by Ginger Booth
His visage was replaced on screen with a glowing green schematic of the asteroid, with a dark chunk. Within that part, a pulsing magenta dot indicated where Nico had recently entered to look for his adoptive dad. “Loki, this is perfect! This is a map of all the corridors, right?”
“No, this is a data bus schematic. I have no idea where the service tunnels run. I gave this map to Ben and Remi.”
“Hold on.” Nico excused himself to step onto the catwalk and comm Teke. Judge had asked the physicist to take over surveillance of the asteroid.
“Teke, I’ve got a zone on the asteroid. Loki says it’s non-responsive. Could you zero in on it?” He sent along the picture from the dining room screen, and explained the diagram.
“We’re on the wrong side at the moment. But will do. And Nico? We’ll find them.”
Did I sound desperate? Yes. “Thanks.” Nico took a deep breath and resolved to stay calm and collected.
Upon re-entering the galley, his intent flew out the airlock. “A clone of Shiva?” Hugo demanded, risen halfway out of his chair.
Shiva was the personality of the master AI, ‘Sanctuary Control’, who preceded Loki. The one who captured Sass and Clay and murdered them repeatedly until she was able to download their digital consciousness for study.
“Not Shiva exactly,” Loki defended. “It shouldn’t be Shiva at all! I don’t understand how this could have happened. Though she was such a genius at manufacturing. Her nanofabs are sublime.” He looked wistful for a moment.
Then his face suddenly filled the screen with rage. “No! I authorized no personalities in my data room controllers!” He shrank back to his seat, looking thoughtful. “But the adjacent controllers call her Kali. The neighbors bear alphanumeric addresses. No personality at all.”
Nico asked slowly, “Loki, who selected the entrance my dad used? Did you direct him into that hole?”
“I – yes. Based on his criteria. It’s a zone of new construction, which includes a high density of critical features needed to support me.” Loki stopped, suddenly looking suspicious. He blinked, as he seemed to do when making intensive queries.
“Yes. The rest of the asteroid isn’t nearly as suitable. This Kali sector includes a nanofab, metals, robot factory, processors, volatile and storage memory, mining, everything I need to reduce myself into a traveling configuration.”
Nico felt stunned, his thoughts moving like Monday axle grease. “But Kali isn’t answering you. The clone of Shiva. Who has everything she needs to recreate your full capabilities.”
“I don’t know that it’s Shiva,” Loki quibbled. “But the name Kali…”
Nico gulped. “Where do you store the archived personalities? Like Shiva.”
Loki nodded unhappily. “There. That asteroid. Near that sector.”
28
Ben thought fast. His first instinct was to run for it. Back up to the surface before the bots could block their exit. But he still had no damned direction to walk to reach the shuttle. Sure, their mapping was probably good enough to choose which quadrant of the asteroid. But he couldn’t be sure of finding line of sight.
Air. They had to secure their air supply. Even if it means getting blocked inside? They could split up…no. Two heads were better than one to solve any problem. Splitting up, they’d have no comms. And no guarantee that they could join up again. These walls seemed to be literally closing in on them. And this one was erected in an hour.
“Blow it,” Remi voted. “Get back to the nanofab.”
Ben stared at him. “If we knew how to blow a wall, why aren’t we headed back to the shuttle already?”
Remi grimaced at him. “It’s not easy! But I think about how since then. Bring me bats. Leave your box. Do not get trapped in –!”
His voice cut off as Ben slipped into the bat cave. He plucked the diminutive robots by the head and stilled one at a time, flapping uselessly at about his chest height, unable to reach a wall. These bats couldn’t fly. He decided three was sufficient. He could come back for more if Remi wanted them. Then he tried to figure out how to carry three at once. One slapped his arm enough to successfully jet itself toward a wall.
Ben gave up and carried two by their knobby heads. He held them outward as far as possible to flap vacuum. He returned to Remi and parked them off to the side, helplessly becalmed. Mercifully, he couldn’t hear them.
The engineer was drilling holes in the fresh wall. He swapped out a drill bit. Ben dove to his taped box, sliced it open, and brought out his own drill. “More holes? Or feed you fresh bits?”
