Time Bomb

by R. M. Olson

  As she brushed gently at the buildup, the narrow, delicate lines of the fins began to emerge from under the carbon. They were blistered with the heat, and the force of her maneuver had ripped some of them apart like paper. She touched one gently, and it disintegrated under her finger.

  For a moment she thought she might throw up. She might start crying, and once she started, she might never stop. She couldn’t lose this ship. It would kill her to lose this ship. She couldn’t—

  “Jez! Snap out of it,” said Tae through his teeth. She looked over, startled. He’d already turned back to his work, grabbing a mallet and banging at the hopelessly-melted bolts in an attempt to break them free.

  She took a deep breath, then another, watching him.

  “Hey. Tech-head,” she said finally. “What’s wrong?”

  He turned on her in disbelief. “What’s wrong? What the hell do you think is wrong, you damn idiot?”

  She stared.

  He turned back to his work, smashing the mallet into one of the ruined bolts.

  “Tae?”

  He didn’t look at her, and for a moment she wasn’t certain he’d answer.

  “It doesn’t even matter to you, does it?” he said at last, his voice low and bitter. She frowned.

  “I—”

  He turned back, and she was shocked at the bitterness in his expression. “Not the ship. What happened before that, you and Masha. I thought we were supposed to be a crew. But hell, it’s much more important that all of you get to air your damn grievances with each other, isn’t it?”

  She blinked, feeling suddenly sick.

  She’d been so angry, on the main deck with Masha, she’d hardly had time to think about what it meant. About what she’d done. And then there had been the situation with Lev and Ysbel, and then the attack.

  But … he was right. Even if they fixed the ship, something had been broken that she had no idea how to put back together.

  “You’ll all be fine without me,” she said finally, trying to insert a jauntiness into her tone she didn’t feel. “It’ll be fine. You can all go with Masha and do whatever it is you were going to do in the first place. I’m not going to stop you.” She had to swallow hard against the words, though.

  For the first time in her life, she’d found people she cared about, and who actually cared about her in return. Who didn’t leave her, even when they probably should, who took her side and laughed at her stupid jokes and rolled their eyes in exasperation, but never actually stopped caring about her, even when she was a complete idiot.

  And what did she do? She decided to leave them, instead.

  Tae was studying her, shaking his head slightly. “You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked at last. The bitter edge in his voice was cut with tiredness now. “You really think you can do that, you can break this crew wide open and smash your way out, and nothing will change.”

  He shook his head and turned away wearily. “Doesn’t matter. It was bound to happen eventually. The thing is, Jez, I don’t even blame you. I don’t think you’re even capable of working with someone for more than a few weeks, because you don’t deal with your problems, you just run away from them, and any time people work together for more than a few weeks there’s bound to be problems. You’re just not interested in solving them.”

  He bent down and picked up the mallet from where he’d dropped it, and started banging half-heartedly at the bolts again.

  Jez turned back to her own work. There was something cold inside her, something that spread from her stomach out through her arms and into her fingers, making her grip on the wire brush clumsy.

  Masha had been right, after all. She was bound to wreck things. She couldn’t help but wreck things. That was why she’d never really wanted a team, before she’d been thrown head-first into this one.

  She glanced sideways at Tae. He wasn’t looking at her, instead glaring at his work.

  He’d been angry plenty of times, at her, at Lev, at Masha—he’d been exasperated, and frustrated, and furious. But now—it wasn’t the anger that had shocked her. It was the hurt behind it. Like he’d trusted her, and she’d screwed up and let him down. Like they all had.

  She brushed gingerly at the carbon coating the fins, even though she knew it was useless. The metal beneath was damaged so badly that when she got the carbon off it, it would crumble at her touch.

  Everything was broken. And it was probably her fault, but she honestly didn’t know what else she could have done. Masha hated her, and Masha wanted her gone, and one of these days she’d have had to leave anyways. May as well have been on her own terms.

  You’re just not interested in solving them.

  What the hell did he know?

  She sighed and dropped the wire brush back into the tool kit, and grabbed the other mallet.

  At least with a mallet, she could make a damn difference.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Hour 7, Jez

  When she’d dropped the mallet for the third time, and for the third time been reduced to choked, breathless swearing, Tae picked it up and refused to give it back.

  “For heaven’s sake, Jez, go lie down in the med bay for an hour. If you pass out here, I’m not hauling you back to your cabin.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to,” she muttered, but a sudden wave of lightheadedness washed over her, and she had to grab for the wall to keep from falling over.

  “Please, Jez,” he said with a sigh. “Lev’s going to actually kill me if I let you keep going.”

  “Don’t see how it’s any of his damn business,” she grumbled.

  Still, he was right. She was probably going to fall over in a minute, and she really didn’t feel like picking herself up off the floor again today. She settled for glaring at Tae, then she made her unsteady way out the door and into the small, tidy med bay.

  When she reached it, she paused in front of the cot.

  She basically hadn’t laid down in a bed since they’d come onto the ship. She lived in the cockpit—she usually slept in the leaned-back pilot’s seat, an alarm set to alert her if anything happened, the feel of the ship soothing her to sleep and her hands on the controls even in her dreams.

