by Ramy Vance
That was fine, though. Initiative Seven didn’t involve belly-crawling from one end of her ship to the other.
It involved breaking shit.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
Toner’s ears were ringing so loudly that it took him a moment to notice the static had ceased. When he realized Virgil was talking to him again, he set his jaw and slammed the butt of his multitool into the insulation foam patch again. A chunk of the stuff ripped free.
Months ago, Baby had ripped a hole into the No-A lounge. Toner had it repaired with reinforced sheet metal and insulation foam. It was a hackneyed job, but he’d had more important things to worry about than cosmetic repairs.
His laziness had paid off because foam and sheet metal were much easier to rip apart than a proper bulkhead. This particular patch of foam and sheet metal was all that separated Toner from the fighter bay and his crew.
“You really shouldn’t do that,” Virgil growled.
Toner flipped his tool and activated the cutting function. Electricity spilled from the tip, and he pressed it against the foam.
“Don’t be stupid,” Virgil said. “You can hibernate. You’ll survive. If you continue trying to make trouble, I will kill you.”
“Yeah? How you gonna do that?”
“I will—” Virgil paused. “Not tell you that.”
Ah, Toner thought grimly. It’s learning fast. A corner of the sheet metal patch appeared as the foam melted.
Toner dropped his tool. Grabbing the speaker mount for leverage, he drew his legs into his chest and kicked.
The force of it sent a shock wave up to his jaw, but a dent appeared in the metal. Something hard hit Toner in the chin. A popped rivet.
“Stop it,” Virgil hissed. “Stop it, or I’ll open the fighter bay doors.”
Toner hesitated for a split second. On the one hand, the AI was threatening to space every member of the crew still stuck in the fighter bay. Occy. Portia. Baby. All of them.
On the other hand, Virgil didn’t seem to realize that opening the fighter bay door would make Toner’s part in this crazy plan much easier. Also, Toner didn’t negotiate with terrorists.
He drew his legs up to his chest and kicked again. He heard a noise coming from the other side. Rattling of the fighter bay catwalk. Shouts of alarm.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
He kicked again.
As he pulled back for the fourth kick, something latched onto the other side of the panel, and ripped it away from the breach.
Baby filled the hole, holding strips of shredded sheet metal in her claws. Toner yelped and pulled back half a heartbeat before forcibly feeding the lower half of his body into Baby’s wood-chipper face.
“Move!” someone screamed.
The tardigrade bellowed and forced her way into the lounge at the head of a line of scrambling crew members.
A bitterly cold wind rushed through No-A as the fighter bay doors began to open.
Fighting the hurricane of escaping atmosphere, Toner braced himself against the wall and pulled struggling crew members through the breach. Portia had turned her mag soles to full power and used them to anchor herself to the walls. The others followed her lead, heads bowed against the wind and flying debris and fanned across the lounge. Occy was the last one through the gap, his little body bloodless and frail as his tentacles spread across the breach to create a safety net.
“Do whatever it takes to seal the breach!” Toner bellowed into Occy’s ear. “Then get into the computers. Slow the fucker down!”
Head bowed against the brutal winds, Occy nodded. He reached forth with one long tentacle and with a vicious jerk, ripped the lounge table from its bolts in the floor. Occy’s mouth moved, but whatever he had to say was lost to the roar of escaping wind.
Toner turned to see Baby standing on the wall, facing him, legs spread wide. Ready to go.
I hope you ate your beans this morning.
Toner slipped an arm beneath her collar, squishing close to her bulk.
With painful slowness, Occy pulled himself away from the breach.
Baby ripped beneath Toner. With a bellow, she squeezed through the hole and back into the fighter bay.
There was a dull thunking noise as the lounge table slammed across the breach. The metal groaned and shrieked, but it held.
Toner only hoped it would hold long enough for Occy to get his arms on more insulation foam.
Six airlock clusters were scattered across the Osprey’s central column because any spaceship worth its salt kept a cache of escape pods where the bridge crew could easily access them. The Osprey’s escape pods had jettisoned months and months ago.
Now the little airlocks led to nothing but cold space.
In the corridor outside one such airlock, between the command and general crew quarters, a ventilation panel wobbled and popped free of its socket. It drifted in the deep shadows of the emergency-lit corridor.
Jaeger let out a deep groan as she grabbed the edge of the tube and pulled herself free. Her whole body burned. Her jaw ached. Sweat beaded across her brow and stung her eyes. Her breath made fog in the chilly air.
“At least the goddamned sirens are off.” With a kick, she sent herself flying toward the escape pod airlock.
“This is lunacy,” Virgil said from the nearest speaker. “This plan has never worked. You’re not prepared.”
Jaeger didn’t bother asking the door for access—she knew she was locked out. Activating the cutting function on her multitool, she began slicing through the panel.
“Here’s the flaw in your logic,” she gritted. “You’ve already made it clear that you want me dead.” The panel broke free from the wall, exposing the circuit boards beneath. An exposed wire spat sparks at her. She barely felt them. “So what exactly do I have to lose by trying?”
