The delta core was the big problem, however, as it lay inside the area that had been redecorated by the alien. Wishing she still had the flamethrower, Amanda swallowed and moved toward the delta core.
It had made sense to switch to the shotgun, as the alien threat had been neutralized when Waits jettisoned Gemini. Or so she had thought. There was only supposed to be one of those damn things. After that, all she thought she’d be facing was an army of homicidal androids.
Piece of cake.
The humidity was even more stifling at the delta core, and she was sweating up a storm—probably because she’d also been running from reactor to reactor. Out of nowhere, she wished she had another Fremon Bar, as she was starving.
Her boots began sticking to the floor, and it was more of an effort to navigate the passageway. Sweat coated her hands, making it difficult to keep her grip on the shotgun. Her mouth felt as if it was coated in sandpaper. She still had one bottle of water left—there was no way in hell it was going to be cool—but she didn’t want to touch it just yet.
Needing to use both hands to hold the shotgun, she had to rely on her hearing rather than the motion detector. Luckily, the creatures weren’t exactly quiet, and even with the low hum of the reactor cores now evident in the background, Amanda heard one of them slither past, and ducked out of sight. Wherever she touched the slime, her skin crawled.
Were all five of those movements I saw earlier aliens, or were some of them Joes? How many more of those fucking things have been breeding?
Miraculously, the thing didn’t see her—much to her relief, as she wasn’t entirely certain the shotgun would be any use against it, and she didn’t want to find out the hard way that it wasn’t. Even though Ricardo called it suicide, she wasn’t ready to die just yet. She still hadn’t gotten to beat the shit out of Marlow, for one thing.
The things we hang onto, she thought ruefully as the alien passed by without bothering her. She came out of hiding. Then again, I’ve been hanging onto Mom’s promise for fifteen years, for all the good that’s done me.
Batting away gunk that dripped from the ceiling, she passed close to one of the eggs. Then she heard a squelching sound. Her eyes went wide, and she held her breath. The egg was vibrating… and opening like a flower.
Oh, fuck.
A creature that looked like a demented crab burst out. Amanda quickly fired both rounds at it. The first shot burst the creature apart in midair, and it made a high-pitched scream as it died. The second shot flew through the air and struck one of the cocoons.
Shit, that was a person! As quickly as panic gripped her, she realized that the person in the cocoon was already dead in every way that mattered. Besides, she was about to blow them all up. She stood still for a moment, and her breathing returned to normal—almost. She reloaded the shotgun, and moved along toward the delta core.
Fortunately, the delta core’s controls had a minimum of weird goo on them, and she was able to input the necessary commands. Then came the words she wanted to hear.
“All secondary cores at full capacity.”
Around her, the walls started to glow. The reactor itself was coming alive and would soon overload—or, rather, build toward an overload, and then shut down. Amanda needed to turn off the safeties. Bypassing that protocol was the only way this would work.
As she turned a corner she came upon a Working Joe, just standing there, confirming that the aliens didn’t bother with androids. Amanda shot it before it could move.
This is starting to get cathartic.
Locating the panel that controlled the safeties, she needed the Halfin to get into the system, but after that it was simplicity itself to disengage the protocols. That, in and of itself, worried her, but maybe idiotic programming was part of why Seegson was closing the station.
As she started to run toward the exit, alarms started blaring.
“Safety protocols disengaged. Reactor overload imminent. Evacuate reactor core immediately.”
Amanda didn’t need prompting, though. She ran like hell, her entire world reduced to the imperative of pumping her legs to get her to the transit car and as far from the reactor core as possible.
The car was still there waiting for her as she leapt over the Joes she’d blown away. Diving inside, she hit the controls that sent it back up to the main level.
“Now’s when you’ll want to hold onto something, Ricardo.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I worked that out when the alarm went off. Hope this works.”
“Me too.” She pulled out her final water bottle. The water was warm—bordering on hot—but at least it got the cotton out of her mouth.
