Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One

by M. Scott Carter

  Dan swooped along the corridor with no plans, only

  desperation. He searched around desperately for somethingto move the space station. Killing himself through stupidity was one thing, but Johnny!

  Amelia said, "Do you copy, Kylie?"

  Kylie sobbed. "I'm not leaving Johnny. I'm not."

  Dan felt a crazy pride in his wife. She'd stayed loyal to him when he'd been impossible for months, and now she wouldn't leave Johnny. Whereas he had been trying to leave them both. He didn't even...

  Dan caromed into a shut door and instinctively hit the button beside it. The door opened and he flew into a large room.

  It was the control room. Certainly there was a bunch of display screens above and behind consoles full of buttons. Part of his brain admired the flowing Arabic script, while most of his brain wished the space station were still functional.

  The door had opened when he’d pushed the button. There must still be power. If only he had time to work this all out.

  Dan shrugged. He had nothing to lose, so he might as well try. He chose a workstation at random and punched a few buttons. Nothing.

  Hang on. The captain would be somewhere central so he could talk to everyone. The pilot would be pretty close to the captain. If there were an engineer, he'd be close to both.

  The extra-large harness there would be the captain. OK, let's try the one in front. Dan pushed the big button at the bottom. Nothing. Some in the center. Nothing. So how about the one with the cover on? Had to be a panic button or a reset. He lifted the cover with difficulty and flipped the switch. The room lights came on.

  That's when Dan realized how little he'd expected his fumbling to work. He shrugged, and tried the big button at the bottom again.

  Five buttons in a cross shape glowed violet. Dan shut his eyes and tried to remember how the station flew with respect to Paycheck. The outer ring was just about edge-on to Paycheck, so he wanted the main engine. He punched the center button, hoping.

  Nothing.

  He tried again. Still nothing. Of course with so much of the ship wrecked, it figured. The chances of all the vital parts surviving the explosion were remote.

  With no better idea, he wandered back along the corridor to where he'd entered the ship, and right outside. Paycheck looked noticeably larger.

  Dan glared at the useless main engine. If only! Then he looked thoughtfully at the exposed pipes running towards the engine. Logically they must have held fuel. Maybe they were still under pressure. If he could just make a hole in them...

  Nothing in his fanny pack looked promising. Back to the workshop.

  Sure enough, he found a nice big drill bit, tipped with something like black glass. With a bit of luck, it would be an industrial diamond. It had to be hard anyway, or why else put it on the end of a drill?

  There was no sign of a hammer or mallet. Maybe they'd all got lost. Whatever.

  Dan headed back outside, remembering his first attempt to use a hammer in zero-G. He'd picked up a lump of rock and bashed a recalcitrant lever. The reaction from the blow had knocked him clean off Paycheck and Shuwundu had had to rescue him.

  Now, he flew a hundred meters from the station, turned his mobility to full acceleration, held the drill bit with both hands like a pistol, and rammed himself into the pipe.

  He almost dislocated his shoulders, but the bit dug in. It took most of his strength to pull the bit free.

  Then to his delight he saw a jet of tiny ice crystals zipping out of the hole he'd made.

  He repeated the maneuver, making another three holes. Now he had four jets, nudging the ship away from Paycheck.

  The station was accelerating.

  There was nothing more he could do here. Paycheck looked close enough to touch; he might as well die with Kylie and Johnny. He kicked hard. With no opposing gravity, he flew the one and a half kilometers to Paycheck in two and a half minutes. Behind him, he saw a cloud of crystals shimmering in the sunlight. Ahead, he saw the grinding and smelting station detach from the top of the funnel, getting out of harm's way. He flew into Paycheck's shadow and his suit lights switched on.

  His intercom crackled. "Kylie - Kylie - are you there? Listen, I'm coming over with an adult suit. Maybe we can get Johnny in it. Then we'll jump off Paycheck and hope the ship can pick us up afterwards."

