Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3)

by Scott Rhine

  Chapter 17 – Escape from Normal Space

  Red labeled the emergency suspended-animation room ‘stasis.’ Then Mercy added a second piece of tape with the name ‘Yuki.’ While others rushed about in the race to beat the shuttle to the nexus point, Mercy spent her two penalty days building a medical lab in her former bedroom. Lou doubled up rooms with Park so she’d have sleeping space. Mercy felt nearly naked without her lab coat for protection. The flight suit reminded her of Yuki’s accident, so she compromised with an unzipped jacket instead. Whenever there was a man nearby, she wrapped her arms around herself self-consciously to hide her chest.

  Leaving the common dining area, she spotted Lou moving her way. She tried to avoid him, but he put his arm in front of her so she couldn’t leave. Eyes flaring, she snapped, “What?”

  Eyes downcast, Lou said, “I’m sorry I didn’t show respect before. Yuki was right—we can trust you with our lives, all of us.” He swallowed. “Thank you for what you’re doing for her, trying to save her. You’re a quality person.”

  This Lou, vulnerable and sweet, could sweep almost any girl off her feet. Boxed in by his body, Mercy had trouble forming words. “You’re . . . welcome.” The pilot was using charm on her like a weapon. She vowed to resist and make him suffer. Instead, all that came out was, “Get us into subspace, and you’re forgiven.”

  His smile reached his eyes. “Aye-aye, sir.” He unbarred her path and stood back.

  She floated into the control room, not sure where she was heading. This is bad. He’s Yuki’s guy and has a hundred notches on his belt. He’s not going to suck me in. This is probably just his way of accepting me onto the team . . . like a handshake. Fortunately, he hadn’t opted for the old-fashioned gesture because her palms were sweating. She had to put some distance between herself and the man.

  Mercy almost bumped into Commander Zeiss, who was exiting his quarters. She strap-anchored to the wall to avoid collision, and her momentum jerked her leash taut. She muttered an apology, and he replied, “It’s okay. We should put bicycle bells on every door to this room. Red slams into people whenever she’s got a new idea.”

  “I heard that,” Red said from their room.

  He smiled. “What’s your new, big plan, Mercy?”

  “Um . . . just wondering how long the initial test run is going to take.”

  Zeiss waggled his hand. “The hop will take us to a position just outside the last known dwarf planet in the solar system, 5.3 light days out.”

  “Sedna, out past the Oort cloud. If we’re bound to light speed, then that trip could take a week Earth time.”

  “Theoretically, it could take an instant for us, or anything in between. We don’t know, which is why I’m insisting on this test. It’s the shortest branch I could find. At the exit, while we brake and turn around for sixteen days, we’ll take several measurements. I need to know how much fuel each hop consumes and how fast the temperature drops in here without sunlight. We’ll be pretty far from the sun. I don’t think our biosphere could survive a prolonged winter. All that information will affect the course we pick. I haven’t ruled out pulling the plug and heading home the slow way at that point.”

  “You don’t seem very confident.”

  “We didn’t trigger any safety warnings from Snowflake, but the aliens let through an exploding camera. I have no idea what the other side of Einstein’s sheet will be like.”

  “You make it sound like dying,” Mercy joked. When Zeiss opened his mouth to amend the statement, she held up her hand. “Don’t worry; I’ve been prepared for that possibility since I flipped the ‘On’ switch for my engines.”

  “Then what’s wrong? Red says you’ve been . . . depressed lately.”

  She looked over her head to make sure none of the other crew members were eavesdropping and glided into his doorway. Red would hear, but Zeiss told her everything anyway. “I’m not going to be any use here after the first transition. I was hoping to rotate to the campsite.”

  “You’ve proven incredibly useful, Mercy. If you let Mira give you the Collective Unconscious page, you might sense how we all care about and believe in you.”

  The soft words threatened to open her up and release all the poison. Mercy wanted to keep her grief to herself, so she focused on the round door jamb, willing her voice to stay level. “In the simulations, we only had to stay cooped up two weeks. A potential twenty-eight days are a lot more than I bargained for, especially when I can see a green wonderland out the windows. I’m thinking of changing my name to Persephone.”

