Tritium Gambit

by Erik Hyrkas

  Chapter 16. Max

  John helped me into a bunk. Even through my pain, I noticed that he had new injuries of his own. His crisp tan uniform had a number of slices, and I could make out gashes in his skin. His shoulder was heavily bandaged with thick gauze.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “We made it to an escape dinghy and it crash landed on Zeta-Terra. We saw the Phoenix entering the atmosphere, and we made straight for it. Unfortunately, we only had a few medical supplies and a tracking device Miranda rigged together from parts on the dinghy.”

  Miranda walked in, her T-shirt intact. Other than some dried blood on her arm, I couldn’t see that she had any injuries. Of course, I had given her blood recently and maybe that had helped. “We’re in orbit, but there’s some bad news.” She paused when she saw me, or rather, saw that I was missing a limb, and looked away. “We can talk about it after you’ve rested.”

  “I could use some bad news, but first I need food and lots of water,” I whispered through dry lips.

  Miranda disappeared through the door.

  I turned back to John. “Thanks for coming back for me.”

  John smiled. “Well, we really didn’t have a choice, now did we. You’d be Wendigo poop on a regular basis if we didn’t come back.”

  “Yeah, well, you could have just taken off without me and saved yourself the risk, but you didn’t.”

  “I’m fairly sure your partner wasn’t going to leave without you, as much as I tried reasoning with her.”

  Miranda returned holding a handful of Bar-E bars and a water bottle. “Tyler didn’t bring along anything better than this.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,” I said. “Hey, did you find our stuff that Tyler took from us? I’d really like my ring back.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I know what you mean. I miss my gun.”

  “Could you reach in my pocket?” I asked.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “There might be a metabolism boost pill or two left,” I whispered.

  She reached into my pocket and pulled out a single pill. I opened my mouth and she put it in.

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  She unwrapped each bar for me, and I ate every one of them in the standard two bites. She made multiple trips to bring me more water. The stump of my arm burned. This was not an injury that would heal instantly. I had to rebuild so much bone, muscle, flesh and sinew that, even for me, it was a tall order. The pain was tremendous, but painkillers had no effect on me anyway and so any ameliorating agent was out of the question even if I had been back at the Service facility. Even though the metabolic boost pill wouldn’t relieve my pain, it would shorten the time I suffered as long as I could get enough food and water.

  I lay on the cot for hours, and Miranda brought me more Bar-E bars and water every thirty minutes. Eventually, I fell into a fitful sleep. I dreamed of caves and spiders, and then of rocky hills and chitinous bears. When I woke, Miranda was holding a wet cloth to my forehead.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I looked down at my arm and saw that it was whole, but the muscles were slender and felt very weak. I could barely move my new fingers. It would take time to make my regrown muscles and sinew strong. I needed more food to fill out my regenerated muscles, but it wasn’t only my one arm that was thin. I had lost lots of weight for enough materials to regrow my arm.

  I smiled at her. “I’m fine. What’s the bad news you’ve been saving up?”

  “Oh yeah, that.” She looked toward the doorway like she might make a run for it. “Well, we don’t actually have enough fuel to return to Earth. We need Tritium to open a wormhole.”

  “No problem,” I said. “The Wendigo have a bunch of it, and I’m pretty sure they owe me some after the nice dinner they had.”

  Miranda shook her head. “I already did a scan of the surface for Tritium, and there wasn’t any there.” She sighed. “The only source I could find is underground, in a cave.”

  I groaned. “Not another cave.”

  She took the cloth off my forehead. “The ship’s bio-scan picks up some very large life force signatures around the entrance, like maybe it is a nesting ground for the Wendigo.”

  “I don’t suppose Tyler left us any weapons.”

  Miranda shook her head. “Nothing that’s useful against Wendigo. The antimatter pistol he was firing at the Wendigo was the only one on board. I didn’t find any of his ammo on board either, and if I had, I don’t know that I would have wanted to keep it. There’s a reason handheld antimatter weapons are banned by the Stellar Command. They sometimes destabilize, and things get destroyed unintentionally.”

  “Well, what do we have at our disposal?” I asked.

  “Maybe thirty Bar-E wrappers, two towels, a ship armed with some rather large proton cannons but with very little fuel, and a bunch of scrap metal in the storage area.”

  “That should be more than enough,” I said. “Can you show me the scrap metal?”

  Miranda helped me to my feet, and we walked through the ship to the cargo area with her holding me up as best she could. The ship itself wasn’t large, but the cargo area definitely was the biggest part of it. The room was roughly rectangular, but there weren’t any sharp corners. There were a few dozen black crates with cylinders in them, an exoskeleton lifter, and a control panel for the bay door. What remained of what I guessed to be half a dozen robots was piled in one rounded corner.

  “Here we are.” She gestured to the pile.

  “I wonder why Tyler had a pile of broken robots.”

