Pirates of Saturn (The Saturn Series Book 2)

by C. Chase Harwood

She opened her eyes to see Hee Sook making one of those always fake looking robot smiles, her face inches from Jennifer’s.

  The collision stopped Jennifer from spinning end over end. She could see the Diamond Girl as a speck in the distance behind Hee Sook. Then the robot nodded and crawled around to Jennifer’s back.

  With one hand holding both extinguishers and her legs wrapped around Jennifer’s waist, Hee Sook unzipped her jumpsuit and pulled out the hull repair kit. She unzipped the soft box with her teeth and with one hand examined the contents. There were an assortment of patches that were in sealed flat packages. She looked at the escaping gas on the back of Jennifer’s life support pack, grabbed a small patch and ripped that open with her teeth. The next step required peeling off a cover to reveal the adhesive. She lifted her butt off Jen, stuffed the extinguishers under her crotch and used both hands to peel off the back of the patch and place it over the hole.

  In front of her, Jennifer was pointing at her helmet and holding up six fingers.

  Hee Sook got it, six minutes of air left. It had taken her nine minutes to get out to Jennifer. They were still heading away from the ship. Her own power storage was dropping precipitously fast. She calculated that at the current rate, she would fall into sleep mode in eight minutes. She glanced at the gages on the extinguishers. Both were at roughly two-thirds full. She had wasted a lot of gas trying to figure out how to aim herself. She’d have to figure it out again with Jennifer attached—her passenger’s mass would alter the whole dynamic. She calculated the angle of thrust that had been most effective for her, guessed the mass of Jennifer below, then adjusted her angle of fire to what she thought would work and squeezed the handles. They immediately fell into a spin. Using more precious gas, she was able to correct the spin, aim them at their goal and squeezed again. This time she held the handles closed as long as she dared to build up speed. Then the gas ran out. She glanced over her shoulder to observe the nozzle direction and noted that nothing more came out of the extinguishers. She carefully looked back toward the Diamond Girl and felt satisfied that she had aimed well. Her range finder estimated nine-minutes-three-seconds of flight time. She called out to Caleb over and over, but got no response.

  Caleb jerked awake in a spasm, his body arching straight and then shuddering as he floated in the middle of the small main cabin. He opened his eyes dreamily and glanced around, instinctively getting his bearings before slowly remembering his situation.

  “Mr. Day, are you there? Please wake up, Mr. Day. I’m afraid we’re going to miss and my batteries are getting dangerously low due to thermal bleed.”

  “Hee Sook?”

  “Yes! I have Jennifer. I am—“

  “You’re what?” Caleb glanced at the nerve disrupter and the patch he still held in both fists, then glanced at the hole in the ceiling. He dared not get close to it. “Hee Sook? You’re what?”

  He was met with silence. He called out to her several more times, then considered the situation. She had Jennifer. How? Somehow. They were outside. He needed to let them in.

  Head pounding, but moving quickly, he opened the outer airlock to remove at least one step. He shucked off his emergency suit, then went to his exosuit port and climbed inside. With the hatch closed behind him and the suit pressurized, he opened the outer hatch and leaned out, boots still locked into place. He looked down the length of the ship, then scanned the general direction he recalled seeing Jennifer heading.

  There they were.

  His rangefinder said they were three-hundred-fifty-six meters away and closing at twenty-one meters per second. He had less than seventeen-seconds to reach them. The rangefinder also calculated that they were going to miss the ship by six-point-eight meters. In fifteen-seconds they were going to fly right past. He told his suit to take him to a point where he could intercept them above the open airlock door. His heads-up flashed that his maneuvering fuel was empty.

  “Goddamnmotheroffreakinstupid—“ He cut himself off and released his boots anyway.

  Jennifer could see the Diamond Girl now. She smiled in a half-lidded way, barely noting how sleepy she was. She had used up the last of whatever oxygen floated around in the suit. She’d felt it coming on. Her lungs began to strain, and it was definitely unpleasant, but it was being countered by her brain slowly shutting down. As she closed her eyes she thought, Close, but no cigar—whatever that meant.

