by Mierau,John
All to escape the Thorn, a giant, spiky planetoid that was manipulating it's own gravity to catch and digest them.
Busy couple of days, Lou thought, but here they were: mostly still alive, and on their way out of the clutches of the Thorn--with the help of some transplanted humans from a hundred years ago.
And the aliens, Lou thought, following Beacham through the dimly lit corridor. Can't forget the aliens.
She wondered if Stan Renic and Rose Okoro, their bodies now coated in metal, all metabolic functions suspended by some alien tech she still couldn’t wrap her mind around, would be added to the list of the stranded, or the dead, when they had time to thaw them out, or reboot them, or whatever.
“How are we doing with the last emitter, ’Short Round'?” She heard Captain Travis ask on the comm line.
“It’s not the prettiest install I’ve ever done,” came the tired but satisfied voice of Steve Bosteder, the cargo specialist helping Kyle Nishioka, pilot of the EVA craft ’Short Round’, mount Beacham’s last force field emitter on the Betty's side. “But Beacham' toys are now all in place."
"Good work crew," Montagne called out. "Now get yourself inside the Betty's cargo bay before company arrives."
"Negative, Commander." It was Kyle Nishioka’s voice now, cool and emotionless. “Daisy piped us video of Rod riguez taking on the Boomer, Commander. Steve and I are ready to dish out more of the same if the emitters don't keep them out. Where do you need us?"
Travis stopped ahead and pounded a small wall panel. A chunk of ceiling began to lower to the corridor grating. Travis bounded up the flat ramp before it even got to the floor.
“What have you got out there for punch?” Travis asked on the line. "What passes for weapons?"
Bosteder came back. “My mech suit’s got the same arms, plasma welder and laser as Rodriguez. I, uh, also brought some high-temp plastic. Use enough and it burns through anything."
'Anything' where we’re from,” Pilot Nishioka amended. “I’ve got the same complement, including my own stock of explosives."
Travis chuckled on the line, and Lou spoke up. "We, uh, were worried about cutting Six loose from Betty if our partnership went south. Sorry, Captain."
The Betty's captain pulled something like a syringe from pocket of his suit, and beckoned Lou to hold out her hand.
“Don’t ever apologize for being prepared," Travis chuckled, unlocking and twisting Lou's glove. "This is Farlost.” He squeezed her palm, and before Lou could register it, he pushed the strange looking syringe against her wrist.
She felt a jab and pulled her hand away, cocking an eyebrow.
"ID chip," Travis said quietly. "Betty's automated defenses are going online. Don't want you shot up by mistake."
Lou nodded, taking his words on faith. She was preoccupied by her crew's plans to take on the Boarders. Dina had caught the aliens by surprise with her attack. She wasn't sure the next wave would let her crew get close enough to do the same damage with their mechanized suits and Eva craft.
But here were no guarantees Beacham's modifications would work as planned. Her chest ached as she made the cold calculation, but she gave the order.
“Find a perch mid-ship, gentleman. If any of those things get through, either take them on where they land, or take Captain Travis’s orders if he gives them."
Bosteder and Nishioka called out acknowledgements, and the line chimed again as they signed off.
“Einstein, my back!” Beacham’s breath was getting ragged in Lou’s ears. "Whoah!" he shouted when Captain Travis twisted off his glove.
"Easy, Beacham," Lou called.
"Okay," Beacham said doubtfully, but he relaxed. More like sagged, she thought, until the syringe tapped his wrist. Travis answered his yelp of surprise with the same words he'd offered Lou.
Beacham paled a little, and nodded quickly. Then he rubbed at his back again.
“How about we turn off the gravity for a while, huh?”
Lou pushed on his suit to help him up the ramp, biting her tongue to stifle the sympathetic groan she’d been about to let loose.
“Sorry. Artificial gravity doesn’t work that way.” Travis was there with an arm to help each of them up the last hump and into a wide, dimly lit space. “It takes time to build up, or dissipate."