  “He didn’t, not until the sheriff and I were trying to escape. When we broke out of the holding cells, the sheriff and I came here first and blockaded ourselves in with a dinghy that was in good enough shape to get us down to the planet.”

  I counted the number of robot heads. “Wow. You destroyed four of them with your bare hands.”

  “Not quite. These four were destroyed when we came back to the ship. The sheriff had a sharp stick, and I had a handful of rocks. Some of the robots don’t have much left of them…” She kicked a robot’s head out of the pile. “Because it was used as a shield against its metal brethren.”

  I eyed the exoskeleton lifter. “Does that thing work?”

  Miranda shrugged. “Probably. I imagine Tyler planned to use it to carry the Tritium into the ship. It’s for moving crates, pallets, and stuff.”

  I sighed and looked at the robot parts. “See if you can find some tools. I need a welding torch and Intergalactic Standard wrenches, and if you can find any other basic tools, that’d be awesome.”

  She looked from me to the pile of robot parts I was staring at. “What are you planning?”

  “A whole lot of fun.”

  While Miranda began searching the ship for tools, which I knew she was unlikely to find, I began sorting out robot parts that might be potentially useful. I saved the intact batteries and weapon systems along with a few working actuators and sensors. In fact, I discovered that most of the primary damage was to the robots’ necks, which left a number of working parts.

  Miranda returned with six rolls of duct tape, a half-empty can of WD-40, an adaptable wrench, and a flathead screwdriver. The screwdriver was practically worthless because robots don’t require a flathead screwdriver for a single part. The wrench, on the other hand, was an Intergalactic Standard, and so it worked perfectly on every bolt I came across. And the duct tape and WD-40, in sufficient quantities, they fix anything.

  I set to work assembling miniature bombs from robot batteries and their weapon systems. On their own, the weapons weren’t likely to do more than sting the Wendigo. We witnessed what they can withstand firsthand when the robots tried to cover Tyler’s retreat. However, I figured an explosion of a robot’s battery might be sufficient to make a Wendigo at least a little worried.

  Miranda retrieved the robot I had destroyed in the holding cell. When I was done, we had five hand-sized, nuclear-fission grenades, each
capable of wiping out a city block of all life and giving you a good tan in the process. Ah, the power of duct tape.

  “So, let me get this straight. These grenades wipe out roughly a hundred square yards, killing anything in that area?” Miranda asked.

  “That’s right,” I answered.

  “What happens if you throw the grenade ninety-nine yards?”

  I shrugged. “You will probably wish you had thrown it fifty yards further.”

  “I can’t throw a grenade a hundred-fifty yards!”

  “You won’t have to. You’ll be flying the ship. The sheriff will be tossing the grenades from the bay doors, and I’ll be running like hell to pick up the Tritium.”

  “You can’t go alone,” she said. “I’m your partner, and we’re going to stick together.”

  “Somebody has to fly the ship, and you’re the only one who knows how. Somebody needs to provide some cover fire, and who has better aim than the sheriff? I’ll retrieve the Tritium using the exoskeleton and be back before you know it.”

  Miranda looked unhappy. She stepped closer to me. “I really don’t want to miss out on all the fun.” She slugged me in the chest, but it didn’t hurt and so I knew she was flirting just a little. “You better be careful.” We were practically nose to nose.

  “By the way, do you know what Tritium looks like?” I asked.

  She smiled and backed away a few steps. “In its pure form, it’s a gas; but what this ship needs, and what I would hope Tyler was planning to get from the Wendigo, is a liquid—tritiated water. It isn’t really water, so don’t drink it. It’s green, and it’s very bad to even touch. So don’t get any on you.” She considered me for a second. “Well, you regenerate and so you might survive, but it would probably still not be pleasant.”

  I looked back at the exoskeleton. It could carry boxes all day long, but I saw a definite problem with my plan. “It’s a liquid?”

  “If it isn’t, we have a problem because we don’t have a way to process it into the liquid form we need.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, but I don’t have a way of transporting a liquid.”

  “Sure you do.” She pointed to one of the black crates holding silver cylinders about twice the size of fire extinguishers with a nozzle on the end of each. “We need to fill one of those cylinders.”

  I looked at the cylinder skeptically. “I thought Tyler said it takes multiple tons for intergalactic space travel.”

  “It does for large vessels, but for this ship, we really only need a ton. One cylinder should hold enough tritiated water for our return trip.”

  I studied her eyes, which sparkled. “When you say ‘should’ you make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

  She stepped toward me again and lightly put a hand on my cheek. “Just be safe, okay?”

  “That’s me. A role-model for safety in an unsafe world.”

  Miranda hesitated with her eyes locked on mine, then turned and left the storage area. I stood there for a while watching the door she left through. When I snapped out of it, I went back to work, attaching the cylinder to the exoskeleton because the machine didn’t have hands to grip it.