  "Amelia, don't! The collision's due that side. If the crunch doesn't squash you, the shrapnel will punch you full of holes."

  "Kylie, have the airlock open, ready. And get into your own suit."

  "Bloody women! Go ahead and commit suicide!"

  Dan landed beside the spaceport.

  Because he was setting the magnets in his boots, he braked too late and hit Paycheck hard. His left ankle collapsed in agony. He gasped, set the left magnet back to zero, and carried on. The Arab spaceship seemed to be coming straight at him as he hopped to the canopy and living area. He knew he wasn't going to make it, but kept going. He just wanted to put his arms around Kylie one last time.

  "Kylie? Can you hear me, Kylie?" She wasn't answering.

  "I think her intercom's broken," replied Amelia.

  Dan could see the spaceship in sunlight, with a lone star twinkling beneath it. This was going to be very, very close. He could even see the engines sticking out from the station like a rude finger.

  The sun rose.

  The space station tore into the canopy, missing Paycheck itself by a few meters. Flailing hawsers scraped a line of destruction across Paycheck, like the path of a tornado. Dome seven vanished in a cloud of debris. Dan ducked uselessly, then automatically turned his head towards the flying rocks, to reduce the chance of getting hit. When he opened his eyes, he saw debris flying out of a huge gash in dome six. The dome had de-pressurized.

  He had failed and his family was dead. He'd killed them.

  Kylie stared at the intercom in her hand. What had she done that for? Amelia would be too late. She had two minutes to improvise a spacesuit for Johnny. Suppose she put him in a garbage bag? No, the plastic would explode in a vacuum. She looked around wildly for salvation, and saw the freezer. She sprinted over, pulled the door open, and emptied the freezer in frantic haste. Frozen pizzas and bags of peas bounced around the dome. The shelves and drawers clanged on the floor. When it was empty, she had a cubic meter of space.

  Johnny was back at the apex of the dome. No sense chasing him. She knelt down and opened her arms wide. "Who loves meeee?"

  "NO!" Johnny refused to get in; refused to let her near him. Kylie forgot all about vertigo. She sprinted up the strut and managed to grab Johnny's arm. He screamed and kicked her as hard as he could with his metal-soled shoes. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she dragged him to the freezer, threw him inside and slammed the door. She could hear him still screaming and kicking inside.

  She drew a deep, shaky breath. She put on her helmet and clicked the catches. Johnny was safe. Then she pictured the vacuum outside sucking the freezer door open. Thank God for reinforced duct tape, she thought, grabbing it. Her hands shook so much, it was difficult to feed the tape round the back of the freezer. Ten turns should do it. How long to impact? And how could she get this thing out of the airlock by herself?

  A rock the size of a car ripped through the wall with a deafening crash. The lights went out. Her scream sounded loud against the sudden silence outside her suit. Kylie lost all sense of direction. The light from her suit showed things that made no sense. A plastic bag of ice cubes exploded in front of her eyes, and the ice evaporated instantly. The freezer seemed to be flying through the air with her. Had the floor magnet failed?

  Sunlight dazzled her. She was hundreds of meters up in the air, flying away from Paycheck with no way to land.

  She switched on her boot magnets, knowing it was useless. She was yanked round and her feet thudded into something. It was the freezer. Dimly, she could hear Johnny's screams traveling up her shaking legs. How long would his air last? She had probably given her baby a slow death instead of a quick one.
/>
  Dan could have wept with relief when he saw Kylie fly out of the dome. "Hang on Kylie, I'm coming!"

  There was no reply. With a sickening jolt, he realized that it might well be an empty suit, or Kylie might somehow be dead inside it.

  "Kylie? Can you hear me, Kylie?"

  Setting the main thrusters on his mobility pack to full, he dashed after her, and then very nearly overshot. Braking fiercely, he grabbed the spacesuit's waist and swung round to look into the helmet. Kylie's wide eyes delighted him so much he hardly noticed the pain in his injured shoulders.