Lou took his hand next, and was grateful for his help clearing the ramp. She stretched out her back, looked around to get her bearings, and gasped.
Lou's mouth went dry, half way through an attempt at a whistle.
Space surrounded them.
Lou’s stomach twitched as she turned slowly and took in the unobstructed view of space around and above them.
Stars, ships, thorn and glittering remains.
She looked towards the Betty’s fore section and saw the long line of cylinders that made up HHL-6 stretch ahead.
Wonder. Terror. Too much of everything.
“Holy ssssshhhhh….” Beacham’s awe-filled voice died away.
She heard the hiss of air and looked over to see Travis pulling his helmet off and latching it to the side of his suit.
“Observation deck. A little home improvement project of Gruber’s. Pretty old school construction, actually. It’s a distant cousin of glass, with a thin coating of Dragon spinal fluid that works pretty amazingly as an insulating gel, then another layer inside of the dome wired for data input and display.”
Travis walked away from the ramp, toward infinity, and Lou had to fight not to reach out and grab him.
Lou laughed. It was a measure of how much crazy was gridlocked in today that she wasn’t pushing him to explain the bit about Dragons and spines. She cracked her own helmet, and Beacham followed suit, fingers tugging frantically. They both exhaled with relief. God, but she was tired of living in this suit.
Travis kept walking towards the sea of black. Twenty feet away, then thirty, and then space shimmered just ahead, becoming a mirror of him. He slowed down, and the shimmer faded.
Travis reached out and touched the air: five little points of light appeared where his fingers rested against what Lou’s mind worked out was the edges of the dome-shaped enclosure. She followed, half waiting to slam into whatever was holding the air in, half stunned by the immense, harsh beauty around her.
Her own image appeared a few steps away. Nice way to avoid walking into walls, Lou supposed. That minor embarrassment forgotten, she stared around again and let her jaw fully drop.
Travis turned back to Beacham and Lou, his left hand tugging at the metal collar of his suit. “Daisy, paint everything within two hundred and fifty K."
Small circles appeared all around: Lou could pick out the tram and boomer ships close behind. She craned her head until she could see the ancient wreck among the sickly, twisted spikes of the Thorn.
"Definitely... not... Kansas," she murmured quietly, not for the first time that day.
Back near the ramp, Beacham gurgled. “I’m just gonna...” he said, and he sunk to his knees.
“Hold onto your lunch,” Travis growled.
Beacham nodded.
“Daisy,” he said, "give him something else to think about."
Small holos coalesced in the air around Beacham’s head, full of equations and metrics. Beacham’s eyes focused on those instead of the heavens, and Lou watched the lines of discomfort on his white face ease.
A chime, and then a familiar cocky voice was amplified into the room.
"Patel and Barrowman here, Commander. We're sitting on Six, all ready for party crashers with a big ol' bag of party tricks!"
"Ready to crack some skulls, Commander.” These angry words sounded strange in Barrowman's calm voice. "Can't let Dina have all the fun."
“Thank you, gentleman," Lou said through her suddenly tight throat. "Carry on."
Another chime and the two voices were gone from the line.
Lou struggled to keep her focus. She felt with certainty that things were finally nearing a tipping point.
Travis walked pas
t, tapped two fingers on the window and drawing them apart, exploding a square several feet wide. He focused in on a silver blur, and the massive spaceship appeared.
"The Eternal,” he muttered. A bit hungrily, Lou thought.
“Captain,” Daisy’s voice called out, almost chiding, sounding as if she/it/whatever you called a supercomputer baked in chlorophyll stood just beside him.
Lou saw another image explode out of nothingness. The new window, Daisy’s doing, she guessed, slid over the gleaming ancient ship below with a blurry, pixelated shape tagged with a slowly rotating gold coin beside it. There was a sun on the coin.
Travis threw his hands up. “What do you want me to do, get out and push?"
“No, Captain,” Daisy said again. Lou would’ve sworn the machine voice sounded apologetic.
