Petrick linked arms with Haber on one side and Suzy on the other; Balta linked with her and with Barry; Barry linked back again with Haber to complete the circle. That put Haber and Balta opposite each other in the small huddle they had formed. This made more sense than a straight line; in this closed circle with one set of thrusters facing one direction and the second set facing the other, they’d be able to make coordinated thruster bursts that covered either trajectory of their momentum, forward and reverse. As long as they stayed connected and tight to each other, they could also rotate the circle as necessary to change the thrusters’ angles and move side to side, or up and down.
“Ready?” Balta called out.
“Ready,” was the response from the children.
They let go of the rock, and Haber pushed them off with a steady movement of his legs. Petrick was surprised at the velocity with which they immediately sprang from their hiding place. They hurtled away from it, and they continued to glide out into open space with nothing to stop them. There was nothing to slow them down out in the frictionless vacuum. It underscored just how vital having a thruster pack was; there was absolutely nothing to push against and change your course if you made a mistake.
“Whoaa,” said Barry across from Petrick. He was looking, glossy eyed, behind Petrick.
Petrick tried to turn in his suit to look in the direction of the station, but his helmet was blocking the way. He considered for the briefest of seconds unlinking one of his arms to try to move his helmet so he could see, but the shove of a thruster blast from Haber nixed that impulse very quickly. A rock about the size of the one they’d just left hurtled swiftly, safely, past them. Haber was doing his job well. The course correction also had the effect of rotating them just enough so that Petrick could see what Barry had been marveling at.
Through the dust cloud and spinning rocks, Liberatia had an eerie glow to it from this distance. The capital ship hung in front of it, still looking just as imposing, even from much further away. Now and then, there was a flash as an energy beam lanced out from the mighty ship at some smaller object. The explosions, it would seem, had stopped. From this distance, it struck Petrick how incredible it was that they’d managed to get beyond the ship. It appeared to be stretching its fingers out in every visible direction. Searching.
“Barry?”
It was Suzy calling out.
Petrick turned back and instantly realized that Barry hadn’t said “whoa” because of the carnage behind them at the station. He’d been losing consciousness. His head lolled to the side of his helmet. His face was now deathly pale, and his hair was drenched against his forehead.
“Incoming!” It was Haber, who’d never taken his eyes and focus off where they were headed.
A rock half the size of the Red Robert was hurtling right toward them.
“I see it!” said Balta.
Neither of them, unfortunately, had seen what was happening to Barry.
A sharp tug on Petrick’s arm signaled another quick maneuvering burst from Haber’s thrusters. But this time, Barry’s unconscious arms could not cling to his partners’. His link to his partners slipped the second their trajectory changed.
Suzy screamed in panic.
The two adults stopped their thrusters mid-maneuver, but it was too late.
Barry ripped away from the rest of the group, his tether streaming after him.
42
“BARRY!” Petrick yelled, and he began to unhook himself from Haber to go after his friend, who was tumbling away at an alarming rate.
“No!” Haber called to Petrick, and the android tightened his grip on him.
Petrick struggled against him in panic as Barry reached the end of his tether. It snapped tautly and held—blessedly it held—and Barry began to drift three hundred feet or so away. Petrick saw with dismay that their interrupted maneuver had put them even closer to the oncoming rock. Its telltale black shadow was looming large, and they were heading straight for it. Barry was a perfect outline against its darkness.
“We have to move,” Haber called.
“We have to get Barry!” Suzy cried.
Petrick saw Balta glance for a split second at the android and then start hauling in Barry’s tether. The silent message between the “adults” was clear: they didn’t dare maneuver with the group unlinked as it was; they’d be completely out of control, an endless circle of cause and effect with crisscrossing angles of trajectory.
“Help me,” Balta grunted to Haber.
Barry was still fifty feet away, and Petrick realized that Balta wasn’t going to be fast enough. They had nothing to brace themselves against in the vacuum, and Barry could offer no counter-resistance to them, limp as he was.
