Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4)

by Scott Rhine

  He was the perfect gentleman as he led her into the pit of hell, the place where she’d been imprisoned. The Zeiss family had draped the walls with sheets to disguise the chamber, but Yvette could still smell the dampness and shampoo. She could still hear her cries echoing. When she noticed the syringe on the stainless-steel tray, she felt a tangible ache to plunge it into her own vein and experience the quiet.

  The command and medical crews clustered around the stasis chamber. Red said, “Snowflake, you can wake Mercy now.”

  Lou grabbed her hand the instant the field was off and kissed it. Like Sleeping Beauty, her eyelids fluttered. Auckland hung an IV bottle beside her. “We’ll drip this in gradually. If she has any adverse reaction, we can freeze her again.”

  Ten minutes into the procedure, Mercy was snoring. Lou said, “Is this like a coma? Should we give her adrenaline?”

  Yvette felt her friend relax. “No. This is good.”

  “How long is she going to be like this? I mean, she’s been asleep for months.”

  “Actually, from her standpoint, she’s been awake for a very stressful eighteen hours. Let her rest.”

  Lou fretted constantly. When they pulled out the IV a couple hours later, Mercy stirred. Her first muzzy question was, “Where did all the colors go?”

  Auckland held up a card and asked, “How many shades of blue do you see?”

  “Only one,” she replied.

  “Well, her extra senses are muted,” Auckland said. “We can move her to her own bedroom upstairs until after the fuel run. Then, we can move her to the Hollow. Nurse, you can check her three times a day for symptoms and give her booster injections twice a week.” He handed her a month’s supply of serum and needles.

  As the men transported Mercy to her room and Red helped the groggy woman into pajamas, Yvette stared at the temptation in her grasp. One push and she could become a monster too, endangering a pregnant friend for the sake of a few hours of release. Several minutes later, she felt a presence lingering in the central command room above her. From the aura of sadness and anticipation, she assumed it was Lou. Clearly, he wasn’t getting the amorous reunion he’d been anticipating.

  Yvette launched herself upward, telling him, “Cheer up. You can escort me to the elevator.” At the top, she caught the rim of the access tube with her toes and held out her arm for him to take, until she saw his face. There was no beard. Toby had been lurking, waiting for her, and the stasis chamber was empty. Her lungs slammed shut.

  Toby looked at the floor. “I’m sorry, for everything.” He took a shuddering breath. “I just had to face you and tell you what I did was wrong.”

  She turned away, waiting for the attack. Seconds passed, and the empathic feedback hit her in the forehead. The man was a black hole of grief and misery, but under that was a yearning. He needed her approval. This animal wanted her approval.

  “I took something sacred that you offered and trampled it,” he continued. “I was sick, but I swear, I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”

  The only aggression emanated from Red who stood ready to leap across the room and kill Toby if necessary.

  He didn’t move.

  The nurse forced herself to examine the man. Yvette had always viewed him as a drunken hit-and-run driver who had staggered away unharmed by a collision. Now through the link, she could tell that his actions of that insane period had wrecked him as well. He was trapped in a twisted ruin wrapped around a telephone pole. Through the smoke and flames, she could just recognize that man she once respected. “Dr. Baatjies,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “Yes?” He held his breath, bracing himself for the blow and telling himself he deserved it.

  Instead, Yvette decided to give him fresh air. “You did outstanding work on the first phase of the treatment. If this works, you’ll have saved millions of lives.”

  “It was a team effort.” He turned a gasp into a nervous half laugh. “Lou kept hanging around me. I had to do something to get rid of him.” Recalling that he’d planned murder against this man, justifying himself with the same phrase, Toby’s face twisted and he let out the strangled exclamation of a man who’d just smacked his thumb with a hammer.

  Red hovered, her right hand flat and rigid in strike position.

  “I can tell how hard it’s been for you,” Yvette said softly. “Can you imagine how difficult it has been for me?” She lowered her shields for an instant and showed him the terror that pierced her standing in Olympus again. She visualized each room and let herself experience the panic and loathing that room induced.

