Oblivion Flight

by J. R. Mabry

  A hole.

  A single hole, about five millimeters in diameter, nearly invisible, as it was sealed off with some kind of poly epoxy that had dried almost an identical shade of white as the rest of the wall.

  He knew he was looking at what ship engineers called the tertiary hull. There would be a gap of about twelve millimeters between that and the secondary hull. It was a poly lining to insure a zero aeropermeability status. Basically, it was the plastic bag that kept the air in and the great cold void of space out.

  Beyond the secondary hull would be the outer or primary hull—20 millimeters of solid iconel. Had someone put something in between the secondary and tertiary hulls? Jeff scowled. He began to run his fingers across the tertiary hull, in a straight line to his right. He stumbled once over a strap, but caught himself before he fell. He kept looking.

  There. Another hole.

  He heard the rustle of Nira’s flight suit behind him as she descended. She came up beside him and he pointed at the holes. Her eyes grew wide and she nodded. He held out his hand and opened his fist. A tiny scrap of some kind of poly material lay crumpled in his palm, its wispy ends quivering under the force of their breathing.

  Nira’s eyes looked up to his, filled with questions. Unfortunately, he had no answers for her. He motioned for her to follow him to the rear wall.

  “Let’s see what that thing can show us,” he said.

  Nira turned the tiny device on, and Jeff looked up, interfacing with it using his neural. A few moments later the diagnostic screen materialized in front of him, superimposed over the cargo hold. “Fire it up,” Jeff said.

  Nira nodded, and began the first of a series of scans. The infrared showed them nothing. The ultraviolet, however, showed several specks along the wall, and some on the deck, where whatever had been pumped into those holes had spilled out.

  “We’re not wrong,” Jeff growled. “Some kind of polymer has been pumped in between the hulls.”

  Nira nodded again, but said nothing. She selected another scan and gasped.

  So did Jeff—he could clearly see what looked like the silhouette of a range of mountains. He scowled, trying to make sense of the image.

  “They poured the epoxy in there,” Nira said, pointing to one of the holes in the wall. It appeared on the readout as the peak of one of the mountains. Then Jeff saw that all the holes showed up as mountain peaks. And the mountains descending from those peaks where simply where the epoxy had flowed down from the holes, filling up the space between the secondary and tertiary hulls. The mountain range descended to ground level gradually, roughly on equal sides of the port and starboard hulls. At least it was more-or-less balanced, and thus had a greater chance of avoiding detection.

  But not today.

  “Do you think there could be four tons of epoxy in between those walls?” Jeff asked.

  “Easily,” Nira answered.

  Jeff opened his fist again and stared at the quivering scrap of epoxy in his hand. “Okay, then. Let’s go to the lab and find out what the fuck this stuff is.”

  The pod hit the docking bay floor with a jarring clank. A moment later, the door swung open and Leif Arnesson was staring down the barrels of four blasters trained on him by Authority security. “Hands where we can see them,” barked one of them, a short man with a ridiculous handlebar mustache.

  Leif put his hands up and followed orders, stepping over the gunwale and onto the deck.

  “Pat him down,” the mustache ordered. His eye never left his scope.

  One of his men slung his blaster over his back and started feeling at Leif’s clothes—his arms, under his arms, his torso and waist, then down his legs.

  “He’s clean.”

  “These other bastards had disruptors.”

  “No disruptors here,” the man said.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m fucking sure. You want to feel him up yourself?”

  The man winced at the barb. “Where’s your disruptor?” he asked Leif, still not removing his eye from his scope.

  “We ran out of disruptors. I have a blaster in the pod—” Leif started to turn back, but the mustache barked at him again.

  “Don’t! Move!”

  “Okay, okay, I thought you wanted the blaster.”

  “We’ll get your fucking blaster when we strip your pods for parts.” He motioned toward the other RFC security personnel, huddled together in the middle of the bay. They were surrounded by Authority soldiers, weapons trained and eager for an excuse to shoot.