“Don’t know yet,” the engineer murmured, not taking his eyes off his work. Another bit shattered, its life expended in its attempt to eat concrete. “What is your hardest tool?”
Ben rummaged through his toolbox, finding nothing particularly harder than a steel screwdriver. But he had some old special-purpose gels, purple caps. He didn’t even remember what year he’d made these. He tried one on the wall before him.
That was fun. It sizzled, gases spewing from its edges as it sank into the surface a few centimeters. “Remi, look.”
“What the hell were you doing with that?” Remi held out a hand imperiously. Ben slapped the capped tube into it.
“Um, cutting a wall of porcelain tiles, I think.” He didn’t remember offhand why he as fleet captain concocted a gel to cut a bathroom bulkhead. But not every ship in his infant fleet rated an engineer. Sometimes the captain stepped in, simply because he could.
He explained this to Remi absently. Remi retorted snidely that maybe he’d be less stressed if he stuck to his own job instead of undercutting his petty officers. Point.
Ben tried mystery purple goo number two. That one just sat there looking shiny. Oh, well. He tucked it away. A third toothpaste-shaped tube sported a red cap. “What’s red on a gel?” He’d seen it before, but didn’t recall the code.
Remi shook his head. “Unless…”
Too late. Ben had the cap off, and squirted some on the wall next to his inert purple test.
“Maybe explosive,” Remi murmured. “Needs oxygen.”
They stared at the little blob of ‘red’ gel, actually a matte black and more of a paste. Ben began to chuckle. “Now I remember this stuff. You’ll like this! Stand back.”
Remi retreated to the door of the bat cave. “Ben, if that’s what I think it is –”
“I have wings,” Ben assured him. He snatched a bat, which had tired of flapping, and tucked it under his arm. He detached his air line, pinched it closed, and aimed it at the precision explosive. Deploying his bat in front of him like a fan, he finally tried a squirt of air at the explosive. Then he stepped up onto the wall and jumped backward just as the goop reacted to the oxygen. He flew backward, accompanied by a rain of tiny concrete fragments.
No longer fearing for his life, he executed a slow back somersault to land on his feet, laughing out loud. “God, I love space!”
“You’re insane,” Remi assured him. The engineer propelled himself back to the wall, not bothering with gravity, to inspect their tests. Ben’s latest effort blew a hole big enough to stuff a basketball into. “Save that for later.”
Ben slowly sailed back to him, and parked his bat in the holding zone. “What were the bats for?”
“That. What you just did.” Remi returned to his systematic drilling. “I think I use the purple to deepen this.” He kept drilling until Ben feared he’d lose the drill bit jammed in the hole. But the Sag was no stranger to that problem, and called it quits. He followed up with a generous squirt of purple gel. “Now for the water.”
“Water? I was wondering why we carried water.” The suits recycled it. Granted, unless his suit was in perfect repair, the water tasted pretty lousy after a few hours. Like now.
Remi confirmed his suspicions. “When the water tastes bad, you void the suit bladder and recharge. Every suit tastes bad after eight hours or so. But no. Water is special for mining.”
He fished out the water thermos and att
ached a straw to it, then stuck the straw into his deepened hole. From Ben’s angle, it buried in nearly the length of his hand.
And Remi squirted water. Which instantly froze and expanded. The explosion wasn’t as dramatic as the red goo. But they were instantly swallowed by a cloud of concrete dust.
“Have a bat,” Ben offered. He flapped dust away with his own, and gradually their view cleared. Disappointed, he saw that Remi’s hole was smaller than his own.
But the engineer wasn’t done. He took a hammer and started whaling on the wall near the exploded part. The shocked concrete crumbled easily. “Bat,” he requested.
Trying not to interfere with his companion’s hammer swings, Ben scooped concrete out of the cloud to send it down-tunnel, out of their way. Remi halted a few times as well to clear his work zone.
Then suddenly he leaned down and peered into the hole, now large enough to swallow his helmet, and half the height of Ben’s torso. “Through. Maybe seventy centimeters deep. Drill.”
