There was a minor problem: The suit would necessarily be dragged somewhat off course as the sheet fell away. When the sheet was clear, Hutch would come up behind the suit, catch it again on the frame, and correct its course, turning it once more toward the open airlock.
Everything went perfectly. “It’s on its way, Jake,” she said. “Looks good.” He shut down the book. “It should be there in five and a half minutes.”
Hutch would be braking again, dropping behind the suit as it descended toward the space between the towers and the telescope.
He tried to relax. To divert himself by thinking about the two deliveries left before he took Hutch back to the flight school. Given a little experience, she’d probably be a decent pilot. But he suspected it was a lark for her. When she discovered that star flight was mostly sitting alone, or at the very least disconnected from real life, in a tin can for weeks at a time, she’d bail. She’d find something better to do. She’d commented once or twice how boring she thought her father’s profession had been. Jake hadn’t said anything. Best to let her find out for herself. But she’d probably go home eventually and sign up for law school. Or get into real estate.
“Still on course,” she said. “Three minutes.”
He had another mission coming up when this series was complete. Hauling supplies to the archeological team on Quraqua. They’d found ruins out there. Dead a long time, apparently. Thousands of years, they were saying.
He hadn’t been to Quraqua before. It had been a long time since he’d looked forward to a mission. But this one should be interesting. He wanted to see what they’d found, and he expected they’d be delighted to take him down and show him. Researchers were always—
He heard the suit thud into the airlock. “Hutch,” he said, “it’s here.”
It was the last hurdle. He went over to the control panel and pressed the pad that would close the outer hatch and begin pumping air into the lock.
But the red light came on. The hatch wasn’t closing.
He pushed it again.
“Hutch—?”
“I see it. Part of the suit didn’t make it in, Jake. It’s wedged half in, half out.”
Don’t panic.
He looked up at the vent.
And pushed on the pad again. “Come on, damn it.”
“Give me a few minutes,” Hutch said.
“To do what? You can’t get in here with the lander.”
“Bear with me. I’ll have you out of there shortly.”
“How?”
“Jake, I’m busy. Try to relax.”
She seemed to have forgotten who was in charge. But he saw no point in hassling her. So he waited.
If nothing else, he’d go down in interstellar folklore. The guy who died to save a cat.
He tried to conserve his air. Take shallow breaths.
Hutch, what the hell are you doing out there?
He started thinking about things he’d wanted to do that he’d never gotten around to. There’d been women he’d simply walked away from who’d deserved better. He didn’t think he’d ever expressed his appreciation to his father for all he’d done. He—
Abruptly, there was a noise in the airlock. Like someone moving around. But that wasn’t possible. “Hutch?”
“Yes, Jake?” She sounded annoyed.
“You’re not running around out there dressed in a Flickinger field, are you?”
“No, Jake. I like you, but I’m not going to get myself radiated—”
“Okay. I thought I heard something in the airlock.”
“You did. Just sit tight and let me work.”
There were times he’d been a crank. He tended to think of himself as better than other people because of his profession. Most people were ground-huggers, people who never looked above the rooftops. They were not playing the game at his level. He shouldn’t have let them see how he felt. But he did. He enjoyed doing it.
At the moment, he wished he was one of them.
He wasn’t sure how much time passed. He had no way to keep track. But he remembered once when he was a boy of about four or five he’d gone to the hospital with an inflamed liver. He’d had the impression that several days had gone by with no sign of his mom and dad. He thought he’d been abandoned. Later, he learned they’d been in the room almost from the start.
He felt that way now. That hours were passing. That he was alone.
Then something clumped into the airlock.
“All right,” said Hutch. “Try it now.”
He pressed the pad. Got a yellow light. It was working. And he could hear the hatch closing.
Thank God. “Hutch, what did you do?”
She’d ignored the plan. She’d cut several of the sheets into thin strips and knotted them together into a line the length of a football field. She’d never really released the Gonzo suit. It had been tied to the lander the whole time.
“I was afraid it would get wedged down there somewhere.”
“Which is exactly what happened.”
“So I just pulled it free. And tried again.”
“Why didn’t you tell me what you wanted to do?”
She smiled. “I wasn’t sure you wouldn’t tell me not to do it.”
They were in the Copperhead’s passenger cabin. “I don’t mind leaving this place behind,” he said.
“You going to do any more animal rescues?”
Tawny was rubbing her head against Hutch’s ankle now. She’d switched allegiances. “I think I’ve had it with that.”
Jake glanced at Tawny’s food and water dispensers, which he’d brought over from the Ossila.
“I wouldn’t want to cause a problem,” Hutchins said, “but she’s going to need her litter box.”
Jack McDevitt has been described by Stephen King as “The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.” He is the author of eighteen novels, ten of which have been Nebula finalists. His novel Seeker won the award in 2007. In 2003, Omega received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel. McDevitt’s most recent books are Echo and Firebird, from Ace. Both are Alex Benedict mysteries, about a far-future antiquarian who specializes in solving historical puzzles. A Philadelphia native, McDevitt had a varied career before becoming a writer. He’s been a naval officer, an English teacher, a customs officer, and a taxi driver. He has also conducted leadership seminars. He is married to the former Maureen McAdams, and resides in Brunswick, Georgia, where he keeps a weather eye on hurricanes.