Beacham started giggling. "Daisy, Day-zee!" he began to sing. She watched his face, relieved to see him buried in the numbers, a little manic maybe, but still his high functioning, borderline antisocial self.
“Dr. Beacham and I have completed the field configuration," the computer voice called.
Lou and Travis looked at each other.
“That wasn’t even two minutes, Beacham,” she said.
“I know!” the physicist said, excited. “I need me a Daisy 24-7!"
“And you’re sure it’ll work?” Travis asked. “No doubt?"
“Redesigning the emitter pattern was just running numbers to build spatial coordinates,” Beacham said, turning his head a little as feet pounded their way up the ramp. “The hard part’s getting the bad guys to fly in the right place at the right time."
“I believe you Stuart,” Lou said, “but please, run it again?"
Beacham nodded, wordlessly, and returned to the halo of holograms wreathing his head.
Ron Taggart and Arnel Villanueva staggered into the Observation room, sharing one end of a stretcher between them. On it were Stan and Rose, Still frozen together in silver.
Engineer Gruber cleared the ramp, holding the rear of the stretcher.
"That power relay's not going to fix itself, Ben. " Travis said, his voice quiet and sad. Lou could guess a lot of reasons for that. Ordering Ben back to engineering - to do his damnedest to get The Betty's broken power relay back to work siphoning energy from HHL-6's reactors- meant putting him in the first place the oncoming boarding party would try and seize.
"I got something to say, first! Well, and then I gotta go harpoon us a tram and save our crew, but after that I'll get the engines on line and save all our asses." Gruber stayed near the ramp, eyes near but not on his Captain. "Like I said, I got something to say, and I needed some stuff that goes bang from the armory anyways, to greet anything stupid enough to try and hurt my engines." He shuffled his feet. Lou s aw his eyes were wet. "Also, I got something to say," his voice died out.
"Ben," Travis started but his engineer cut him off.
"If you make it and I don't, make damn sure my money and network time with Ery and Martel gets to my kids."
Travis nodded. “I will." Silence fell. "You're a shit engineer, old man," he said.
Ben barked a laugh. "You won't ever find one better."
"No," Travis agreed solemly.
Gruber finally met his Captain's gaze. Lou saw a lot of history and love on both faces, but they simply nodded at each other, then Gruber turned and left.
Her first officer stepped to her side. "Commander," his face was warm, smiling down at her.
She nodded back, feeling comfortable meeting his gaze. Feeling a lifetime of shared danger that the Universe had seen fit to jam into the space of days. She almost laughed, remembering how staunchly Villanueva had petitioned Dwyer to remove her, even as late as the start of this very long shift.
"I'd like to suit up and cross back to Six to to lead our defence. If we lose the reactors... "
" There won't be anything left to power Betty's engines when Gruber gets the relay working again." She offered her hand. "Keep her safe for me, First."
Arnel took her hand, shook once and turned to go. He hesitated and turned back, offering Lou his best version of a military salute.
She returned it, with a smile.
He snapped it off, and crossed without another word to Taggart. They shook too, with Arnel nodding over his shoulder to her and Beacham. She didn't hear his quiet words, but read the meaning clear enough when Taggart fiercely answered "count on it."
Footsteps echoed down the ramp, and Lou walked to Travis's side. "Where do you want me, Captain?"
"Sam," he murmured, his eyes on the empty ramp. He breathed deep and the emotion disappeared from his face, replaced with determination. "We're headed for the bridge. Most of Daisy and everything else that runs the Betty funnels through the bridge. We're going to hold it or die trying," he summed up, as lightly as describing the strategy for a beach volleyball game. "So I think you can call me Sam."
She looked over at Beacham. Taggart stood above him, arms behind his back, eyes on the ramp. His face suddenly bore a startling resemblance to a pit bull.
"I'm not really dressed to repel a boarding party."
Travis' smile would make a shark turn tail and run.
"Where are my manners? Have I forgotten to show you Betty's armory? It's on the way to the bridge."
She matched his smile.
"In that case... You're on, Sam."