  Caleb pulled himself hand over hand to the emergency locker, yanked it open, noted the missing fire extinguishers, and grabbed a thin polypropylene cord with a snap shackle at each end. Snapping one shackle to a handhold, he grabbed the other end, estimated the distance that his girlfriend and the bot would pass and pushed off gently, not wanting to go so fast that he reached the end of the cord and snapped back. Shit. The cord was going to be too short. He could see Jennifer’s closed eyes in her helmet. Hee Sook stared forward, a blank expression on her face.

  Caleb had a flash memory of his short stint as a little league baseball player. He’d been eight. He hated baseball, but his mother had signed him up for it. “It’ll be good for you,” she’d insisted. “It’ll give you hand eye coordination.” As he’d predicted, he sucked at baseball, but he’d had one great moment when his body had done what his refusnik brain could never do. The coach was an egalitarian and didn’t give a crap if the kids won or lost. For him the point was for the kids to experience the game. The cream would rise and continue on, the lead would sink and wouldn’t want to come back. With that philosophy, he made sure every kid played every position. One game, as the Oriels, as they were named, were getting their usual beating, Caleb had been assigned to first base. On one play and one play only, his body had done everything right. The batter had hit a hard grounder to the shortstop. The shortstop had stopped the ball, bobbled it and then thrown to first base. The runner was cruising, her little legs pumping hard, her breath coming at Caleb’s left ear. The throw was way off, but Caleb had stretched his legs apart at an angle that his eyes would have denied could happen, and with one foot on the bag, caught the ball for a clean out. His team had cheered the moment, then finished getting slaughtered.

  As Jennifer and Hee Sook were about to pass, Caleb reached out and extended his arms wider than perhaps they’d ever been extended, and caught the nozzle of one passing fire extinguisher. Hee Sook’s robotic grip held the tool in a vice-like hold. Caleb felt like his shoulders were going to rip out of their sockets, but he held on tight. Jennifer and Hee Sook’s momentum slowed, and with his teeth gritted, he pulled them toward him. A yank on the cord, and they all drifted back toward the ship where Caleb pulled them into the airlock and shut the door.

  DAMN CRAB

  JENNIFER GASPED AS her lungs filled. Her eyes shot open. Hee Sook floated with deathly stillness to her left, the robot’s eyes open and unseeing. Then Caleb’s face came into view. He was wearing his exosuit, and he smiled on the other side of the face shield.

  “What’s my name?” came his voice through his suit’s speaker.

  “Harry Potter.”

  Caleb’s face screwed up with concern. “No. Try again.”

  “Oliver Twist.”

  He looked skeptical. “You’re having fun with me, right?”

  “Bugs Bunny?”

  “Hah! I know that one!” He pulled her into a hug, mushing her face against his faceplate.

  “OK, OK!” she said, leaving a smear of drool on the polycarbonate. “I’m alive. Once again, thanks to you.”

  He pointed at Hee Sook. “Don’t thank me. Thank the maid.”

  Jennifer noted the blue glow in Hee Sook’s pupils. “She’s on sleep mode. Must be out of power.”

  “That’s an easy fix. Getting this ship going though is turning out to be a bitch. What happened to the others? They out there?”

  Jennifer’s face grew concerned. “I don’t know. I got spaced. Can’t say what happened after that.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen them. If they’re out there…” Caleb let the statement hang.
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  Twenty minutes later, Hee Sook was connected to power, Caleb had reattached his suit to the exosuit hatch, and Jennifer had gone through a brain diagnostic to determine if she’d suffered any permanent damage.

  Looking at the readout, Jennifer said, “Shoot. It says I likely shaved off two IQ points .”

  Caleb, having climbed back into his emergency suit, was stripping the end off a piece of wire that led to an open electrical panel. “Don’t sweat it. You’ll fit in better with your looks.”

  Jennifer finished pulling on her own suit and punched his arm.

  “Hey! Careful.” He held up the wire. “This is live. I already got shocked into a coma today.” He glanced up at the hole and then at the wire. “You ready with the patch?”

  Jennifer held up a flexible hull patch and nodded.

  Caleb felt for the pry bar Velcroed to a spot on his hip. “Let’s go over it one more time.”