  The uncanny stillness felt strange and unsettling now, and she wasn’t sure she could have borne stepping back into the silent cockpit.

  She sighed and sank carefully down on the narrow cot. It was softer than she’d imagined it would be.

  She couldn’t stop seeing the look on Tae’s face, hurt and betrayal and a sort of exhausted hopelessness.

  Damn him.

  She dropped her face into her hands, scrubbing gingerly at her eyes, because the bruises from prison were still far too sore.

  479 Standard, three-month, seven-day. That was the date on the tag Lena had put on her.

  It had been a long, long time. Three years was a long time, and a hell of a lot had happened since then. Never really kept track of dates much. But—well, something had happened around that time. She’d managed to almost shove it out of her mind, but … she never quite succeeded. And even the memory of it made her stomach twist, and a faint taste of vomit climb the back of her throat.

  She’d been flying on her own for a solid year by then. Lena’d said she’d never make it on her own, but Lena didn’t know spit. Of course, it hadn’t hurt that, thanks to Lena, she’d had probably the fastest smuggler-ship in the damn system.

  And it really didn’t hurt that there wasn’t anyone else in the system who could fly like she did.

  She’d just come in from a long run. The clammy, cool Prasvishoni morning air clung to her nostrils, cut with the burnt ozone smell of her jacket and the usual faint scent of dirt and mildew and forgotten trash from the alleys that lined the narrow streets. She shoved her hands in her pockets as she sauntered back through the filthy streets from the loading docks where she’d dropped her ship after the run, the dim morning sun barely filtering in through the city’s force-field. She had plenty of credits loaded onto h
er chip, and she had two days off before her next three runs. Find a kabak, maybe? Or she could look up her last girlfriend or one of her other old flames, probably find someone with nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in.

  It wasn’t until she reached her seedy apartment—a second-story one-room in a dingy prefab building, white walls almost grey with mildew—that the unease twinged in her brain. It wasn’t anything she noticed. It was what she didn’t notice—the normally-quiet alley was more quiet than usual, dead, completely deserted. There should have been at least some street kids huddling around the entrance. But there was nothing.

  Still—it was early morning. Maybe it had been a cold night, and they’d found somewhere warmer.

  Frowning, she held her com-key up to the outside door and pushed it open.

  The noise it made opening was usually enough to set off a round of sleepy curses from the surrounding apartments, especially if she was coming in early. But it was silent on its hinges, and the unease in the back of her brain spiked. For a split second, she was tempted to run. Maybe she should have. But she set her jaw and stepped carefully through the door, letting it swing silently shut behind her.

  Her apartment was up a narrow, dirty staircase, and she climbed it with careful steps. Her heart was pounding, and her mouth felt dry.

  As far as she knew, Lena was the only one after her, and Lena couldn’t have caught up to her yet. She’d been careful. OK, maybe careful was the wrong word. But she’d damn well made sure that the plaguer wouldn’t have been able to track her here.

  She pushed open the door from the narrow landing and into the hallway, and the alarm in her head sounded louder when it swung open easily. She’d given up a long time ago asking the landlord to fix the plaguing thing, and she usually had to set her shoulder against it to get the ancient hinges to move.

  She should run. Whatever had happened, it was bad, she could feel it in her gut.

  But she couldn’t, not yet. Not until she knew what the hell was going on.

  She walked silently down the grungy hallway. Her door was second to the end, and she paused in front of it and glanced around.

  The door next to hers had a faint mark by the handle, like someone had forced it. Had it been like that last time she came? Probably not, but then she’d been gone for three days. Could have happened anytime.

  Her door was clean, and she took a deep breath.

  Must have been the neighbours whoever it was came for. No surprise there. Didn’t know what they did, but you didn’t rent a place in this dump unless you really didn’t want the government knowing where you were.

  She held her com-key to the door lock, and when the click sounded, she pushed the door gently open.

  Her eyes swept over the tiny, dingy room, and it took her a split second to realize what she was seeing.

  When she did, she felt suddenly, unaccountably sick.

  It wasn’t the violence of it. It was the sheer, methodical destruction.

  Everything she owned had been torn to pieces—the sagging cot, the sitting cushions, her suitcase of spare clothes. The cleanser had been dumped over on its side, the rusty metal of the heating compartment pulled apart like a swamp-crab shell. Every dish in her cupboard was smashed, piece by piece, on the floor. Her clothing was torn deliberately to pieces, and someone had taken a razor-blade to her spare pilot’s coat, ripping it down every seam. And the stack of grey cargo-boxes she’d stolen from Lena were gone, every last one of them.

  She wasn’t afraid of Lena, or anyone else. Now that she had her own ship, did her own runs, she hadn’t been afraid of anything in a very long time.

  But suddenly, she was terrified.

  She stepped back abruptly, letting the door swing shut in front of her, and it was just the tiniest sound as the door touched the doorframe, something she wouldn’t have even noticed if every nerve in her body wasn’t on edge.

  A small click, like something mechanical had been triggered.

  Whatever it was, it sent her sprinting full-tilt down the hallway towards the stairs.