  Toby collapsed, wailing at her feet.

  Even at the fringe of the emotional exposure, Red paled and swayed. “Back on suicide watch for him.”

  For a split second Yvette wondered if she’d been too harsh and wanted to stroke his back to comfort him. No. She wasn’t ready to feel sorry for Toby yet. She whispered to Red, “Get me out of here.”

  Chapter 12 – A Run to the Corner Store

  Lou wandered into the storage room, bleary eyed and unshaven. Brushing past them, he sensed all of the comet mission members and their significant others crowded inside. Most of them were crinkling around in bulky spacesuits. “Glad you could join us,” Toby said with genuine humor. “Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

  Taking a swig of the obnoxious coffee blend, the pilot grunted. “I slept almost four hours. It was the waking part that was good. Why are you so happy? You didn’t cut anyone into sausage this morning, did you?”

  “No,” Toby replied with more reserve. “Yvette spoke to me yesterday. I understand I have you to thank for that.”

  Lou chuckled throatily. “I got treated to ‘the Salmon Ladder on the Raging River’ last night, and you made that possible. So we’re even.”

  “What’s that?” Toby asked.

  “A secret Asian sex maneuver that Yuki told Mercy about. Ho! My woman wanted to make up for missing my birthday this year . . . and Father’s Day. Did she ever!”

  Park coughed. “You know we can all hear you. I’m Asian, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I guess you’re used to a diet of cold borscht,” Lou replied.

  Red snorted in laughter, but Nadia, Park’s partner, slapped Lou in the back of the head.

  Zeiss raised his voice. “Captain Llewellyn, mission 7-11 is a marathon: twenty hours of hard labor and four hours of decontamination. Are you up for it?”

  “Sir, this is my normal mission prep. Only this time I don’t have a hangover.”

  “I gave him a hall pass for being tardy,” Red explained. “He wanted to walk Mercy down to meet Yvette for safekeeping. So he was late because he was holding hands with his wife and didn’t want to say good-bye.” Several people made ‘isn’t that sweet’ noises at this revelation. “Herk and Park, help Snuggle Bear suit up.”

  Zeiss smiled at Lou’s chagrin. “Back to our regularly scheduled program. There are seven of us heading up: six members on the shuttle plus Toby standing by in the landing bay to treat casualties. Risa, is the conversion process finished?”

  The Latina structural engineer gave a brief report. “Herk and I have been busy hauling things up to the hangar and welding the last few weeks. We put skis on Ascension for our uneven ice landing. All the parts of the distillery are installed. I have no idea how well it’s going to work. I’m sure we’ll have a few adjustments to make once we feed the fuel components in.”

  “How’s the communication cable you ran?” Zeiss asked.

  “Plenty of bandwidth.” Risa explained to the others, “Since the Magi built this ship with a barrier that shields against any kinds of radiation—electromagnetic or mental—we needed a bypass so we could maintain contact with control.”

  Over the radio, Yuki spoke up. “The walls in the hangar broadcast barnyard images, and we can control the telescope lens from here. There must already be a connection of some kind.”

  “We haven’t found it in time for project 7
-11,” replied the commander. “Risa, how did the return pods work?”

  “We followed all the new safety steps. I’m sure being this close to the sun helped, too. The portable heaters and pressure tent we took worked like a charm. The oxygenated liquid filled the decontamination pods, and we came back clean as a whistle. There are still sixty pods left in the room.”

  “Why did you call the mission 7-11?” asked Red. She had been busy supervising the medical team until the day before. “Because there are seven participants?”

  “Because we’re going to the convenience store on the corner for a drink and chips,” Risa replied. Then they had to explain corner stores to Red because she’d never been to one. “They’re usually run by someone from India. Can I say that?”

  “Is the mayor or Auckland here?” asked Lou.

  “No.”

  He proceeded to do a spot-on mockery of Pratibha. “Oh, you came to get a Big Gulp of jet fuel? It would be more cost effective to order nachos with that.”

  Nadia slapped him again, but this time she was laughing. “If you ever do me, I’ll put lithium grease in your ketchup bottle and give you the runs for days.”

