Chrystal knelt next to Sugar, touching her neck. The last of their creations, the best. The leader of them all. Sugar’s eyes were filled with pain. “I’m so sorry,” Chrystal crooned. “So sorry. So sorry. So sorry.”
Yi raised his gun and fired. Sugar’s head dropped.
Katherine fell to her side, repeating, “No, no, no, no,” over and over as if she could undo what had been necessary.
Chrystal reached for Katherine, but Yi waved her back. He knelt beside Katherine and took her in his arms, and she beat on his back with her closed fists and cried.
Chrystal drifted close to Jason. Her hand crept into his. They held their silence, watching until Katherine stopped hitting Yi and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
All four of them stood near the bottom of the zip-line platform, holding their bulky suits. Yi balanced his slate on his suit, which he had folded neatly. He thumbed the slate one handed, muttering under his breath. Jason had figured out how to rig his own suit like an awkward backpack. He used his free hands to massage Katherine’s shoulders. She had stopped crying and appeared to have lost her anger as well, or buried it. At the moment her face was a study in calm, touched with mild curiosity.
“Your muscles are rocks,” Jason muttered.
Yi held up the hand with the slate in it. “There’s no trains running. But we shouldn’t take the tunnels; they could start.”
“Unlikely,” Jason said.
“We die if we’re wrong. Let’s use the airlock.”
The group trudged after Yi and clambered off the edge of the meadow. They stood on the thin lip of metal that never rotated. Seven ladders ringed the round airlock door, radiating down to attach near the ledge the group stood on. They were able to sidle just a little to the right and up the edge of the cylinder and then take a ladder that canted about five degrees off of straight up and led to the airlock door. Yi went first, then Katherine, Chrystal, and finally Jason. All four of them fit easily into the cargo airlock, even with the suits and the backpacks.
Jason latched the door shut from the inside and then opened the other door and peered out.
On the far side, a corridor, and at the end another airlock. “I’ve never been here,” Crystal said. “Do you know where it goes?”
“No,” Katherine said. “I bet none of us have been here.”
Yi pulled a map up on his slate and projected it in 3D for them. “It goes to offices.”
“Exciting.” Jason tugged to re-arrange the suit.
As they walked through the corridor, the left foot of Chrystal’s suit kept dragging on the ground. “Shouldn’t we just put those on?” Yi suggested.
“No,” Jason and Katherine said at once.
Chrystal wanted to suggest that they shouldn’t even be carrying them, but she knew without asking that Yi would object, and he’d be right. Which didn’t make dragging the suit any more fun.
Yi said, “After the offices, I think there’s habitats. We might find people there.”
They climbed into the lock on the far side and shut it.
Just as Yi reached for the handle to open the outside door, the station creaked and shifted, throwing Chrystal into Jason. “What was that?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Yi said. He hesitated for a second, and then looked at the others. “We are putting on suits as soon as we get through here.” He reached for the handle of the door.
Katherine put a hand on Yi’s forearm, stopping him. “Is it safe to open that?”
Yi looked at Katherine gently and nodded. He opened the door and peered out. “Offices.” He squinted. “It’s cold in there. A lot colder than it should be.”
“At least there’s light,” Chrystal noted, grateful.
The over-loud clunks and whirs of damaged air scrubbers overrode their voices from time to time. The station was working too hard. Or maybe she was imagining things.
They didn’t see anyone in the immediate area. Desks were bolted to walls, chairs to floors, walls to each other. While anything could be moved with a heavy wrench and the facilities crew, it had held together for the tow. The contents hadn’t done as well. Cups and water bulbs and slates had collected in drifts along cubicle walls.
As they pulled their suits on, the station gave three more deep shudders, the last one so sharp that Chrystal had to step to retain her balance. She felt relieved to dog her helmet down.
Walking in the suits felt a little better than walking and carrying them, except that she hated having so little peripheral vision. It made her feel like she was looking through a tunnel with walls that flared out from behind her ears.
About halfway down a long corridor, Jason pointed right.
A body lay in a corner under a desk, or maybe the person had chosen the corner before they died. The corpse had no pressure suit. The cause of death wasn’t obvious, and they didn’t get close enough to examine him.
At the end of a long corridor they found another door. This one wasn’t an airlock, and they went through one by one. On the far side, Yi whispered, “Housing.”
Housing meant worker housing, smaller and cheaper than what they had been enjoying; simpler. They peered into doorways. Many were empty. Some were full of bodies. “It’s just like our babies,” Katherine said.
“They don’t keep suits so handy in here,” Jason said. “They hang them in racks by the doorways out.”
“How do you know?” Chrystal asked.
“I worked on a station like this right out of college. No money. These habs are tiny boxes,” he waved a gloved hand at a doorway, “and it’s not like we ever needed the suits.”
“A suit might not be enough without an acceleration bed or couch,” Yi said. “Maybe for the lucky and healthy.” He sounded dismayed.
They started passing people in suits or partially in suits. Unmoving. Eerie. They might as well be walking through a horror immersive. Jason stopped to take off a helmet. They didn’t need to feel for a pulse.