Find Heaven and Hell in the Smallest Things
Simon R. Green
They threw me into Space and then dropped me into Hell, with just a dead woman’s voice to comfort me.
They should have known better. They should have known what would happen.
We sat in two rows, facing each other. Twelve people. Yes, call us people, but we certainly weren’t men or women anymore. Twelve people from Old Earth, wearing the very latest hard suits. The new armour, built for strength and speed, cutting-edge science, and all the latest weapons. Along with a built-in AI to interface between the occupant and the armour…to speak soft soothing words to us, keep us human, and keep our minds off the perfect killing machines we’d become. We sat in two rows, six hard suits staring at six hard suits—identical suits of faceless armour, except for the numbers One to Twelve stencilled on our chests. Mine said Twelve.
Looking at the suit opposite me was like looking at myself. Gleaming steel in the shape of a man, with a smooth, featureless helm where a face should be. We couldn’t look out, but it also meant the world couldn’t look in, and for that, we were grateful. We don’t need faces. We see the world with new eyes, through the augmented senses of the hard suits.
We were all of us strapped in, very securely. To hold us steady, or to keep us under strict restraint so we couldn’t hurt anyone, including ourselves. Just in case we were to go crazy. It does happen. After all, no sane person would allow themselves to be put in a hard suit.
The armo
ur keeps us alive. The armour makes us strong and powerful. The armour is our life support and our life sentence, a prison we can never leave.
We don’t use our names anymore. Just the numbers. The people we used to be are gone. We don’t talk much. We never met each other before they marched us aboard this ship at gunpoint. We’ve never seen each other outside our armour, and we don’t want to. Pretty people don’t get locked inside hard suits. Not handsome, whole people, with their whole lives ahead of them. At the hospital, they let me look in a mirror once, and then they had to pump me full of tranks to stop my screaming.
The ship’s Captain spoke to us through the overhead speakers. His voice sounded human enough, but he was no more human than we were. Just a memory deposit, grafted onto the ship’s AI—a computer haunted by an old man’s memories, the ghost in the machine. A memory of a man, to run a starship, to take things like us to worlds where Humanity isn’t welcome.
“This is the Captain of the Duchess of Malfi,” said the human-sounding voice. “We’ll be dropping into orbit around our destination shortly. The planet’s official designation is Proxima IV. Everyone else calls it Abaddon. Why? Because it’s just another name for Hell.”
The Captain wears a ship the way we wear our armour. It occurred to me that might make him a little more sympathetic to our plight than most.
“What did you do, Captain?” I said, through my suits’ speakers. “What did you do, to be imprisoned in this ship?”
“Are you crazy?” said the Captain. He sounded genuinely amused. “I asked for this. Begged for it! Thirty years service in the Fleet, running the space lanes, at play among the planets…and they took it all away from me. Just because I got old. And then they came to me, and offered me my own ship and the freedom of space. Forever. Of course it wouldn’t be me, as such, just the memory of me, but still…I jumped at the chance. I only thought I knew what Captaining a ship was like. If you could only see the glories I see, through the ship’s sensors. They say Space is empty, but they’re wrong. They need to see it with better eyes. There are delicate forces and subtle energies out here that would put the brightest rainbow to shame. There are giants that walk among the stars, living shapes and concepts we don’t even have names for. We are not alone, in the dark…”
An awful lot of people go crazy, when you take their humanity away, and lock them inside a box. Even if it’s a box as big as a ship. I tried again.
“Don’t you miss being human, Captain?”
“Of course not! How could I miss being that small, that limited? Anyway, the real me is still human. Somewhere back on Old Earth, probably dreaming about me out here…Look, whatever briefing they gave you about what you’re doing…forget it. Abaddon isn’t like anything you’ve ever encountered before. Here’s the real deal; everything on the planet below is deadly to Humanity. The air, the gravity, the radiation, everything you might eat or drink, and anything you might happen to encounter. Very definitely including the extensive and murderous plant life. Once you’re down there, you’re at war with the whole world. If you get distracted, you’ll die. You let anything get too close to you, you’ll die. You get lazy or sloppy, you’ll die. Just…do your job, and try to survive.”
“Are there any human people at the Base on Abaddon?” said Three. The voice that issued from his speakers was neither male nor female. All our voices were like that. Anything else would have been cruel.
“Hell no,” said the Captain. “No people anywhere, on Abaddon. It’s not a people place. That’s why they’ve sent you to work on the terraforming equipment, because robots and androids can’t operate under the extreme local conditions. Now brace yourselves; we’re entering the atmosphere.”
The whole cabin shook as the Duchess of Malfi dropped like a stone, and gave every indication of hitting something that was doing its very best to hit back. I say cabin, but cargo hold would probably be more accurate. No frills or fancies, just a holding space for twelve suits of armour. Turbulence shook us like a dog shakes a rat, slamming us all back and forth in our reinforced straps. We didn’t feel a thing, of course; feeling is one of the first things you learn to do without. The armours’ servomechanisms whined loudly as they struggled to compensate for the sudden movements. My suit’s AI flashed up status readouts on the inside of my helm, to reassure me we were still operating well within the armour’s specifications.
