by A. B. Keuser
She’d been through a psychological hell…. but she wouldn’t think of that, not when she was about to throw herself into the maw of the void.
Her eyes traveled up the length of his back as he slid into the largest EVA suit she’d ever seen. The unmistakable scar from a skin welder cut across his back, its rubbery purple hue told her the scar tissue was only a few months old. Rather, a few months older than when he’d been shoved into cryo.
Most people looked silly in the old suits—like puffed dolls. Osiris Bowlin only looked more imposing. A mountain disguised in fresh snow.
“I’m on frequency four-five-niner. Should we get this over with?” He pulled the interior hatch open and held out his hand.
Sliding on her helmet, she noted she looked like a shadow—a child’s shadow when next to him—in stark contrast to the marshmallow suit. She clicked the helmet secure and pressed a button on her arm. The suit sucked against her like a second skin and she waited as she acclimatized to the higher concentration of oxygen.
“Any day now….” She stepped into the hatch, avoiding his hand, and let him close it behind her.
A light flickered on and she saw the red sleeping bag. This hadn’t been her initial thought for disposing of him, but she guessed they were going to come back to suit up and cycle him out. Now she had the pleasure of doing it for them. Asshole. She’d give Stugg a stern talking to when they got back inside.
Si stopped half over the hatch. “Is there a reason Jarrod Mandall is in my airlock?”
“It looks like my crew felt this was the best place to dispose of him.”
“He doesn’t deserve to be thrown away like trash.”
She kept silent, but her eyebrow raised involuntarily as she considered the strength of his conviction toward a man who had stolen fifteen years of his life.
Pulling the hatch closed behind him, Si said, “Don’t hold your breath.”
He punched the button to cycle the air and Danielle felt the spiny fingers of claustrophobia clawing at her mind.
She’d done this before, she could do it again.
As the air expelled from the airlock, the artificial gravity clicked off and Danielle pressed a hand to the ceiling to keep from bobbing about like a ship adrift. Osiris picked up the remains of the youngest of the three Mandall brothers and held them as one might an infant.
When the green light flared above the exterior hatch, Dani braced her feet against the brackets and pushed the hatch outward into the void. “Stay close. I don’t want you losing your step and drifting off into the black.”
“Soon as I lay Jarrod to rest, I’ll be on you like fleas on an engineer.”
He pushed out the door, floating though it wordlessly, the red bag and corpse cradled in front of him. She wasn’t going to wait for him.
Why he’d take such care with the man who’d imprisoned him for fifteen years, Dani couldn’t begin to fathom. So she didn’t try.
Her hands found the small spaces on the hull that depressed for hand and toe holds. There weren’t many, and she realized quickly that this part of the ship’s design was not intended for a person of her stature.
She stretched across to reach the rung and let the lack of gravity help her over to get a good grip, before turning her attention to the next and stretching once more.
The fourth hold was out of her reach. Try as she might, her gloved fingers would not grasp it. She pulled herself back to her current hold and shoved herself away, reaching out to the hold with and brushing it with the tips of her fingers…
… before her momentum carried her further on and any hope of grabbing hold was lost.
She scrabbled for a hold along the hull. There was nothing to stop her.
The pressure around her ankle was sudden and unexpected. Nothing but darkness and stars filled her visor, as Si reeled her back in. When she finally got a hold on the ship again, she turned to Osiris, a thank you on her lips. It went unspoken.
Laughing at her through his bulbous helmet, he said, “Aren’t you glad you let me tag along now?”
She rolled her eyes at him and turned back to her forward progress. He didn’t deserve a thanks if he was going to be a jerk about it.
“You can make it up to me later. I’m sure we’ll find a way. José had some suggestions.”
Unwanted memories plagued her and she forced herself to . “José wants me to jump you first chance I get. I think we can both agree his judgment is flawed.”
“That’s something I really don’t understand. I’ve known José a long time and the way he’s acting about you and me… it doesn’t add up. I’d think he’d be the last person to suggest it.”
“Ten years ago, he might have been.” Dani reached for the next handhold. “I’d guess he sees you as better than the alternative.”
“There’s an alternative? Anyone I know?”
Dani hesitated before grabbing the next hold. “Sure, the most likely of which is a Pääom laser burning a hole through my brain.” She paused and then said something she’d kept to herself for far too long. “There is only one person in the Pääom fighting to save my life instead of end it… but what he wants for me is worse than death.”
She pulled herself along, conscious of the fact she couldn’t actually run away from Si.
“Well, hey, we could try it out, for José’s sake.”
“Right,” She said with a mirthless laugh. “And if it doesn’t work out you’ve got a wife on ice.”
“You’d like Adi, maybe that’s why I’m afraid to wake her up.”
Osiris caught up to her much more quickly than she would have liked. He didn’t have to fling himself around like a monkey.
Reaching another junction she couldn’t pass, she pushed off in the same manner. He caught her hand this time, pulling her back before she could even think about missing the handhold.
“Let’s do this the easy way so you don’t end up drifting like Jarrod back there.” Si pulled her against him and she tried to ignore the crawling feel of his embrace through her skintight suit.