The rock hurtling toward them couldn’t have been more than three hundred feet away, easily traveling at thirty feet per second.
“Barry,” Haber called out over the intercom. “Barry, can you hear me?” No response.
“We need you to pull against us, kid,” Balta called. “Come on!”
Nothing.
The looming rock, the size of a house, was maybe eight seconds away.
“Suzy!” Petrick heard Haber cry out. “What are you doing?”
Petrick turned to see her unclipping her tether. She then grabbed hold of Petrick, turned her body away from him, planted her feet, and pushed off him as hard as her little legs would let her.
The rock was five seconds away.
She shot out like a cannonball, and her aim was true. She crashed into the motionless Barry and wrapped her short limbs around him in a full-body hug.
“Good girl!” Balta yelled to her. “Click in. Click in!” She was gesturing frantically to her tether clip.
Suzy fumbled with it, all dexterity lost because of the giant gloves meant for adult-sized hands.
The rock was maybe three seconds away.
“Suzy!” Petrick screamed. She didn’t have time!
She understood.
Thank the stars, she understood.
She abandoned the clip and wrapped the tether around her arm once, twice, three times. She looked back to the group, just able to peer over the bottom of her helmet’s faceplate.
“Pull!” Balta commanded.
She did.
They did.
The rock was a second away.
The opposed resistance on the tether snapped the two ends toward each other, and Barry and Suzy crashed into the rest of the group. Haber had alertly angled himself to receive the incoming Barry and Suzy at his side so that their momentum swung his back to the rock. The adult hands were vises as they linked into the children.
Haber fired his thrusters.
The rock was so close it glowed red where the pinpoints of fire touched it.
Their acceleration banged Petrick’s head against the back of his helmet.
Haber cut his burst, and Balta fired a second later, giving them an angle away from the rock. Once she cut her thrusters, confident they were out of harm’s way, Balta whooped in exultation.
“Nice flying, android,” she said.
Haber nodded, looking as simultaneously shaken and relieved. He turned his attention to Barry, who remained unmoving in the tangled mass that connected him to Suzy. Suzy was tapping on his helmet, trying to wake him up. His face was even paler than it had been a minute before. His forehead pressed on the front of his helmet. Petrick could see no movement.
Suzy looked at Haber, eyes wide with dread. “Is he dead?”
Haber put a hand on her shoulder. “No,” he said, and he pointed at the area of Barry’s faceplate where his mouth was practically touching it. A tiny little circle of condensation formed, evaporated, formed again, evaporated . . . “He’s still breathing.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Petrick asked.
“What’s happening to him?” Suzy said, overlapping Petrick’s question.
“I would hazard a guess that Master Barry’s leg is bleeding rather seriously,” the android answered. “We must
get him inside. Quickly.”
Petrick looked around. They were drifting slowly now. “Do we know where we are?”
“I did not have time to plot our new trajectory,” Haber said. “I’m afraid we may have put ourselves quite a bit off course. Captain Balta, perhaps you can—”
“There she is!” Balta cried out, nearly exploding Petrick’s eardrum.
He followed the captain’s sightline, which went down below them and slightly to Petrick’s right. He had to squint to see through the dusty muck and spinning rocks. Just as he was about to ask what in the stars Balta was hollering about, he saw a small red flash of light. The shadow of the Red Robert emerged against the dusty backdrop once he had that point to fix upon.
“I see it!” Suzy exclaimed.
“I see it, too,” Petrick chimed.
It seemed so far away, and in the darkness, it was really hard to tell how fast they were moving, but Petrick soon saw that the shape was growing steadily larger as they approached. It was like a beacon of hope, as much as a shadow against the dust and stars can be a beacon. There were no running lights on, of course, given that they were hiding. The Red Robert would have been impossible to see if Balta had not been pointing directly at it. It was the most welcoming blob shadow Petrick thought that he had ever seen.
