by Anna Gaffey
Jake had thrown himself down and wound his arms around the console’s base, but the vacuum seized his legs and dragged him up parallel to the floor, and he dangled there in the hungry single-minded grasp of the void. Worse, he could feel the wooziness starting as the oxygen fled his lungs, and there was the pressure and the slow swell and the answering rush of heat in his chest. His eyelids fluttered. Would his tongue tingle when his saliva boiled? His skin smarted. His fingers uncurled. His arms relaxed. Mick and Mei were gone—gone—he’d follow them into space—he’d freeze, die—but it was the least he could do—
And then a heavy clang sounded from the docking doors. The proximity and depressurization alarms cut out, and Heart’s deep bell tones came online.
“Repressurizing. Reoxygenating. All hands alert. Vessel dock procedures commencing.”
Jake crashed back into the floor. The jar shook him fully alert. He took deep, thirsty, thankful breaths of sweet recycled air, delighted in the itch of pressure hickeys already forming on his neck. Then he instinctively covered his head. Where was Nat?
She was still by the console but bent over, scrabbling at something on the floor. Jake tried to remember the layout of Level 7. There was a hatch in the floor, a hatch at every corner of the bay, for access to all the main conduits, the fuel cells. No.
He heaved himself up and at Nat just as she raised the hatch lid, knocking her away from it. Her heavy boots dug into his shins. “Ow, damn it—”
“Get off!”
They fell to the floor, and Jake tugged at her helmet until it ripped away from the connecting material. He smashed it against the floor, and glittering shards scattered around them. Nat shrieked in his ear. She twisted away from him, pulling free of the helmet through the jagged mess of fractured glass. Slender cuts rose instantly in a tracery of red across her face. Mei’s beckoning arm flashed in his mind, and he felt a surge of delight at the blood.
They fought in grim silence. She was surprisingly strong and agile, but he had her, what with the height advantage and the mess of surplus suit material hanging about her shoulders. What was more, she wasn’t really fighting him. She let him kink her arm up behind her back without so much as a squeak. She was reaching beyond him, groping for something…and she snaked back with the conduit wrench in her hand and beat him a glancing stroke between his shoulder blades.
Jake howled and dropped her arm. Nat dragged herself out of his reach and then, as he tried to follow, she brought the wrench down decisively on his right knee.
There was an unnaturally loud pop, and a conflagration of pain flared through his leg. For a moment, the cargo bay dimmed. His knee throbbed excruciatingly. Jake slid back against the console. He clutched at his knee and then yanked his hands away; whatever she had crushed was shifting under his skin, but it didn’t matter because she was still swinging, again and again, smashing his fingers and his hands and his wrists with precise bruising beats. He felt the contours of the metal as it sank into his flesh.
Happily, his brain stopped processing. His knee and hands felt like bright hot pulp, so he went away just for a moment, somewhere far away from the console. He listened to the dull thumps and watched the blows travel up his legs and thighs and belly, as one smashed square against his hip, drawing him back into his body with nerve-shrieking pain. Nat was grunting something between each stroke, her eyes wild and bloodshot, her cheeks sketched with blood.
“Stay—”
thump
“down—”
thump
“bastard—”
thump
“Okay,” Jake whispered to the persistent roaring of pain. “You got it, no problem, I’m staying, okay. Just stop.” Mick. Mei. Me. Not good enough. I’m sorry.
She didn’t seem to hear him. She fumbled at the floor hatch lid with one hand and with the other, raised the wrench over his face.
Then a gloved hand seized her arm. The wrench clanged on the floor. An unblemished fishbowl helmet loomed over Nat’s shoulder, one with Connor Griffin looking out of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“To all captains and pilots within range. We are broadcasting this on behalf of the Selas Station crew, as they are experiencing technical difficulties with multiple systems, including comm, environmental, and auxiliaries. Loss of orbit seems a distinct possibility. In the event of catastrophe, the Harmon is ready and able to assist the crew with evacuation, but we are hoping to salvage the station. Any available ships, please respond.”
