by Jake Elwood
Joss stared up at Chan, despair in her eyes along with the faintest tinge of hope. She still seemed to think he might find a solution. Singh didn't look up. He knew better.
"There's no coms," Chan told them. "We can't call for help."
Joss's eyes widened. Singh looked up, gave Chan a long, bleak stare, then put his hands back over his ears and resumed staring at his feet.
Vogel kept screaming, and Joss turned her attention back to him, speaking in a low, soothing voice, clinging to his hand as if she could physically drag him out of the hell he'd sunk into. The sweet, alien smell coming from his body was stronger now. It clogged Chan's nostrils, choking him, making him yearn for the honest stink of Coriolis sludge.
He stepped out into the hall, closing the door, but he could still hear the screams. For a moment he stood, every muscle in his body rigid, fighting against the decision he had already made. Then he set off down the hall, through the office, and into the changing room, where he found his helmet in the rack. "Last chance," he murmured, then pulled the helmet on.
The radio earpiece gave a low hiss. "Liz?" he said. "You out there? Liz? Anybody?"
Static was his only reply.
Leaving the helmet on, he walked back through the dormitory, the offices, and finally the labs. He didn't open the door to the lab where Vogel lay dying. The helmet muffled the screams, but didn't block them out. He went past the lab as quickly as he could and kept walking. He rounded the corner, pushed open a door, and started up the stairs. The door swung shut behind him, but he could still hear Vogel screaming.
The dead woman on the landing seemed to stare up at him reproachfully. "Mind your own business," he told her, and opened the hatch marked "Escape Pod."
The pod was tiny. He wedged himself inside, watching as the hatch slid shut. The hatch was airtight, and it looked fairly thick. There was no way he could still hear Vogel screaming in the lab. It had to be his imagination. It would fade. It had to fade.
He scanned the pod's control panel. There was a big red button to launch the thing, a joystick, and a throttle. If there was an emergency beacon or a radio they had to be automatic, because he didn't see any other controls.
He shrugged and wriggled his fingers inside his gloves. It was time to go. There was only one sensible course of action left to him, and this was it.
You can't do it, Jim. You can't abandon your crew. If there's one line you can't cross, this has got to be it. You've had your little hissy fit. Now get out of this pod and go back to your crew. They need you.
"Need me for what?" he shouted. "What am I going to do for them?" A memory flashed through his mind, of taking Vogel aside during a break, ignoring the stink of sludge rising from their boots while he told the kid about his plan. Watching Vogel's face light up as he thought of the possibilities. A ship of our own. We'll call it the Albatross. We'll go in search of salvage, and we'll come back rich.
"Enough," he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. "I've done enough." He found the big red button by touch, took a deep breath, and pushed it.
Chapter 8
Liz lay in darkness, curled into a tight fetal position, blood and snot running down her cheek and pooling under her right ear. She was crying, from fear and pain and despair, her whole body shaking with sobs. Only the cold steel walls closing in on every side kept her from kicking her feet and sliding into a full-blown tantrum.
Her helmet was shattered, a shard of glass from the faceplate embedded in her face a centimetre below her eye. That she was still alive felt like a miracle, but it was a miracle of very short duration. She wasn't going to live much longer. She still couldn't believe the freakish strength of the thing that had attacked her. Hell, she couldn't believe anything about the creature. It was something from a nightmare, it couldn't be real. She had fought as hard as she could and achieved nothing, and now it had free run of the ship.
She sniffled, and the helmet rattled as her head moved. The helmet had kept her alive. The creature had wrapped its tentacles around her head and tried to crush her skull, and it had damn near succeeded. Modern vac suit helmets could survive incredible impacts, but this helmet had splintered around her.