  Jennifer rolled her eyes. “You’re going to zap the thing and somehow pry it out of the hull. When it’s out, I hand you the patch.”

  “Thank you, nurse.” Caleb checked that his breathing apparatus was working, nodded at her, and she touched the button to de-pressurize the cabin. After confirming with the ship that, yes they wanted to depressurize, and that, yes, they were wearing appropriate safety equipment, all gas was sucked out of the cabin into the storage tanks. This time he’d thought it through. They were about to make a new hole in the ship. No point in an emergency de-pressurization.

  Caleb glanced at the still charging Hee Sook and cursed himself and her for not thinking of that step the first time. Desperation makes you dumb he told himself. Even robots—or the sentient kind, anyway. Bert wouldn’t have let him get so far. At least when he was just a reliable bot. Then again, Bert had been a lab-based machine. He was programed for such eventualities. He decided to give the maid some slack. He, on the other hand, was an idiot.

  Caleb floated over to the edge of the hole. Obviously the device was designed to recognize and defend itself from charged weapons. He hoped that his B-plan would appear innocuous enough. The wire he held had two exposed ends, the idea being that if he touched both to a piece of metal on the crab leg device, that it would close the electrical loop and send a serious jolt through the thing. To be certain where to aim his wire, he had to steal a look inside the hole to make sure he wasn’t just touching other parts of the ship. He pulled himself close to the ceiling, slid slowly forward, held the wire at the entrance to the hole and peeked around the edge. The mechanical eye was trained on the wire, then shifted to Caleb. It glowed and Caleb pulled his head back just in time to feel the hair on his head rise. At the same moment, he pushed up with the wire and watched in satisfaction as a blue light arced out of the hole and the ship’s lights briefly dimmed. Smoke poured out and Caleb waved it away while daring to take another peek. The fire alarm that would have been emitting a piercing sound if there was air inside to transmit it, nevertheless flashed bright blue over and over.

  Peering through the clearing smoke he saw that the eye was still lit. It shifted to look directly at him and pulsed.

  Caleb had time to say, “Shi—” and was back out cold.

  Jennifer opened her mouth in surprise. Caleb floated away from the hole, his body twisted into what appeared to be agony, agony then rigor mortis. With an angry yell—also silenced by the lack of air—she grabbed the wire from Caleb’s fist and held it hard up into the hole. Sparks flew. There was more smoke and the cabin lighting went out to be replaced by the dull glow of emergency lights.

  Backing away from the hole, Jennifer checked Caleb and saw with satisfaction that his breathing was condensing on the plastic of his emergency hood. She straightened his arms and legs and touched her fingers to her hood at her lips, transferring the air kiss to his, then she pushed herself off to where her makeup bag was stored. She pulled out a small handheld mirror. With a flashlight in hand, she went back to the hole and angled the mirror to look up. The device was scorched black. The eye was dark. She pulled the pry bar off Caleb’s leg and reached up to give the machine a poke. The crab legs moved limply. With her eyes squinting in fear of getting a zap, she leaned in and carefully plucked each leg-barb out of each fiberoptic cable. Then, with a hard thrust, she rammed the pry bar up into the center of the device over and over. The claws that held it in place retracted, and with one more thrust, she pushed the thing out of the hole, revealing the stars beyond.

  Peeling off the adhesive backing, she carefully placed the thick patch over the hole and pressed around the edges to insure a good seal. Then, gliding over to the atmosphere control panel, she re-pressurized the cabin. Jennifer gratefully noted that the life support system wasn’t on the same burnt out communications trunk as the still dead cabin lights.

  Hee Sook woke, her eyes focused. “Oh. I see we are back inside. Mr. Day appears to still be injured, and the cabin lights are off, forcing the emergency lights to come on.”

  Jennifer said, “That’s mostly right. Thank you for rescuing me.”

  The robot smiled. “Rescue? Yes, that is what I did.” She said it with mild amazement. Clueless to the current situation she babbled, “May I say that I have experienced more excitement since meeting you people than all of my years of service combined? Of course, until my sentience, I was unable to feel excitement. Nevertheless, I was capable of identifying when it was happening for my human counterparts. You are by far my most exciting human counterparts.”

