. We’re keeping an eye on the scopes,” Cavers added.
Spider hardly heard a word of it. Raspa had stopped to listen to the boss, but he was still in that room, freezing despite his suit, trying to separate bodies. Many of them were frozen together, in huge, solid blocks. It took enormous effort and time to separate bodies enough to haul them out. Then there was the problem of what to do with them. Cavers, seeing that Spider would not stop, not now, and not ever, if it meant finding Molly, told his men to provide what help they could. Soon, with everyone helping, a neat line of frozen bodies began forming on the passageway floor. Spider checked each one, studying faces as best he could through the frost, trying to find Molly. It was, in many ways, even worse than separating the bodies themselves: up close, staring into those iced-up eyes, the full magnitude of what had happened here struck him like a great weight falling from the sky, again and again. At least at first. Then, after about twenty or thirty such bodies, he found he was starting to get used to it. Each new frozen face, while gruesome, stopped freaking him out quite so much. He wasn’t sure whether to be horrified at himself or not, and got on with the job.
Molly was at the bottom of the pile. She, like the others, was frozen solid, her eyes shut. Squeezed shut, he noticed. Her face was drawn and lined in a way he had never seen before, and he noticed her shoulders looked wrong. Then he realized: her shoulders had dislocated.
Spider collapsed next to her, unable to speak, face buried in his shaking hands, his stomach heaving. The pain was unspeakable.
Cavers couldn’t watch. The other marines sat down around Spider and Molly, and said nothing. They sat like that for a long while.
It was hard, Spider discovered, to prevent breaking Molly’s hair when he tried to stroke it. When he regained his composure, at least a little, he found himself staring at her, his mind shot full of thoughts, memories — that first time she kissed him, surprising him greatly, considering she’d just been crying; the first time he’d seen her face by candlelight in a dingy little Italian restaurant in Nedlands, the way the light caught the highlights in her hair.
He managed a small smile, still staring at her in the torchlight. Something was wrong, though, he kept thinking. Molly didn’t quite look like the rest of the bodies. Getting to his feet, he checked some of the other bodies, comparing the way their skin looked to the way Molly’s looked.
“What?” He scraped a layer of crusted ice and frost from her face. “What does that look like to you?” he asked Raspa and the others. Everyone leaned in for a look.
“That’s not right,” Cavers said.
Spider checked her hands, her feet, and two of the marines checked the other bodies for comparison and reported back. Molly’s feet and hands did not look like theirs. Once Spider scraped more frost away from Molly’s body, he sat back, sniffling, and looked at her, tilting his head this way and that, his pulse quickening, but trying not to get his hopes up. “Is it just me,” he said, “or does she not look frozen to you?”
Cavers hunched down next to Spider, and looked Molly over. With Spider’s permission, he touched her face, her arms. He called the team medic, a no-nonsense female marine named Peel. She produced some diagnostic tools from her belt, and touched Molly’s skin with the tips of each one, while watching tiny screens on her wrist. Spider thought he would explode if it took any longer. At length, Peel nodded at Cavers. “Stasis, sir.”
“So she’s not actually frozen?” Spider asked.
“She’s not frozen, Spider,” Cavers said.
“Is she… Is she…?” He couldn’t say it.
Cavers glanced at Peel, who said, “Hard to say, Mr. Webb. It looks like she’s in deep Level IV stasis — um, she’s been stopped all the way down to the atomic level. Getting her back, well…” She glanced away.
“So she is alive?”
“I don’t want to get your hopes up, sir.”
Cavers said to her, “For God’s sake, Peel.”
Peel said, “I don’t want to give Mr. Webb false hope, sir.”
“How long,” Spider asked, “can she stay like this?”
“Depends, sir,” Peel said. “There’s a certain amount of flux friction between the stasis field on one hand and standard background entropic activity on the other.”
“Oh, shit,” Spider muttered. “So you’re saying, she could thaw out over time, kind of?”
“That’s correct, sir, yes. And if she’s not given the right treatment during that process…”
“So she could still die? Is that what you’re—”
“Stasis is a rock in the stream of time,” Peel tried to explain. “It’s an affront to the natural order of things. The universe will do its best to overcome the stasis field. It’s a question of whether the stasis is cancelled in one step, or whether it runs out over time. If the latter, Mr. Webb, different parts of your wife’s physiology will start running again before other parts are ready. She—”
“I see,” Spider said. He’d thought it would be something like that. “God. So how do we snap her out of it? Can you guys do that back on your ship? Have you got a ‘thaw’ setting on those staser rifles?”
Before Peel could answer, Cavers interrupted. “Spider. We have to go.” With that, he assigned Raspa and Spider to carry Molly, and ordered his team back to base.
Spider stayed with Molly in the Masada’s sickbay. This was a compartment bigger than the one he’d occupied earlier: where that one only had room for three patients, this one could handle anything up to ten at once — though Spider noticed four of those beds were shut down, their monitoring screens dark. There were two busy scrubber-bots working over the walls and floor, humming softly. That aggressive antiseptic odor filled the air to a degree that was almost offensive, Spider thought. The doctor, the same guy Spider met before, not looking any better, told him the waste recycling system was up and running again, for now, but there was no predicting how long it might last before it crashed again. The doctor, Spider thought, looked like he’d been awake and under stress for so long he might just go crazy.
“And you know what’s really funny?” the doctor said, wide-eyed, jumpy, fidgety, “I’m not even a real doctor. I’m a glorified nurse with a field promotion, ha-ha, ha-ha.”
“Just tell me whether you can restore my wife, would you?” Molly occupied one of the operational beds. In this warmer environment, all trace of frost and ice had melted away, leaving Molly looking more or less fine — those dislocated shoulders notwithstanding — but very very still, like a three-dimensional photograph, a person caught between moments. It was an eerie thing to see, Spider commented. Something he never wanted to see again.
“We’ll do our best, Mr. Webb. Best I can tell you right now.”
Spider heard him, and heard within those words the real message: don’t get your hopes up. He only had to look around, and think about what he’d seen of this ship earlier: things were bad. There was very little available power. The EMP shot, so useful for taking out the causality weapon, had left them in trouble. Soldier Spider had told Spider that this was okay,
and he should not feel bad about it. There had been a long meeting about it. The crew had reported that they could do a lot to harden critical systems, and that it should be possible to get things running after the shot, to some extent. It was better to shut down the weapon than have Soldier Spider — and potentially Spider himself — erased, leaving the Masada not only with bad internal damage, but with two baffling corpses as well.
So Spider settled in to wait, sitting next to Molly’s bed around the clock, getting up only to hit the washroom and to eat whatever the ship’s chef could scrape together. He slept lightly, uncomfortably, but would not be shifted from Molly’s bedside. At one point he took up reading to her. He found a lot of reading material in that screen Soldier Spider had given him, and which Cavers had retrieved for him. Entire books and sets of books, thousands of different titles, occupied a small portion of the thing’s enormous memory. There was Pride and Prejudice, he discovered, to his great surprise. It had been one of Molly’s favorites, a book she read every couple of years. By the time he finished the final page, though, Molly was still locked in stasis, and the doctor, now feeling a little better after some badly needed sleep, had found nothing that might help, or which might mitigate the damage as the stasis field weakened.
“So we’re screwed?” Spider asked, frustrated.
“I think we’re at the limit of what we can do with this ship’s resources. I’m sorry,” the doctor said, meaning it.
“So that’s it?”
The doctor was working a screen, and beamed something to Spider. “That’s the specs for a treatment that will fix the problem, and provide the best chance for a full recovery.”
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 28