  He nodded. “I suppose as long as we keep one planner and a couple of monitors up here for safety, we could all rotate out—maybe seven-day shifts. We should keep one of the medical personnel on board at all times. That means that each camper should get a turn up here, too. Then, I want the original planning crew back for the final jump.”

  Red said, “I’ll tell Herk to plan more beds at Garden Hollow. They’ve reinvented the straw mattress. I’m told it’s much more comfortable than hanging on the wall like a bat.”

  ****

  At T plus 120 hours, the entire planning crew was glued to the telescope image. Sojiro said, “If nuclear weapons are going to hit, it’ll be soon.”

  Red complained, “The moon’s out of sight from this angle. Do you have some kind of magic strontium-neutrino filter to watch?”

  Mercy sighed at the impatience. “No. Sorry. We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way—wait eight hours for the moon to swing into view and then look for new craters.”

  As they waited, Park was the first to bring sleeping gear out to the central room. Sojiro shouted, “Pajama party!”

  “I don’t remember people duct-taping me to walls at parties I went to,” Mercy commented.

  “You don’t go to the right parties,” Lou bragged.

  “Ha, wrong again,” Sojiro crowed. “This girl has been a guest of honor at Carnival in Rio. She went to four days of parties that put your frat keggers to shame.”

  Mercy blinked. “Um . . . how did you know that?”

  “I watch The Rich Cry, Too with Risa. It’s a soap opera on Telemundo late night. We caught footage of Mercy on some of the news coverage. This girl can dance!”

  It seemed in poor taste for her to say, “That was my dead sister. Thanks for the painful reminder.” Instead, she gave a crooked grin. “Mom forced us all to take ballroom dancing for state dinners and stuff.”

  Lou blinked. “How bloody rich are you?”

  Red cleared her throat. “That’s not a question you ask a lady.”

  “Come on,” urged Sojiro. “It’s not like Downton Abbey, where he’s a landed noble looking for a rich, American heiress to save the family estate.”

  “I don’t have that much, really. Even with my stock options, I control less than half a percent of what Mira does,” Mercy explained.

  As eyes rotated toward Red, she complained, “Way to throw me under the bus. I’d trade my money for two living parents like you had. You got to go places. Hell, you had breasts when you went to college.” At this, Lou’s eyes shifted toward the assets in question, and Mercy had to step behind Sojiro to hide. “Boys asked you out, and you could date.”

  “I only went out four times, nothing serious. None of the boys who asked me measured up to Dad.”

  Lou rolled his eyes. “Any more of this, and I’m going to start menstruating. She never even answered the question. She needs to trust her mates more. Z, help me out here. Why are you so distracted?”

  Zeiss stared at the screen. “I’ve been worrying about the people on that shuttle. They’ll have spent most of their fuel to catch us. The pilot might be able to follow Saturn’s orbit around the sun, but they can’t return to Earth. Corporate may rescue the ship when they send a scientific expedition to study the jump point, but the crew will be long dead by then.”

  “We certainly don’t want them on Sanctuary,” Lou reasoned.

  “No,” Zeiss agreed glumly. “But I don’t want t
hem to die, either.”

  Red gazed at him lovingly. “Did you want to drop out some of our spare water?”

  The commander shook his head. “I doubt they could catch it unless Ascension carried it over to them. Then we couldn’t leave Sanctuary to land at our destination. We’d be imprisoned for life.” His wife held him as he struggled with the guilt.

  Mercy said softly, “What if . . . no, it’s crazy.”

  Lou laughed. “That’s Red’s middle name. Out with it.”

  “What if they passed inside Saturn’s orbit and just grazed the planet, or one of the gassier moons? Wouldn’t the ammonia or methane atmosphere have enough hydrogen in it to bounce them back toward Earth?”

  “If they hit at just the right angle, perhaps,” Zeiss said, already calculating.

  “It could be a huge explosion,” Red warned. “They might not survive the acceleration.”

  “If they climbed into their super-goo cocoons and we gave them the best combination of homeward direction and g-force, would that satisfy your conscience?” Lou asked.