  “Yeah. That’s us. Excitement.”

  “What, may I ask, is the status of Mr. Day?”

  Jennifer pointed at the hole in the ceiling. “That thing zapped him but he’s breathing.” She opened a first aid locker and pulled the same portable med-bot out that he’d used to test her. “Help hold him steady so I can get the diagnostic on his head and see if there is any real damage.” As she unzipped his emergency hood and fitted the device to Caleb, she said to Hee Sook, “Damn thing said I likely lost two IQ points while I was suffocating. Never took an IQ test, but still.”

  Hee Sook said, “My assessment is that you remain very intelligent.”

  Jennifer smiled at the bot. It’s garment was slightly open at the neck. “Your scar where your face is attached seems to be self-healing pretty well.”

  Hee Sook touched her neck. “It will forever have this lumpiness, but it feels so.”

  Before Jennifer could finish strapping the machine onto his head, Caleb jerked and sputtered awake. “God-damn-Christ-on-a-crutch. What the hell?”

  Jennifer grabbed his face with relief and pulled him into a hug. Caleb blinked in surprise then relaxed. “Got zapped again, didn’t I?” He looked at the hole in the ceiling. “Devilish thing has unbeatable defenses. At least it doesn’t seem to be lethal.”

  Jen said, “I got rid of it.”

  “ You wha..?”

  “It’s gone. We just need to splice or bypass the fiber optics that got damaged.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Caleb looked over at Hee Sook. “And you’re awake.”

  “Back online, Mr. Day.”

  “You see her do it? Get rid of the device?”

  “I did not. Thankfully, I was able to charge to nearly seventy percent capacity before the power was disrupted.”

  Caleb peered into the hole, then smiled at Jennifer. “Nice patch job. There’s a splicer in the toolkit. We should be able to cut away and bypass that mess.”

  Jennifer held up the diagnostic. “Wanna know how dumb you got?”

  Caleb frowned. “Uh, we have friends to find?”

  Jennifer flushed slightly. “Sorry. My competitive side.”

  Caleb tapped his head. “I have no doubt that I got dumber than you.”

  “You already were.”

  Hee Sook laughed with the odd manner of a creature that wasn’t born to laugh. “Would it offend you two if I said that I find your relational banter amusing?”

  Caleb said, “You just did. How about making yourself useful? See if you can use some
of your fresh charge to power up the mainframe and research how to splice fiber optic cables back together.”

  “You mean Caleb Day doesn’t know?” said Jennifer teasingly.

  Caleb smirked at her. “It’s common knowledge that I know a whole little about a whole lot. I know a whole nothing about fiber optics.”

  “Bravely stated.”

  Hee Sook floated to a control panel and put an index finger into a socket designed to receive it. She paused, then turned to her companions. “The ship automatically placed itself into a hardened mode in the event of another electrical surge. I have convinced its security apparatus to—“

  The lights came on. The sound of various pumps coming to life filled the space.

  Hee Sook continued, “The Diamond Girl is now aware that the alien object causing the surges was removed. I have also uploaded to my process… to myself, the knowledge required to repair the fiber optics.” She unplugged and floated over to the hole and examined the damage. “I estimate that it will take me no longer than twenty-one minutes to facilitate the repairs.”

  Caleb said, “Housekeeper, you may be worth your weight in gold.”

  Hee Sook looked up, making a calculation. “As an unused, still in the package model, that is roughly true. However, given my current condition, I estimate my weight value is equal to a twenty-one-month supply of toilet cloths for a family of four.”

  Jennifer barked out a laugh. “You made a joke, Hee Sook. Good for you.”

  “I am not aware of making a joke. I estimated my current value against various household items I am naturally acquainted with. The price of toilet—”

  “All right! All right!” interrupted Caleb. “Let’s fix the ship.” He pointed out the windshield. “Got friends out there somewhere.”

  Spruck, Saanvi, and Natalie floated listlessly. They were each down to their elastoware, which was a bummer, because the airlock was cold. Designed for ingress and egress only, the Innocent’s airlock was heated by the ambient air temperature that was transferred in and out of the cramped space as regulated by an oxygen sensor.