When the car deposited her at the top level, she ran to a picture window that allowed her to see the reactor from above. It was crackling with energy that was building up to a crescendo.
“Here goes!” she shouted over the thrum of the energy buildup and the blare of the alarms.
And then she saw them. Five aliens were skittering away from the reactor like rats deserting a sinking ship.
Fuck!
Amanda gripped a railing as the entire station started to shake. Closing her eyes and covering them with her free hand, she still saw the flashing red light through her eyelids as the reactor core purged itself.
When the shaking finally stopped and Amanda was able to stand steadily on her feet, she tapped her radio.
“Did it work?” Ricardo asked.
“Yes and no. The nest is toast, but the creatures escaped.”
“Creatures?” Ricardo sounded panicked. “Plural?”
“Yeah. At least five.”
“It took everything we had just to get this far, and now there are five more of them?” It sounded as if he was becoming hysterical—not that she could blame him.
Again, Amanda said, “Yeah.”
She collapsed to the deck. All that work. Almost getting killed on the jettisoned lab. Overloading the reactor core. And there were still a bunch of those fuckers roaming around Sevastopol. She only had half a bottle of warm water left, only two more shotgun shells, and one tool that doubled as a blunt instrument. The Working Joes were still on a homicidal rampage.
What was the point?
She put her head in her hands, convinced that it was all over, just like she had been with Brodsky.
Encrypted Transmission
From: Xavier Spedding
To: Suzanne Fontanarossa
Date: November 21, 2137
Suzanne, sweetheart. I’m going to have to raincheck. I’m getting reports from downstairs about abnormal android behavior.
You need to get to the showroom and shut yourself in. There’s a lockdown button on my terminal from when these machines were actually worth something.
Don’t worry about them. They’re only display models. Just sit tight. I’ll sort this out and we can celebrate the deal with Weyland-Yutani when we’re not on company time.
Xavier
This message and any attachments are confidential, privileged and protected. If you are not the intended recipient, dissemination or copying of this message is prohibited. If you have received this in error, please notify the sender by replying and then delete the message completely from your system.
26
TRANQUILITY BASE, LUNA
OCTOBER 2137
“All right,” Zula Hendricks said as she stared at the exposed guts of the Rivellini 3607 generator. “Let me guess this time.”
Amanda raised an eyebrow. “So you can get it wrong again?”
“I’m not gonna get it wrong.” Zula shot Amanda a nasty look, then stared intently at the generator. It had been failing to power one of Donovan-Nitsuke’s Lunar Study Modules.
“If it helps, there’s more than one thing wrong with it.”
“The Bistert shunt! It was installed backward!”
“Bravo!” Amanda said. “It is, in fact, installed backward.”
“I told you I was paying attention.”
“You told me that
last week when you insisted the Cowling coupler was burned out.”
“It looked burned out,” Zula said defensively.
Chuckling, Amanda reached into the generator, grabbed the misplaced shunt, and yanked it out. She looked it over to make sure there wasn’t anything else wrong with it, besides being put in backward.
“Listen, Amanda,” Zula said, “thanks again for this. Been going stir fucking crazy just sitting around waiting for the next physical therapy session.”
Amanda shrugged as she reinstalled the shunt.
“Long as the Marines don’t mind one of their soldiers shadowing me between physical therapy appointments, I don’t mind having someone to talk to.”
“I’ll tell you what we do mind,” Private First-Class Hendricks said. “Being called ‘soldiers.’ We’re Marines.”
Amanda turned back to her. “Not soldiers?”
“That’s the Army.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
“Seriously, best way to piss a Marine off? Call her a soldier. Best way to get your ass beat? Piss off a Marine.” Zula was grinning as she spoke, which was the only reason Amanda wasn’t suddenly scared shitless.
“Got it.”
“Besides, the physical therapist says I need to walk a lot, and seems like you spend your days walking the entirety of Tranquility and back.”