She didn’t look at Si as he spoke to her, but she could see the logic in his plans, she let him hop across the gap ahead of her and begrudgingly took his outstretched hand. With the weightlessness of space, she swung across easy as anything and continued on ahead of him.
“Why are you here?” He asked, his voice crackling in her ear with the strain of a connection through two systems that weren’t meant to be compatible. “On my ship, I mean.”
“Honestly? I’m not sure anymore.” She needed to find the right time to tell him the man he’d just set to drift was the younger brother of her employer. “This started out as a snatch and grab job. I was supposed to get in, get the ship and get paid. But you… you’re not something any of us counted on.”
His face fell in a scowl and he loosened his grip on her. “So, Captain, what do you plan on doing with me know that you’ve popped me out of the deep freeze?”
“I didn’t defrost you. Your psychotic ship did.” How many times was she going to have to tell him that? “And I don’t know. You’ve thrown a wrench into things and I’m just trying to figure out what’s going to incur the least amount of damage.”
“For you? Or for your crew?”
The question wasn’t valid.
“You are bigger than all of us.” She stopped, clinging to the hand hold and staring at his face under the blue lights inside his helmet waiting for the realization to kick in. “Your resurrection will kill more people than you can possibly begin to fathom.”
“I can’t restart a defunct war all on my own,” he said, and the casual tone stirred a fear she’d buried deep inside her.
“You’ll try and that’s the problem. A lot of people managed to dodge the executioner’s blade when you disappeared, but now.... To be blatantly honest, I think the Pääom would destroy anyone and everything they had to, to truly be rid of the false hope you gave the rest of us.”
His expression fell flat and in the dim suit lighting she saw h
is jaw twitch. “I’m just one man.”
“There are more than a few people out there waiting for the right person to get behind. And there are more who were once on your side that would gladly knife you in the back first chance they got.” She breathed out the fear clawing through her. “Desertion is the most cowardly of crimes. Finding out a man they thought was martyr deserted them… that’s not something I want to see the punishment for.”
Pulling herself further along, she finally found their target.
“What the heck is that?” Osiris pointed to the shelled tracker clinging to the ship.
It was black. Nearly indistinguishable against the background of stars and the dark hull. Fading into blood red in the distal portions that lay against the metal, it reminded Dani of a host of nightmares she’d had as a child—before she realized the real monsters looked just like her.
Scaled, with antennae laced down its back in a pattern that mimicked a circuitry grid, the tracker’s carapace blinked dimly.
“That’s not a simple Tack n’ Track model. Slap one of these on the hull and she holds tight and always calls home so they’re not worried. Their real name is azotochtli. We call them squeakers.”
“How in the black do you remember a name like that? It looks more like a bug than anything else.”
She didn’t answer his first question—since he moved on from it quickly enough that he didn’t really seem to care—and moved straight to the implied second.
“Well, it’s organic if that’s what you’re getting at.” She looked at the bug-like tracker. Its banded shell looked very much like the segments of any number of the species of roaches that plagued the outer colonies. “Problem is… if we remove her, she’ll send out a blip to her receiving point, and they’ll know we pulled her.” And at three feet in length, with claws that could latch to metal… Dani didn’t want to get any closer.
“We’d have to get out of here pretty fast.”
“And do some creative course changes.” She let her hand fall across the gun holstered in the suit. “What kind of a hit could Obie sustain?”
Si looked past her to the tracker. “Inside her shields? A glancing blow wouldn’t do much. A direct hit with anything meant to pierce through metal could be disastrous.”
“Alright, a glancing blow… with just enough power to dislodge the squeaker.” She popped the gun from its holster, adjusted the settings and took aim.
A thought made her pause. Grimacing, she took a deep breath. “Do you think you could get a hold on me… relativity and what not.”
Osiris laughed and took a firmer grip on his hand hold, wrapping his other puffy arm around her waist. “Good enough?”
She closed her eyes as the pressure of his arm brought up memories of a past she’d tried too hard to forget. “It’ll have to be.” She lined up her shot again, pretending the small amount of pressure around her waist didn’t hurt her soul.
The trigger compressed easily under her finger and the blue ion charge sizzled over top of the squeaker and bounded away. The electric pulse burst and shimmered as it broke over a flickering bubble.
“Damn, it’s shielded. Means we’re going to have to remove it manually… and there’s only one of us on board with steady enough hands. We’ve got to get back inside and get José up to speed so we can get this little creep off.” She snapped the gun back into place and tried to swing around him.
His arm held her firmly in place. “Hang on a minute.”
“Seriously, I don’t like being out in the vacuum.” She gave him her best “I will hurt you” glare and tried to wiggle from his grasp. People got weird when you told them you didn’t like being touched by men. Men in particular always took it as a personal offense.
“Listen. There’s only one place on the ship that I can be reasonably sure Oath Breaker isn’t listening in and not even then I’m not totally certain it’s safe to speak of this sort of thing, it’s why I had her put you in my cabin. Out here is the only place I know she can’t hear us.”
“There’s something you and your beloved ship don’t share? ” Dani snorted a laugh.
