by Scott Baron
“Oh, shut up, Sarah. You’re dead—you don’t get a say in this,” Daisy said with a grumble.
“Like that would stop me from calling you on your shit. Ha! Fat chance. Or maybe I’m really just a secret chip implanted in your head. A conscience given to the prodigal daughter because your machine overlords knew you didn’t have one.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny. First, you know damn well I have a conscience. I never told Barry about you admiring his multi-speed package—”
“Hey!”
“And second, I saw the scans. I’m clean, no chips in my head. Just one hundred percent organic human gray matter up there.”
“Well then, that must mean I’m all in your mind. Damn, girl, you’ve got a pretty messed up imagination.”
“Oh my God, will you shut up? I swear, I wish you were still alive so I could kill you!”
The voice in her head remained silent.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I miss you, Sarah,” Daisy whispered, a quiet confession drifting in the cold, dry air.
Daisy slept poorly, her stomach upset from her unexpected meal of extremely outdated dehydrated food rations. She had found herself wondering if everything else about the shuttle was antique as well. She had spent the majority of her first day aboard reconfiguring the faulty navigation system. All of her time spent in the Narrows still hadn’t prepared her for the arduous task of rewiring such an old vessel. It was time-consuming, tedious, and unfortunately, was absolutely necessary if she hoped to reach Dark Side base. The ship simply wasn’t designed for such a long flight.
The navigation readouts were easy enough. She had those up and running and displaying a true heading—despite multiple other systems malfunctions—within mere hours. It was the rest that was taking so much time.
Connecting the guidance to the engines and maneuvering thrusters was far more complex than she felt it needed to be. By the end of the day, however, she thought she finally had everything in order. At least it held together and flew true to course, though the myriad warning lights that still lit up the old-time display console like a foreboding Christmas tree were troubling, to say the least.
“I really need to figure out a way to reduce the pressure on fuel line two before it becomes a problem,” Daisy griped to herself.
Ever listening, Murphy would soon rear his ugly head and address her concern.
Less than twenty minutes later, the ship rocked to the side as the fuel line ruptured, spewing precious compressed liquid fuel into space. Fortunately, the vacuum froze the combustible fluid into a solid block and prevented ignition as the metal housing sheared free from the sudden pressure, but the vacuum was also unforgiving in its effect on bodies in motion. Sure enough, the shuttle quickly veered off course.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Daisy scrambled for the emergency shutoff valve. “If the frozen fuel hits the engine wake—”
The silent explosion triggered as the burning exhaust touched off the frozen fuel sent the shuttle spinning. Even with artificial gravity, the unexpected gyrations threw Daisy into a dizzying tumble. Her stomach, already uneasy from less-than-wonderful rations, emptied itself in a painful heave, its contents impacting the bulkhead with an unpleasant wet smack.
Daisy ignored her stomach and lunged for the shutoff. The knob, naturally (courtesy of Murphy, once more), was stuck open. Daisy’s knuckles turned white with strain as she tried her best to turn it.
“Go, you sonofabitch!” she yelled, directing all her energy into that one hand. “Come on, you bastard!”
With a screech, the shutoff began to turn.
“That’s right! Turn!”
Using all her might, she managed to turn it the rest of the way, cutting off the flow of fuel from the ruptured line. The engines sputtered and fell silent, their steady vibrating hum suddenly noticeable in its absence.
With no time to rest, Daisy quickly set to the task of damage control. While the engines were now cut off from fuel, only one of them was damaged. Murphy’s law seemed not to apply to the ship’s living compartments, however, as they escaped unscathed and were still holding pressure. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said of the work bay on the shuttle’s back.
The explosion had bent open one of the access hatches. Daisy was sure of it. The angry little red light flashing in her face told her so. So, too, did the video display showing the ever-so-slightly buckled metal, now open to space, right at the seam. While her living area was secure, Daisy found herself unexpectedly with no access to the tools housed in the work bay.
Or the protective space suits stored there.
Without a suit, there’s no way to do an EVA to fix the fuel line. Daisy forced down her panic, took a deep breath, and cleared her mind as best she could. Then she focused on the problems facing her and pondered them as objectively as she could.
Okay, nothing to be done about the fuel for now, so deal with that later. First things first, get the ship flying level and back on course.
The engines were completely offline, and that meant the directional vector panels would be useless. Likewise, the maneuvering thrusters seemed to be malfunctioning.
“I bet the air-feeds to the thrusters purged when the fire hit as a safety precaution,” her friend suggested.
“Great minds think alike, Sarah. But I can’t get to the access panel to reset the system from here. The bay is in a total vacuum now, and I don’t have any way to fix it.”
“Well, there is one thing you could do, but it will make the rest of the trip rather unpleasant.”
Daisy knew what she meant. It was not an option she was at all fond of.
“But I need that air. I’m breathing it.”
“Won’t do you much good if you shoot right past the moon, now, would it?”
“I hate it when you’re right.”
“So, pretty much always, then?”
“Zip it. I’ve got work to do.”