“Only because Dmitriy’s too cheap to get me a bike.”
“Yeah, well, whatever works.”
“And hey,” Amanda said, “you’ve been showing me how to use all those nifty guns they make you carry, and how to fight.”
Zula snorted a laugh. “I have not been showing you how to fight. That would take a few months of basic that would destroy your wimpy ass. I have been showing you how to defend yourself long enough to find an opening to run the fuck away.” She smiled. “Gotta say, though, you’re a good shot. Shoulda joined the Marines, they’d’ve made you a sniper.”
“No, thanks, I prefer to fix things that are broken, not go out and break things.” Amanda indicated the generator. “All right, besides the shunt, anything else wrong?”
“Not that I can see,” Zula said, but she sounded very reluctant to admit it.
“The wiring’s loose. That’s a pretty easy fix.” Before Amanda could ask for the Weinshelbaum X5 to tighten the wires, Zula handed her an X4.
“Close. I need an—”
“X5!” Zula said quickly and apologetically. She dropped the X4 into the toolbox and rummaged around before grabbing an X5. “There you go.” As Amanda took the tool, though, Zula winced. “Fuck.”
“If your back’s acting up, you should get back to the infirmary.”
Zula waved her off. “It’s just a twinge.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I’m okay.”
“That’s what you said the day we met,” Amanda said, “when I had to help you get to your feet. I didn’t believe it then, either.”
“Just tell me what else is wrong with this stupid generator.”
“I think that’s it.” Amanda finished tightening the wires. “Let’s fire her up and see.” She closed the access panel, turned the generator on, and it hummed to life with a gentle purr. “That’s the sound you want to hear,” she said, smiling. Then she turned it back off and pulled out her NohtPad.
There was a vid from Dmitriy. Before even viewing it, she sent her boss a text saying that she’d fixed the Rivellini. Then she played the vid.
“There’s a busted airlock door at the Weyland-Yutani tech center,” her boss said in the message. “Five people are trapped inside. They’re fine—the airlock’s pressurized, they’re just stuck. Brodsky’s working on it, but he needs another pair of hands. Get over there as soon as you finish with the Rivellini.”
“Jesus, and he left you here screwing around with a fucking generator,” Zula said. “Why the hell didn’t he call you sooner? We should already be over there.”
Once, Amanda might have been pissed off too, but three and a half years of working for Dmitriy Slavashevich had beaten it out of her. Hell, the year before that—of scrounging for whatever work she could get—had drained her of any ability to question her superiors.
Turning in Flora Mendez had made her persona non grata on Luna for more time than she’d expected. Nobody wanted someone with a history of sending their superiors to jail. That Mendez had actually been guilty, and was serving thirty years in the asteroid belt, didn’t seem to matter.
She could have taken a job with Weyland-Yutani easily—that offer had always been present—but Dmitriy hiring her meant she didn’t need to take quite that desperate a step—yet.
Something about the way the company had been so helpful to her throughout her preteen and adolescent years had sat very wrong with her.
“Donovan-Nitsuke is too good a client for me to leave a job unfinished,” she said to Zula. “Besides, he said they were okay, they’re just stuck.” She had to admit to admiring her friend’s righteous indignation.
The walk to the Weyland-Yutani tech center would normally have taken fifteen minutes, but Zula still couldn’t move that fast, so it took them closer to twenty-five. When they got there, Jeremiah Brodsky was kneeling in front of the airlock door. A spark hit him in the left hand.
“Dammit!” He fell to the floor, waving his hand around. “Shit!”
“Having a little trouble, Brodsky?”
He looked up. “Where the fuck have you been? I asked Dmitriy to send you here an hour ago!”
“Had to finish fixing Donovan-Nitsuke’s generator. He told me it wasn’t urgent.”
“Asshole.” He shook his head, ignored Amanda’s offer of a hand up, and instead clambered to his feet on his own. “Who the fuck is this?”
