by Alex White
Or she could admit to herself that she didn’t drag her bones to the far side of space just to roast them here.
Marcus is still near the egg storage. If she can get to the escape pods, she can instruct him to collect the praepotens sample and the drives, then seal herself inside to wait. The creatures may be clever, but they won’t get in through an airlock door. She’ll have to convince the others not to launch, but she can cross that bridge when she comes to it.
All that matters is getting that sample.
She picks up her portable terminal and unfolds the screen. It still has a charge. She can instruct Marcus via wireless uplink. She doesn’t have time to type the painstaking commands just yet. She just needs him to stay alive.
Blue: //PRIORITY 1: remain hidden in airlock and await orders
>>ERROR: system cannot process the request
Marcus: First priority is rescue and protection of RB-232 survivors
She scoffs. He’s protecting the people who would just as soon leave her behind.
Blue: //Can you get me to the escape pods?
Marcus: At present there are more pressing demands. Recommend you call out for help. Remain in shelter. I’ll come for you ASAP.
But he won’t have time. They’ll launch the escape pods without her.
“Well fuck you, too.”
Blue reaches down and clamps her G-tube before disconnecting it. Then, she winces as she gently pulls out her catheter tube. Everything is so raw—those bastards haven’t let Marcus come by to replace it and disinfect. She checks the seal on her colostomy bag. It looks nice and tight. Marcus always did a good job locking it down. She swings her legs over the side of her bed, reaching for the ground with her bare toes. Her eyes aren’t good enough to perceive depth, so it’s like reaching out into a chasm.
The mattress is higher off the ground than a normal bed, ostensibly so she can be close to eye level with visitors. She feels stretched to her limit when her right big toe touches the cold surface. Slowly, she eases her weight forward off the mattress.
“Okay,” she says, repeating the word every second to keep the assurances going. “Okay.” She hasn’t stood in over a year. She won’t be able to catch herself if she falls. Slowly she slides down onto her feet and her ankles lock in place, sustaining her swaying frame. She holds fast to the sheets with a white-knuckled grip, her biceps quivering with every small motion.
It’s two giant steps to her old chair.
She could try to stumble them, falling into her seat, but that seems too risky. To her left, there’s a rolling tray where Marcus usually puts her meds. She reaches out with one hand, pulling it to her, clutching the metal lip to her stomach. To stabilize, Blue throws her other arm across it, leaning her weight onto its wide caster base.
Using it like a walker, she traverses the distance on decaying muscle. When she arrives, shaking, at her chair, she turns to orient her rump to the seat. Pulling the tray with her, she moves cautiously until the backs of her knees touch the edge. She goes to sit, and the tray comes out from under her with a heinous clatter, striking the bony top of her bare foot.
Pain lights up her leg. That hit will leave a green bruise. Her skin is like an old woman’s now, mottling over with the slightest provocation. A bruise isn’t going to kill her, however, so it isn’t worth worrying about. The only thing that matters is getting her ass to the docking area.
The crew quarters module looks like a cyclone went through it. Clothing, gear, and personal effects lie strewn across the deck. Blue wonders what’s important enough for people to defy a full evac. Jewelry? Trinkets of another life? Everyone has a fetish, a sentimental object from a time before the Cold Forge, before they became Company property. Maybe the praepotens sample is Blue’s fetish object, from a time when she was foolish enough to believe in a cure.
Her wheelchair is a stair-climber, so the debris poses little threat to her progress, though she has to make sure when she rolls over an article of clothing that it doesn’t get tangled up in the wheels. She’d be stuck. That’d be a horrible way to go—done in by an errant shirt.
Rolling across the threshold of the crew quarters module, she enters the central strut. Several closed doors block the way, and she’s thankful for it. If she saw what lay ahead, she might not be able to make herself proceed. She’s just meat in a chair, after all—easy pickings for the creatures vomiting forth from the SCIF.