“Okay, but remember, breathe shallow.”
After far too much exertion to open the small access panel, despite lack of proper tools, Daisy finally managed to gain entry to the correct cluster of pipes, tubes, and wires. The old-school technology was ridiculous to her high-tech-accustomed eyes, but she would have to make it work. Somehow.
Teeth clenched, Daisy got down on all fours and carefully wiggled forward until she wedged herself up to her waist in the tiny routing conduit behind the bulkhead. Unlike the Váli, the shuttle was not designed for ease of access, and even accustomed as she was to tight spaces, Daisy found herself feeling rather claustrophobic in the restricting environment.
Her elbows and shoulders ached from repeated impacts with pipes and beams as she set to work using only cobbled-together hand tools for a job that demanded power ones. The process would work, but it would also take hours. Gritting her teeth, she set to her task.
“That should do it,” she said triumphantly some time later as she tightened the last compression fitting. “Am I awesome or what?” she joked to herself. “Victory is mine!” she said with a laugh, then promptly banged her head on a pipe as she slid back out of the narrow space.
“Ow! Sonofabitch.” She ran her fingers through her hair and checked her hand. No blood, but she’d probably have a nice bump on her head, knowing her luck.
With exhausted hands, she gradually eased open the pair of valves jury-rigged to feed into the thruster system. It was ugly, it was far from ideal, but she knew it would almost certainly work. Sure enough, small puffs of compressed air vented out the thruster nozzles, slowing the spin. There we go. A few more like that and I’ll be flying level. Then I just have to nudge this bucket back on course.
It was very slow work, the venting of air to steer the ship, but it had to be. Anything faster, and it could be the end of her. Sarah was right, she’d need to take shallow breaths, but at least she would be back on course. All it had cost her was roughly half the air in the living spaces, cleverly re-routed into the pressure feeds to the directional navigational thrust system.<
br />
She was still moving at a high speed, even without the engines firing, thanks to the friction-free physics of space travel, and within a few more minutes she had finally succeeded in nudging the vessel back on target to Dark Side Base.
Daisy figured she would be okay. So long as nothing got in her way, that is.
Any drastic avoidance maneuvering would likely overload what little integrity the overtaxed electronics still maintained, not to mention dropping her oxygen stores to zero.
Zero air would not be good.
Daisy was desperate for a break. She had been running on pure adrenaline for over a day, but she knew she had to power through the exhaustion and aches. There was still one more very important job to do. She had to reconfigure the engines.
The plan was to allow the one functional engine to fire for emergency purposes, while keeping the damaged engine completely offline. Combined with the compressed air to the thrusters on the damaged side, she was pretty sure she could compensate for the off-centered thrust and keep the ship flying straight.
It was a good plan, and a vital one if she wanted to survive any unlikely obstacles or debris floating in her trajectory. Unfortunately, it had one far-from-small flaw. She would have to open the emergency shut-off valve to prime the engines.
Fuel was already extremely low, but if she ever wanted to use the lone engine, it would require a sacrifice. Not one of blood, tears, or virgins, but of precious fuel. She figured she had one, maybe two decent bursts at her disposal before the ruptured line drained the reserve tanks dry. It wasn’t a win-win situation by any stretch. More like a win-lose one, but it would have to do.
The work took the better part of three hours, but when it was finally complete, Daisy felt a weight lifted from her shoulders. She had done all she could, and the rest was up to fate and fortune.
Better than nothing at all, she mused, then settled into as comfortable a position as she could to try to rest.
If she could.
The routine was repetitious.
Breathing in, briefly holding her breath, then slowly letting it out as she focused on relaxing every muscle in her body from head to toe and back again was getting beyond boring after so many hours. With nothing else to do, Daisy felt it best to follow her own advice and conserve as much air as possible. No sense tempting fate, after all.
For the first few hours, she had found herself beginning to tap into that near-trance state, which previously helped her calm herself. She was surprised to find that the deeper she turned inward, the more the tantalizing fringes of her nascent abilities began to tickle the edges of her awareness.
Exactly how much the neuro-stim had put into her head was a mystery, but the human mind was long-known to only use a fraction of its processing and storage capacity, and she suddenly felt that she only knew a tiny portion of what was in there.
As she relaxed even further, Daisy found herself at increasing ease with the skills she recently discovered in her possession. Coding and machine language at a whole new level suddenly made sense, now that she was looking at it in a non-panicked life-or-death situation. Of course it would flow like that. The knowledge was as much a part of her as knowing how to tie her shoes. How had she ever thought otherwise?
Technical weapons engineering adapted from salvaged parts at hand? The knowledge was there. She hadn’t really known the full potential of the electromagnetic pulse grenade she had fabricated while crawling through the Narrows on her way to the shuttle, but somewhere in her mind, the survival combat skills and technical prowess to put them to use, were lurking just below the surface.
If the situation wasn’t so dire, she’d have reveled in the newfound discoveries and delved even farther into the still-clouded areas of her subconscious as they gradually came into focus. Unfortunately, the low oxygen alarms shrieking from the shuttle’s console had eventually disrupted her calm enough to put any further thoughts of true self-discovery on the back burner while she figured out how to mute them.