“It’s not funny. If I don’t tell you this now, chances are you won’t have long before you end up like Jarrod.”
That got her attention.
She waited, mincing words with him wasn’t going to get her back in the environs of the ship. He still hadn’t let go of her and the closeness only added to her sensation of claustrophobia. When he opened his mouth but said nothing, she said, “Spit it out. I want to get back on board.”
“Jarrod Mandall didn’t put me in cryo. Oath Breaker did.”
FIVE
Osiris could count on his left hand the number of times he’d seen someone struck dumb. The dazed look on Yella’s face marked number four.
“What?” Yella’s glove went to her helmet, rubbing across the visor where her forehead would be. Without his grip on her waist, she would have drifted away.
“Mandall’s the one that physically put me in there, sure, but he was acting under Obie’s orders.” He saw something flicker in her eyes, recognition? “She’s forced you to do something already, hasn’t she?”
“Not exactly, I mean, she woke you up… and she tried to steam Stugg when he wanted to pull Mandall out….” She met his eyes, her brow furrowed in the convex lenses of her helmet. “So, you’re telling me your ship really is psychotic?”
“My best guess is that her AI got twitchy… a virus maybe? I haven’t had much time with her since being pulled from that ice chest, but I don’t think anything has changed from when I went in.”
Her face twisted in a disgusted confusion. “Why?”
He shrugged—as much as his marshmallow suit would let him. “I don’t think anyone’s tried to fix the problem. If what José told me was right, she’s been in a junkyard for the last decade or so… there’s no reason for anyone to have tinkered with her AI.”
“No.” Her head shook inside the helmet. “Why did she force Jarrod to toss you in the deep freeze?”
“Because she thought I was going to join the Pääom.”
Danielle snorted, leaving a puff of condensation on her mask. “She probably pulled you out of cryo when I came on board because my Pääom file explicitly directs any of their agents to apprehend me on sight, and shoot any of my associates. That would keep you from trying to join the other side.”
“That was part of it, though she couldn’t tell me why they want you dead. You’ll have to tell me that story sometime.”
“It’s not very interesting….”
She glanced away. Lying.
“So. Were you going to jump ship and sign up with the Pääom?” she asked
“No, but Jarrod and I had convinced some of the Pääom’s officers I was—and apparently I’d been more convincing than I thought. The plan was to get in with the Mandall family and take them down from the inside.”
“Because the Mandalls were the ones who betrayed Perhonen….”
“Jarrod was a good kid. He didn’t have anything to do with that…”
“Frank and Theo Mandall are the only ones left—aside from their wives and children. After a public beheading of… someone who clearly wasn’t you, you were posthumously charged and found guilty of the murder of the four other Mandall brothers.”
“Well, they were right about three of them…” He let out a long sigh. “That doesn’t matter anymore. Here’s the plan—”
“Listen, just because you should be nearing retirement doesn’t mean you’ve got seniority. A lot has happened in fifteen years and you need someone to keep you from pulling a Paddok.”
“I don’t know what that is…. And I suspect that’s the point. Let me be clear about something. Obie may have had Jarrod put me in that cryo-capsule, but it’s clear she still thinks I’m in charge. The best way for you to stay alive is to convince her you’re subordinate to me.”
“You think she’d kill me? Remember, my file will keep you from getting any ideas abo
ut going back to the Pääom.”
“She killed Jarrod. What’s to stop her from killing the whole lot of you?” He didn’t mention Obie had already offered.
“She didn’t need Jarrod anymore. He put you into cryo, his role in her sordid production was over. She still needs me to keep you in line.”
Osiris thought back to the other reason the ship had brought him out of cryo for her. “She knows me too well.”
She gave him a scathing look.
“It’s not important. What is important is making sure we keep you and your crew alive long enough to get them off this boat.”
“How do I know you didn’t program her yourself? How do I know this isn’t some really weird ploy? I mean, I know José trusts you, but....”
He released his hold on her and let himself drift away back to the next rung, his brow knitting together in a quiet frustration. “I joined up, staked my life in this war so that pointless murder would stop. Does the Pääom still have their camps?”
Danielle face went ashen and she closed her eyes, visibly struggling to breathe. Her jaw going stiff as she turned out toward the black. “Yes, official.” The whisper was barely audible through his helmet speakers as she swallowed hard.
“Publicly… they’ve always denied their existence, but yes. The camps are still running. They don’t have to send anyone there, though. Ruma is just as desolate and they can put you to work without it being considered slave labor, though it doesn’t pay much of anything. If I had to put money down, I’d say more people die there than in the camps. Both are abominations.”
Silence hung between them, permeated only with the sound of the recycled oxygen pumping into his helmet.
“You’ve made your point. Is there anything else you want to say that has to be said outside?” Yella asked.
He shook his head inside the plazglass bubble and held out a hand for her, pulling her across the expanse and all the way back to the ship’s hatch.
Back inside the airlock, Yella sat on the plastic bench, pressing herself to the seat with the hand holds on the bulkhead behind her. He closed the exterior hatch, and tried to figure out what she was thinking as her eyes followed him to the atmo-cycle.