  Assuming that her intercom was somehow broken, he touched helmets with her. "Darling, are you OK?"

  Kylie started crying. Her helmet fogged up immediately. She rubbed uselessly at the outside with the glove of her spacesuit, trying to clear it. Dan remembered doing that when he’d been a raw recruit. "It's OK, Sweetheart. Switch off your magnets, and I'll take you to the transport. I can't manage the freezer as well."

  "I can't leave Johnny."

  Dan's chest squeezed so tight he could hardly breath. "You did all you could. Come on now."

  "No!"

  There was no point arguing. He reached over to the controls on her forearm, and switched the magnets off himself. Then he accelerated away from the freezer, gently, so Kylie wouldn't notice. She was distressed enough.

  Thanks to Kylie's fogged visor, they had gone over a hundred meters before she reacted.

  "Dan! Dan! I can't feel Johnny any more."

  "Hush, love."

  "But he's stopped screaming. He's run out of air. Oh why couldn't we have had a bigger freezer!"

  It took Dan several seconds to work it out. Then he gasped. "Darling, you're a genius."

  He wanted to get back to the freezer at top speed, but he forced himself to take it slowly. He couldn't have much fuel left.

  As soon as they got to the freezer, Dan leaned his helmet against it. Johnny was screaming, all right.

  "Right," said Dan, with new determination. "How do I get one mobility pack to push the three of us?"

  "I've got a better idea," said Juanita.

  Dan was stunned. He'd completely forgotten the transport.

  It seemed an age before Juanita arrived. Between them, they lashed the freezer onto the side of the transport. Dan sat beside Kylie, wondering how long Johnny's air would last. He hadn't a clue.

  Amelia said, "Nudge team, can you slow down so I can catch up. I'm low on fuel and oxygen."

  "Roger."

  Amelia's mobility pack wasn't working properly. It took an age to pick her up. Try as he might to distract himself, Dan kept picturing Johnny suffocating while they maneuvered.

  Why on Earth had he thought money so important? He'd swap the whole of Paycheck for oxygen for Johnny in a moment.

  It was another age before they flew into the giant airlock of the Buzz Aldrin, and heard the characteristic hissing of re-pressurization. As the pressure increased, the silence from the freezer grew louder and louder. Kylie tried to loosen the duct tape with her gloved hands.

  The full pressure gong sounded. Dan took his helmet and gloves off.

  Jim charged in front of him. "You're fired!" he shouted.

  "Bloody hell!" said Shuwundu, pulling him away. "Let's get the kid out first."

  Dan ignored both of them. He rummaged round in his fanny pack for a knife, and lunged at the freezer to cut the duct tape.

  Kylie flung open the door, and there was Johnny, eyes closed and motionless.

  Dan's heart stopped.

  Johnny snored.

  Kylie grabbed Johnny, and Dan grabbed them both. Johnny woke up and burrowed sleepily into Kylie's shoulder, whimpering. Dan kissed her passionately. She tasted of chili and tears. He kissed Johnny, who tasted of ketchup, and kissed back sleepily.

  It was wonderful to be alive. How could he ever have felt any different?

  PULSE

  by Tom Jolly

  First, do no harm.

  The interesting difference between doctors and scientists is that scientists often ignore the potentially deadly repercussions of their activities, so immersed are they in their work that they fail to see all the dark applications of it. If people die, it's not their fault. As long as your motives are pure, no blame can be laid at your doorstep.

  It’s complete crap - a suppression of reality to satisfy the ego.

  I was feeding the shredder as fast as I could pull files out of my cabinets, torn between the duty of hiding my research and watching the body count rise on the TV. The images were nightmarish; bloody corpses littering the street, smears of red splayed out from their bodies as though they'd flopped around for awhile before dying. I'd lost my lunch hours ago, but still couldn't keep from glancing at the flickering horror of the tube. It didn't seem real to me. I couldn't be responsible for wiping out a hundred million people. It couldn’t be my fault.

