by Max Barry
* * *
—
A minute later he felt a kick through the floor. It was unlike anything he’d felt in the ship before, and he pressed his palms against the cool metal to see if it would repeat. There was something else now, a kind of juddering rumble. Also new.
He reached for his film.
As soon as he got it on, Jackson squawked in his ear. “Status. Status.”
Gilly, his voice strangled: “Beanfield’s hurt. I can’t get her out.”
“Can you reach station?”
“Everything’s . . . we took damage. I can’t see.”
Anders said, “What’s happening?”
Jackson: “Anders, get your ass back here. Intel, I need you at station.”
“I can’t reach her!”
He got up and moving. He fixed Gilly’s location on ping and saw Beanfield in the same location. “I’m coming.”
“Intel, you need to leave.”
“I can’t. I can’t. She’s hurt.”
Shit, he thought. He had done it again. Gotten wrapped up in himself and let other people get hurt. He spun a hatch and began to ascend the ladder. The rungs didn’t move. Apparently he would have to do this manually. He loathed ladder shafts so much. Couldn’t see the bottom of them. Couldn’t help thinking he’d never reach the end. He would climb and climb and the walls would inch closer behind his back.
Jackson: “Intel, I can’t do this by myself.”
“I won’t leave her.”
“I’m almost at you,” Anders said, although that wasn’t true.
“Intel, we have six hostiles and they’re tearing us apart because we can’t control Armor or Weapons. The survival of this ship depends on you restoring basic function.”
Six? He couldn’t imagine the ship being taken down by six salamanders. That was ridiculous. He said, “Gilly, I’ll deal with Beanfield. Go do your job.”
Gilly: “Do my job? Do my job?”
Jackson: “Gilly.”
“She’s not responding!”
“I don’t care,” Jackson said. “Get to station.”
He broached A Deck and the relative space of a long corridor. “I’m here.”
“Where?” Gilly said, and then: “You’re half the deck away!”
“Gilly, we need you, buddy.”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?!”
“Hostiles have ceased firing,” said Jackson.
“You left me in the core room,” Gilly said. “I don’t want you. I’ll do this myself.”
“Physical contact in three minutes,” said Jackson. “Prepare to be boarded.”
“Did you say boarded?” Anders said.
“They’re approaching; not sure what else they’d have in mind.”
Gilly said, “Wait . . . do you have Sensors?”
“Yes. Correction. I have Ring 2 Sensors. I can’t make sense of anything else as it’s coming through as raw data.”
“Do we still have Life?”
“Yes.”
“Can you shut it down?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Just do it.”
“We need Life, Gilly.”
“I realize that! I’m not an idiot!”
“Dialing down,” said Jackson, after a brief pause.
The lights blinked out. Anders stopped. His film projected a faint blue light but everything beyond ten feet was darkness.
“The ship won’t drop core function,” Gilly said. “It’ll always maintain thermals and air pressure as a priority. But disabling the rest might let it skip ahead to systems we really need, like Weapons and Armor.”
“Thank you,” Jackson said. “How’s Beanfield?”
“She’s breathing. I don’t know. She needs Medical.”
“Can you leave her?”
Gilly hesitated. “How close is Anders?”
“Close,” he said.
“I’ll leave Beanfield when Anders gets here.”
“Armor is still unmanaged,” Jackson said. “Weapons unmanaged. Physical contact in two minutes.”
“Okay,” Gilly said.
Anders saw a red glow ahead and it turned out to be a ring around a small-arms locker. He hadn’t known they had emergency lighting. He tugged on the release. “Can I get a cycle on a weapons locker?”
“Where are you? I thought you were coming!”
“There’s a locker on the way.” He ran his hand across its surface. “If we’re getting boarded . . .”
Gilly cursed. There was scuffling. “I’ll take her to Medical myself.”
Jackson: “Anders, you’re off mission. Go to Beanfield.”
He exhaled. Salamanders at the front door and guns beneath his fingertips that he couldn’t reach. But he turned his back on the locker. The darkness ahead seemed thicker. It was a blanket poised to wrap around his body and squeeze tight. He’d prepared for this, though. Sometimes he ran around the ship with his eyes closed just to see if he could do it. Drove his knee into a bulkhead once and it sounded like a bag of peanuts and felt like hot knives and he had to drag himself to Medical. The ship gave him hydrexalin, which was the start of a whole thing. Another time he’d cannoned into Jackson and she said, “What are you doing?” like there was no good answer, and he couldn’t think of anything to say except the truth, “Running to station in the dark,” and Jackson looked impressed, like, Bravo, training for an emergency.
“We have a gravity well situation,” Jackson said.
“What?” said Gilly.
“We’re getting close enough to a planet to have to care about it.”
“Maybe the ship wants to use it to evade.”
“Has it taken control of Engines yet?”
“I don’t think so. Are we on an impact trajectory?”
“Negative.”
Ahead was a faint blue glow like an itching on his eyeballs. It resolved into a mess of shit, broken beams and twisted metal and dark holes in everything. In the middle of all that was Gilly, a blue glowstick in his hand. Beanfield was slumped across his legs. Her eyes were closed. In the blue light, her skin from her chest to her chin was black. There was a first-aid patch on her left side and that was black, too.
