Zero-G

by William Shatner

“There will be a delay in the Fractal Tower for an incoming shuttle.”

  “Fine. Just get me out of—this place.” She gestured disdainfully toward the world behind the door.

  The elevator began to move. Kristine moved closer to the pole, hugging it. Suddenly, she felt as though she was beneath the pole, as if it were a chin-up bar at the gym.

  What the huke is going on? Had that bastard Franco dropped Star Dust in her drinks?

  Grasping the pole even tighter, she placed her shoulder against it so she could turn ninety degrees and right herself. Now the pole definitely seemed horizontal. She began to lose her footing. Either she was hallucinating or the carriage kept changing position. Ninety degrees one way, ninety degrees another—Where is gravity? she wondered. Maybe that was the problem. It was missing. There was something about that in the briefing—

  Suddenly the elevator glided to a stop. Kristine slid again and found herself once more hugging the pole to her chest.

  “Incoming shuttle,” the SimAI informed her. “Estimated wait time is twenty-six minutes to arrival, cargo off-load estimated at one hour, ten minutes—”

  “What . . . are you talking about?”

  The SimAI repeated the information; Kristine barely heard it. She was marooned in a sickening swirl as the carriage turned around and around the central pole.

  “Why is everything spinning?” she asked.

  “The elevator module is decoupling, for your comfort, from the rotation of the Fractal Tower. Please try to remain calm.”

  “Let me off,” she said weakly. “I don’t care where I am.”

  “Holding for decompression of Fractal Tower and docking bay.”

  Trying to stabilize herself, Kristine reached out. Her fingertips stopped against a panel set high in one wall. Looking up, she saw that it was a transparent case with a red lever inside. A moment later she found herself cracking through it with her fist and pulling the lever.

  A hatch in the ceiling hummed open, exposing the elevator shaft.

  “Emergency close must be initiated or the carriage will—”

  “No!” Kristine said. “No. I want to get out.”

  Above her was an open aperture to one of the docking chambers at the pinnacle of the tower.

  With a low giggle that was part manic relief, part desperation, Kristine pulled herself through the roof of the elevator carriage and grabbed at a ladder recessed in one wall of the shaft itself. At once the young woman’s body pivoted from the rungs so that the ladder became monkey bars, her body responding to the loss of gravity outside the moving elevator. Surprised by this latest shift in her position, Kristine lost her grip and cartwheeled toward the wall. Her forehead struck one of the pylons that supported the elevator’s magnetic track and she vanished into the tangle of cryogen hoses and power conduits that lined the shaft.

  Her last thought was that it smelled like gunpowder in here, just like it had on the skin of the shuttle.

  Somewhere above her, a series of valves unlocked. As if in response, below her, the elevator’s emergency hatch closed and sealed. And with a gentle rushing noise, the air in the shaft slowly bled into the vacuum of space.

  Sam Lord quickly retraced his steps toward the reception, once again thanking the Israeli scientists that he didn’t have to do this with just his old bones. The new metal leg was so liberating he had to make sure he didn’t push his flesh-and-blood leg to keep up.

  “Who has anything on Ms. Cavanaugh?” he coaxed his agents.

  “Pulling images off the deck scans,” Janet Grainger replied. “I have target leaving the reception, heading into the hall. She was weaving. Looks like the effects of alcohol combined with Earth legs.”

  Lord quickened his pace. The combination of inebriation and the body’s inability to adjust to variable gravity could be dangerous even for veteran spacefarers, and Kristine was not that.

  Grainger’s eyes danced across volumetric security scans of Kristine’s movements. “She entered Elevator C,” she said, and immediately brought up the woman’s SimAI records. “Records locked, sir.”

  “DW override,” Lord said. “Cavanaugh personal data now.”

  There was no need for Lord to identify himself. The ship’s SimAI heard him through the IC, identified Lord’s voice, and allowed a danger warrant—which trumped the privacy laws—to give him access to the elevator’s audiovisual records.

  “G206, last activities,” Adsila put in quickly. She was asking for the records of Guest 206—Kristine, and her last communication with the SimAI.

  “Let me off. I don’t care where I am,” they all heard. That was followed by the elevator’s admonition: “Holding for decompression of Fractal Tower and docking bay.”

  Lord simultaneously watched a drop-down, two-dimensional video image, pulled from the volumetric scans. It showed Kristine heading toward the elevator hatch. But none of the sensor positions, none of the backscatter modes or deconvolution algorithms permitted him to see what happened next.

  “Hatch status,” Adsila asked without having to be prompted by Lord.