The airlock door slammed shut behind Jaeger. There wasn’t time to wait for the automated pressure system to run through a standard cycle.
A standard off-the-shelf human could remain conscious in vacuum for about fifteen seconds before oxygen deprivation would make them pass out. Once that happened, it would take anywhere between sixty and one hundred seconds for their lungs to rupture and their blood to simultaneously freeze and boil.
A human loaded with aftermarket genetic modifications was a grab bag full of interesting features. Some of them were quite useful.
The genetic artists of Tribe Six had seen fit to give Ensign Sarah Jaeger cell walls thick enough to buy extra time in vacuum before her eyeballs boiled—but only a little.
According to her experiments and simulations, she had two minutes, maybe three, before the low pressure would kill her.
Jaeger peddled her legs in the air, warming up as she studied the exterior airlock hatch.
One.
She sucked in a deep breath and pushed it out. It was an old swimmer’s trick. Hyper-oxygenate the blood before diving.
Two.
Another suck and press of air.
God, I hope Toner is in position.
Without comms, there was no way to know. She had nothing to run on but planning and faith.
She braced her legs against the wall and rested a hand on the emergency release switch.
Three.
She blew all the air out of her lungs and flipped the switch.
The airlock hatch blew.
Jaeger exploded out of the ship and into vacuum.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Initiative Seven had been a stupid idea from the beginning.
They’d formed it three months ago, and like most stupid ideas, it was born from a night of drinking.
Toner had been annoyed about something. He didn’t quite remember what, but whatever it was, it was very important. Enough for him to raid the cache of fancy liquor he’d stolen from Percival’s bar and run off to brood. He’d chosen a mechanical storage locker at the very tip of Osprey’s starboard wing—as far from the command center and the captain as he could get wit
hout outright stealing a shuttle and going AWOL.
He’d woken up sometime later with a terrible hangover, a tardigrade’s toothy orifice in his face, and a very annoyed captain screaming at him for dereliction of duty.
In his defense, he’d mumbled that it took an unreasonably long time for a man to travel from the tip of a wing, down to the base juncture, and up the central column to the command center. Of course, he was going to be late to his shift.
Then Jaeger had gotten that look in her eye.
She’d told Toner that he had a fair point.
She’d told Toner they were going to start practicing some special maneuvers that very hour.
Maneuvers meant to get vital crew members from one sector of the ship to the other very quickly, without bothering with all of those pesky luxuries like oxygen or pressure.
Baby soared out of the open fighter bay doors, riding the very last wisp of venting atmosphere like a surfer on a swell.
Toner clung, body and soul, to her collar as she cleared the bay doors and flew into space.
A crust of frozen moisture formed over his skin, but right now, the cold was the least of Toner’s concerns. The mother of all pressure headaches settled into his skull. He’d have a few minutes before all that building pressure finally escaped by exploding all the veins in his eyeballs. In the dead silence of space, he heard the crackling fizz of his blood boiling in his veins.
Seven minutes. Eight tops before his genetic modifications took over and would force him into deep hibernation.
As for Baby, who could tell?
As they cleared the fighter bay doors, Toner tugged hard on her collar. The tardigrade, utilizing some fine motor control over her anus that Toner didn’t care to contemplate, rolled until she was belly-up and glided along the hull. Sleek planes of metal slipped beneath Toner as he kicked, pressing his mag soles in first one direction, then the other. He became a speed skater wearing the world’s most inconvenient jet pack. Baby’s mass made for clumsy navigation across the Osprey’s outer hull, but between her propulsion and Toner’s steering, they found a rhythm.
The fizzing cold nipped at the corner of Toner’s vision as he scanned the hull. Through the pounding headache, he clung to one thought.
Corridor F. Corridor F.
It was near the tip of the wing.
Toner fought to recall the Osprey’s layout. He thought there were two escape pod airlock clusters near Corridor F. He prayed Jaeger was blasting her way toward one of them at this very moment. But which one? Toner would have to catch her, and he didn’t have time to waste guessing wrong.
Every joint in his body screamed as the expanding air in their sockets tried to rip his skeleton apart. Craning his neck, he looked overhead. Around Baby’s bulk, he saw a sliver of the central column, glittering in the distance.
She’d be coming from near the crew quarters.
He shifted his weight, angling himself and Baby further toward the inner edge of the wing. God, F-sector was so far away. A block of ice grew in his stomach. His head spun like a top, ready to detach from his body and fly away.
You better be there, he thought, furious, as the F-sector sensor array slid into view over the near horizon of shining metal. You better be there, Jaeger.
I came charging out into vacuum for you. Didn’t even grab an equipment pack. God, that was stupid.
So you just better fucking pull through.
There she was, a pale dot moving against the deep void of space. A falling star. A Captain Jaeger Popsicle, hurtling on a collision course toward the wing.
She’s going to overshoot, Toner thought numbly.
Toner’s body had turned to jelly. His movement was sluggish, and the cold had burrowed right into his soul.
Ahead, the empty escape pod cluster loomed into view. A row of little docking cradles, each with its tiny airlock hatch. They weren’t so far away. Toner thought he had a good shot at making it to one of them.