Any human being would have been killed by that fierce descent, but we were never in any danger. Hard suits are designed to insulate their occupants from any danger they might encounter. I could hear the wind howling outside the ship, screeching like a living thing, hating the new arrival that pierced its atmosphere like a knife. The Captain was right. We’d come to a world that hated us.
“The landing pads are almost two miles from Base Three,” said the Captain. “Once I’ve dropped you off, find the beacon and head straight for the Base. Don’t let anything stop you.”
“What happened to Base One and Base Two?” said Seven.
“They really didn’t tell you anything, did they?” said the Captain. “How very wise of them. The whole planet is covered by one massive jungle, and everything in it hates you. Base One was entirely mechanical: drones and robots run by the Base AI. Plants overwhelmed the whole thing inside a week. You can’t even see the Base anymore, it’s buried so deep in vegetation. Base Two had a human crew; they lasted almost two months before they stopped answering their comm. The rescue party found the Base completely deserted. Force shield down, main doors wide open; no trace of a living person anywhere. Not a clue anywhere as to what happened to them. Maybe you’ll find out. Maybe you’ll last longer.”
A holoscreen snapped on, floating in mid air between our two rows, showing remote sensor imaging of what was waiting for us down on Abaddon. At first, all I could see was the light: bright and vicious and overpowering. My suit’s filters had to work hard to compensate in order for me to see anything at all. The landing pads were still some distance below us, shining like three crystal coins dropped into an overgrown garden. In reality, each pad was almost half a mile wide, specially designed to absorb the destructive energies that accumulate from starship landings. The jungle came right up to the edges of the three pads, surrounding them with tall rustling stalks of threatening plant life.
“Why do they allow plants to grow so close to the landing pads?” said Nine.
“Base Three sends out drones to burn it all back, once every hour,” said the Captain. “But the jungle grows back faster than the drones can suppress it. If it weren’t for the radiation the pads generate, the jungle would have buried them too. Base Three has its own force shield; nothing gets past that. Remember; once we land, watch yourselves. You’ve got no friends down there.”
You’ll be fine, Paul, said a warm, comforting female voice in my head. The hard suit’s AI. Just follow your training, and everything will be well. I’m right here with you. I didn’t say anything, but I shuddered in spite of myself.
The whole ship cried out as we slammed down onto the landing pad. The holoscreen disappeared, replaced by a flashing red light and an emergency siren. The Captain’s voice rose over it. “Out! Out! Everybody out! I’m not staying here one moment longer than I have to!”
Our straps flew open, releasing us at last, and we all stood. Guns and other weapons appeared and disappeared quickly, as we ran our system checks. Servomotors whined and whirred loudly as we checked our responses, like knights in armour about to set off on a crusade. And then a hatch opened in the far wall, a ramp extended down to the landing pad, and we went slamming heavily down the steel walkway to meet whatever was waiting for us.
The light hit us hard, almost blinding us despite our suits’ filters, but none of us hesitated. We just kept pressing forward, wanting to be well clear of the ship before it took off again. The ramp disappeared the moment the last one of us stepped off, and the hatch slammed shut. We were down, on Abaddon.
We moved quickly to stand back to back, in squads, the
way we’d been trained. The light was just about bearable now, but the air seemed…sour, spoiled. Two suns blazed fiercely in the sky, too fierce to look at directly. The sky was the crimson of fresh blood, the roiling clouds like dark masses of clotted gore, outlined by great flurries of discharging energies from storm patterns higher up. A heavy wind blasted this way and that, howling and shrieking. Abaddon: just another name for Hell.
The jungle was all around us: unfamiliar plants a good ten, twelve, fourteen feet high in places. The colours were harsh and gaudy, primal and overpowering, clashing blatantly with each other in patterns that made no sense, in a manner openly upsetting and even disturbing to human aesthetics. There were things like trees, with dark purple trunks and massive spiked branches, weighed down with masses of serrated, puke-yellow leaves. All of them bended and bowed at impossible angles, as though they wanted to slam their tall heads down on us. And all around the trees were every variation or type of plant you ever saw in your worst nightmares, thrashing and flailing with endless hate and vitality, whipping long barbed flails through the air, pushing and pressing forward as though they couldn’t wait to get at us.
They’d seemed restless enough on the holoscreen, but once we appeared on the landing pad they all went crazy, absolutely insane with rage and bloodlust. Every living thing strained towards us, churning and boiling like attack dogs let off the leash. I actually saw some of them rip their own roots up out of the dark wet earth and lurch forward on roots curled like claws. There were huge flowers with mouths full of grinding teeth, wild with the desire to drag us down. Seed pods hurtled through the air to explode among us like grenades, but the razor-edged seeds clattered harmlessly against our armour.
It was as though the whole jungle was coming at us at once, struggling against each other in a vicious urge to get to us, with no sense of self-preservation at all. We stood together in our squads, taking it all in.
Armored-ARC Page 14