  Hands still in the air, Leif joined his fellows, and tried to keep his face neutral.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” his friend Alison asked.

  Before he could say anything, Ernesto answered her. “We’ll be taken to Earth and tried for treason. Then we’ll be executed.”

  Alison’s eyes narrowed.

  Alison may not believe it, but Leif did. He wished he’d snagged the doses of Happy Ending from the pod before he’d left it. One for him, one for her. They could fall asleep together.

  But it was too late for that now.

  “Move out!” the mustache ordered, and the Authority security team shifted, opening a way for them to move—in only one direction.

  Leif knew what direction that would be—toward the brig. So I’m not going to escape the brig after all, he thought. It’s really not my week.

  Captain Federer offered a smug smile that Jo wanted to rip from his face—preferably with a blaster.

  “Security,” he said, with an imperial air. “You can return the rebel captain to her—”

  Jo lifted her hand, “Please, Captain Federer, if you don’t mind, there’s a matter of honor at stake.” She looked down at her feet. “I mean, captain-to-captain…we’re supposed to go down with our ships. If I can’t do that…I should at least have to watch it.” She looked up at him again, her jaw jutted out bravely.

  He seemed to take her measure and approve. He nodded slowly. “That…is fitting. You may watch.” He nodded at the security guard standing a little too close to her. The guard took a step back but did not remove her hand from her holstered blaster.

  “Hail the Talon, Mr. Barrow,” the captain said to his communicator.

  “I have the acting captain,” the young man at the communications station said.

  “On screen.”

  Once again, Jo saw Marcia Chi’s worried face.

  “Prepare to be boarded.”

  She saw Chi nod. “The crew have been informed. They will be docile and compliant.”

  “Either that or they’ll be dead,” Federer pronounced.

  “I understand sir,” Chi said with a quick nod. The screen was quickly replaced by a field of stars. Jo watched the Talon slowly float into view as the Eisenhower moved into position.

  “Ready the boarding tubes,” the captain said.

  Several moments passed when silence reigned on the Eisenhower bridge, broken only by the occasional electronic alert from one of the dozen stations that surrounded them. Jo dug her nails into the meat of her palm, the pain focusing and calming her.

  “Boarding tubes in place, sir,” the weaponer called. She was a stocky woman with fiery red hair. It occurred to Jo how much she’d like to fight her. But it wouldn’t be today.

  “Begin boarding,” the captain said with a wave of his hand.

  He turned to Jo. “I have two hundred men pouring through those tubes into your cargo and shuttle bays. How many people do you have aboard?”

  Jo shook her head. “Who knows? Our full complement is one hundred and twenty-seven, but I don’t know how many got away in the pods.”

  He sneered. “So it will be over quickly.”

  Jo said nothing. Instead, she felt bile at the back of her throat. Inwardly, she cursed Chi for being so thick, so scared, so stupid. She needed an XO she could trust, someone who could complete her sentences. Her mind flashed on a distant memory of Jeff. It had been a long time since she’d thought of him. She felt an unfamiliar wav
e of grief ripple through her. She shook her head to clear it. She didn’t have Jeff, or even Danny. She didn’t have a competent XO. She only had her wits, and those, it seemed, were in short supply.

  “What is going to happen to me?” she heard herself ask. She was shocked at the words—her people were dying, and she was concerned with herself? Obviously, some deep part of her was.

  The captain narrowed his eyes at her, disapproving. As well he should, she thought, feeling the heat of shame on her neck.

  “You? You’ll be delivered to the Terran Authority War Crimes Division for trial and execution.”

  “Execution how?” She couldn’t look at him.

  “Live public disembowelment is the current penalty. It’s live-streamed, of course. Your admirals could watch, if they like, if only to get a glimpse of their own fate.” He smiled.

  Jo felt a wave of vertigo wash over her. She clutched at a nearby chair, willing her knees to hold. She stood straight, she felt her knees lock into place. Like a winch hoisting a girder, she willed her chin to rise, forced herself to look him in the eyes. She locked onto them, and willed her lips to slide back into a sneer. It was all force of will, a show, a charade. But at the moment it was the only thing in her power she could draw on.

