dimensional scan of the damaged tether section, the widowspider's control computer occasionally highlighting fractures and breaks, beeping out a simple child's lullaby of restrained complaint.
Then I kicked out of my seat, filled with a purpose I couldn't describe, but I knew I had to get closer to the tether, as close as possible. I went down to the maintenance mezzanine between decks. There was an eerie sense of deja vu; the trainer in Houston was precisely the same, down to weird splotches of paint on the door (code from a previous and unknowable regime). I ducked my way through pipes and over vents, stepped cautiously over grates whose blackness extended beyond the dim utility lighting. I didn't know what I was looking for, or even if I could find (or recognize) it if I were able to stumble on it.
And I almost stepped on it. It was a little thing, a child's music box, placed in just the right way over one of the vents that its shriek had wailed through the climber, resonating at exactly the right frequency to disrupt the broken nanotubes. If it had been on an even remotely smaller section of the tower, it could have snapped it entirely.
Attached to its side was a small Geiger counter. The Van Allen radiation had set it off. I swallowed hard, and weighed my options for a moment. It was possible the device had internal explosives; anyone willing to use such sophisticated sabotage perhaps wasn't above more conventional methods. What was worse, the widowspider had been swept by security teams before we left, and cleared, which meant the only people who even had access to the mezzanine was the crew: my fellow astronauts. A shiver went through my spine, thinking of what one of those eggheads could have constructed, hooked to a simple mercury switch so it went off the moment I touched it. I thought it would be foolish to pick it up, that I had to have more time yet to examine it, and-
That's when the red LEDs began to flash again, and before I had a moment to think it over, I picked up the music box and I was running back for the crew compartment. I stopped at the first console I came to, and sent the intercom message “Outer Van Allen, everyone back in their seats,” and I knew the excitement was heavy in my throat. When I’d reached our compartment I stopped, forced my heart to beat a little slower, forced my legs to walk with purpose, my face to let all of its tension go, and walked inside.
I let the sensations of the room engulf me, not paying attention to any one person, not focusing on anything, but trying to let it all reach my senses unfiltered. I held the music box in my hands as if it were nothing at all, because I knew to most people it would be nothing but a moment’s curiosity. And then I felt them, eyes on me, angry and terrified in the same instant, and I let my eyes focus, then, panning across the room, until I saw the eyes staring at me, now glaring, for a moment, before she realized I’d looked back at her.
I set the music box down on the ground where I’d been standing, then said, loudly, “Everybody buckle in. The outer belt’s where things could get interesting.” I waited, until all the crew members were in their seats, most of them looking at me expectantly. Most of them had noticed the box by now, and were peering quizzically at it. But one person was refusing to look at it now. Her eyes occasionally darted to me to see if I was still looking at her. I flashed Diane the same smile from earlier, and her mouth dropped open, and she started to shake, before she balled her fists and forced herself to stop and pushed a terse return smile onto her face.
“Okay, I want everyone to remain calm.” I paused, just long enough for the thought to sink in, but not enough time for people to start worrying why I needed them to remain calm. “We have a saboteur. The high-pitched wail, the damage to the tower, both came from this. It was meant to go off during the higher radiation of the second Van Allen belt, a point where the tether is at its weakest, and at a point where we would be high enough to float off into space.”
And as I said it out loud, I watched the effect it all had on Diane, and the mournful way she occasionally looked at Nathan, I understood why. “She wasn’t trying to kill us- not directly. Nate, I hate to air people’s laundry here, but I’m afraid yours is a little too dirty to ignore.” Diane went rigid, afraid to look around, because she knew I was close- too close. “You had a, fling or whatever, with Diane, and when you ended it, whatever it was, well, she knew that fiancé of yours is on Earth, and I think she thought if she could just have you alone, keep you away from her, she could rekindle that whatever-”
Nathan started to unbuckle his belt; he wanted to stand, and defend Diane, maybe defend himself and his own part in it, but that wasn’t why I’d stopped talking. Goddamn me, I knew she’d snuck the music box on board, for all intents and purposes a bomb under these circumstances, I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought she might have brought a gun, too.