But it didn’t really matter because the Captain was going to overshoot F-sector by at least fifty meters. An easy distance to run or jog or swim or crawl, but in cold space, it might as well have been a thousand light-years. She was out of reach.
Distantly, he felt Baby’s mass shift as the tardigrade wiggled her legs.
It’s not gonna work, Baby, he couldn’t tell her. You’re not harnessed. I can throw you after her, but even if I throw perfect and you catch her, you’ll have no way back. You’re just gonna keep flying in the direction I threw you.
Forever.
Baby wiggled. What would have crushed him under standard Earth gravity felt now like no more than the restless squirming of a…well, a baby.
She was ready to go. She was ready to try the next part of this stupid plan.
Toner had no idea if the creature understood that this wasn’t like the training simulations. There was no tether to haul her back to the ship.
There was, fundamentally, no hope of succeeding now, just like there hadn’t been in all the practices before.
But as Toner and Baby soared toward the escape pod cluster, Baby’s wiggles grew more animated. Dimly, Toner realized they were picking up speed.
Fine, he thought, vicious and somehow sad. Fine. You’re gonna fucking die too, but if you wanna try, go right ahead. It’s not like I can stop you.
Silently, they hurled toward the docking cradles. Moving in a smooth arc, Toner slipped an arm from Baby’s collar and reached down to snag the docking cradle brace.
He barely felt his shoulder dislocate as he twisted, winding up to slingshot Baby into open space.
Apparently, he and Baby weren’t on quite the same page after all because at the very last moment before he released her, Baby twisted and snatched at him with thirty-centimeter claws.
Toner watched, horrified, as Baby unzipped his arm from elbow to wrist. The last-second adjustment converted some of Baby’s forward momentum into angular momentum, and she tumbled away from Toner, turning head over rear over head—shrinking as she cartwheeled after Jaeger. Those were drops of his frozen blood spraying through the space between them.
Toner stared at the white arc of his exposed ulna and watched a lattice of frost form over his insides.
God. Dammit.
Flicking a middle finger at Baby’s shrinking shape with his good hand, Toner hooked his legs around the docking cradle and spun himself up against the Osprey’s hull. Next to the airlock hatch was a small electrical panel protected by a metal shell.
It was technically possible to access one of the Osprey’s escape pod airlocks from the outside. The designers had taken mercy on a hypothetical stranded space-walker who got herself locked out of the house.
Unfortunately, they’d assumed that said hypothetical space-walker would be wearing an exo-suit, which came equipped with a multitool, which one could use to pry away the protective metal casing.
It was a reasonable assumption—but then, Toner wasn’t a reasonable man.
Especially not when he was good and pissed off.
Leveraging all of his mass against the docking brace, he started punching.
What Baby lacked in eyes, she made up for in a preternatural sensitivity to composition of nearby molecules and ambient radiation, made possible by patches of highly photosensitive cells and chemical receptors scattered across her body.
Baby knew her business.
With the silly man’s help, she had managed to work up enough momentum to catch up to the tiny woman as she overshot the ship and hurtled out into open space.
The direction wasn’t perfect, of course, but that was fine. As long as Baby was spinning, a carefully timed series of bio-fuel expulsions could pitch her in the right direction. Couldn’t fire too hard, of course. She needed to keep some spin.
She waited until she sensed the thin trail of the tiny woman’s molecules and fired. It took a few adjustments to stay on the tiny woman’s trail, but sure enough, the trail grew stronger.
When she could tell by the density of
the shed molecules that she was nearly on top of the tiny woman, Baby spread her legs wide and became a fat gray hand, fingers splayed for catching.
Baby felt something small and hard connect with two of her legs and pulled it into her chest, being careful with her claws. Yes. Yes, this was correct. The molecules the thing shed belonged to the tiny woman. She was far too cold, but there was nothing Baby could do about that right now. Baby herself was beginning to feel the strange sensation of cold collecting at the rims of her various orifices. Everything inside the tardigrade told her it was time to settle down and take a nap.
That would have to wait, just a little longer.
With the tiny woman wrapped in her arms, Baby waited for the angle of her spin to shift.
When she sensed the full radiation of starlight reflecting off the ship’s hull against the side of her body with the hole for eating, she expelled the very last of her bio-fuel reserves.
Baby never quite understood why the humans had always made such a fuss about the tethers every time they practiced this move.
Toner heard his heart thudding in his ears.
It wasn’t thudding nearly fast enough.
Clumsy, numb, stinging over every inch, inside and out, he plunged his good hand into the mechanical panel and ripped off the casing. Another cloud of frozen blood droplets collected around him as the tortured metal ripped into his flesh, biting down to the bone.
This wouldn’t be so fucking hard if he could feel anything. This wouldn’t be so hard if Baby hadn’t turned his left arm into a useless, dangling limb.
He shoved, plunging his arm shoulder-deep into the panel, grasping blindly for the right electrical cables, distantly aware of the fresh gashes gouged into his flesh. How long had it been since he’d flown out of the fighter bay? Seventeen years?