Hammering the thing with her fists had done nothing. She doubted the creature had even noticed. Finally she'd wrapped her arms around that hard, repulsive body, lifted the lower tentacles clear of the floor, and thrown herself at the edge of the hatch, head-first. Slammed the thing into the steel with all her strength. The impact had rattled her clear to her heels, and the thing had let go, just for an instant. The blow would have crippled a strong man, but the creature had recovered immediately. It had been right on her heels as she flung herself down the corridor and into the only bolt-hole she could reach.
The ventral airlock.
Her hand went to the hatch beneath her, tracing the protective cover over the fat red button that would open the hatch. She wanted desperately to flip the cover up and give the button a push. The hatch would fall open beneath her, she would drop to the surface of Enceladus, and death would come in minutes.
It was in the middle of a fantasy about her funeral that the first pangs of embarrassment started to penetrate the all-encompassing misery. "Elizabeth Jones, bad-ass pilot, dies crying," she muttered. "Kicked off of three different ships for fighting, banned from four space stations and the entire planet Mars for kicking too much ass, no longer welcome in the roughest bar on Ganymede because she put three grown men in the hospital. And now she meets one lousy alien, and she decides to end it all?"
She gave a low chuckle. Her shame was fading, washed away by a familiar rising anger. "Slap me around on my own ship, will you?" she snarled. "I'll show you a thing or two." Her hand moved from the hatch below her to the hatch above, the one that would let her back into the ship.
Her fingers ached with the need to press the small green button that would open the top hatch, but she made herself hesitate. She couldn't defeat the thing with her fists, however satisfying it might be to try. She needed a better strategy if she was going to have her revenge, and by the black and frozen gods of the space lanes she was.
So she lay still, and she thought furiously, and she listened. There was an occasional metallic vibration through the deck plates, but she hadn't actually heard the creature in quite some time. If it was still in the corridor above her, she was dead. If it had gone aft, she would live an extra thirty seconds or so. Then she'd be dead. If it had gone forward, though…
She kept herself perfectly still, held her breath, listened with every scrap of concentration she could muster. And she decided that she had no idea at all where the creature was. So she jammed her right thumb against the green button. The hatch slid open with a hiss, light flooded in, and she pushed herself up. She uncurled her body as soon as she was clear of the lock.
The corridor ahead of her was empty. She whipped around, looking behind her.
Empty. She got to live for a few more seconds.
She was making plenty of noise, though. It was best to assume the creature was coming. She lunged to her feet, ignoring the protest of her muscles, and raced aft. Her legs had gone to sleep, but she made them move, ignoring the tingling that quickly sharpened into pain. Her run turned into a drunken stumble on numb feet, but she reached the hatch at the end of the corridor and slapped her hand down on the panel.
The thing was somewhere behind her. She could hear tentacles thumping against metal, then a hiss as a hatch slid open. She didn't turn to look, just sprang through the hatch in front of her and fell to her knees. She turned as the hatch slid shut, and pressed her thumb against the emergency locking button.
Tentacles battered the hatch, and she heard an angry squeal from the other side. She made a rude gesture at the hatch, then dragged herself to her feet. It was time to get to work.
Singh, she saw, had been sloppy with his tools. There was a niche in the wall for the welder, but he'd left it sitting on the deck. She checked the charge. There was more than enough juice left to toa
st one small alien.
She set to work rummaging. There was a space station orbiting Mars, where someone had actually imported guard dogs from Earth to keep people out of a warehouse. One night, Liz, after too many drinks, had broken in with a couple of other drunken morons. They hadn't even found the Scotch before the dogs came after them.
Liz had made it onto a pile of crates, but the guy beside her wasn't as quick. She couldn't remember his name, but she remembered what had happened to him. He'd thrown an arm up, instinctively covering his throat. The dog had latched onto his forearm, and wouldn't let go.
That was what she needed now. Something for the creature to grab onto, and not her arm, either. Something long enough that she could keep the thing at a distance.
Something that would conduct electricity.
The creature was, she thought, largely mindless in its attacks. It grabbed to the first thing it could lay a tentacle on and just hung on. Her helmet was proof of that. All she needed was the right bait.