“Thankfully,” Haber said with the faintest glimmer of hope, “we did not throw ourselves too far off course after all.” He then turned his attention to the rest of the group. “Is everyone okay? Suzy, are you damaged?”
Suzy answered in the negative. She was all right. Haber had her and Balta both request status updates from their suits, and those both checked out as relatively fine as well. Suzy was getting low on oxygen, but not enough to be worrisome now that the Red Robert had been spotted down below them. Satisfied, he let off a series of very light, controlled bursts and Petrick once again felt the slight push of acceleration as they drifted down toward their waiting home.
As they got closer, the dust cleared, and details of the hull came into view. Balta was making course corrections with Haber now as well, slowing their descent down to the ship and lining them up with what soon became visible as an airlock.
Once they were finally within a few feet of the ship, Balta slowed them significantly with braking maneuvers, and Haber then used his thrusters to rotate them so that the airlock was “above” them, at their heads. Slowly, slowly they drifted up toward it, and when they were within an arm’s length, Balta reached out and grabbed one of the handholds just outside the airlock door. The move swung the whole group around her, and they banged up against it.
“Just hang out there,” she said to them as she grabbed a lever with her gloved hand.
A couple twists later, the airlock door swung inward, and Petrick tumbled inside and straight down onto the floor with a grunt.
“Gravity plating is working,” he said wryly as Suzy plopped down next to him along with Clarke’s crate.
Haber extended his leg as he floated over the threshold, holding Barry’s unconscious body so that when they crossed into the gravity field, he could settle Barry to the floor gracefully and carefully. Balta was right behind him, doing the same motion, but she’d extended the wrong leg for the way she was leaning, and she clanked down hard on her other knee. Petrick might have laughed at her if the circumstances had been less worrisome.
Balta wrested herself to her feet and staggered over to the control panel on the far inside wall of the airlock. Petrick tried to stand, but his own legs started to quiver like jelly and quickly gave out. He crumpled back to the floor. Apparently, the weightlessness of space had momentarily sapped them all of their strength.
“You’ll have a nasty case of space legs,” Balta said from the wall panel. “Just take it slow, and you’ll be fine.”
There was a sudden rushing sound; Petrick realized it was the first sound he’d heard outside of his own helmet for quite some time. He realized that air was flooding the room. Balta had closed the outer airlock door, Petrick just hadn’t heard it because a vacuum conducts no sound. He saw Balta remove her helmet; take in a deep, very satisfying breath; and let it out slow. Petrick took his helmet off, too, as did Suzy, and they mimicked Balta. The air was stale, not particularly sweet smelling or otherwise pleasant . . . but it was warm.
“How is Barry?” Suzy asked Haber the instant she wrested her helmet off.
Haber, unaffected by “space legs,” was unwrapping Barry from his suit with precise, quick movements. Suzy tried to move toward them but tumbled back to the ground before she could take a step.
Balta stumbled over to her, grabbed her by her armpits, and hoisted her upright. “You don’t ever listen, do you?” she muttered.
Together, they teetered toward Haber and Barry. Petrick followed them by smartly not trying to stand, but opting to crawl instead.
“What’s wrong with him?” Petrick asked when he caught sight of his friend’s face; it was very, very still.
“Is he dead?” Suzy asked. The question caught in her throat.
Haber didn’t answer.
Off went the upper part of the suit. Still, Barry didn’t wake up.
“He was fine when we left the station,” Petrick said. Balta slumped down onto the airlock deck next to the children.
The legs of Barry’s suit were stuck, and so in a flash, Haber ripped them down the seams.
Petrick gasped. Suzy shut her eyes.
Blood had pooled in the bottom of the airtight suit, so much blood, and it was still oozing from the leg wound that Petrick had bound for him back on the station. Guilt stabbed at Petrick’s chest, and the room began to spin.
“He’s bleeding out,” Haber reported.
“But I wrapped him tight,” Petrick said, staring at the bandage overwhelmed with blood. “Just like you told me.”
Haber got Balta’s attention. “Do you have a medical bay on board?” he asked.