For the time being, focusing on conserving air would have to suffice. Once she arrived at Dark Side, a proper counterstrike team would be readied, and Váli and its traitorous crew would be dealt with before their plans could be realized. Only then would she let herself truly relax.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Dark Side Base, this is Váli shuttle, do you copy?”
Silence.
“Maybe we’re just too far out for them to read our signal. They are on the dark side of the moon, after all.”
Daisy considered the possibility. A base located in the shadowy part of the moon likely took its security a bit more seriously than your regular space-port. Still, not getting a reply was becoming more than a little disconcerting.
“Dark Side Base, this is the Váli shuttle on distant approach, do you copy?”
Still nothing.
The shuttle was moving at a rapid pace, thanks in no small part to the hours upon hours of hard labor Daisy had put in re-working the thrusters and drive system. The ship had stayed on course, and at her present speed, it would reach the moon in less than a half hour.
No sense saving these now, Daisy thought as she rummaged through her flight suit. She’d eaten only the old freeze-dried rations on the long flight to the moon, fearful of exactly how long the flight might take, but now that she was finally almost safe and sound, she felt it was all right to dig into her emergency stash.
The bars had been tucked away safely deep in her pockets and were somewhat worse-for-wear after all that crawling, but they tasted wonderful to her hungry taste buds. She took a quick survey of her hoard as she chewed.
Two nutrient bars, a packet of electrolyte gel, and a handful of candy-coated stim tablets were all she had.
Don’t need those, she mused, tucking the stimulants back into their cozy home. The electrolyte gel and one of the bars, however, were fair game, and she made quick work of them, washing the disproportionately satisfying snack down with a sealed water pouch before sliding into the lavatory pod to relieve herself.
And there I go, contributing to the water reclamation system. She couldn’t help but laugh.
The lights flickered and dimmed, then brightened back to normal levels.
“You know, we really should have gotten to that, Daze,” Sarah chimed in.
“If we’d known the shuttle would become such an urgent priority, I suppose we would have put the upgrades higher up on our action agenda. As it stands, the old bird seems to be holding up all right, all things considered.”
“There you go, tempting fate again.”
“Yeah, yeah. Such a daring person, I know. Sure, it’s a little colder than I’d prefer, but bringing the heating system up to modern standards wasn’t really high on anyone’s list after we got hit. And what’s with this thing anyway? I mean, the creaks and rattles, this shuttle has to be at least seven generations earlier than the Váli. Why strap an antiquated thing like this to its belly when they could have used any one of a number of vastly superior designs?”
“Maybe it was all they had on hand.”
“Come on, Sarah, we both know there are dozens of variants of configurations that could have been mounted there, any one of which would have sufficed.”
“Maybe because this one has actual wings, while the others were designed mostly for space travel.”
“And what does that have to do with anything? How do wings help?”
“Think about it, Daze. If, by some odd set of circumstances, the drive system were to go offline, all of the other variants would pretty much drop from the sky if they tried to enter the atmosphere. This old bucket of bolts, however outdated it may be in all other regards, is one of the only designs capable of gliding without thrust.”
“So you’re saying it’s really more of a lifeboat than a shuttle?”
“You have to admit, it makes sense.”
Daisy paused a moment, considering the possibility. But if the shuttle was meant for emergency egress only, what was the plan
once they arrived in Earth’s orbit? Sure, Dark Side was there to conveniently patch up their hurt from the impact that had so rudely woken them from cryo-sleep, but that had never been the actual plan. So why a ship that could glide?
A man’s voice crackled out from the comms array speaker.
“Váli shuttle, this is Dark Side Base. We have received your transmission. Do you register this message?”
Daisy quickly finished her business, pulling up her flight suit and locking down the waste recycling port before hurrying back to the command chair.
“Váli shuttle, this is Dark Side Base. Once again, we have received your transmission. Do you register this message?”
Daisy reached for the comms button, then paused. Something felt wrong. Off. Nagging at her brain. It took her a few seconds to put her finger on it.
The way the man spoke. It was something in his cadence. The tone of his voice.
“Váli shuttle, this is Dark Side Base. We have received your transmission. Do you register this message?”
The inflection. Exactly the same each time. Exactly.
“Goddamn it, Sarah, it’s a fucking AI.”
“Of course it is. They’re standard on all ships, and who do you think runs the docking arrays in the spaceports?”
“I know. You’re right. It’s just that after Mal, I don’t know anymore.”
“You disabled Mal’s long-range comms, so what’s to worry about? They’d have had to physically fly here before us to poison that well. Look at the scans. No sign of the Váli anywhere. So come on, let’s go get reinforcements and handle things with that rogue crew before they get even more out of hand.”
“You and your damn logic.” Daisy turned her attention to the ancient monitors in front of her. “You’re right. Scans show no sign of the Váli. The base has no vessels at all docked on the exterior—”
An uncomfortable silence filled the cabin.
