by Max Barry
“I’ll come get you,” Anders said.
“Negative,” said Jackson. “And stop asking.” The onscreen readout spun lower: fifty seconds, forty, thirty, twenty. “Gilly, don’t want to bother you, but I need an update.”
“Almost done. I’m committing a command sequence now.”
In the doorway, Anders adjusted his footing.
“Shit,” Gilly said.
“What is it?” Jackson said.
“Minor problem. It’s fine. Hold on.”
Onscreen, the red arc began to blossom. Pinpricks of white light appeared, moving toward them. The first timer vanished and a second, measuring time until impact, assumed its place. They had forty-three seconds. “Hostiles firing. Gilly, you need to come back now.”
“It didn’t work. I missed something. But I can fix it.”
“If we don’t move, we’ll still be here when the huks start hitting.”
“You should detach. You can separate from the ship until it’s over. You’ll be safe.”
“Negative. Not leaving you there.”
“If you . . .” Gilly trailed off. They listened to him make mysterious sounds for a moment, bumping and scuffling around, doing who knew what. “Um. You should detach.”
On the screen, white pinpricks everywhere, like snow.
“Thirty seconds to impact. Come back, Gilly.”
“I’ve messed this up,” he said. “I shouldn’t have tried to run systems manually. It can’t be done.”
“Gilly, come back.”
“I should have prioritized getting the AI back. I’m clearing out some subsystem caches. That might help.”
“Gilly.”
“I can’t reach you anyway,” he said. “There’s a salamander in the corridor.”
Jackson thumbed her board. A floor plan appeared on screen. A section of a middle corridor was smeared red.
“Detach so you don’t get hit,” Gilly said. “I’ll stay here and do the best I can.”
For a moment, Jackson didn’t move.
Then she touched her board. The jet doors slapped closed, almost catching Anders. The jet kicked. Talia felt them detach with a metal clunk. The loss of gravity was instantaneous, her body floating up in the harness.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Anders shouted.
Jackson wrenched the jetpod to the side, rolling them away from the ship. The universe revolved. The engines bit and inertia pressed Talia into her harness. “Gilly, you have a path to Ext-4. We’ll attach there and pick you up.”
“That’s—”
“If you’re not there when we attach, I’m dragging you out, you hear me?”
Anders stowed the rifle and pulled himself along the handles to the front harness. “We can get him?”
“Yes. But it’s going to be rough.”
Onscreen, the pinpricks converged on the blue dot. The timer dwindled away.
“Got it!” Gilly said. “AI is up!”
Jackson: “Brace, brace.”
Over the engines rose a chorus of bleats and tones. The right screen flipped into an engagement loadout and the universe was full of salamanders. They filled the screen like stars. She was amazed at their numbers. She had followed mission stats. She had known they were grains of sand on a beach. But look at how many.
“Our twenty-five ninety,” Anders said. “The ship will block some of them.”
Jackson nodded. The jet kicked. They skimmed along the underside of the ship and sections flew by on the viewport. Ahead was a heavy-liquids tank, and for no apparent reason, it burst, spraying globular fluid, and then not far away came another blowhole, and then another. Her whale, breaching. She didn’t know if it could survive this much damage and was suddenly afraid because it was breaking everywhere.
Anders pointed and Jackson swung the jet around. The docking brace grew on the main screen, a flat section marked with fat white lines. As she watched, it heaved and burst open, spraying debris.
Wreckage thumped the jet, knocking it about like a toy in a bathtub. The screens spun. Jackson and Anders were shouting; she couldn’t hear their words. Jolts reverberated. Jetpods weren’t designed to be hit with debris. They weren’t designed for any of this. On the engagement screen, the salamanders were arriving, drifting down from the stars like spider eggs in the wind. The jet was screaming. Jackson was fighting it for control. But it wasn’t going to help, Talia saw. They had lost. They had gone deep into VZ and failed to appreciate how the salamanders were expending vast numbers of lives trying to get close to them, or the resolve that that implied, the hunger, the hate. They had been very complacent. She hadn’t really noticed she was in a war, if she was honest.
