by Mierau,John
She whistled, pouring some thrust on, and watched with a mixture of snarling glee and a horror she barely felt as a huge square of the hull came loose. More lashing, whipping tentacle bodies disappeared into space.
One flew straight at her.
She reared her right arm up and grabbed for the thing, snagged before it got to the glass bottom of the toad’s cockpit.
Even as she watched, pieces of it were sucked away into vacuum. Dina was horrified and fascinated by the brutal anatomy lesson.
A long muzzle broke through the brambly exoskeleton and layers of gauze protecting it’s soft center. The teeth didn’t look so soft as its mouth opened and long fangs bounced off the Toad’s window and hull.
She fired up the cutter on the arm again, and the thing blew apart.
Half the mass of mostly black tentacles cindered as they disappeared. The other half now went limp, like a squid out of water, wavering in her grip until she tossed it away.
Dina grabbed more of the broken hull and tore it off. Grabbed again, had a scary moment where she thought she’d be flung free, and grabbed something substantial. Something long and heavy, that rippled everything mounted overtop it.
She maxed her thruster, and a long beam tore free, and the dumbbell shape broke in two.
Dina shrieked black bliss as half the Boomer exploded, and smaller parts exploded again. She immediately landed on the donut on the end of the remaining half, and pulled and pulled until she found another beam and shattered it completely.
Something exploded while she was holding on. That brought Dina back to herself. She spent scary minutes straightening the Toad out again. It took longer than before because of the ice water pouring straight inside her spine when she saw her fuel gauges.
All in the red.
Panting, disoriented, nauseous from more than the spin, she had to have the nav computer tell her where the tram was.
With trembling hands she misered out the tiniest of squirts until the Toad was back on track and closing the distance.
She realized she was exhausted. Her body felt like cast iron. And she crying.
How many had she killed, she wondered.
She stared out the window at the tram. Tiny stick figures were waving at her from inside, and several banks of lights were winking on and off.
Dina closed her eyes and begged her stomach not to hurt her any more. It felt like her body was trying to expel her soul.
She didn’t blame it.
She left the radio off. She didn’t want any of the cheers it looked like the creatures on the tram wanted to give her. Not for what she just did.
She spent a little bit of time craning her head to dry her eyes on the fiber pads mounted inside her helmet, and busied herself with repair duties on the Toad until she was close enough to grab the tram with her bloody hands.
Toad was listing, and she wondered how badly she’d damaged the poor thing. She was dead tired, and she re-engaged the auto to find the right wire on her suit leg to pull to release a very nice cocktail of drugs into her leg.
She was making crying sounds again, but her eyes were dry and her emotions were as much on autopilot as the ship was.
The next thing she knew, both arms were latched back on to the tram. She didn’t even remember doing it. The lights on the thing were flickering like mad. It hurt her head.
She was about to flick the radio back on when she saw she’d grabbed on in a better position this time, and she could see the tram’s airlock open ahead.
That’s cool, she thought, seeing as she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get herself back on the tram without a lot of bruising and dangling on the end of safety lines.
Then a tree root the size of a horse slammed into the cracked canopy.
Not root. Tentacle. Black tentacle. It shattered the canopy. The cracked, black thing surrendered long, desiccated chunks of itself to the vacuum but it never stopped reaching.
Until it curled around Dina and squeezed.
PUTTING HEADS TOGETHER
45
New sounds. New vibrations.
New pain.
Lou woke up, sprawled on the deck grating of… someplace not on HHL-6. Not floating. Sprawled.
She was in gravity. She felt heavy. Leaden. Her head ached. And for some reason, she inched in a lot of places.
Vibrations jarred her teeth. A quiet roar from somewhere far off worried her brain. Her battered ears were ringing.
Through all of that, she heard Taggart's voice, and Villanueva's. She opened her eyes. It felt like raising an aircraft hanger door with her fists wrapped around a chain, but she got them cracked.
She lifted her head. Up. She cracked a weak smile. There was an 'up'? She liked that.