Ben supplied the tool into his outstretched hand. Then he pulled back to wonder at the engineer’s feel for this, occasionally supplying a new drill bit on demand. Remi drilled inside his gaping hole, positioning a pencil-thin hole toward the tunnel wall, and another straight down and halfway back.
“Maybe I could get through with a blaster,” the captain suggested.
“Save that for the edges. Purple.”
The new holes were deepened with the purple gel, then exploded with squirts of water again. By then the hole through to the other side was clear, twenty centimeters across, and the gap on their side stretched from Ben’s chin to mid-thigh.
Remi stepped back. “Try the blaster on the far side.”
Ben took an experimental approach, starting his beam at the thin edge of the opening beyond, and working toward the wall until it seemed to do no further good. Remi’s wisdom grew clearer to him, as dangerous fragments now blew away from him. He managed to grow the opening big enough to push one of the boxes through. But it was too narrow to risk scraping a pressure suit.
“Excellent,” Remi praised. “Now for the red.” He took the tube and applied a zigzag of it to the whole left side of the gap, toward the tunnel wall. Then he blew a Sag emergency air bubble on the far side of the wall, and coaxed it toward him to adhere to the far side. He repeated the maneuver on their side. “That’s not enough protection. Hide in the bat cave.”
Ben held his ground. “You don’t get to die first.”
Remi grimaced at him. “We both hide in the bat cave. Go!”
While Ben retreated, Remi pulled out a roll of airline tubing and inserted one end into the pink bubble, then retreated toward Ben at the bat cave. The airline didn’t reach quite that far, so he returned to snatch a bat for added protection. Protection accomplished, sort of, he shoved Ben into the doorway. “Give me room to dive in.”
So Ben didn’t see the biggest explosion. He merely caught Remi as the engineer sailed inward, then taped the couple tears in his spacesuit. They took a moment to swap his air canister for a nearly-full one as well.
Only then did they exit to check their work. Remi grinned ear to ear. Ben traded him a high-five. They dug their boxes and sled from the rubble, and squeezed through their new doorway.
“Should we try that to get back to the shuttle?” Ben wondered. The thought of blowing up another wall right now exhausted him.
“Air. Sleep. Then maybe.”
Ben woke groggily to Remi’s gentle tug on his arm. His surroundings weren’t entirely black, but it wasn’t his cabin, either. What the…oh. The plumbing of his suit, and the dim presence of a Sag pink bubble surrounding him, brought unwelcome reality back to mind with a sinking feeling.
“That was two hours sleep?” he grumbled. “I want a refund.”
“Light, Ben.” Expanding on his comment, Remi rolled him in mid-not-air to face the nearest entrance. Which glowed faintly.
Which tended to explain why Ben could see the pink bubble. Unlike himself, Remi felt the suit tell-tales and his tablet to read, provided enough light to stave off disorientation. Ben figured Remi would fall asleep on watch. But he addressed that by setting an alarm to wake himself.
Which hadn’t gone off, he realized sourly. All he got was a 40-minute nap. He growled and canceled the alarm.
“I just noticed a few minutes ago,” Remi shared, still whispering.
Which was silly in vacuum – the not-air non-conducted no-sound. Ben yawned fiercely and ordered himself to speak proper English, at a normal volume. “Any movement?”
“I feel it grows brighter.”
“Pack up. Let’s go look.” His words were more bracing than his movements. They were running low on duct tape, and he considered leaving their gear. But he’d established rules for this nightmare existence. Never get separated from the gear. Stay in constant line of sight for comms. “Thanks for waking me.” Ben sliced the pink membrane out of their way in an instant.
“Ready,” Remi said reluctantly. He carried the sled and box, tacitly inviting the guy with the blaster to go first.
Practiced, Ben ducked under one conveyor belt, jogged left, and hopped the next to reach the exit. Since they hadn’t encountered this phenomenon before – a lit tunnel – he hung back in the doorway, only slowly extending his helmet to look.