The biggest wrench on the ship was gone, taken by Joss for use as a weapon. There was, however, a heap of scrap metal that Singh hadn't needed for the bridge window. She rummaged through the heap and came up with a metre-and-a-half length of rebar.
The Stick-All was on the deck beside the welder. Sloppy. Singh was going to need a good talking-to. She picked up the tube and used it to seal one of the metal clamps that led from the welder onto the end of the rebar. She gave it a minute to set, then slathered Stick-All along the length of the rebar, leaving a twenty-centimetre gap for her hand.
There was silence in the corridor outside, so she booted the hatch. Tentacles slapped the hatch on the other side, and she kicked a few more times. She wanted the thing in a mindless frenzy. Then she popped out the lock button on the hatch, picked up the welder's other clamp, turned on the power to the welder, and tapped her knee against the touch panel.
The hatch slid open. For an instant the creature froze, as if startled. Then it lunged at her, and she jabbed it with her rebar.
It ripped the bar from her grasp. Something yanked her forward, and she stumbled toward the creature, cursing. The clamp fell from her right hand. Her left hand was still wrapped around the rebar. Some of the Stick-All had dribbled onto her glove, and she was effectively glued to the metal.
The creature squealed, trying to toss the rebar away and reach for her. For an instant a tentacle touched the side of her face. Then the tentacle pulled back, wrapping around the rebar and jerking it aside. It gave an angry squeal as it found that it was stuck.
For an endless, nightmarish time the creature thrashed the rebar back and forth. Liz lurched to and fro, almost crashing into the creature, using her free hand to fumble desperately for the zipper that sealed her glove to the rest of her suit. Each time her fingers touched the zipper, the creature would yank her arm away.
The creature paused, tentacles clenching to twist the rebar. Liz got her thumb and forefinger onto the zipper pull, tugged it a few centimetres to the side –
And the creature sprang backward, yanking her along so that she almost pitched onto her face. The welder crashed into her, and she breathed a fervent prayer that nothing had broken. The creature backed through the hatch and into the corridor, dragging Liz by her glove and the welder by the cable. She used her free arm to scoop the welder up and hold it against her side, protecting it as best she could.
There was a sound like tearing fabric, and she felt cool air against her wrist. The pressure on her glove was pulling the zipper open and tearing away the seals underneath. The creature gave another mighty tug, Liz sprawled forward onto her stomach, it tugged again, and her glove tore free.
The fall had knocked the wind out of her, but there was no time to worry about details like breathing. She scrambled to her feet, staying close to the creature, not letting it break the cable on the welder. Free of her weight, the creature went wild, raging from one side of the corridor to the other as it tried to tear itself free of the rebar. It reached the open hatch to the ventral airlock and fell back, writhing. With a loud tearing noise it ripped one fat tentacle free of the glue, spattering the wall with blood as its skin tore. Four or five more tentacles still held the bar, and Liz stepped in close. She scooped up the dangling clamp on the red cable, squeezed the handle, and snapped it onto the end of the rebar.
There was a fat blue spark, bright enough to leave an after-image each time she blinked. The creature squealed.
And that was all.
Liz didn’t see the tentacle that swept her feet out from under her. She lay on her back, watching the creature thrash, and saw another tentacle come free.
It didn't work. She'd been so sure! She'd done everything right, and the stupid creature refused to be electrocuted.
It wasn't fair!
Tears filled her eyes, the flailing monstrosity blurred, and then the world turned pink. Pain faded away, and fear, and a familiar emotion swept in to replace them.
Rage.
She'd done her part. She'd been clever and determined and brave, and the fact that the creature refused to die was utterly unforgiveable. Fury suffused her, a roaring filled her ears, and the ship, the moon, the entire universe faded away. Nothing existed but an all-consuming wrath. She was distantly aware that she was screaming, her throat growing raw. There was a strange pain in her hands, and it grew and grew until finally it became a distraction big enough to pierce the red cloud around her mind.
