by Scott Baron
“Fine,” she answered with a gasp. “I don’t see why I have to do this, though.”
“The captain wants me to challenge you with your training, that’s all. And I’m happy to comply. Now get moving, your clock is running out.”
Daisy checked the readout on her suit’s heads-up display and realized she was right. If she wanted to make the cutoff, she’d have to hustle. She took off at a run, or at least the closest thing to a run you could achieve in low gravity.
One would think that running and moving obstacles to retrieve pieces would be easy in the reduced gravity, but Fatima had ensured that Daisy would have to stretch and strain every muscle if she hoped to finish her task on time.
Interestingly enough, after all the months of training, from sparring with the crew to her sessions with Fatima, Daisy’s strength, agility, and endurance were greater than they had ever been, by far.
“Maybe there’s a method to her madness,” Sarah suggested. “I mean, you are kinda kicking ass out here.”
Not enough, though. I still have three missing pieces, and I’m almost out of time.
“But what about all the other progress? Maybe you really do have super powers in here.”
You’re the one living in my head. If I did, you’d see them, right? I mean, normal sisters borrow clothes, or steal boyfriends. You borrowed a piece of my brain. So, what is it? You see anything ‘special’ in there?
Sarah paused.
“Well, no. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing here. I just might not be able to see it, is all.”
Daisy barked a little chuckle.
No, I’m not some chosen one. And another thing, I’m sure as hell not going back to Earth to be hunted and killed by some four-armed freaks and robots with fedoras.
“Technically, they were cyborgs with––”
Can you still call a cyborg without the meat part a cyborg? I mean, really, Sarah, they were fleshless metal men. Sounds pretty much like a robot to me.
“Okay, no need to get snippy.”
I’m sorry, it’s just, you’ve seen the scans. There are no signs of human life. No signs of anything down there. The only reason to go back is some stupid pie-in-the-sky quest that will just get me killed, and you know what? I choose to live. It doesn’t matter what I was supposedly designed for. I control my own destiny.
In her haste and frustration, Daisy lost her footing as she skirted a small crater, her boot crunching through the loose crust at the rim, sending her tumbling over the edge.
“Shiiiiiiitttt!” she cried out as she slid the fifteen meters down into the pit.
The impact was minor—the gravity on the moon was drastically reduced, after all—but when she landed, she did kick up a cloud of fine moon dust that had settled in there over the centuries. What she saw as she rose to her feet made her scramble backwards.
“Holy––”
“Oh my God,” Sarah gasped inside her head.
Staring up at her from beneath the silt was a desiccated face in a cracked helmet. Daisy felt a warm rush of bile in her mouth and fought to keep it together.
Do not puke in your helmet, Daisy, she chided herself.
Looking closer, she noted that the corpse was a woman, her long, blonde hair still clinging to her dried-out scalp.
“Hey, Fatima,” she keyed into the comms, swallowing hard.
“What is it, Daisy? Your time is running low.”
“Yeah, well I just thought you might want to know that when you did your clean-up way back when, you missed one.”
“Missed one what?”
“Body. I just found a corpse in the crater near Hangar Three.”
The line was silent for a long pause before Fatima finally said something.
“I’m sorry, Daisy. You shouldn’t have had to see that. Continue your training run. I’ll send Ash out to dispose of it.”
“Her.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a woman.”
“Of course, you’re right.” There was a long pause. “I’ll have Ash retrieve her. I’m also adding five minutes back to your clock for this unexpected interruption. Now get moving. You’re still on a countdown.”
Daisy started the climb out of the pit.
Gee, thanks, Fatima. So kind of you.
Daisy reached the rim but nearly fell back in again. She was angry, and that was making her careless.
Calm down, Daisy. Focus! she told herself, fighting to rein in her heart rate and respirations. Slowly, she began to gain control. Keep moving. You can do this while you’re mobile.
Ten minutes later, with Sarah’s help, she had all the pieces in her bag and was walking back down the long path to the airlock when an alarm sounded in her helmet.
Dammit, time’s almost up.
She took a deep breath, then settled into a steady jog, trying to mind her footing and not fall, while simultaneously reassembling the many pieces of the model. At this rate, though, she wasn’t going to make it.
Daisy picked up the pace, running as best she could in the low gravity, her hands working as she periodically glanced into the bag, where her gloved fingers were doing what they knew to do on autopilot. There wasn’t any time to stop and double-check her work. She would have to trust her instincts.
“Fifty meters, Daze! You can do it!”
While she was never a fan of rah-rah motivational speeches, Sarah’s sincere support helped her focus for the last push. She ran hard, feet slipping as she pushed off against the unstable surface of the moon. The beckoning airlock door was in sight.
“Thirty meters! You’re going to do it!”
Goddamn right I am! She grunted, pushing even harder, while the clock ticked lower and lower as she ran.
“Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.”
I know, I know!
“Loose ground two steps ahead!”
Good looking out, she thanked Sarah, then bounded over the uneven patch and threw herself into the airlock controls, quickly punching in the access code. The exterior hatch swung open and she dove inside, slapping the recompression cycle command as the door swung shut behind her.