Balta nodded and grunted herself to her feet. “We do, it’s just down—”
At that moment, the airlock door to the ship’s interior clanged open. Colossus stood in the doorway.
“Colossus,” Balta called to the robot, not wasting any time for ‘hello’s,’ “take him to the infirmary.”
Colossus responded immediately and wordlessly. He stomped over to them, slid his shining arms under Barry’s body, and lifted him in one smooth motion.
“Carefully,” Balta called after him as he left the airlock. She then nodded to Haber. “Follow him. He’ll show you where it is.”
Haber gave a curt nod and rose to leave. Before departing, he stopped and put a hand on Petrick’s shoulder, and he waited to speak until Petrick raised his head to look at him. The android’s ice-blue eyes were focused, deliberate. “Master Barry’s leg bled through his bandage,” he said. “This didn’t happen because it was loose.” Haber squeezed. “It’s not your fault.”
The fall of Liberatia unfolded in front of them. The capital ship, a giant beast, was gobbling and gobbling, trying to satiate a bottomless appetite.
From the dark shut-down cockpit of the Red Robert, Petrick and Balta had a peeping view of the tragic scene. No ships, no people, no part of the station could escape the maw of the Authority and its capital ship. One by one, the lights in the old station went out. One by one, the glimmers of each fleeing ship were swallowed in. The two largest ships, Dedrin and Arris’s colony ship and the Tusian battleship, were lightless and listing to their sides. Petrick wondered if their Indacaran friends had ever made it onto their ship. He tried not to wonder what was happening to them now.
Balta pointed out that there were no longer explosions. The lights were disappearing because they were being turned off or swallowed into the Capital Ship’s holding bays, not from destruction.
“They’re looking for us alive,” Balta said.
“They’re looking for me,” Petrick said.
“Yeah, well, they won’t find you.”
“This is all my fault.”
Balta sighed. “No, it isn’t, kid.”
“It is. The ship wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t here.”
“True, but you’re not driving that ship. They fire those weapons. They tractored in those ships.”
“Because of me.”
“Listen, bad people do bad things. That’s what makes them bad. You did not make them do that, they did it all on their own. They are responsible for themselves.”
“I led my friends out here. That means I’m responsible, for what happened to—whatever happens to them.”
Petrick finally took his eyes away from the scene. Balta understood.
“Your friends are going to be okay,” she said, patting the boy awkwardly on the shoulder. “The android said so.”
The boy crumpled.
Balta wasn’t sure if he was feeling relieved now or guilty or just overwhelmed, and she sure as hell wasn’t sure what else she could do for him, or say. So Balta silently stood for a while, just to be there. She stayed until she felt as though the boy would rather be alone. And then she left.
For a long, long while, Petrick watched alone and in silence. All the lights disappeared, and only the gleaming curved hull of that giant ship remained. It hung there, still hungry, still looking for its true prey, knowing it was still out there somewhere but suddenly unsure as to where to look. Balta had made it clear they would not be moving an inch until the capital ship was gone, and from the efficiency with which any shiny moving object seemed to be snatched up, it was a solid plan. The pirate haven of millennia, perhaps longer, was now gone. Only the husk of the ancient webbed station, buried in the middle of the great Wall, remained. It looked as if no one had ever been back to it since those unknown aliens so many years ago had occupied it.
Petrick was sure much wickedness had been reined in today, Liberatia was no utopia . . . but it had been free. Women and men had been free to travel where they wished, which was the only kind of freedom that really counted in space. He wondered if other pirates, among the inner systems and scattered about the Outer Rim, would have heard already of the fall of their trade city. How fast did news still travel in these times of dried-up will and hope? Hope robbed . . . by his own father? The same father who tortured him now at night with pleas for help, who dragged his friends along with himself toward the clutches of slave traders in marketplaces, and who had been hiding, cowardly, watching the last free city of man fall in his name.
Starstuff (Starstuff Trilogy Book 1) Page 28