A communication ping lit up Yi’s slate. “There’s someone nearby,” he said. “To the left.” He followed the map on his slate and they all followed him, watching warily around corners. They came to conference rooms. “Hellloooo?” a voice called. A head poked out of a door. Un-helmeted, multicolored hair awry.
Chrystal pulled her helmet off, relieved and suddenly irrationally hopeful. “Hello back!” The woman worked in the grocery store closest to them. She was highly modded, with rainbow eyes, berry-red lips, and many multicolored braids that ran down her neck like a cowl. Chrystal struggled to remember her name. Something simple. “Toyo! Good to see you.”
Toyo looked briefly embarrassed.
“Chrystal.” She introduced the others, all of them still standing in the hallway. “Is there anyone else?” Yi asked.
Toyo nodded. “Come on in.” She disappeared through the doorway.
Chrystal went in first. A young woman bent over a toddler with a broken leg that had been braced with a long piece of metal tied from the boy’s waist down past his tiny out-turned foot. The child fussed and babbled while the woman sang to him. Across the room, an old man lay on the floor with a coat for a pillow. His eyes tracked the new arrivals but he didn’t move.
After they were all in, Toyo closed the door behind them. Chrystal sat down by the boy. “Is he yours?” she asked the young woman.
“My sister’s. She died.”
“I’m sorry. My name’s Chrystal.”
“Lien’cha.”
“I’m sorry about your sister.”
The woman touched the child’s cheek. “We all are.”
The door slammed open with a bang. Startled, the little boy cried, while the adults looked toward the noise.
A cluster of machines stood in the open doorway, holding weapons.
Silver machines, shiny. Perfect. Formed liked humans, although blockier. They moved more smoothly than people, gliding from pose to pose, as if they had perfect joints or no joints at all.
They floated into the room,
the humans backing, open mouthed. In spite of their beauty, they felt . . . powerful.
She hadn’t expected the ice pirates to look so sophisticated. They were supposed to be a blend of human and machine. The human wasn’t easy to see.
One spoke. “Please line up against the left wall.” Its voice sounded as silky as their movements looked fluid.
Nothing about them made Chrystal want to obey. She wanted to flee.
The four of them lined up against the far wall. Toyo backed into the group, ending up between Jason and Katherine.
Lien’cha picked up the toddler and held him close, backing against a different wall.
The ice pirate in front of the small group of robots glided over to the man on the floor. It held something in its hand that looked like a syringe and reached down and touched the old man with it.
As the robot backed up, the man’s head slid from the pillow, his mouth open and his eyes wide.
Lien’cha clutched the toddler, who screeched.
“Who else is injured?” one of the ice pirates asked.
Chrystal heard the rasping of breath from them all, and for a long moment even the child’s cries stilled.
The same robot that had murdered the old man held its hand out toward Lien’cha.
She forced herself back behind the others.
The robot pulled the woman and the little boy forward. It cocked its silvery head at the pair, and then said, “I will take the child.”
“No!” Lien’cha screamed.
The arm with the syringe plunged into Lien’cha’s neck. She fell, still holding the toddler, who fell onto his back and shrieked in anger. Chrystal glanced at the robot, which stood still now, regarding them incuriously. Even though her legs trembled, she walked toward Lien’cha and leaned down and touched her neck, feeling for a pulse.
Nothing.
Instinctively, Chrystal reached for the child, clutching it to her. The robot plucked it from her arms and handed it back to one of the other robots. That robot jogged off, carrying the boy. “Come with us,” one of them who hadn’t spoken yet said.
Chrystal’s feet refused to obey her mind and either run or follow the robots. She might as well have grown roots.
Yi leaned down and touched the old man’s neck. He shook his head.
“We should . . . we should . . .” It seemed that words had gotten stuck in Katherine’s mouth.
Toyo spoke. “We’ll die if we don’t go with them.”
“Yes,” Chrystal said. Yi nodded. Katherine worried her lower lip and looked like she wanted to refuse, but Yi put an arm around her and whispered, “There are no options.”
Toyo followed the pirates. Jason pushed Chrystal forward. She took a step and then another, and then she was following Toyo and the pirates. Yi and Katherine were behind her, and Jason took up the last place. Chrystal had expected one of the robots to be there, herding them, but instead they just went about their business of knocking on doors. They didn’t seem to care what choice the humans made.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHRYSTAL
The robots led them through two entire sections of the ship and gathered twelve other people, all healthy young adults like themselves. Along the way, they killed the injured casually, each act making Katherine pull in on herself further, so that she grew whiter and her eyes rounder. Jason looked angry and lost at once, Yi impassive except that he glanced around all the time, as if every single detail of the destruction mattered. One of the women they didn’t know cried out, over and over, until one of the robots killed her, too.
At one point, the robots stopped them all in a wide hallway. “Everyone in a pressure suit must remove it and leave it here.”
Yi looked ready to protest, but Jason touched his arm and they all obeyed. Chrystal shivered in her thin, sweaty clothes and clomped along behind the robots in her heavy suit boots until the next stop, when they were all able to pull clothes and walking shoes from their packs.