  “It will have to do,” Zeiss admitted.

  Lou walked toward the storage room. “Then I’ll climb out the tunnel from luggage claim to our shuttle area; there has to be a way through. I can radio the pursuit from Ascension.”

  Red stopped him. “No. You’re too valuable. Pick someone from the Hollow.”

  “We can’t use Oleander unless her brother is on board to see her. None of the Chinese agents are likely to be Actives,” Lou reasoned. “Besides, she might not be able to run up here in time to reach them. It has to be one of us, a planner.”

  Sojiro was already feeling the walls inside the storage area with his eyes closed. “You’re right. We can crawl through the access hatch in the ceiling, as long as we seal it off and fumigate the passage once the volunteer is in the decontamination zone. The bad news is that passage is one-way. People need to reenter through another sterilization pod.”

  Mercy raised her hand. “Send me.”

  Auckland interrupted. “Negative. You’ve almost passed out several times from Snowflake abuse. If you have an aneurism out there, we won’t be able to save you in time. Besides, you were one of the chosen six. If we lose you, we might not be able to jump. I have to make the long crawl.”

  Lou gloated in an effeminate voice, “You’re too valuable. Ha. How does that feel?”

  Sighing, Mercy said, “Like I’m living back at home again.” Toward the overhead dome, she said, “Snowflake, split the screen. On the left, show a schematic with Auckland’s current position.” Nothing happened. She had to duck under the hood to give a detailed new command. By the time she finished, the Zeisses had computed a likely path for the shuttle, and Sojiro had mapped it into a storage device for transmission.

  As Auckland climbed into his spacesuit in the storage room, Sojiro explained, “Put this card into the navigation station and hit the button for automated Mayday transmission. If they receive the message, they’ll respond on channel two.”

  “There are three messages in the packet,” the doctor noted.

  “The second bundle is a quantum-encrypted update with our maps and plans. Only Mori will be able to read it. The third packet asks the shuttle crew whether our friends on moon base and L1 lived,” Sojiro said. “Consider it a trade of information: they get a chance at life and we get peace of mind. Snap that helmet on and give me a comm check.”

  Auckland obeyed. “Tasting one, two, three, tasting.”

  Sojiro held a thumb of approval up after verifying the seals.

  The doctor lumbered toward the access hatch, stacking crates like a monkey attempting to reach a banana. “What if they won’t listen to me, won’t veer off?”

  Over her headset, Mercy said, “Tell them I’ll trigger the remote separation protocol for their engines.”

  “They’ll never believe that,” Auckland said.

  Straight-faced, Lou said, “It’s standard for every shuttle in case it falls into the wrong hands or the pilot dies. The UN made us install the feature so no one could go kamikaze on Earth. Tell them to bring up section nine of the manuals—emergency reentry.”

  “But Mercy would never actually do that,” the doctor argued.

  “I would,” Lou asserted. “Their missiles killed Vanessa and blew off Yuki’s arm. I’d have no qualms erasing a billion of their murdering asses for that.”

  “I’ll try to be a little more diplomatic,” Auckland promised. “Close the door to the control room. I’m ready.”

  Once he crawled into the tunnel, the doctor vanished from radio because of the heavy shielding between the ship’s sections. Monitoring his progress with Snowflake, his trip toward the lens took less than half an hour. The Sanctuary crew couldn’t hear the exchange between ships; however, the Chinese-controlled shuttle eventually veered off.

  Mercy paced in the showers, waiting for Auckland to return. The second decontamination took an hour longer than the first. When she heard the flop of a wet human body, she entered the room instantly. Over the radio, everyone could hear her gasp. “Oh my gosh.”

  They heard her close the door and the steady sound of the shower mist as she counted out thrusts in CPR. Being lifeguard trained, she soon had him coughing up fluids. “He’s really pale, almost blue.”

  The men hauled him to the medical bay, and over the headset, Toby walked them through the basics of triage. Wearing an oxygen mask, Auckland was finally able to speak. “It was really cold in the pod room, and the pressure was low. I had to turn face down to suck the oxygen fluid into my lungs quicker. It was so thick I felt like I was drowning in Jell-O.”