If she hurries, she can barricade herself inside a lifeboat before the creatures spread to the docking area. For the moment, the beasts will be preoccupied with her colleagues. The thought sickens her, but what choice does she have? She must strike while the iron is hot.
The central strut looms around her in the red lights of the evac warnings. How far out have the creatures progressed? Every shadow jumps, dancing just beyond Blue’s focal plane. She wishes she had glasses, but every prescription she’s tried has failed as her optic nerve continues its sclerotic decline. They could be right in front of her, and she’d barely notice.
As she passes the lights of the medical bay, she glances inside. Dim convalescent lights, like a cool summer’s night, invite her into its comfortable interior. It’s the only salubrious part of the station, probably because the computer can’t override the lighting grid and risk damaging patient care. All of the settings in the med bay are manual, at the discretion of doctors.
Resting quietly atop one of the beds is Kambili Okoro. There’s no blood on his sheets, no snatcher dismembering him in rapturous delight. He’s alive, and peaceful.
Kambili sold her out. He told Dorian where to find the server. For whatever reason, the station has gone to hell, and Blue is ninety-percent certain that Dorian Sudler’s arrival had something to do with it.
But she blackmailed Kambili. He lost half his face doing something he didn’t want any part of. It was her fault. As she watches him sleep, chest rising and falling, the sting of her crewmates’ abandonment wells inside. If she leaves him to die, she’ll have ditched the last shred of her humanity in this godforsaken place. If she tries to help him, it could kill them both.
“Motherfucker,” she mumbles, steering her wheelchair toward the door.
The door shuts after she passes inside, and the med bay’s soundproofing kicks in, muffling the klaxons. Inside here, there’s a chime and a pleasant voice says, “Alert. All personnel please check monitors for urgent messages.”
The facility supports ten beds—enough for just under half of the crew. There’s a surgical station, but that’s rarely been used. The person who needs the most medical attention is Blue, and she gets most of her treatments in her room. Kambili is one of only two crew members who ever needed a bed. Anne was the other, having fractured a vertebra in a fall. Everyone else just used the med bay for the supplies whenever they had a cold or needed contraception.
Anyone still in the SCIF wouldn’t need a bed. They’d need a tombstone. Blue tries not to think about it. Since the breakup, she’s had a lot of practice shutting Anne out of her thoughts.
She motors over to Kambili and reviews his vitals. He’s had a few doses of painkillers in the last hour, but she ought to be able to rouse him. Bandages cover the missing half of his face, and his breathing is heavy. Blue reaches up to jostle his shoulder—this is her first time touching him with her own hand. Kambili is heavier than he ought to be. He stirs, but doesn’t open his eyes.
“Kambili,” she says, glad it’s quiet enough in the med bay for him to hear her.
He blinks at her with his good eye, a fugue over his features. He’s not as angry as he usually looks, and she realizes it’s because he doesn’t immediately recognize her. Almost no one sees her human body on a regular basis, and they tend to react with shock at the sight of her. Being outside of Marcus is like being naked before the world.
“You’ve got to get up, buddy,” she says, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.
“Don’t buddy me,” he slurs, laying back down. “Go fuck yourself.”
/> “Kambili, wake up.” She jostles him again. “You have to wake up, come on, buddy.”
He sits up suddenly. “The fuck did I just say to you, bit—”
“Alert,” the pleasant voice says. “All critical systems fault. All crew report to docking area.”
He squeezes his eye shut, trying to push through the fog of drugs enough to hear what’s being said. Blue knows that feeling all too well.
“I know you hate me, but we’ve got to go,” she says. “You’re a dead man if you stay here.”
“Where are the others?” he asks, bewildered. Moving with some effort, he swings his legs over the side of the bed and goes tumbling off like a sack of potatoes. His ragdoll arms get under him, and he pushes himself upright. Blood spills down the backs of his hands where the IV needles come loose, and he swears. Lurching to his feet, he starts looking through the shelf for bandages, and grabs a package of clotter.
Blue considers her answer. The cruel thing would be to tell him the truth, and he might lose his will to flee. She knows all too well by now that fear can equal death.