Her stomach gurgled, disagreeing with her brain, so she took the rest of the way onto her side, then up to seated, very slowly. She folded her forearms over her knees, and her forehead on her arms.
She did a mental double take and lifted her head again: someone had coated the back of her hands with dark gray pain. It continued up into the arms of her spacesuit.
She flipped her hands around in the air. Shocked she could do it, that she wasn't weak as a kitten, she stared at the paint.
Her gloves were gone. Her groggy brain realized her helmet was, too... and she could feel something plastered on the back of her neck.
She reached a hand to the back of her head. Her arm moved slowly, trembling. She felt a wide, strong adhesive bandage there, moved her head experimentally and felt the bandage taking some of the weight off her neck. She had most of her range of motion if she moved slowly, but if she moved faster than turtle speed her motions were restricted. Not to mention painful.
"How are we..." she croaked and swallowed. How are we in gravity? Or, how are we not crushed to jam by the gravity? Or maybe just, how are we still alive? She looked around, wondering which to ask, and who exactly she should be asking.
Her gaze met Villanueva's, who nodded back out of the helmetless ringed neck of his spacesuit. She saw acknowledgement and relief in his gaze, following the recognition his commanding officer was logged in to reality again.
He was kneeling, with obvious effort, over Okoro. "C&C crew's all in one piece," he reported automatically. "Gruber got our power mains mated to the Betty. We're making best speed up and out. " He straightened and winced. "And what a best speed!"
Lou noticed he was wearing a pad on the back of his neck. Paint crept up his neck and the side of his head. She met Rose Okoro's half-lidded eyes and her Nav Officer nodded. Stan Renic was feeding water to Okoro, and god help them, they were giving each other puppy eyes.
Both were speckled with paint.
She swung her head -slowly- around the long compartment. It felt like a sea-going vessel's engineering section, twenty or so meters wide, full of piping and tanks and instrumentation. Nothing like what pictures of the old Belter ships looked like. Lot of retrofitting, she realized, seeing welds and cutouts and temporary bracing everywhere she looked.
A gantry surrounded the rectangular room, and a high ceiling above that. The middle of the room and each end were filled by three floor to ceiling tanks.
She was near the far wall across from one of the tanks, on the floor near an elevator, dead centre in the middle of the room. She kept moving her head from the elevator further left, to where her first officer and nav officer were, and then back to the right, seeing a pile of their helmets and gloves, glossing over machinery that was both familiar and alien, and some of it grew like stunted metal trees out of the deck grating.
She saw Beacham and Taggart on the far side of the elevator, also in the middle of the floor.
She sighed again, enjoying that there was a floor. Even if her back and muscles ached because of it.
Beacham looked dazed. He was still talking, though, muttering and shaking his head.
Taggart was ignoring him, and as Lou watched, the security officer got to his feet. He wavered, but stayed up. Lou wondered how the hell he could do that aft
er months in zero gravity! "Commander!" He wore a wide grin.
She waved back at him, surprised she could even keep her hand up.
All of CNC was weak, but alive. That was more than she'd counted on. She took a deeper breath. Looked around again.
So. This was The Betty.
Beacham kept quietly muttering, but Lou guessed he was okay, from the way Taggart patted the scientist on the head as he walked stiffly toward her. Montagne focused on getting off her ass before he got to her.
She swung over onto her hands and knees, ignoring how the metal grill of the deck dug into her fingers. She just managed to crawl a few feet, feeling her body out.
Her skin felt hard. Moving her fingers took an extra impulse to get over some kind of pressure, and then she could move normally. She lifted one palm -only mildy surprised she didn't fall face first.
How was she doing this? She should be on a stretcher, setting her sights on a wheelchair in maybe a day or two.
Fascinated, she put her other hand up and -sitting up easily on her knees- she felt along her palms. The skin was slow to bounce back from the pressing metal of the floor grating. She peered closer, and saw a misting of grey dots and thin lines along her hand, too.
Something else. She realized the itching she felt rippling along her skin went deeper. Like it was in her bones.