“She got impaled,” Gilly said. “A piece of the ship went through her.”
Anders knelt and saw that she was alive. The patch wrapped around her side, and as terrible as it looked, it would be performing the essential function of preventing Beanfield’s insides from leaking out. “Go fix the ship,” he said.
“Her leg is stuck. I can’t get her out.”
He hadn’t even noticed that. Her left foot was trapped beneath a slab of rubber and metal. “I can do that. You need to go do your thing.”
Gilly hesitated, then pressed the glowstick into Anders’s hand. “Okay. Take this.”
He nodded. Gilly eyed him and left. He bent to inspect Beanfield. Her hair was covering her face; when he pushed it aside, her face was dark with dust and dirt. “Hell of a day, Beanfield,” he said. He explored her leg until he found the place she was caught. When he tugged, she gave a low, guttural groan. He peered into the wreckage and saw immediately that there were two ways to free her: the way that required him to lift ten thousand pounds of busted ship, and the way that would snap her ankle.
He wriggled down and set himself as best he could. Her pants were torn. From the angry look of her skin, Gilly had removed some debris before he arrived. He took hold of her leg and her eyes popped open and she gave a small cry. “It’s okay,” he said. “Worst part is over, Beanfield.” But his promises had never been worth much and she’d always known that about him and she kept protesting, making a terrible, feeble mewling. He pulled as hard as he could and there was a noise and her leg slid free and she fell silent and limp.
He c
arried her to the ladder shaft. He was glad she was unconscious. He didn’t know if he could do this with someone clinging to him, trying to grab his shoulders. It was bad enough already.
His brothers had put him in a toolbox. He’d had a thing about small spaces even before and he made the mistake of telling Eddie, the youngest, whom he trusted, and Eddie told the others. After that they would come anytime. Hands on his shoulders. Hey, Pauly. He kicked and screamed but there was never any help. Sometimes they sat on the lid and didn’t lock it, so he could believe that if he pushed hard enough, he could escape. Each time he saw a sliver of light before the dark slammed down again. He died a whole lot of times in that box. Screamed and cried with wet terror bursting inside his mind. It felt like they left him in there for hours, for days, or not even that, a spongy, indistinct amount of time that could grow or compress and conceivably last forever. That was his real fear, that they might not let him out. He couldn’t close his hands into fists when he got out because of how he’d punched the lid. Couldn’t write well, either, or manipulate a board, or do much of anything that required fine motor skill, and he tried to cover for it with horse-ass behavior, which got him appointments with the school counselor. I want to help you, the counselor said, but Anders had heard that before and not once had it been true. When he did get around to asking that man, in a roundabout kind of way, what would happen to a person who killed a member of their own family, he was silent awhile and then said, Sorry, Paul, but we have to leave it there. No school for a while after that.
One time in the toolbox he had kicked and there was a sharp noise. He pulled himself free and lay on the cool concrete floor and it was the sweetest moment of his life. He’d never found anything quite so good again, and not for lack of trying. Lying there, things had become very clear to him: one, that when his brothers found him, they would put him back, and two, he would do anything to prevent that from happening. So he took down a wrench and waited by the front porch. He knocked Eddie off his bike before any of them noticed him. The others jumped him pretty quick and beat him half to death, but Eddie was still out four teeth and never spoke right again. Anders caught all kinds of hell from his father for that. And he always felt bad for how it went down, because Eddie was the nicest, and just happened to come around the corner first. But it was the end of the box.
“I’m at station,” Gilly said.
He wedged Beanfield into the ladder shaft. “You hear that? Gilly’s on the case.”
She didn’t reply.
“I’m going to trigger the pulse manually,” Gilly said. “Stand by. Three. Two. One. Pulsing.”
“Was that it?”
“What do you mean?” Gilly said. “Yes. We pulsed. Why? What happened?”
“I’m not seeing any impact. But it’s difficult to assess damage without the regular scans.”
“I can pulse again in twenty seconds.”
“Six incoming hostiles,” Jackson said. “Same as before. Twenty seconds to physical contact. Confirmed, no apparent impact.”
“Shit,” Gilly said.
“What went wrong?”
“I don’t know. It’s . . . wait. They’re too close. They’re too close.”
“For the pulse?”
“Yes. They’re inside its minimum range.”
“Use the drones,” Anders said.
“That’s . . . a good idea for three minutes ago!” Gilly said. “I can’t do it that fast!”
“Breach on A Deck,” Jackson said. “Breach on B. Second breach on B. Breach on D. Third breach on B. We’ve been boarded.”