From the ship, a core of light, clean and brilliant.
A concussive force hit her. She was at the beach, six years old, her father turning away and a wave she never saw coming hitting her from behind, plunging her into a churning watery world of confusion, not knowing where she was or how to escape. Her father had caught her hand and plucked her from the sea and held her in his arms while she coughed and cried.
The screens were filled with debris. A large chunk of the ship’s rear was venting fire. “Go,” Jackson screamed. “Go, go, go.” The jet fled but the ship hung on the screen and Talia could see fire spreading along it like fault lines, rupturing and splitting. The fire looked small compared to the mass of the ship but each tear revealed a deeper conflagration. It was insatiable and it ran in straight lines, following the materials lines, eating the ship in bites, and there went her station, and there the place she had gone with Anders to the hot room, and where she had eaten, and lived, slept, too many places to count, all becoming light and ash.
* * *
—
They ran through space. “Goddamn it,” Anders said. “Goddamn it.” He was cursing a lot. He was wrestling with his controls like a lover; which was to say, roughly. She felt the urge to go up there and tell him he should have been the one left behind, not Gilly. I’m not leaving you, Gilly had said, when he was carrying her down the ladder shaft. But she had left him.
“Give me thrust,” Jackson said.
“I’m fixing the redline.”
“You can do both.”
“Like fuck I can.”
“Calm down,” Jackson said.
She wanted to speak to Jackson, too. This captain schtick of Jackson’s wasn’t cutting it anymore. To the untrained observer, sure, Jackson was a picture of professionalism, strapped up there with her shoulders bunched, her jawline jutting, that would make a really terrific clip, right there, but Talia knew the truth: that Jackson had been chosen for her public profile, and that was why all of them were here—not because they were good soldiers but because they made a good feed. They sold a good war. Even herself, for all she wanted to believe she was keeping this crew together in deft and clever ways; that wasn’t a real skill. That wasn’t what anyone really needed in a war. They were impostors, all of them, and they had gotten Gilly killed. She felt choked with failure.
The jet shuddered. Another impostor. If it was anything like its crew, they were in for a short ride. It jumped about like a skittish cat, avoiding debris, she guessed, which, according to the screens, was all around them, most of it small, some not so much, and plenty banging against them. The only reason they hadn’t been torn to pieces was they were all moving along roughly the same vector, traveling away from where the ship had been. She caught a glimpse of some large part of the wreckage, a great broken chunk like a falling moon, then lost it.
The ship hadn’t said good-bye, she realized. It had said hello, but never good-bye.
“Four of them now,” Anders said. “Fuck!”
“We can lose them. Keep burning.”
“If they don’t box us in, which they fucking will!”
“Bank,” Jackson said. “Bank!”
&nb
sp; A force pressed her against the floor. She heard something detach from the jet: clunk. Anders yelped. The pressure increased. She could feel blood falling from her brain. She wasn’t a drinker, but the times she indulged it wound up like this, her feeling the blackout coming and realizing she should have made different choices about half an hour ago. She wasn’t terrific at anticipating the consequences of her own actions, if she was honest. A part of her would see disaster coming and embrace it. Why was that? Maybe she liked to have problems to fix. Maybe she was deluded. One more drink. I’ll be fine.
She swung into the wall. That was a surprise: She was supposed to be in a harness. There was a lot of noise from she didn’t know where and her hair was all up in her face. She pushed away from the wall with a free hand but it was difficult and slow, as if she were a child. She couldn’t move her left arm at all and was momentarily confused before remembering the medbag. She looked at her free hand again. She wasn’t supposed to have a free hand. She was supposed to be encased from head to toe in a protective blue inflatable.