The itching in her bones rivalled the background vibrations of a power stack and engines that weren’t Six’s. The two sensations raced each other along her nerves to her brain, and her brain couldn’t compute either.
She shrugged. Too many ‘what the hells’ to count, but after the day she'd had, she was going to roll with it.
Her space suit felt stiffer than it should. It's new resistance helped her straighten,she discovered and then slowly bent with her motion as as she flexed all her limbs.
Taggart was at her side now, giving an old fashioned military salute. She returned it and began to stagger towards Beacham with Taggart at her six.
When Montagne got a few feet closer to Beacham. she heard a whisper in the air. Daisy's voice, she realized, and suddenly the jumble of Beacham’s words made sense.
She walked behind him, staring where Beacham stared. Coherent light suddenly became visible floating in the air in front of him. She saw the outer surface of Six. Dina Rodriguez's ’s team mates, Raj Patel and Murray Barrowman, were removing one of the force field generation arrays from the hull.
“Careful for shit's sake! It’s not like we can message the Haskam shipyards in Earth orbit for replacements!”
“We’ll get it back to you in one piece, Doc,” came Raj Patel’s cocky voice.
"We talked about your potty mouth," Lou croaked.
Beacham looked up at her. “Hey. Glad you’re not dead. Tell these assholes not to call me Doc!”
Taggart snorted. “Why don’t I hate this sonofabitch?”
Lou shook her head. “I do not know.” But she was glad to see the scientist alive, too.
That was something she wouldn’t have thought she’d care about, when she'd woken up to start this long, long shift. “How long until we can put on a show, Beacham?”
Beacham shrugged. His face conveyed only a touch of discomfort, not the outright agony shifting his back muscles like that should have elicited. “With Stan making googly eyes over there? Scratch that, I’m doing fine without him. Be doing even better, if this leafy green mainframe wasn’t so stupid!” He pointed at another screen and yelled. “If you’re so smart, why can’t you improvise worth shit!”
The whisper was back, but louder now Lou was standing next to Beacham’s shoulder. “There are no power conduits on the Betty’s midpoint to wire your pods to, Doctor. If you will allow me to calculate an alternative pattern of pod placement I am sure I can reduce the power drain and use existing ports -“
"There's no time!" Beacham looked up, murder in his eyes. “Goddamn plant’s gonna get us all killed,” he grated through clenched teeth, then turned his eyes back to the display floating in the air. He backhanded the images, causing them to ripple. “Us primitive human beings can run a cable and weld it in place, did you ever think of that, you arrogant weed!”
Taggart leaned close to Lou and whispered “I think he’s in love.”
“I heard that!” Beacham called out, but there was excitement in his voice, not acrimony.
Who’d have thought the scientist would be this cool under fire? Lou thought. She remembered him piroutting around in the zero-g back on Six, once he'd forgotten to be clumsy and scared.
She called out loud to the image of the mechs. “Barrowman, are there any other mechs that can run the line?”
A moment of silence. On-screen, Lou saw one of the exo-suited men's arms freeze. “Commander? Glad to have you back, Ma'am! We...we lost Petrie, but Nishioka and Bosteder are standing by in the cargo bay.”
“Nishioka here.” The pilot’s voice was cold, clinical. “Confirmed: I’ve got enough power cable left to get us where you need us. Working out a plot to get us there is tricky, and at The speeds Betty’s pulling especially so, but I've got some ideas. We can do it.”
Another voice joined the line. “Bosteder here.” His voice was pinched, and blustery. “If my pilot can get us in position, I’ll lay all the pipe Betty needs.”
Montagne heard, through the bravado and rough humor. Steve Bosteder and Kyle Nishioka had been teamed with Dan Petrie for over two years. She was glad there was more work for them to do. It would stave off the pain a while longer.
“There you go, Steve, bragging again,” Nishioka said, a bit more color to the voice after Steve's goading . “Just tell us where you need us, Ma'am.”
"Stand by gentlemen. Co-ordinate with Beacham, and…and Daisy." She left Beacham to it. “Keep up the good work... ‘Doc’,” she added with a grin.