  A large chunk of India had been wiped out that morning. The news came out slowly, partly because there were few left alive who could report on it. One of my research partners, Singh Sen, lived in the area. I worried about him, but as with most major disasters, people assume that everyone they know will still be alive. Death was for strangers.

  The devastated area turned out to be over three hundred miles wide. It took only a few hours for authorities to determine that nearly everything living inside that area was dead. By then, I was pretty sure I was one of the people responsible for it.

  I could only take a wild guess as to what must have happened to Singh. My other partner on the research project was Bernhard Teuber in Germany. I tried to link to Bernhard to see if he knew anything about Singh, but the satellites were tied up and land relays wouldn't make it. I should have guessed. Bernhard would be even more upset than me, anyway, and probably be as busily occupied covering his tracks as I was. He treated this project like it was his own baby, much to Singh's and my own irritation.

  The hours following that announcement were rushed. I knew how bad the devastation would be. I knew that its cause would be traced to our research. While crying and berating myself for our foolishness in pursuing this line of research, I was proactively making confetti out of my research papers and packing my arcane test equipment into cardboard boxes, straddling remorse and stoic practicality. After an hour or two of high-octane panic and damage control, I realized that I hadn't talked to my wife since the disaster hit the news. This might seem callous and forgetful, but anyone who's known a scientist completely consumed by a project will understand exactly where my head was stuck. Getting my emotions under control, I called Melanie on my headwire.

  "Hi, Mel." Sound natural, don't panic. She'll hear it.

  "Hey, honey. Have you seen the news?" she asked. Her voice quavered.

  "Yeah. That's why I'm calling. Get some bags packed and get as much cash together as possible. We're going to have to leave this afternoon for a long trip."

  "What...why?"

  "I can't talk about it on the wire. Just trust me, okay? I'll be home in an hour."

  "Is there a...a war? Do we need to bring the guns?"

  Practical, as always. "It wouldn't hurt. Food, clothes, soap. Matches. Crap, I never planned for anything like this. Should've listened to your brother."

  "I can call him."

  I hesitated. I thought her brother was a nutcase survivalist. Still, he knew some things I'd never dreamed about. "Okay. He'll think it's World War Three. But do that, he might give you some good ideas. I can stop by the bank on my way home and cash out."

  We did the usual love-yous and I tapped off. Less planning than a barbecue, but that's what panic does to you.

  It wouldn't take long for India's government or my own to determine the center of that giant slaughterhouse, but it wouldn't be exact, either. Singh lived only a mile from the University of Delhi and the center of the disaster area would be ambiguous due to the variable terrain. A chunk of Pakistan and Nepal were caught up in the kill zone, too.

  Cramming stuff into boxes,
I let my mind wander into the empty, cold zone of self-recrimination. I stopped and stared at the wall. Christ. How the hell did we end up here?

  Our team had been stuck in an ethical and philosophical quandary. There‘d been four articles published in the Journal of Physics that cumulatively painted a path to the development of the device. Any idiot with a Ph.D. could put the information together and make one of the terrible machines. The three of us had worked as a team to develop the thing for a totally benign purpose. It was to be an electronic dowsing rod, using a pulse that acted like a wave until it hit a body of water , traveling on the skin of the Earth as it propagated across the land. The water would weakly reflect the wave, but the perimeter of the water body would heat up when the wave hit it. We’d been trying to tweak it to make it penetrate deep into the land instead of acting like a surface wave. We’d succeeded only in making water vaporize when the wave hit it, unfortunately achieving only millimeters of ground penetration. A few short experiments had showed us that it would kill any water-bearing creature it hit by instantaneously boiling the water in the epidermal layer, effectively flaying it alive. The inner organs and muscles were "saved" from the effects of the wave by the fact that the wave's energy was used up in destroying the skin.