It was made of ceramics and plastics. I knew the weapon; it was the kind of gun we’d kept on the space station since one of the Russians killed one of the Italians over a Chinese woman a couple of years ago; the Indian commander tried to separate them, and got his throat half-slit, almost by accident, and the rest of the crew had to watch as the Italian crew member was suffocated because they were busy trying to keep their commander from bleeding out in zero gravity. But I was distracted, and the history, the preparation, ran past me in an instant. The gun used pressurized gas and a lead-tipped ceramic slug that was meant to penetrate and then shatter; since each round had to have enough pressurized gas to accelerate to subsonic speed, it only held three shots, though some models only had one or two. She was far enough away and her hands were small enough that I couldn’t be sure which variant she had. She was pointing it right at my heart.
“It could have been perfect,” she said, and for the first time I realized she was sobbing. She looked to Nathan, who instinctively half-raised his hands, even though she kept the weapon trained on me, and repeated, more quietly this time, “It could have been perfect.”
“It doesn’t have to end like this,” I said, and I immediately regretted it, because her eyes, no longer mournful, flicked back to me.
“Shut up.” She said. “You ruined this. Ruined everything.” My chest got tight, and I knew what was about to happen, and before I could stop myself my eyes shut. The sound of it was actually very light and soft- just gas escaping at a high velocity, which was nothing to the concussive bang of powder. The ceramic bullet seemed to have the same softness, and it felt like someone flicked my chest with a finger, like my mom had done when George and I fought as kids.
And an instant later the pain came, as a hundred different cuts inside my chest all opened at once, and it was like a choir’s crescendo, a blinding moment, like the beauty of light coming in through a stained glass window as the swell of their song peaked- only the religious experience was pain, and I felt for a moment like I was being crucified from the inside out. I was only vaguely aware of hitting the ground, and the extra pain that came with that, as the impact hammered the ceramic shrapnel deeper into my wounds.
My eyes opened, though it took me a moment to realize it. The crew reacted quickly, dividing neatly into two groups that had either come to my aid or attacked Diane, as if there’d been a plan all along and this was just its next step- but I knew that was just the kind of thing that came from training vigorously with the same unit for as long as we had.
And I found myself laughing inside my own head (though I certainly couldn’t have done it physically): the first thing I’d done well, first job I’d done right- and I’d fucked it up anyway. I saved lives, and I got to die a hero, but… I became vaguely aware that the medical officer and a few of the nonmedical doctors were talking around my body. A few of them, a growing majority, it sounded like, wanted to cut the climber loose, abort the mission. The medical officer wasn’t really arguing against it- she just knew that I was dead either way, sometime in the next few minutes. I wouldn’t live long enough to splash down, let alone make it to a hospital advanced enough to save me- and even that was a pretty big if.
The problem was they seemed to like me; it had always been my better feature, I knew, be
ing liked. It came so much more naturally than being competent. None of them wanted me to die, especially when there was something, some gesture that could at least absolve them of their guilt.
I sat up, and realized how much I’d been dissociating the pain; dozens of little razors with purchase in my chest slashed new holes in my flesh as I did, and I winced, and shuddered as I tried to keep myself from throwing up. I grabbed the nearest doctor, and I didn’t know who it was until I saw our geologist, his little mousy face suddenly horrified to be held so close to me. “Keep climbing. I’ve been killed for this mission, and you damn sure aren’t aborting on me.”
I let go of him and all but passed out; my body went numb, and limp. I smacked onto the floor hard enough that for a moment the pain in my head outstripped the pain in my chest, but with every beat of my heart the chest pain grew, and grew, until it was almost everything, and then I felt myself floating away from it, and I became aware of my surroundings as if I no longer had a body of my own.
Bill, my second, came over. Diane was unconscious, buckled into her seat, restrained with some cords. “What’s the
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