  Captain Federer met her eyes and gave her a look that was one part sneer and two parts pity.

  “Bring it on, motherfucker,” she said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jeff dropped the scrap of epoxy into a plastic dish filled with solution. He fixed the lid to it and slid it into the electron analyzer. As the machine began its work, he saw multicolored lights dancing across its display. Soon, strings of numbers began to organize themselves into groups. He felt hot breath on his ear. He didn’t have to turn to know it was Emma. He could smell her. Instead, he leaned ever-so-slightly, touching his ear to her cheek. She squeezed his shoulder.

  Looking past the machine, he saw Nira standing at the other end of the small lab, staring at an auxiliary display, no doubt studying the same information he was. He admired her—she was a compact tornado of cunning and will, and he did not doubt her loyalty. She was as good an XO as he had ever worked with. Her eyes widened suddenly, and she looked up. Then she pointed down at the display.

  He looked at it himself, but didn’t understand at first what he was looking at. Chemistry was not his best subject—but it didn’t matter. Apparently, there was nothing that Nira didn’t excel at, and she didn’t mind translating.

  “It’s a poly explosive,” she said. “R-29.”

  “R-29? Who uses R-29 anymore?” he asked. “It’s not quite as powerful as the R-30s.”

  “It’s still plenty powerful, though,” Nira said. “And apparently the Authority still uses it. Maybe they haven’t developed the R-30s.”

  “Maybe,” Jeff said, staring at the molecule on his display. There were three molecules, actually, but he could see that one was a simple poly base, another a standard explosive stabilizer. It was the third one that was exotic, sporting connections to nucleotides that reminded him of bed hair or an upside-down waterfall.

  “How stable is it?” Jeff asked. Emma squeezed his arm. He gave her a quick, grim smile.

  “It’s as stable as R-29 ever is. Which is to say that as long as we don’t hit an asteroid or discharge a bunch of electricity between those hulls, it’s going to stay inert.”

  “They must have put it there for a reason.”

  “There’s no question they put it there for a reason.”

  “It wasn’t there before,” Jeff said.

  “No.”

  Jeff chewed on his lip. “Do you think they intended us to discover it?”

  Nira blinked, her black eyes a little too large for her head. “To what end?”

  “Who can say?” Jeff asked.

  “So what’s your theory?” Emma asked.

  Jeff sighed. “I think they hid it pretty carefully. They tried to even it out so that there wouldn’t be any flight anomalies—”

  “Except that there was one,” Emma reminded him.

  “Yeah…”

  “I think we should come back to that,” Nira said. “Buddha’s arrow.”

  “What?” Jeff made a face.

  “Buddha’s arrow. A follower of the Buddha was asking all kinds of impossible-to-answer questions—like ‘Is the world eternal,’ and ‘What happens to us when we die?’—and to shut him up, the Buddha told him a story.”

  “What’s the story?” Jeff asked.

  “A man is shot with an arrow, and his friends need to pull it out in order to save his life. But the man won’t let them pull it out until he gets all his questions asked. ‘The man who shot me, was he short or tall? What color was his skin? Is the fletching done with vulture feathers or hawk feathers?’ Shit like that.”

  Jeff scowled. “What difference could any of those things possibly make?”

  “None. That’s the Buddha’s point. He’s saying, ‘Unanswerable questions are a distraction. Deal with the danger that’s in front of you.’”

  “And the danger that’s in front of us?”

  “We have four tons of poly explosive sealed into the hull of our ship, and no idea how it’s rigged to detonate.”

  Jeff felt his stomach sink. She was absolutely right. Obviously, the explosive was not cargo. Someone wanted them dead, or something destroyed, or someone—

  He felt like an idiot. He shook his head to clear it. “Okay, then, let’s find that detonator. Preferably before it goes off…”

  The good news was that the cell was much larger than the escape pod. The bad news was that Leif was crammed into it with all twenty of his fellow RFC security personnel. Leif shifted, trying to worm his way into a space on the floor where he would not be touching one of his fellows. It was pretty much impossible, and he resigned himself to the fact that he was going to have to lean on someone, or someone else’s leg was going to be draped over his. He sighed.