Items were flying around. Containers and cables and, hello, a boot. And not only items she would expect to float if introduced to a gravity-free environment: items that shouldn’t float under any circumstances, like shreds of plastic and carbon fiber and twisted-pair metal. Items that should be part of the jet. And they were moving toward her. When the jet kicked, they heaved together, left or right or up or down, then resumed drifting in her direction, like she was pulling them toward her on strings. She swung into the wall again. She was getting annoyed with that. The express purpose of her harness was to prevent her from banging into things, and it was sucking at it. She twisted to see what was going on behind her. She couldn’t turn very far, but caught a glimpse of a flapping strap, the end torn, as if savaged by animals.
She looked forward again. Up front, Anders and Jackson remained safely ensconced in their harnesses, like sensible people. Jackson’s black braid stood tall, pointing straight up. They were shouting: She could see the cords in their necks, although she couldn’t hear their words. The screens were full of space and stars, all going around and around. One showed a jetpod spewing white gas. That jet looked pretty fucked, in Talia’s estimation. Whoever was on that thing was definitely going to die.
She shook her head, trying to beat back the chemical fog. There was a noise behind her that felt familiar but she couldn’t place it, couldn’t see it, either, because she was trapped by the medbag, which was strapped into the harness. It was the harness itself that was moving in a way it wasn’t supposed to, she figured out. She began to wriggle her shoulders. With one hand she worked the medbag down to roughly strapless gown level, creating the perfect outfit for Camp Zero tomfoolery, or, no, better, a hilarious feed clip, since she was always complaining to her followers about the uniform. They would die to see her like this. They would absolutely die. The next part was harder because the medbag gripped her torso, all the better to maintain positive pressure in the event of puncture wounds, an oft-overlooked feature of the modern medgown, and when she revealed her legs, the left was purple and swollen around the knee, coated in a thick yellow paste. She stared at it a moment, because it was pretty gross.
She blinked. Focus. She pushed the medbag free and gripped the straps. At last, she was able to twist around and see.
At the rear of the jet was a hole. Above it, vents blasted, fighting to equalize pressure, but also, she saw now, creating a cycle of air that pushed everything that was floating toward the breach. Her medbag flapped like a flag. Here she is! You found her! Since her station had been breached, she hadn’t been able to forget the void, and how about this, it turned out the void hadn’t forgotten her, either.
She grasped a handle and pulled herself away from the hole. She had been very superior about these handles before. She wanted to apologize for that. She gripped one and then the next and pulled herself toward Jackson and Anders. They didn’t notice her approach. They didn’t even know about the breach. They were flying the jet manually and the screens were terrifying. It abruptly occurred to her that her life was in their hands. That was an amazing concept. She would live or die because of Jackson and Anders. If she’d needed more evidence that somewhere along the way she had made some really poor life choices, here it was.
She got a hand on the back of Jackson’s harness. We’re breached, she shouted, but couldn’t hear herself. She grabbed Jackson’s braid and pulled.
Jackson jerked around. Her eyes roved over Talia. “What are you doing? Strap in!” Talia could barely hear her over the whirlwind of the equalization vents. She pointed to the rear of the jet but Jackson had already turned away. She shook Jackson’s shoulder again. “Get off me!” Jackson said. “Anders, bank!”
“Shut up!” Anders shouted. A tone sounded, harsh and insistent. A screen flared:
GRAVITY WELL
Anders gave an anguished roar. He fought the board. The jet kicked. Talia almost lost her handhold. Jackson shouted, “Strap in! We’re going down!”
Down? Talia wasn’t familiar with the concept of down. That wasn’t really a thing on board a jetpod with zero gravity. But a dull orange-purple curve passed across the left screen and was that a planet? It looked like a planet. Which would explain the down. But that couldn’t be right. They couldn’t land on a planet. She had been trained for every bullshit scenario she could imagine and some more besides, they had trained her in what to do if the ship were overrun by mice, but not how to survive ditching a jetpod on a planet. That was crazy.