  Zeiss scolded, “Children! We’ll have three support personnel here in the saucer. Since he can pilot, Park will be active duty first and take standby for second shift. Yuki will be active for second shift to monitor for storms and quakes. She’ll be tuned in on our approach in case we need to pick a second landing zone or need specific minerals. Once we’re safely back, Auckland will take the last four hours alone. He’ll babysit us through decontamination. Lou planned the choreography for this run, so I’ll let him walk you through it.” He fiddled with a projector until there was a click.

  Lou spoke up. “We’re already pacing the comet. Once in the shuttle, we’ll have Snowflake pump the air out of the landing bay. I know that it’s supposed to stay contained by the force field, but the explosions after we landed damaged the membrane. We’ll open the lens and the nictitating membrane completely. Wide open like that, the lens is effectively a movable hole in space that looks like it only has one side. Snowflake will hover the lens 100 meters off the comet, facing the surface. We wait for a calm and then eject no faster than a jogger. We should drop to the ground like a tank out the back of a cargo plane. Simple.”

  “What do you mean ‘wait for a calm’?” Nadia asked.

  Zeiss fielded the question. “The lens may cause swirls in the comet snow like a dust storm. If there’s an icequake or an eruption on the surface due to sunlight boiling off volatile material, we’ll pull back and wait for traffic to subside. It’ll be just like crossing the street to buy that Big Gulp.”

  “If you lived on the other side of an eight-lane freeway,” Nadia said, nervously.

  “Relax, I could do this blindfolded,” Lou said. “My only worry is that there might be some blowback from our landing, takeoff, or one of these comet belches. In that case, some of the foreign objects may enter the hangar. This is key: Toby will need to pick up every speck bigger than a marble and remove it from our runway. Any rubble can cause incredible damage to our landing gear, or bounce into our hull. On the bright side, these are free resources. Put them in a fifty gallon drum, and we’ll sort through them later.”

  “I’m game. What do I use to collect the fragments?” asked Toby.

  Zeiss said, “Oops, we almost forgot the grabbers. They look just like the ones Apollo used on the moon to take samples.”

  Over the radio, Yuki said, “I used those to stock the high shelves in the dining hall. I can play fetch after I finish testing all the helmet cameras and voice logs.”

  “Not enough time,” Lou decided. “Nadia, could you go get those?”

  “Da,” she replied, slipping out of the storage room.

  After snapping on Lou’s last glove and testing the suit’s systems, Park whispered, “What is birthday sex?”

  Herk answered before the pilot could. “The one night a year when a woman in a committed relationship will do anything you ask. It’s great. You do the same for her on her birthday, of course, but she usually wants a night out at an opera, dinner at a restaurant with cloth napkins, and a present first.”

  Lou said, “You know what we’re talking about, Park. You took Nadia to the Bolshoi Ballet before we left, and you hate that shit. I mean, you turned the big three-oh last week. You had to have . . . you know . . . Herk, what’s Russian for bow-chicka-bow-wow?”

  “She gave me a book—Seven Habits of Highly Effective People—and we shared a cookie,” the Korean drive specialist said solemnly. “I wasn’t allowed to have either in bed.”

  “Ooo,” said Herk in the same tone one would after witnessing a fresh arrow wound.

  “Ouch,” echoed Yuki, who’d been eavesdropping.

  When Nadia returned, Park announced, “I’m going to seal the storage unit and test the communications cable.”

  After her partner left, Nadia said, “What did you guys say to get him so riled up?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Herk muttered guiltily.

  “He didn’t give me a good-bye kiss on the cheek. Also, he addressed half the crew and didn’t say please once. This is unlike him.”

  “Ask him when you get back. It’s game time,” said Lou, screwing his helmet into place.

  The climb up the tube was uneventful. Zeiss led Lou using a tether. When they passed the thick layer of radiation and psi shielding, the commander said, “We have passed the point of no return. We are beyond the barrier into normal space. Olympus, do you read me on the cable?”

  “Loud and clear, sir,” Yuki replied.