  The cell was built to accommodate four comfortably. There were four beds, and each of them had three people seated on them, side-by-side. There were two chairs, both occupied. Someone else was even sitting on the toilet, although not using it, thankfully. But that would come.

  Svoboda was pacing, picking his way around and over people. It was annoying and Leif wished he would just light somewhere.

  “We’re fucked,” Cheodon said. His black hair and swarthy skin revealed his Tibetan ancestry, and he wore a dark wooden wrist mala. It wasn’t regulation, but no one gave him any shit about it.

  Leif glanced over at Alison. He liked her because she was funny, smart, and real. She also didn’t take shit from anyone. After trying to squeeze into a number of places, she finally gave up on trying to find a spot on one of the beds, and instead, climbed over the bodies of her shipmates toward him. She kicked him with her boot. “Scooch,” she said.

  “Scooch where?” he asked.

  “Don’t care,” she said, sitting down almost on top of him. Everyone around them shifted resentfully, but they made space. Leif was beginning to feel claustrophobic.

  “What was the plan, anyway?” asked Teeley. Leif hated Teeley. He was a back-stabbing opportunist who would sooner sell his mother to the wolves than do an honest day’s work. Leif kept expecting his superiors to catch on, but if there was one thing Teeley worked hard on, it was making himself seem indispensable. The man had a mane of bright red hair that made Leif hate red hair no matter who it was on. And that, he knew, was irrational. He didn’t care.

  “I think we were supposed to infer the plan,” Leif said.

  “Infer? What the fuck does ‘infer’ mean?” Teeley’s eyes narrowed.

  Leif wanted to say, It means you’re an ignorant donkey’s ass, but he kept his mouth closed and just stared.

  “Whatever.” Teeley was, thankfully, sitting on the bed furthest from Leif. “But fat lot of good the poly weapons did.”

  Leif looked around, trying to detect a camera. Surely there was one. But all he saw was
the frosted white walls of the cell. And there had to be a microphone. He didn’t dare speak his secret aloud. Instead, he took Alison’s hand and guided it to the small of his back.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” She snatched her hand back. “Pervert.”

  He looked her in the eye, and lowered his head slightly, nodding slowly. He saw her expression change, saw that she knew he was serious. He held his hand out to her. She bunched her eyebrows, but put her hand back into his, and this time allowed him to guide her to his back. And then she felt it. The disruptor.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “What?” asked James, next to her. His people were from South Africa, and Leif had heard plenty of stories of his rough-and-tumble childhood in Soweto.

  She leaned in and whispered. His eyes widened and a grin broke out on his face.

  “What the fuck, Frank?” Teeley asked.

  James leaned over and whispered to the woman next to him, who passed the message along. But long before the message had gotten to Teeley, he blurted out. “What? Do you have a piece?”

  It was the last thing Leif heard for a while. There was a flash of light, and he found himself instantly immobilized—able to think, but not able to move. He was not even able to twitch his finger. And although he could not move his eyes, he discovered he had been frozen at a good time. His eyes were wide open—they could have been at mid-blink, he realized—and they were looking out into the room. He watched as the frosted cell door slid open, and he heard the whine of a small electrical engine.

  A moment later, a lab robot with an extended grip rolled in, but found its way blocked by the mass of bodies. It tried several paths, and Leif realized it was trying to move in his direction.

  Fucking Teeley, he thought. Of course they were watching. Of course they were listening. And no doubt there was an automatic security monitor system in place listening and looking for contraband—especially weapons. This was probably all automated, but Leif was certain somewhere in the deeper bowels of the security unit, alarms were blasting and Authority security personnel were scrambling. First chance I get I’m going to punch the teeth out of that fire-headed fuck.