“They’re waiting for us—in the docking area. Come on, get up.”
“They… left us?” Even drugged halfway to oblivion, Kambili is sharper than most. He stops applying the clotter, letting his bloody hands fall to his sides.
“Focus, Kambili, and let’s work with what we have.” She used that adage with her students a lot, back during her doctoral days. “We can’t stay here. We’ve got to get to an escape pod.”
“Okay.” He shakes his head, wincing. “Right. Yeah.” He stumbles around the bed toward her, obviously unable to walk in a straight line. She backs up her chair so he can pass, but she doubts he’ll make it all the way to the door. He’s a fall risk, and if he hits his head, it could be lights out.
“Fuck,” he says, collapsing to his knees. “Why now?”
“Been asking myself that for a long time.” She rolls past him and stops. “Grab onto the back of my chair. I’ll keep you steady.”
He struggles to his feet, and when he puts all of his weight on the handlebars, Blue fears she’ll tip over backward. She leans forward as much as her ailing abdominal muscles will allow, and he eases off a bit.
“You ready?” she asks.
“As ever,” he replies, steadying himself.
She rolls toward the door, and Kambili takes toddling steps behind. When the med bay door slides open, the cacophony of the Cold Forge rushes into her ears, momentarily deafening her. Klaxons fill the air, there have to be a dozen different critical alarms sounding, and all systems are under some kind of attack. By their nature, the escape pods must be on their own network, ensuring that a general failure doesn’t kill everyone by preventing an escape.
Then again, Titus and Juno were supposed to be air-gapped, too. So were the Silversmile servers, and the kennel cells could only be operated by manual control. One system failing is normal. Two systems is unlikely. All systems, and it’s sabotage. Will the escape pods even work when they arrive?
There’s no time to think about that. She just has to take the next right step, and that’s getting to the docking bay. Kambili stumbles along behind her, half pushing so that the motors squeal tiny complaints. If she were alone, she could really open up the throttle, but she made the decision to rescue him, and that’s that. Her eyes dart back and forth, searching for the lethal shape of a snatcher, but she finds nothing.
Unlike the walls of the kennels, everything in the central strut is an industrial, gunmetal gray—polished, welded, and installed without paint. She gets a dozen false positives as her failing eyes scan the scene from large conduits to cooling pipes. Too many objects vaguely resemble the slender shaft of a snatcher skull.
“Why are you so jumpy?” Kambili shouts over the alarms. “We just need to get to the—”
“Containment failure,” she interrupts, coughing, and Kambili leans in closer.
“What? Like Silversmile got out again?”
“Yeah,” she says into his ear. “And the kennels are open.”
Her chair speeds up as he lets go. She spins to face him and finds him bewildered, swaying in the hall, hands by his sides.
“We’re fucked,” he says. “That’s it.”
“No, Kambili, we can salvage this. You just have to—”
He shakes his head no and points down the central strut. Blue turns her chair around to peer into the blurry distance, but she can’t see what he’s indicating. She knows what’s down there.
He’s pointing at the escape pods, toward the screams of the crew.
INTERLUDE
KEN
Nothing interrupts a good time with porno like an all-crew evac. Ken Riley sits in the toilet on board the Athenian when the transmission belts over his intercoms. He waits to see if he heard correctly. Maybe it’s a drill. Dorian is off looking at a secret project and shagging the hot security officer, and Ken just keeps the ship ready for launch like a glorified errand boy.
Not a lot of pilots would’ve taken on the posting with Dorian Sudler. It keeps Ken away from home for years at a time, not that he has much of a home. The post was a convenient way offworld, and Weyland-Yutani was willing to be lax in its background checks for qualified star jockeys. Ken owes a lot of people a lot of money, but with a few more missions, those people would all die of old age.
The intercom message repeats. It’s not a drill. This kills Ken’s wood. He wipes, closes up his portable terminal, then dashes out into the mid-deck toward the bridge.