Excerpt: modified distress signal
01 November 2242
Pilot Connor Griffin
Personnel Carrier Leah Harmon
United Worlds DS 2150-1
En route Selas Station, Satellite, Eos System
[Data recovered 02 Dec 2242, Gunaji rights per salvage]
1 November 2242 AEC
23:01
Con looked so calm and blank, even a little bored. His eyes, though… They blazed out at Nat with a fury Jake had never seen him show, ever. Jake tried to sit, to prop himself up against the console, and his hip and leg screamed at the motion.
“How in the hell—Con?”
Con turned his scorching gaze on Jake. The console room wavered. Jake crumpled down again, and the pain retreated to a merely deafening level.
Nat was struggling against Con’s grasp. She kicked him and beat at his chest and shoulders with her free fist, but her blows were as weak and ineffective as a child’s. Con’s gaze didn’t leave Jake’s as he pulled back and cracked Nat across the face with his gloved fist. She collapsed to the floor, tangled awkwardly in her oversized suit.
For a moment, Con stared down at her. Then he knelt, carefully threaded his fingers through her black hair, and banged her head against the floor. Once. Twice. Three times.
“No!” someone shouted, and the voice echoed across the cargo bay. Despite his fuzzing vision and throbbing head, Jake still thought he recognized it. Could it be? Rachel. Rachel?
“Enough. She’s unconscious, get back from her, we don’t know…”
Perhaps he hadn’t spoken out loud. He tried again. “Rachel Santos. Rachel. Is that you?” His voice sounded sonorous enough, but only slightly louder than the underlying rushing in his ears. It sounded like a waterfall, or a tide of static over the comm, louder now, louder, the chill air of Selas tossing through the trees—
Selas? queried his mind.
—Mick and Mei’s bodies, tossing into the void, space, darkness, the shadows between the trees, all of it muffling the frantic chitters of pain running through him. He lay back. There was no one there. No Rachel, no Con, just blurry indistinct figures.
Brilliant blue light hurt his eyes. Someone was saving Nat, using her suit’s auto medical injection override. Maybe they were waking her up to beat her to death again.
He could dimly feel hands under his armpits lifting him away from the icy floor, support under his ankles and thighs, or maybe he was resting on a stretcher, it was hard to tell. Dizzy and weightless, someone carried him through the air for an indeterminable time and distance and finally deposited him on another unyielding surface. A swab of something wet brushed his neck, and he jerked away. “No. No more KOs—don’t wanna sleep.”
“Ease,” a soothing voice said. A cold press at his neck. “Just a bit. It’s to wake you up.”
A hand stroked into his hair, and Jake licked his lips. “Where am I?”
“On the station. In the cargo bay.”
“Still?” Jake managed a grin. “Hate to say this, but I think I need to go see Dr. Lindy.”
The gentle fingers against his scalp were familiar, and Jake turned into them with a sigh. More of the present rushed back to him in a sickening swing of memory. “Was that Rachel?”
The voice did not answer.
“Con, I know it’s you.” He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “Mick? Mei? Are they—you got them? I said I would save them. I have to. They’ll be frozen, but I could fix that. Did anyone get them?”
>
The hand lifted away, and the comforting presence beside him was gone. He lay in stillness for a while, unsure of how much time had passed until Lindy’s voice, all tarnished and sharpened steel, rasped into his ear.
“Time we took a break from each other, don’t you think, sonny?”
Jake smiled to himself. “That depends.”
“On?”
“On how many painkillers you’d leave me.” Jake opened his eyes.
The cargo bay ceiling lights glared down. He lay on a hasty spread of emergency blankets and storage padding, and something soft shielded the back of his head. Beside him knelt Lindy, her doctor’s case spread open with bright vials and packets, her hands busy with various ugly shiny metal implements. Jake’s palms burned as he turned them against the floor, but the pain had dwindled far from his remembered agony.
His ass was numb. His legs, too. So strange, he mused, a sensation that was annoying rather than devastating. Excess KO would make a space-ape philosopher out of anyone.