  As she ran, one of the neighbours’s doors swung gently open, as if at the breeze of her passing. She caught a glimpse of what was inside, and with a sudden sick feeling, she knew exactly why no one had made a sound as she came in. An older woman lay on the dirty carpet, a red stain bleeding outwards in a widening circle around her throat.

  No, not the stairs, she’d never make the stairs. At the end of the landing was a narrow window of cheap glass, and she yanked a spare wrench out of her pocket as she ran and hurled it end-over-end at the glass. It hit with a crunch, and a spiderweb of cracks appeared in the wavy surface. She set her shoulder and hit it at full speed, and the glass exploded under her weight, and she burst through the narrow opening, legs flailing and shoulders tucked, as behind her the entire apartment building erupted in a fountain of flame.

  She landed in the courtyard below in a shower of glass shards and burning prefab, rolled, and scrambled to her feet. Then she ran, hands and face cut and bloodied, down streets and alleyways until she was far enough away that she could stop and catch her breath.

  She hadn’t looked back. Not once.

  Because the thing was, not even Lena had the kind of pull to rig something like that.

  There had to have been at least fifty apartments in that building, fifty or a hundred or two hundred people crammed into those tiny, dingy spaces.

  If any of them had been alive when she reached the building, none of them were now.

  And she didn’t even know who’d done it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hour 1, Ysbel

  Ysbel closed her eyes for a moment, pausing on the small ladder down to the life-support room, trying to hold onto her frayed temper.

  Lev had climbed down before her, tension obvious in his posture.

  Fourty-eight hours. That’s how long they had before they all died. She could work with this bastard for that long, surely. She could keep from killing him for that long.

  Probably.

  When she reached the ground, she bent down beside the control panel of the massive oxygen converter, which took up most of the cramped space, ignoring Lev completely. Her hands, thankfully, were steady as she lifted it gently free, even though her breath was coming too fast and there was a sick, shaky feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  She’d been dreaming about killing him for five and a half years now, without knowing it was him. It had been the only thing keeping her alive.

  He pushed the door open and slipped inside, moving quietly around to look over her shoulder.

  “What’s it look like, Ysbel?” he asked, and the familiar, calm voice jolted her. Somehow, she’d expected it to be different than it had been, now that he’d revealed who he was.

  She didn’t speak, just gestured to the panel. He hesitated, then crouched down beside her, frowning.

  “Everything offline,” he murmured. “That’s probably to be expected. I assume the conversion panel burned out.”

  “I’ve seen this before,” Ysbel said reluctantly. “If there’s a power surge that’s too high for the regulators, the panel will overheat and burn through the wire filaments. Then no more oxygen conversion.”

  He nodded, forehead still creased in a frown of concentration. “So unless we have replacement filaments, there’s no fixing it.”

  “Yes. But we knew that before we started. What I’m concerned about is this.” She pointed to a small, flashing red light at the corner of the panel. “The filaments are usually close to the external walls of the compressed oxygen storage tank. Which usually isn’t a problem, because they never get above fifty degrees, even at high usage.”

  “But if they’re burning out,” he said slowly, “then at that temperature—” He stood. “You’re right. We’d best check. If it’s venting into the waste gas tank, it’ll run out in a couple hours, and we’ll all be dead.”

  He turned to the wall where the repair tools hung and studied them for a moment. Ysbel
rolled her eyes, reached past him, and pulled two wrenches off the wall, shoving one into his hand.

  “For someone who’s so smart, you are remarkably useless,” she grumbled. He gave a rueful smile.

  “I’m open to the possibility that you’re correct.”

  For a moment, she had to bite back a smile of her own. Instead, she glowered at him, and he dropped his eyes.

  She felt along the back of the cylindrical main compartment until she found the access hatch, and started pulling the bolts free.

  Even from here, it didn’t look promising. The bolts screeched against metal, warped from the heat and the strain. She frowned as she worked, handing the bolts back to Lev as he waited behind her.

  At last the control panel was unbolted, and she took a deep breath and lifted it carefully off. Immediately, the room was filled with the charred smell of scorched metal and burned components. Lev coughed.

  “I assume that means your guess was correct,” he said.

  “Yes, I—” she broke off. “Do you hear that?”

  Lev’s face went tense, and he pushed in to stand next to her.

  Something was hissing through the vent, pushing the smell of scorched air through the compartment, and behind it, fainter yet, there was a thin sound of escaping gas.

  “You were right,” he said in a tense voice. “The storage compartment is bleeding out. We need to—”

  “Get back,” she shouted, and she shoved him backwards as the panel on the compartment creaked and burst open at the seams. He stumbled backwards into the small doorway, she almost fell on top of him. He caught his balance on the door frame, then pushed past her and set his shoulder to the broken compartment, shoving it back.

  “If we can get it closed—” he began through his teeth. She set her shoulder next to his, and somehow, centimetre by centimetre, they managed to shove it back into place.

  Gas was still hissing from the cracks, their precious oxygen bleeding out.

  “The pressure’s pushing it open,” he said through his teeth. “Listen. If the filaments burned, where would the crack in the tank be? On the top seam?”