"Stupid, macho plant," Whish muttered. "Volunteering for everything. I'm better off without you," Whish tapped pretty much the same thing across the inside of his helmet.
He pushed his body down against the chair-sized autoturret and tapped another virtual button painted inside his helmet. He felt the 'whoomph' through his suit as the weapon fired hooks into the deck plating.
He flew off the gun, slapping the small digits growing from either side of his mouth together, a habit he'd picked up from the Betty's Captain and Engineer.
I'd like to see anything get past that, he thought, then felt his gas flaps tremble as he imagined his ID chip failing and the gun targeting 'him'.
Swallowing his nerves, he tapped the auto-turret active and watched the six barrels spin and load. Laser-light dotted the doors and Whish sighed. It wasn't a guarantee against Boomers but it was something.
A green response tapped itself out below his message to Salix.
*You worry too much, chicken-shit.*
"Don't call me a chicken, Sal!” he squeaked to himself at the old joke. He rippled his space-suited wings with a groan to send him back to the far end of the bridge, where he'd place the other bridge defense gun, hidden from view by the massive holo tank at the center.
More green text followed, Salix having correctly predicting his response:
*You 'are' a chicken. Stay that way. Don't be a hero. You're valuable: you lose all our bets and pay for all my rounds in port.*
Whish immediately tapped back.
*Just get yourself, Doug and Newark back safe, and I’ll buy without bets. Even for the new human.*
Whish held onto the nervous gas building in one of his dorsal chambers for a moment, out of respect for the one name they hadn't input.
Posk.
He felt bad for all the times he'd called her a stupid, clumsy house pet. She'd knew he'd been joking, right?
Whish felt his wing's ripple again-his version of unconscious, nervous laughter.
He tapped back:
*I always said humans would be the death of us.*
More green text.
*Not these humans. Need to go. Keep yourself alive, Whish.*
The blinking text faded to Gray as the connection closed.
Whish slammed his whole mouth against the glass of his helmet, then pulled up the remote control for the second gun, walking its legs to try to finagle an even better position to cover the first gun.
A chime, and Captain Sam's voice filled the bridge.
"We're getting our crew back, starting now," he promised, "and we're taking out those Boomer ships!"
An
other voice joined his. "Commander Montagne here. If we can't take both ships out, well, you've all seen the footage: they can live and do damage in vacuum.”
Travis again. "If any get through, they'll head for engineering and command centers to slow us down until the Guard ship that launched them catches up. We can't let happen."
Montagne again. "The crew of HHL-6 is still alive here because of you and yours, Betty. My crew and I will do anything we can to keep both our crews flying safe."
"Don't hesitate!" Travis snarled. "Dont let them get close. Kill them on sight. They got it coming."
Voices Whish didn't know sounded off, cheering or otherwise beathing their chests.
Whish tapped to join the circuit himself, but the line stayed dead.
"Daisy, put me on the line."
"The Captain has locked your comm due to your unfortunate tendency for frequent outbursts, Whish. He fears you could betray information to the Guard ship, who may be listening."
"I'd never!" he squeaked.
"You do have a history of describing the Captain's plans before he can activate them," Daisy reminded him gently.
"One time, maybe, I talked in the wrong place! Okay, twice. Three times, tops! And I was drunk!"
Silence.
"At least keep talking to me, Daisy! Please..."
"I am capable of performing all my required tasks, including conversing with you."
"Glad I'm a required task, but I'll take it!" Whish let off a little steam with a violent fart. "'Cuz all I can think of is..." He smelled himself and could tell just how frightened he was. As if he didn't already know.
"One of the most sought after salvages in the history of Farlost is escaping from the Gravity of a Thorn," Whish mutterd as he again nudged the legs of the second autoturret into a more stable footing. "That there is a first! We don't know what that hulk is gonna do if it catches us--if we're still here, I mean. 'If' we survive two Boomers attacking us first! After all that, if we're still in one piece, then we've got a Guard ship coming down on our heads, and we don't have any juice for the engines to escape it with!"