Another doorway glowed bright, to the right and 30 degrees up. “Huh.” A quick glance up and down the tunnel showed only one further new feature. The busy robots had walled off the tunnel past the nanofab, too. And repaired their new hole in the previous blockage. “Is that a new doorway?”
Remi drifted forward. “I don’t remember.”
Ben skate-stepped to peek into the bright chamber. And blinked.
No, this definitely wasn’t here before. The door revealed a small chamber, not much larger than his cabin on Merchant. The roughly hemispherical room was brightly lit by a fixture in the ceiling, the light a touch on the purple side. The color of dome and flat floor were Mahina mushroom. And on the facing side sat a table with an input tablet and large color computer display. On which showed a purple face with a hot-pink tongue lolling down its chin. Female, with greasy black hair, on a psychedelic background.
“I think someone wants to talk.”
Remi joined him. “Merde.”
29
Judge pursed his lips at the head of the dining table. Teke finding the SOS should have been good news. And it was, to the extent they believed Ben and Remi had lived to set it blinking. But the light stopped before Wilder and Joey reached its entrance with the shuttle, its battery dead.
He sent the sergeant under absolute orders to go in just to the first intersection, stick his head in, look for markings, and report back. This agenda was soon waylaid by a robo-dumpster coming out to discard a load of rubble. Judge’s men on the surface had to flee and wait for it to recede back into the hole. That took time. Then Wilder exceeded his orders and continued to a second intersection.
“And it’s blocked again. Joey says it’s just like the first.”
Joey nodded confirmation beyond his shoulder, their helmets off in the shuttle. “Arrowhead this time. Ben and Remi etched an arrow, then the wall was built.”
“Are they building these walls?” the security goon suggested wildly.
“Now why in hell would they do that?” Judge drawled.
“If something is stalking them through the asteroid!”
The acting captain reflected that Remi was right. Acting captain was like being a substitute teacher to preteens. And like many before him, Judge never could figure out why Ben kept Wilder on staff. Though he’d come to appreciate Quire in his absence. The ship’s gardens remained a wreck.
Ben’s life was on the line. Judge slapped the table. “Two entrances. Both blocked. Which one?” The entire remaining crew ringed the table for this momentous fork in the road, each sleepier than the last.
“The first,” Nico insisted. “Follow their path. Understand their choices.�
�
“The second!” Wilder demanded. “We know they were here recently!”
With a lazy forefinger toward the big screen, Judge awarded the point to Wilder.
“Both!” Nico argued. “Judge, they’re running out of time! How much air do they have?”
Judge patted air for him to calm down. “Crewman, you’re not going anywhere. Joey, blowing a concrete wall is tricky. Brittle and sharp. You need sticky explosive, another wall to hide behind, and a remote detonator.” This was the sort of thing Judge did every day as a mining skiff boss in the rings, before he joined Ben’s crew. Too bad he was here, and stuck with the ship. Or was he?
He sat up. “Teke, discussion. What do you think of me appointing you captain? And I deal with the asteroid. Because working through Wilder the Waldo, without comms, is about gonna drive me nuts.”
“I can blow a wall,” Joey muttered.
“No offense, Joey,” Judge assured him. Though he knew for a fact Joey couldn’t even mix the gels for the job, because Judge supplied those. The crew was top-heavy this trip, too much brain and not enough skilled brawn.
“We have two shuttles,” Floki suggested. “Nico and I can pursue from the other entrance. And I do know how to blow a concrete wall.”
Judge glowered at the bird, who in return pressed his beak flat and lidded his eyes.
“Sure,” Teke belatedly replied. “I can run the circus while you blow stuff up. I wonder what Ben would think, though. Were it up to me, I’d say Nico has limited skills. I’d add the bird to Wilder’s team, and keep Nico here. His qualifications are AI. Mine don’t include starship command.”
Wilder concurred. “The kid sucks on a spacewalk. But I don’t want to come pick up Feathers.”
Floki countered, “I can use robots to communicate with the ship. Can you?”
“You can do that?” Nico blurted in surprise. “Floki, that’s an awesome idea! Judge, if we have comms with the search party, we can track them!”