They changed in the open in a bare spot on the floor of a machine shop. The robots swept through the shop, gathering two healthy men from behind a stack of boxes and injecting a sick woman and a wailing child with killing shots. As the child died, Katherine moaned.
“Be quiet,” Chrystal hissed, frightened. They had to survive this, all of them.
She was out of adrenaline, left with heavy limbs and exhaustion. The captives walked a long way, their numbers neither growing nor falling.
They stood in a line in the middle of a large warehouse. There were perhaps twenty-five survivors, maybe a few more. Every time Chrystal tried to count, she lost track, her mind refusing to focus on even the simplest task.
Shipping crates lined two walls. The dead in here wore uniforms striped with glowing neon colors. A long segmented transport of a design Chrystal had never seen rolled up in front of them. The robot at the front of the line said, “You may not take anything with you.”
Slates, extra coats, a bag of extra food, and a stuffed animal joined a discard pile by the door. One of the robots ran a wand over each of them, and one man had to leave his belt behind for no obvious reason. Their captors stood to the side and watched as the humans climbed into the transport. Inside, a uniformed woman with dark hair and almond-shaped eyes guided them into seats. Chrystal contrived to sit beside Katherine in the front right behind a window view screen, and Yi and Jason sat behind them.
“Why is that person working for the pirates?” Katherine wondered out loud. “I could never do that.”
Since it didn’t sound like she expected an answer, Chrystal settled for twisting her fingers through Katherine’s. She felt completely rocked, lost. So much death. They’d fallen from the top of a beautiful mountain just as they were reaching the summit, gone scrabbling down a cliff barely hanging on, while others around them failed to find the tiny toeholds needed to survive. Their creations had died horribly.
They had done nothing to deserve this. No one on the High Sweet Home had deserved this. No one did.
She tried to think through what it might mean for the Deep, for Mammot, for Lym, for the hundreds of stations and other places in the Glittering.
Why did the pirates do this? What would they gain?
The machine crawled through the rest of the station. It wove around corners and seemed to become larger and smaller as needed without disturbing the passenger compartment. It moved with an eerie quiet, making only the slightest sounds of flexing as it moved.
The light in the empty station was intermittent at best, often only the dull green of the emergency lighting. Chrystal stared out the window anyway, trying to make sense of what she saw. Reasonably orderly corridors and working spaces gave way to damaged ship’s bays and military training areas, to places full of twisted shadows, and holes in the station where Chrystal could see the bright pinpricks of stars. She turned away from the damage and hugged Katherine close. “We were lucky.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Katherine said. “We might be better off dead.”
“No,” Chrystal whispered. “As long as we’re alive, there’s a chance.”
Katherine leaned into Chrystal, her cheek resting on the top of Chrystal’s head. Their breathing slowed and matched the same way it sometimes did in the last soft moments before sleep. It comforted Chrystal to breathe with Katherine, to feel one with her.
She woke when the transport stopped, blinking for a moment as if coming up from a bad dream. A deep cold settled over her as she woke to the walls of the transport. “Where are we?” she murmured.
“I was sleeping.” Katherine sounded surprised that it been possible.
Yi spoke from the seat behind her, where he sat next to Jason. “We’ve docked inside of a bay that’s part of something huge. I can’t tell if it’s a station or a ship, but I’d bet it’s a ship.” He sounded awed. Yi, for whom everything was no big deal.
Their captors gave them no useful information. A tunnel grew out from the wall. It attached itself to the door, and immediately looked l
ike it had always been part of the transport. The door opened onto a pressurized environment.
They followed the uniformed woman down the corridor. Since they had been in front, Chrystal and Katherine now walked at the end of the line. Another woman followed them, close enough in looks to the first one to be her sister.
The woman led them to a large room with three hallways radiating in different directions. The gravity felt light enough to unbalance her. Ten more people were already there. “Please wait here,” the first woman said. “There are bathrooms.” She pointed. “And you may shower. We regret there are no clean clothes to give you.”
“What about food and water?” Jason said.
“There is water in the bathrooms.”
Chrystal’s stomach complained about the lack of food, which surprised her.
“What’s going to happen to us?” a man asked.
Toyo asked, “Are we hostages?”
The woman smiled. “Please wait here and there will be a time for answers. Make yourselves comfortable. We are continuing to scour the station for survivors.”
“Who are you?” a woman called out.
The woman walked down one of the hallways and disappeared.
Yi leaned down between Chrystal and Katherine, and whispered, “That’s no woman. She’s a robot, too. They’re all robots.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
NONA
Nona sat in a big comfortable chair in front of a roaring fire, Cricket on the floor close to her. The tongat had started following her around as if the foolishness of almost drowning had convinced Cricket that the new girl needed watching.
The flames enchanted Nona so completely she had trouble looking at either Charlie or Jean Paul, although she followed their conversation about a herd of some kind of predator well enough to get the gist of what they were saying. Flame amazed her. Living like the planet, breathing and dancing. Warm. Curious. A force that humans controlled so tightly in space that she’d never seen it in the open. She had been taught that it meant death.
It seemed like death dogged her. Her mother, gone now. Her father, gone for longer. Chrystal. Almost certainly.
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