“Two, and one! Hell yeah!”
Daisy grinned, sweat dripping down her face. After a ten-second decontamination burst from the nozzles in the airlock, the door swung open. Fatima was standing there, waiting.
Daisy reached an exhausted arm up and handed Fatima the model ship, then popped the helmet off her head, wiping the sweat from her brow as it pulled clear.
“Made it!” she gasped. “T-told ya I could do it,” she managed to say as she rested her hands on her knees and sucked in lungful after lungful of air.
Fatima quietly stood there, beaming at her like a proud parent.
“What’re you so chipper about?” Daisy asked.
Fatima looked down at the completed model in her hands.
“How did you get this done, Daisy? You were moving the entire time, and the last five minutes you were traveling at almost a full run.”
Daisy was momentarily taken aback
How did I do that? she wondered.
“I guess I just went on instinct. I didn’t know what I was doing, not really. It just seemed right.”
Fatima smiled brightly.
“Special, Daisy. Special,” she said with a knowing grin, then turned and walked off. “We’ll push tonight’s session back an hour. Go eat something and relax a bit. You’ve earned it.”
Daisy slowly peeled herself out of the EVA suit, her muscles burning gloriously from the exertion. Rather than feeling tired, she was electrified.
“What the hell just happened, Sarah?”
Her sister laughed in her head.
“You just got Miyagi-ed.”
“I what?”
“Wax on, wax off, grasshopper.”
“You’re such a dork,” she said with a chuckle.
Despite playing it off like it was no big deal, Daisy felt an unfamiliar sense of accomplishment boosting her spirits. She had ki
cked ass. With a bit of shock, she realized she was actually looking forward to next time.
Next time sucked.
Fatima and Chu were standing by, monitoring Daisy’s progress that evening as she toiled at the far end of the base. This wasn’t another obstacle run or dexterity test. This time they sent her on the insanely boring task of repairing systems in the parts of the base long silent. Rerouting access conduits, laying new communications cables, unsticking frozen airlocks that hadn’t cycled in centuries.
Fatima had never made it that far in her repairs, and when the subsequent failed missions brought her a handful of new inhabitants, sprucing up the facilities already functioning took priority over resurrecting the distant ones.
Daisy dragged her tool kit to a heavy set of doors. According to the base schematics, they led to a components warehouse, long abandoned.
Whatever. A door’s a door.
Daisy opened the panel and ran a bypass.
Nothing.
Huh, that should have worked. Okay, let’s try this.
She ran a second bypass, linking in a peripheral access protocol as well.
Again, nothing. She spent over an hour trying everything she could imagine, but the door simply would not budge. It had power, of that she was certain, but only a minimal amount.
Needs a little somethin’-somethin’ to get it moving, is all, she realized. Okay, I think I know a way to do this.
Daisy reached back and pulled her suit’s power pack loose.
“Daisy, what are you doing? We just got a warning reading from your EVA suit. Are you okay?” Chu asked, concern in his voice.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Hang on a minute.”
“Your suit is––”
Her comms went dead when she clipped her alligator leads from the suit’s power controls to the non-functional door mechanism.
Oops.
“Daisy, what’s your status? Daisy, can you hear me?” Chu called to her from the base.
No reply.
Come on, you bastard, you can do it! Daisy gritted her teeth and gave the release mechanism a hearty pull with her spanner, while her suit’s batteries fed a surge into the control panel.
The door crunched and strained, the lights on the panel flickering as it sucked more and more power from her suit, until it finally slid open, albeit reluctantly. Daisy disconnected herself from the door and tucked her power cell back in place.
“Used up about forty-five percent of your power there, Daze.”
Yeah, I see. Worked, though, didn’t it? She fiddled with her suit and got her comms back online.
“—is reading a power spike. I say again, do you copy, Daisy?”
“Yeah, I copy, Chu. Sorry about that, lost comms for a minute.”
“What the hell were you doing, Daisy?” Fatima grilled her over the wireless.
“Just getting this stupid thing open. I had to give it a little jump-start, is all. Sorry about the comms loss, but it rebooted the system when I linked in.”
The line was silent for a long pause.
“You got it open?” Chu asked.
“That’s what I said,” she replied. “Just took longer than I anticipated.”
“Daisy,” Fatima said with a bit of shock in her voice. “The last of those doors our team worked on took over two weeks to finally crack. You just opened that one in under two hours.”
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Kickass!” Sarah hooted.
“It just needed a power boost to the right controls, is all,” she messaged back to Fatima and Chu. “Hang on a sec, I think I see why this section is having such problems.”
Daisy stepped in through the open door and turned on the larger flashlight hanging from her hip. There was power, indeed, but not nearly enough to open the doors, let alone keep the entire section functioning. A blinking light keyed her in to the problem.
“It’s the solar uplink from the bright side,” she called out. “Looks like the connection was partially severed during the attack. Only about two percent of the solar feed is making it back here. The battery packs are intact, but they’ve been maintaining at near zero charge. I’m going to try to reconnect one of the inputs manually by splicing in a fresh piece of cable. If I’m right, that’ll trickle charge the batteries to at least a reasonable level. Once that happens, the other bypasses I’m going to wire in should be able to signal the relay junction to deliver a steady charge to this section again.”