  Zeiss shrugged. “We’ll ask Snowflake. Maybe we didn’t wait long enough for the air system to cycle, or the human body can only go through scrubbing once a month.”

  Over the headset, Toby added, “We think your hemoglobin might be damaged from the scrub process. Until you recover, Yvette and I will trade shifts up there.”

  Looking at the small mirror that Red held up, Auckland muttered, “Roger. I hope for all our sakes this color change isn’t permanent.”

  Giggling, Red said, “Unless Pratibha likes Poppa Smurf.”

  Mercy snorted and covered her mouth. “Sorry. That’s horrible.”

  Lou laughed. “No. Horrible would be calling his lady Smurfette and asking her to wear a blonde wig.”

  Punching him in the shoulder, Mercy ordered, “Stop it. How would you like it if I made part of you turn blue and teased you?”

  This made the pilot laugh even harder.

  Red wiped away tears as she asked, “What did the shuttle have to say?”

  Auckland sobered. “They promised to convey our message to Mori. Moon base cobbled together spare engines and merged them into a monster force field based on instructions Mercy left.”

  “I told them not to do that!”

  “The shield took several tries to initiate, but once established, it blocked all the incoming nukes. Some generals are already planning a toroid ring around the entire crater as a defense.”

  “Armageddon averted,” Zeiss said with relief. “How’s Alistair?”

  The doctor shook his head. “Everything in L1 was wiped. Only the Saudis are making apologies. For better or worse, the Chinese are our allies now.”

  After talking to Sojiro and their mechanical engineer, Risa, Zeiss reported back. “Evidently, the lens had an invisible membrane that was still in place when Crandall set off the explosion.”

  “Like a frog’s eye. Did we permanently damage the seal so air leaks out?” asked the doctor.

  Zeiss nodded. “Like chimps trying to adjust a television by banging it.”

  “Hah. I know some sports fans who still do that.” Laughing caused Auckland to wheeze uncontrollably for a minute. Mercy rushed in to put the breathing mask back on and pull up his blanket.

  “The best workaround we found was to close both the lens and the decontamination room door for at least an hour before someone steps into a po
d. We also need to tell Snowflake to heat the room faster. However, there’s a cost: each time we use the lock, we lose a little more nitrogen and oxygen from Sanctuary. The ship can generate more by tearing apart water and biomass, but that’s also fuel and our ecosystem. When we reach the new planet, we’ll have to load more of the appropriate elements to balance what we’re burning. Once we own the ship, Sensei might teach us to repair the lens damage.”

  Checking the doctor’s pulse on the monitors, Mercy whispered, “Z, he’s not supposed to be exerting himself.”

  “Did you see much soccer when you were in Brazil?” the doctor asked his ersatz nurse.

  “Dad went to the championships last year with the president, but I never saw the point.”

  Auckland winced. “You’re killing me. Have you no soul, no national spirit?”

  She shrugged. “It was the quietest work day I ever had.”

  Mercy stayed by his side and learned how to take basic patient vitals every hour, just in case the machines failed.

  While she was counting the patient’s heart rate for the second time, Zeiss came into the medical bay. “Hey, doc. Pratibha just called.”

  Auckland perked up at the mention of his girlfriend’s name. Because the Indian expert in space colonies was in charge of Garden Hollow, she couldn’t accompany him when he was stationed in Olympus. “How is she?”

  “She wanted me to officiate at some sort of ceremony when spring arrives.”

  “What kind of ceremony?”

  “Remember that question you asked her when you visited her folks?”

  “She turned me down. Her grandmother told her in a few months she’d get this playboy astronaut thing out of her system and settle down with a nice Hindu boy.”

  Zeiss nodded. “Yeah, well, in light of recent events, she’s reconsidered.”

  “Hmm. I guess the trip back to Ascension was worth it after all. I’m getting married.”

  The commander clapped him on the shoulder. “Congratulations. Sorry I can’t offer you a cigar or go clubbing like we did for Herk’s stag party.”