  Once they arrived in the decontamination area, the team placed a few heaters and arranged emergency air tanks and a plastic tent around the first available pod that would prepare their bodies for reentry into Sanctuary. Even if Snowflake couldn’t raise the pressure and temperature to welcome levels, they could still send someone back in a hurry.

  When Lou reached the landing bay, he walked the thirty meters of the shuttle, dragging his fingers along the old friend. Entering the command module through the airlock, he tested the air quality using voice commands. “Life support is green,” he reported. “Red, perform a system check on the Chemical Oxygen-Iodine Laser. We left the COIL deployed before we entered Sanctuary. You can retract the toys back into the nose cone.” Helmet off, he was pushing buttons for prelaunch checks. Even blind, he could power up this bird.

  When he flipped an overhead switch to disable a false alarm that told him the Icarus engines had been jettisoned ages ago, Lou glanced up through the lens. “Fuck me sideways,” he muttered.

  “What?” Red demanded. “Is ignition failing?”

  “Worse,” he said, head still tilted upward. “I can sense the grav signature of the comet, but not in stereo like I usually do. I have no depth perception.”

  “Is it because Mercy is on the other side of the barrier?”

  “Or the dampening drugs she’s on. Either way, I can’t make touchdown. I’m off from the mission. Toby, you’re up. Give me that grabber, and I’ll wait in decontamination.”

  “You’re going to be able to find rocks?” Toby asked.

  “Olympus will talk me through using the cameras,” Lou said softly. “If you need advice, I’ll be monitoring.”

  Zeiss had to reorganize the mission. Toby would sit with the non-command personnel in the cargo compartment. As co-designer, Toby would ride herd on the distillery with Risa. Zeiss opened the hatch between shuttle sections so the two could be chaperoned. Freed from chemical duty, Nadia shifted to the laser controls at Lou’s station. She had cross-trained on the high-powered weapon and would blast away obstacles to make Herk’s drilling job easier.

  “Smooth,” said Park, observing the asteroid landing on his cameras. “Barely a puff of snow dusting the wings.”

  “Watch closely,” Lou warned, “because you’re riding shotgun with Red next mission.”

  “I don’t have enoug
h practice hours,” Park objected.

  “Relax,” Yuki said. “A black belt is just a white belt who never gave up.”

  “Already quoting the great and powerful Z,” Lou observed.

  They deviated from mission specs when Nadia found that bursts from the COIL on low power made a better ice remover than the drill. Herk just had to keep the flex-line siphon near the site to capture the steam.

  Lou complained, “For the next nineteen hours, I’m as useless as tits on a bull.”

  “Keep an eye out for stresses building below the surface,” Zeiss suggested. “You can still spot those before they manifest as fractures.”

  “Roger,” Lou agreed. “Hey, Red, be careful on the way back. You’ll be carrying a lot more mass. The controls may be a little sluggish.”

  Red politely ignored him while she watched the asteroid surface for real threats.

  Chapter 13 – Truth and Consequences

  While Park was distracted on duty, Yuki entered every room of the saucer, peeling her listening devices free before the doctor woke up. The bug in the dining area was obstinate due to repeated exposure to heat and cooking oil. She had to grab a spatula and a ladder to scrape it. The process would destroy the bug, but she didn’t dare leave one behind.

  So she wouldn’t get grease spots on her uniform, she slipped out of her pants and climbed the ladder in just her J-Wear bottoms. She didn’t mind because with all the conservation measures lately, it was hot in here. She was bent over the step ladder applying elbow grease, grunting, and thrusting with all her might, when she heard the door shoosh open. “Just cleaning a bit, Doc,” she ad-libbed. She wiggled enough with the next few scrapes to make the bronchially-challenged man wheeze half to death. “There,” she proclaimed.

  When she turned, Park was staring at her, mute and stunned. Finally, someone who appreciated all the exercise she’d been doing. She found that she enjoyed his attention. He was a little straight-laced but dependable. With no ring on his finger, he was also technically single. Yuki crouched on the ladder, trying to distract him from the pile of listening devices to his left. “Should you be away from your post?”