Beacham glared - and fought back a grin- then focused back on his screens.
“Glad to see humanity didn’t get completely dumbed down since we left.” Gruber appeared, fully suited, his helmet visor retracted. He passed Lou a thin canister with a wide mouth. “Pleased to meetcha, Commander Montagne. I’m Ben Gruber, and you’re in my engineering room.”
Video hadn’t done Ben Gruber justice. He wasn’t tall, but he was big. Really big. And that beard…he really did look like Santa on a bad day…or a bender. She took the bottle, sniffed it hesitantly.
“H20 and electrolytes, mostly,” Gruber said. “Plus a little extra to feed the little gray buggers keeping you from dislocating everything.”
She pulled her nose away from the bottle and stared her question.
“It’s safe,” Gruber reassured her. “Daisy cooked it up. We sprayed it inside your suits, sprayed it down your nose. Simple recipe life form, designed to infiltrate all your systems, support your bones in the short run, and help you rebuild your muscles faster.”
Lou’s stomach knotted up again, thinking of something bioengineered growing inside her. She looked down with wide eyes at the gray marks on her hand.
“Side effects?” Taggart asked, before she could. Ron Taggart looked like Lou felt.
Gruber laughed. “Stay close to a crapper for the next few days, and don’t look inside when you’re done. The little buggers won’t leave nothin' behind 'sides a shiny colon.”
Lou and Taggart looked at each other. Taggart's face twisted. "Lucky colon."
Both exploded in nervous laughter. It only lasted a couple breaths before reality vise-gripped them again. Perhaps a little less crushing than before, thanks to the moment of cameraderie.
“‘Scuse me.” Gruber moved past. Lou looked down and saw HHL-6’s emergency power cable stretching out of a small hole in the wall beside the elevator. It split into two and snaked into different machines ahead. gruber stalked along the cable, eyeballing it.
The cable was a reminder. They were lost in the woods, here. If Travis and Gruber were lying to them, they were done for.
Lou compartmentalized her ‘ick’, shrugged, and drank. An
d drank some more. She quickly finished off half the concoction. She stopped and passed the drink to Taggart.
“Thank you,” she called out. It sounded dumb even as she said it. Her head was spinning, her body barely standing and weak as a baby. ‘Thank you’ would have to do.
Gruber waved over his shoulder. “We’re savin’ each other’s ass, remember?” His voice softened. “Welcome, all the same.”
Lou turned and looked back the way she’d come, seeing a door past Arnel, Rose and Stan. “Where is Captain—“ She felt her shoulder crack as she turned, and she winced.
She must have done more than wince, because Gruber barked at her.
“You want to move slow! That gray goo ain’t miracle sauce! I lowered the gravity in engineering to a third, but take it easy. It’s a lot on the muscles, back in gravity, but you should be able to move around about as well as your average invalid.”
‘Lowered the gravity’? Lou thought, but didn’t ask any more. Baby steps, she thought.
The elevator opened, and a tall, spacesuited man walked out. His suit was tarnished and patched, a quilt of silver and bronze and whites and blues. The suit looked both ancient and damaged and at the same time beyond anything Lou had ever seen.
He surveyed the room, concern and thought behind his eyes. When his gaze settled on Lou. A small smile grew. The scar on his face rippled. “Commander, we've got a solid seal and we've anchored Betty and Six in multiple points. We're in business.”
“If you can call that stack of tanks a ‘ship’!” Gruber laughed. “Pretty touch stack, though, I’ll give you that.”
“Glad to have you aboard,” Travis said, walking closer. Lou felt one eyebrow rise. That suit fit him well. She could make out definition to some of his parts. She warmed, but her mind kept driving.
She took his extended hand. "I'm grateful to you and your crew, Captain. I'm glad you were around, and glad we could," a genuine smile crept onto her face, recalling Gruber's words. "Glad we could save each other's asses."
Travis laughed. Lou heard the stress being relieved, and the emotion riding on top of it. She believed this was a man who cared for his crew.