The proximity tone rose in pitch and hysteria until it became an unbearable electric scream. “Get off me!” Jackson shouted, and began to pry Talia’s fingers off her seat. Jackson wanted Talia to return to the rear harness. But that was not happening, if Talia could help it, because back there the universe’s black lips were clamped to the jet and sucking the life from it. She would not go anywhere near that. She fought but Jackson was strong and Talia felt her fingers going. She seized a fistful of Jackson’s hair.
There’s a hole, she said.
Jackson didn’t hear or didn’t care. She seized Talia’s wrist and applied pain to it. Talia lost her grip and tumbled backward, or downward, or rearward, whichever it was, slowly, like a daisy in the wind. Eventually she stopped herself on a buckled locker door that shouldn’t even have been open and began to drag herself forward again. She was going to tell Jackson what she thought of her. This felt important. It was time to stop biting her tongue about the truth that Jackson was the worst person ever.
When she reached Jackson’s harness, the screens were yammering with information. There was something else now. Orange, like the planet, and round, but small. A hive. As she watched, it began to spit little black dots. Salamanders. The jet seemed to be heading directly for them, which struck Talia as a bad move. She would definitely have gone in the other direction.
“Get in your harness!” Jackson screamed.
There were salamanders behind them, too. Now Talia saw the problem. Hostiles on all sides. She decided not to be harsh with Jackson. Jackson was dealing with a lot. She’d come up here to say something, though. Not only to speak harsh truths to Jackson. She blinked, trying to recall. Jackson’s eyes went past her to the rear of the jet and widened. Oh, yes, Talia thought. The breach. That was it.
“Oh my God,” Jackson said, and unbuckled. “You sit here.”
That was fine. Talia climbed into the harness. With fat, numb sausage fingers, she pulled the straps around her. They felt amazing. She closed her eyes for a moment. She was halfway into a lovely dream when a new tone rose and she opened her eyes to see what it meant. The screen read:
COLLISION AVOIDANCE DISABLED
She looked at Anders. They were still running straight at the hive. It seemed now like they were going to smash into it. Anders, she said. Anders got a lot of crazy ideas and she had the suspicion that this was another. She turned to check whether Jackson w
as seeing this but Jackson was plugging the breach with the medbag. Talia blinked. That was really clever.
“Hold on!” Anders shouted.
The hive ballooned on the screen. She remembered Anders lying in his own vomit, months before, looking up at her and saying, I like the way your face is arranged. So this was it. He had finally found a way to kill himself, in the most spectacularly pointless way possible. She began to unstrap but it seemed to take forever and while she struggled the hive rushed toward her, growing exponentially, eager to help Anders get what he wanted. She leaned out and grabbed his wrist. He knocked her away. By this time, the hive was filling the screen. Maybe he wouldn’t hit it, she thought. He would just shoot by, close enough to lose their pursuers. Then he punched the board and the jet lurched into the hive.
Her ears filled with screaming metal. She was flung in one direction and then the other. Wind was everywhere, the growl opening into a throaty roar. They were breached in a dozen places. Her eyes streamed. But she saw white dots vanishing from the screens. They had struck the hive and it had torn them up but also created a thousand tiny pieces of deadly shrapnel to tear apart the salamanders.
He was trying to drag the jet around but there grew a terrible shaking. The planet had them, she realized. They had flown too close and the jet was doing its best but wasn’t designed for this and the shaking was turbulence. Her brain rattled. A high whistling grew behind her, and she felt joy, because as terrifying as that sound was, it meant atmosphere. It meant she had escaped the void. She was falling toward an orange-and-purple planet at terrible speed, but the universe wouldn’t eat her. She opened her mouth to scream or laugh or something. She didn’t know. It was a good moment to do, well, anything. Last drinks, ladies and gentlemen. Last drinks. One more couldn’t hurt. The jet’s engines thundered, the wind screamed, and she fell, fell, fell.
10
[Jackson]
THE CREW