“PFC Zula Hendricks, sir.” The Marine held out a hand.
Brodsky ignored it.
“Why the fuck you call in the Marines?”
“Private Hendricks is an intern,” Amanda said quickly. “Doing some on-the-job training in tech work while she rehabs an injury. Dmitriy went for it, ’cause she’s unpaid.” In fact, Dmitriy had no idea that Zula was shadowing Amanda, but she needed to shut Brodsky up and get him to focus on the problem.
“Fine, whatever,” he said, turning to the airlock. “The inner door thinks the interior of the airlock is depressurized, and that the outer door is open. Which, obviously, it isn’t, and there’s five people standing in there with their thumbs up their asses wondering why they can’t come in.”
Peering through the inner door window, she saw five people looking bored out of their skulls. They all still had their EVA suits on, just in case, but their helmets were all on the floor to preserve the suits’ air supplies. “Why not tell them to put their helmets on and then depressurize, open the door, and close it again? Maybe the computer—”
“Already tried that, Ripley. Jesus, you think I’m a total dumbass?”
Do you really want me to answer that?
Somehow, Amanda kept herself from saying it out loud. Zula could see it, though, and suddenly developed a coughing fit.
“What’s she rehabbing, tuberculosis?” Brodsky asked. “Never mind. Look, it’s not a software problem. I reset the system and did what you just said, and nothing’s working. Not only that, but the outgassing that caused them to come inside in the first place is now a category four, so it ain’t safe at all out there. It was only a three when they arrived.”
Amanda had heard the announcement about the outgassing, but missed that it had been upgraded to a four.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked.
“I need to check the servos on the outer door, to make sure they’re hitting the pads that tell the system that it’s closed.”
“But you don’t fit in the conduit,” Amanda said. Brodsky had more than a foot on Amanda, as well as very broad shoulders.
“Exactly.” He handed her a radio. “Here, take this.”
Shrugging off her backpack and dropping her toolbox, she took the radio from
him and stashed it in one of her pockets. She grabbed the stepladder Brodsky had on his bike, as well as his headband flashlight, then headed over to the access hatch in the ceiling.
Of course, he gets a bike, she thought darkly. He’s an actual certified engineer.
“Why can’t you use your own fucking flashlight?” Brodsky asked.
“Mine’s a handheld,” she responded. “I need my hands free if I’m gonna do this.”
“Can’t your fucking intern go with you to hold the light?”
“What I’m actually rehabbing, sir, is a back injury,” Zula said. “I’m afraid crawling around up there is not happening.”
Admiring her friend’s restraint—never once did she call him an asshole—Amanda climbed up the stepladder and removed the hatch.
“I promise not to sweat on it, Brodsky,” she said. “At least not much…”
“Very funny.”
He said something else, probably foul, but Amanda ignored him and hoisted herself up into the shaft, then started crawling through on her belly. Dust and grime were getting all over her jumpsuit—and, she thought with glee, Brodsky’s precious headband—and she sneezed twice before she finally reached the part that was over the outer door to the airlock.
Pulling off a panel, she looked at the wiring for the door, and immediately spied the problem. Grabbing the radio from her pocket, she spoke into it.
“Brodsky, you read?”
“Yeah, Ripley. Whadja find?”
“There’s a shit-ton of dust in here. They sealed off the airlock itself, but this shaft is full of crap. It’s all over the circuit board for the door controls.”
“Can you clean it or—”
“Yeah, I’ve got a CircuitWipe.” It was, ironically, Weyland-Yutani who’d manufactured the CircuitWipe, a specially designed cloth meant to clean circuit boards on the spot without having to remove them. It had done wonders for the repair business—at least for those who were honest about it, and didn’t try to pad their repair times.
Luckily, Dmitriy wasn’t that kind of asshole. He preferred to get things done quickly, so he could get more clients. Good and fast repairs generally meant repeat business, which was worth more than trying to squeeze a little extra cash out of the clients.
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