He made to rise, and Lindy pushed him back down with an ungentle elbow in the chest. “No moving, now, this is delicate.”
She leaned over the knee Nat had smacked. It felt swollen and hot and also painless. Jake craned his neck and saw she’d packed it in a brown pressure brace.
“What’d she do to me?”
“Bashed you up like an expert. You’ve got contusions from stem to stern. She also fractured your kneecap, but I stabilized it and it’s on the mend now.” Lindy shook out something long and metallic that clunked against the floor. “If you’d had the decency to stay unconscious for five more blasted minutes, I’d already have the immobilizer boot on. Now stay still.”
“I’m sorry I thought you’d gone bad.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He managed to keep from wiggling. “Mick and Mei?”
A long pause. “No,” Lindy said.
Tears started out of his eyes, but he couldn’t feel them. He couldn’t feel much of anything, only coldness. The KO did its work well. He counted ceiling lights until the wet stopped dribbling over his temples, until he could trust his blurred voice again. “And…Nat?”
A longer, more uncomfortable pause. Jake counted twenty-three ceiling lights before Lindy finally responded. “She’s alive. Barely.”
“Where?” Although it didn’t hurt, the angles Lindy was pushing and pulling his leg made him want to vomit. He craned his neck around. Was it his imagination, or the KO kickback, or were there people in the bay? Lots of people. People in blue uniforms. People moving crates and containers, speaking in continuous humming hive drone over earbuds. “How long was I out this time?”
“It’s a bit after twenty-three hundred. As for Nat, we moved her to the sickbay on the Harmon. Carmichael too. In case we don’t steady the station.”
Jake swore. “She can’t have done that much. Nothing’s irreversible when it comes to twenty-second cent tech.”
“Maybe not.” Lindy’s hands faltered. He looked up to see her mouth set in a rigid, regretful line. Lindy, carved in wood, no-nonsense, space pioneer Lindy was worried. As if she could read his thoughts, she scowled and resumed her nauseating tugs to his leg. “All the more reason for me to get you up and helping. You’re needed in Astrometrics.”
“Where’s Kai?”
“Working on cracking Heart wide with some techs from the Harmon crew.”
So that explained the blue uniformed swarm. And as for all the crates and containers and boxes… “They’re cleaning us out, aren’t they? Salvage already.” He watched a woman ferrying a cumbersome crateload of yellow food-storage boxes.
“The term you’re searching for is rescue,” Lindy snapped. “Or good fortune. Incredible plaguing luck that a ship is here to save us. See if you can call it anything else when you get up to the lab.”
She slapped something into place, and Jake’s leg stiffened. “Ow. Ow.”
“Oh, settle. Here.” Lindy pressed several packets into his hand. “Some painkillers to tide you over ‘till I see you next.”
His fingers had been cleaned and bandaged. He hadn’t noticed. Jake raised himself up, ignoring the aches radiating under the gauze, and assessed the damage. His right leg was trussed in sterile bandages, the pressure brace, and, on top of everything, the immobilizer. Constructed of a mess of straps and a tensile stellarcore frame, the boot fit over his foot and calf to halfway up his thigh.
Lindy fit a powering gem into the base behind his ankle, and gently stroked a hidden switch. A jolt jarred Jake’s teeth. Blue containment fizzed up and down the frame, then settled in a pocket surrounding his knee. “Christcakes, Lindy.”
“Ease, rosebud.” Lindy smirked. She shifted with a creak of joints and sat down. “Stand up. Let’s see if it takes your weight.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’ll roll you into the Harmon and hope Kai can work some virulent juju here all by his lonesome.”
“Now you’re just trying to piss me off.” Jake bit back a groan as he stood and, with some trepidation, leaned onto his right foot. The immobilizer boot flexed with his movement, but, true to its name, it held his knee motionless and secure. He jumped. The boot banged and absorbed the shock. “Good enough?”
“It’s a little big for you. Keep the straps tight and the power steady, and try to take it easy. There are more gems in Astro. Get going already.”