“Wait, you’re going to do what?” Chu asked, confused. “But we have the solar fields powering us already.”
“Not all of them, it seems. There are multiple lines branching out, from what I can tell. I think the one servicing this section was damaged in the attack. By tapping into one of the functional ones, all the stuff that powered down over here should come back on. I don’t know when, exactly, but hopefully fairly quickly.”
“Okay, Daisy. Just be careful,” Fatima said over the channel.
“You know it,” she replied.
Thirty minutes later, the lights—at least some of them—had come back on in the chamber, and it appeared the battery backups for that entire section of Dark Side were receiving a trickle of current, as she predicted. She only hoped the batteries were still sound after all those years, and able to hold a charge.
“Okay, Daisy, there’s still no atmosphere over there, and your air and power are both running low. Head on back. That’s enough for today.”
“Copy that,” she said, stepping out of the airlock.
Daisy closed the thick door and was about to begin the long walk all the way across the base, when she noticed a tiny light peeping out from a sheer rock face a good thirty meters outside the base perimeter. If not for the Dark Side being, well, dark, she never would have noticed it.
“Hang on a sec. I just need to do one more thing, then I’ll be heading right back,” she said, then walked across the rocky terrain to the mysterious light.
It was a control panel. One that had been hidden behind a protective rock covering, until the attack all those years ago had scorched it and broken much of it away. She pried the remaining bit of the cover free and examined the mechanism. It was intact, she noted, and was a much higher level of security than any of the other panels she’d ever encountered, but why?
Daisy’s gaze shifted, scanning the rock face. Something about it seemed different. The way some of the rocks lined up. Almost as if—
“Holy shit, it’s a hidden door!” she gasped.
“What was that, Daisy? We didn’t copy you.”
“Um, nothing, just looking at the big door I hot-wired. Yep, all seems good there. I’ll be heading back in just a minute.”
“Copy that. Thanks, Daisy.”
They bought it.
“You’re lucky they did. Gotta be careful using your outside voice. So what is this thing?”
Looks like a secret access panel. You know, if its cover hadn’t been broken off, I’d have never even seen it.
“As it is, if you hadn’t cross-wired all those feeds to get power back to this section, those lights wouldn’t have been on. Again, you’d have never seen it, even with my extra set of eyes helping.”
But what is it?
“Beats me, but let’s find out!”
Daisy broke out her tool kit and set to work on the panel, but unlike the large door she’d hot-wired earlier, the mysterious panel was sealed shut and entirely inaccessible.
“I’m going to have to get creative with this one,” she muttered, then tried again. Ten minutes later, she had made absolutely no headway whatsoever. Whatever confidence boost she’d been enjoying earlier was rapidly depleting even faster than her oxygen levels.
Shit.
She checked her levels. Dangerously low, and she still had to make it all the way across the base.
“Daisy! What are you doing? Get back here. You’re almost out of air!” Chu was nearly yelling into the comms.
“Sorry, I was Zenning out and kinda lost track of time.
On my way back now.”
Daisy jammed a rock over the panel, hiding it from prying eyes, then, reluctantly, turned back and started the long walk to the airlock.
“You know we’re coming back, right?” Sarah said.
Oh yeah, she replied. Yes indeed, we are.
Chapter Nine
The hidden door was a problem of the most delectable variety, and Daisy found it difficult to push the new challenge to the back of her mind and focus on regular conversation with her Dark Side companions as they sat down to dinner. It was titillating. Something secret. Something no one else on the base knew about. A mystery to be solved.
And it was all hers.
“Hey, Daze,” Gustavo said as he plopped down beside her at the metal table. His plate was piled high with the special treat Finnegan had whipped up for them that evening. “Can you believe it? Steak and lobster! I love lobster, though some would say it’s really just a fancy way to get more butter in your mouth.”
“It’s machine-replicated protein, Gus.”
“You say that, but my taste buds can’t tell the difference.” He dipped a bite in the cup of drawn butter—another replicated delight. “Besides,” he added, “if we were on Earth, I don’t think I could bring myself to eat an actual animal, you know?”
Daisy flashed back to the rabbit she had caught and killed during her brief escape to the surface. With all of the food stores centuries out of date and extremely limited edible plant-based resources within the city—at least ones that didn’t require a great deal of labor to find, determine their edibility, and harvest— it was a good old-fashioned snare and a roasted rabbit that had quite literally saved her from starvation.
Morally, she did not like taking life, but from a true hunter-gatherer perspective, she was glad for the protein in whatever form she could find it.
“I hear you, Gus,” she replied. “Though I wonder how well that moral stand would hold up if you were truly hungry. You know, they say society is only three missed meals away from anarchy.”
“I like to think I have stronger character than that.”
“Wouldn’t we all?” she said through a mouthful of perfectly cooked, machine-grown beef protein.
Finn made a round of the tables, dropping fresh-baked cookies on everyone’s plate whether they wanted them or not. Given his baking talents, however, non-takers were a rare thing when the baking bug bit him.