Liz tried to move her fingers, discovered they were clenched tight, and made herself relax them. That made the pain worse, and she gasped. She blinked, shook her head, and blinked again, and suddenly she could see.
The creature was still in the ventral lock. She was standing over it, one fat cable from the welder looped around the thing's neck, with her hands wrapped around the cord on either side. She'd torn the skin on her fingers from pulling too hard, and she could feel knots in the muscles along her shoulders and back.
Her foot was on the side of the alien's head, jamming the misshapen skull against the deck plates. The welder cord was twisted deeply into the flesh of the thing's neck. The alien was dead, the head flopping sideways as she relaxed the cable. She seemed to have broken its neck.
The tip of one tentacle twitched against the deck plates. Two more tentacles had come free of the rebar, and she saw rips in the legs of her vac suit. The thing had put up a good fight.
But it had lost.
"Well," she said, her voice husky from screaming, "I guess that'll teach you."
Liz stood over the thing, looking down, feeling her anger ebb away. She drew back her foot to kick the creature, then lowered her foot to the deck. After a while she turned off the welder.
It was easier than she had expected to get the black clamp free from the rebar. The glue had burned and become brittle, and a couple of good twists let her pull the clamp loose. She grabbed the end of the rebar, heaved the creature out of the lock, and dragged it down the corridor. She put it back in the aft airlock where she'd found it and sealed the inner hatch.
She stripped off the remains of her helmet, then peeled off the suit as well. She was confined to the ship until she found another suit. She pulled the piece of glass out of her cheek, sealed the cut in her cheek and the tears on her fingers, and washed her face. Then she limped to the bridge, lowered herself into the battered remains of the helmsman's seat, and turned on the radio.
"Hello? Anybody out there? Captain?"
Silence.
"Damn it." She tapped the screen on her console. Air pressure was holding steady. Everything seemed to be functional. It didn't look as if the creature had done any harm, except to Liz and her vac suit.
Something pinged.
Liz tapped her screen, bringing up an alert message. A ship was approaching Enceladus.
She felt a brief surge of joy. They were rescued! The people in this new ship would have vac suits. They would be able to go into the base and look for Chan and the others. She opened a command menu and
hovered her finger over the radio icon.
And hesitated. She was painfully aware that she had no idea what was really going on. There were pirates, unregistered ships, and a hidden base. Aliens, dead bodies, disappearing crew. Suddenly she didn't want to reveal her presence until she knew who these new arrivals were.
Another ping. She peered at the message, baffled. It was something she had never encountered in all of her years as a pilot.
Incoming encrypted message.
She tapped the "Accept" icon on the message, and a burst of static filled her ears. Then a man's voice, low and gravelly, with some sort of refined Earth accent.
"Blackbird One, this is Blackbird Seven. Do you copy?"
Blackbird! Liz thought. I knew we should have called it Blackbird.
"We're coming in hot," said the man. "If you're still intact, you'd better let us know, because we're going to sterilize everything that moves."
Liz stared at the console, her mouth going dry.
"Blackbird One, are you there? Does anyone copy?"
The radio went silent. Liz sat alone on the bridge, her mind racing, weighing her options. If the Raven could receive encrypted messages, then the new arrivals were allies of the pirates. She thought of the Mixatonic, riddled with holes, everyone gone, and decided that she really didn't want to meet anyone the pirates counted as friends.
"Jim," she murmured. "Where are you? If you're still alive, you're in a world of trouble."
Chapter 9
"I'm going for help," Chan said. "That's what I'm doing."
He didn't move, though. Enceladus tumbled by beneath him, so beautiful it brought an ache to his chest, and beyond it the rings, glittering in the light of Saturn and the distant light of the sun. He was in a low, fast orbit, and the view changed quickly, but it was always beautiful.