“Gaia, let’s get those engines hot!” he calls, and the computer acknowledges. “And open up the docking bay doors! Let me know when the rest of the crew are on board.”
The next set of alerts come through, and it sounds like RB-232’s computer is having a shit fit. Ken races around the mission planning station as it flickers to life, punching in coordinates and knocking out vectors. Without knowing exactly what’s happening to the Cold Forge, though, it’s tough to plan. If, for example, RB-232 needs orbital correction assistance, then Ken is obligated to help push. “
New arrival: Navigator Lupia,” Gaia says, her smooth voice a balm in the stress.
It’s going to be okay for Ken, no matter what. They said evac, and he’s basically already there. It’s hard to get more evaced than being on a fully operational starship with enough supplies to last a hundred years of cold sleep. Sinking into his pilot’s chair, he settles his fingers across the controls and chuckles, remembering the old saying at the academy, “If a pilot doesn’t have his hand on one stick, it’s on the other.”
“What the fuck is going on out there, man?” Montrell says as he rushes in, panting. He’s in his casual gear, and must’ve been hanging out in the crew lounge. The navigator is way out of shape, and he looks to Ken in that moment like a sweaty brown ham. That ham, however, hauled ass, and Ken is appreciative.
“I don’t know but these peckerwoods fucked up something. Like bad.”
“Truth,” Montrell agrees. “Gonna set up some potential escape vectors.”
“Already did that,” Ken says, winking. “Didn’t know if you were going to make it.”
“Thanks, asshole.” Montrell mops his brow and plops down at his station by the mission planner. “You know, this better not be a drill, or I swear to god…”
“You swear nothing. Those evac orders mean you do job, drill or not. Commander Cardozo would kick your ass up and down the station. Guy looks like he’s seen some shit.”
“Engines are up to temperature,” Gaia announces. “Maneuvering thrusters at nominal pressure.”
Ken nods, a stupid habit when talking to a headless user interface. “Thank you, Gaia. Give me hot sticks and snap that docking tube shut when our last two get aboard.”
Gaia chimes an acknowledgement.
Montrell raises an eyebrow. “You’re going to do this manually?”
“You’ve never wanted to do a full-burn maneuver away from a station?” Ken asks. “I bet I can make
Dorian’s eyes bug out.”
“New arrival,” Gaia says. “Copilot Spiteri.” Within seconds, Susan rounds the corner, her cheeks flushed from the run.
“It’s chaos out there. Everyone is panicking, acting like it’s the end of the world.”
“Suzy, Suzy, Suzy,” Ken says, sucking his teeth and spinning his chair to face her. “It’s the end of a space station, maybe. The world will still be there.”
She narrows her eyes. “Fuck you, Ken.”
“Gladly, babe.” He folds his hands behind his head, leaning back in his chair.
She starts to protest when the back of Ken’s chair taps one of the sticks. The Athenian shudders as the maneuvering thrusters fire a short burst. It groans and a half-dozen alarms pierce the bridge. Ken spins back to his console, checking to make sure there’s no damage to the docking clamp.
“What the fuck, Ken?” she shouts at him. “You left your shit on manual?” Montrell mirrors her glare.
“It’s the plan, goddamn it! As soon as Dorian is on board, we button up and blow this popsicle stand. Now, chill, girl!”
“Fuck you, you chauvinist prick,” she says, sitting down beside him. “This isn’t over. Dorian is going to hear about this when the time comes, and—”
“New arrival,” Gaia says. “Unknown entity.”
Ken grimaces, then calls out, “Go to your own escape pods, you fucking dumbasses!”
They wait, listening to the distant sound of RB-232’s alarms.
“New arrival: unknown entity.”
Ken looks across to Susan, then Montrell, then gives them a “What the fuck is it with these people” shrug.
“New arrival: unknown entity.”
“Yes, Gaia, we heard you!” Ken says. “Susan, would you please go explain to the jackoffs in our loading bay that we are not their ship, so they can kindly get the fuck out?”