Small-arms lockers, Anders thought, but didn’t say, because he was trying not to drop Beanfield down an unmotorized ladder shaft. He managed to work her down to F and then it was easier through the corridor. He reached Medical, cranked the manual door release, and lay Beanfield out on the table. He waited for something to happen but it didn’t. “Ah, bitch,” he said, because of course the ship wasn’t working. He yanked open drawers until he found a blue medbag. He tugged down Beanfield’s pants and she woke and tried to stop him and he said, “It’s okay, I’m helping,” and it was hard, because he had to be forceful. Once he got the medbag over her hips, she calmed some. He detached her survival core and set it aside. Not much use against crushing forces, that. Kind of completely useless. He carefully unpeeled the first-aid patch. Blood welled immediately, a lot of it. He drew the bag up tight so it could press to her skin and watched it begin to inflate, turning her into a big blue cuddly toy. The medbag would apply pressure where it was needed, and dispense medicine, anesthetic, whatever. It would also drug her out of her mind, most likely. But that was probably for the best. “Beanfield’s bagged.”
Jackson: “Anders, I want you out of there right now.” There had been some conversation he hadn’t followed while he was figuring out the medbag.
Gilly: “Is Beanfield all right?”
Jackson: “Anders, they’re on your deck.”
He looked at Beanfield. He wished she was awake. Salamanders on the ship, Beanfield. Two years of nothing, and when something finally happened, she was unconscious.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. Beanfield’s okay.”
Gilly said, “I’m locking everything down. If you want to be on the right side of the blast doors, you need to get to a junction or hatch right now.”
He wondered what to do with Beanfield’s survival core and decided to leave it; it wasn’t going to help with her injury, and couldn’t be applied over the medbag. He hefted her. The fabric crinkled. Her eyes were closed. She looked peaceful. “Going to need you to open that small-arms locker, Gilly.”
Gilly: “Ah . . . all right, let me check on that.”
He stepped into the corridor. It felt colder. From above came sounds like whispers. Could be anything. Could be wind, dragging around parts of the ship. Could be Eddie, coming for him with the pipe, his mouth bloody, his teeth full of gaps. He carried Beanfield, the glowstick dripping blue light.
From ahead came a low dragging. “Is that them?”
“Yes. Move.”
“Because it sounds like they’re ahead of me.”
“You’re okay if you move.”
He moved. “You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
The glowstick jiggled in his hands. He was going to drop that fucking thing. It would roll across the deck and while he was on his knees, balancing Beanfield and groping in the dark, salamanders would find him. They were big. He didn’t want to face one without a gun.
“Junction right ahead,” Gilly said. “Get through that and I can drop a door behind you.”
He saw it in front of him. But the thing about corners was that anything could be around them. He knew that better than anyone. But if they were that close, Gilly would know, and tell him. He had to trust that. He stepped out into the junction and raised the glowstick. To port was a small-arms locker, but of course his bullshit light stopped at six feet and his imagination extended farther than that. He wasn’t illuminating anything except himself, standing there.
“They to my port or starboard, Gilly?”
“Closest hostile is port.”
Of course it was. “How close?”
“Close enough. Keep moving.”
Gilly was cautious, though. Always thinking things were worse than they were. Anders set Beanfield against the wall, on the far side of the yellow-and-black markings that outlined where a blast door might come to rest. Then he returned to the adjunct corridor. “Beanfield’s clear. You can drop the door.”
“What about you?”
“I’m getting the guns.”
Jackson: “Don’t do that, Anders.”
“Anders, you’re heading right at one. Don’t be stupid.”
“Anders, go back,” Jackson said, her voice thick with anger. She was hellishly sexy when sh
e was angry. He’d told her this once and her jaw had flexed and he could see he’d offended her. But he’d meant it as a compliment. He would genuinely fuck Jackson in a heartbeat if she promised to stay mad at him the whole time.
“Salamanders on the ship,” he said. “Somebody needs to shoot these fuckers.”
“Don’t do this, Anders.”
“Just open the locker, Gilly.”
“I don’t even know if I can!”
Jackson, resigned: “You can. Do it.”
“Thank you,” Anders said. He kept moving, searching for the telltale red ring. The glowstick was fucking with his vision, washing everything blue, coaxing glints and reflections from every surface. Finally he saw it, a solid box projecting from the wall, red light like a halo. “I’m there. Gilly?”
“Working on it.”
He pulled the release but it was not generous and did not open. He’d had an argument with Beanfield about this very thing, saying, What kind of asshat thinks it’s a good idea to put the small arms behind a lock we can’t open? and Beanfield had patiently explained that, essentially, people like her and Jackson did not want people like Anders getting their hands on a gun whenever they felt like it. Which, he had to admit, had a kind of sense to it. But now look at this. Look at this shit right here.
“Picking up more incoming,” Jackson said. “A lot more. A thousand or so. The ship is lost. Evacuate.”
“Now, hold on,” Gilly said.
He peered into the darkness. Since he’d stopped moving, he could hear a sound from ahead, something dragging. He listened until it stopped. “Gilly?”
“The ship isn’t far off attaining full function,” Gilly said. “Twenty minutes. Maybe less.”
“We’re not going to be here in twenty minutes. And the ship can’t help us purge internal threats.”
“We can’t evacuate!”
He got the heebie-jeebies and whipped around. The light jumped crazily, throwing salamander shadows everywhere. But there was nothing. The dragging came again, ahead, louder. “Gilly!” He tested the release again. This fucking ship. It had wanted to kill him since the day he boarded, and here it was again.