“Lindy, wait—” He cast about in the sea of too little information. “My chip! My chip. I shouldn’t do anything. I can’t do anything, it’s dangerous.”
“You’ll have an armed escort. Now get going. D’you want me to lobotomize you here and now? We’ve already drifted so far out of orbit and near entry, it’s doubtful we can pull her back in. And if that’s the case, we’re abandoning the station.”
A rush of pure anguish welled up inside Jake. It swallowed his stony grief for Mick and Mei. Appalled, he tried to bring to mind their faces, and he couldn’t. Lindy’s mouth twisted, as though she too were struggling. “Necessary,” she muttered, before he could say anything. “Doesn’t do to get too attached anywhere, does it?”
“On whose orders?”
Lindy’s frown firmed back into place, but she wasn’t looking at him. Jake craned his neck to follow her gaze. A pair of Harmon crew approached from across the cargo bay, swathed from head to toe in blue haz-mat gear: goggles, hoods, full gloves, and masks.
Gathering her instruments and packets and vials into her satchel, Lindy rose painfully and crossed to meet them. Jake watched them confer, and then Lindy came back. “They’ll take you up to Astro. Go easy on that leg for a bit.” She turned and walked toward a pile of crates sealed with blue medical tape.
Jake looked up at the two of them. They had a decidedly military air about them, along with a whiff of odd-couple: one tall and scrawny and androgynous, the blue goggles suctioned tightly to her (or his?) face, the other, short and burly as a testy male stereotype. They were both tricked out with equipment vests over their blues. Both wore fryguns. Both were unidentifiable behind their gas masks.
“So, escort me.” Jake crossed his arms.
They goggled at him.
“Speak Regulation?”
No response. Tall One appeared to be grimacing behind the mask. Short One tramped away and returned with a canvas sack. It looked familiar…
“Those are the legacy gems. From Chubaryan’s time.” Jake reached for the sack, and Short One held it just out of range. “Well, what are you showing me for, if you don’t want me to have them?”
Nothing. The bustle of Harmon crew around them was deafening in comparison. Short One scuffed his heels. Was that supposed to mean something? A Defense sign for something like No time for questions, let’s get going? Jake had no idea. Who would? He focused more closely on the guy’s boots, and realized that they were spattered with dark smears of blood. Mick’s blood, and Mei’s, casually tracked around like mud.
Jake’s fist clenched and raised almos
t lazily. But Tall One insinuated between them and stopped Jake’s hand with a gas mask.
“Fine,” Jake said. “Let’s get going.”
Short One shrugged. Jake shrugged back in disgust, and Short One tossed the sack at him. It thunked heavily into Jake’s chest, but he managed to keep his hands on it, and on the gas mask.
The mask was a portable clip-on, a tough little thing made out of green plastic. Jake spent most of the lift ride from Level 7 up to 4 fitting it over his nose and mouth, and adjusting it to his collar, and thinking. Level 4. The Astro lab and Jake’s quarters were on the same level. If he could talk to these space apes, they might let him grab the satchel before they took him to the lab.
“Interesting you guys managed to fix the lifts,” he commented. “How did you do it without accessing the necessary channels of Heart?”
Short One gripped his vest pocket like it had disobeyed in some sad, textile rebellion, but the intent was clear. He had a weapon in there.
“Whoa,” Jake said. “Ease, all right?” Were they on him so closely because of the chip? Given what had happened with Rachel, that was a good thing. But why wouldn’t they talk? Was any sort of connection with him considered dangerous? He didn’t feel dangerous, what with the clumsy cybernetic addition to his leg. “I don’t want any trouble. I’d just like to stop by my quarters and grab something important. It might be crucial to the survival of the station.”
No response. The silent stares were beginning to wear on him.
The lift doors shot open, and, as a unit, they tramped out and down the corridor toward the nearest lab entrance. Jake eyed the passing corner of his quarters’ door and stopped. Tall One and Short One halted immediately, and observed him wordlessly in their unyielding masks. “My quarters.” He pointed. “Right there. It’d only take a second. I’ve got—”