  “Emergency exit protocol initiated,” the SimAI replied flatly.

  Lord was swinging around a long, curved section of the corridor that seemed to go on forever. He was just coming to the elevator that had brought him to this level.

  “Cancel decompression in shaft!” Lord ordered.

  “Decompression of entire sector in progress,” the SimAI replied. “Incoming vessel requires cargo access.” That meant “no.”

  “Get me a schematic of that shaft,” Lord demanded. “Thermal reading. Any station personnel near the lift?”

  “All are assigned to reception and guest quarters, sir,” Grainger replied.

  “They’ve been alerted by Colonel Franco, are starting to head over,” Adsila said.

  “Give them her location,” Lord ordered.

  “Already done, sir,” she said. “But if she’s in that shaft they’ve got to have space suits to get to her.”

  As Adsila was saying that, Lord saw why. The elevator was connected to the landing bay but without a cupola or doorway. That was about eighteen square feet, times three elevators made of heavy, precision materials that did not have to be manufactured or hauled into space.

  Damn PEA-brains, Lord thought.

  The Project Empyrean Association spent nearly a trillion Globals on this space station and skimped on what they called “structural luxuries.” Lord had warned them about that when he did his walk-through up here, but Al-Kazaz had ordered him to back off. Lord was informed that investors wanted the base to start paying for itself—and also to pay dividends. One of the only reasons they even let the FBI up here was that juicy government contract.

  “Automated maintenance report showing a heat spike in that elevator’s maglev,” McClure informed him. “Throbbing like a pulsar on the cryo-cooled rails; the indicated track segment is just below the bay door.”

  “Dimensions?” Lord asked.

  “Looking at her height in the scans,” Adsila said. “Matches the hotspot,” she added gravely.

  “How far down?”

  “Eighty-eight inches from the open door on top.”

  Lord neared the elevators. Beyond them was a narrow spiral stairwell, cunningly designed to translate, as one ascended, out of the whirling reference frame of the Fractal Tower, into the static frame of the docking bays above. The stairs also became a ladder as gravity dwindled on the way up. There was no door down here, but there was one at the top. That door was airtight and opened into the landing bay.

  “Slammer six, seal,” Lord said as his fingers began playing through the IC images. He saw the bay and its contents, studied them briefly.

  “Sir,” Adsila said warily. “What are you—”

  “Drop the airtight wall now!” Lord ordered.

  “Stanton wants to
know what we’re doing,” Grainger said.

  “Tell him we’re trying to save a life,” Lord replied. “Adsila?”

  “Dropping Slammer,” she replied.

  At once, a solid barrier fell from the ceiling behind him. There were forty such panels throughout the station in case of decompression. That was one area where PEA couldn’t skimp. Lord hesitated long enough to pop a small compartment and pull a palm-size packet from inside. He slapped it on his chest then charged up the stairwell.

  “I’ve got to go through the bay,” Lord explained, though he was sure the team had already figured that out. “It’s the only way to get to her.”

  “That door is double-locked during decom,” Adsila pointed out.

  “My IC signature, shoulder, and body weight versus a low-pressure situation on the other side,” Lord replied. “Which way do you think the door goes?”

  “You may be correct, sir, but at the current rate of decompression you’ll be entering a roughly eighty-nine-percent airless environment and lose consciousness in ten seconds.”

  “I made it to twenty at ninety percent in hypoxia training—”

  “This will surpass that level very quickly,” Adsila went on. “Do you have a plan, sir?”

  “Working on one,” he assured her.

  Adsila was silent for a moment. “We just picked you up on sensor Fifteen C,” she said with tense, resigned efficiency. “We will lose you in the stairwell.”

  “Understood.”

  “And you will lose body heat rapidly,” she added. “We’re already losing Ms. Cavanaugh’s thermal.”

  Adsila sounded angry and Lord didn’t blame her. This was reckless. But then, so were at least half of the sorties he had flown back home. His life, his work, had never been about playing safe. It was about doing the job he’d agreed to do. He had always taken very much to heart what his pioneer ancestor Isaiah Lord had written in a diary that had been passed from generation to generation like a family Bible: “You’re either in a river, cold and wet and building dams, or you’re a beaver hat.”

  Of course, he had done all those practice drills back on Earth when he was still all flesh and bone. He thought about his metal femur, and his nonmetal epidermis swelling agonizingly away from it, in the near-­vacuum of the bay.

  “Did you at least take the—” Adsila began.

  “Got it,” Lord assured her.

  She was referring to the BB packet he’d pulled from the door. The “bends bubble” was a single decompression membrane that inflated like a bubble around a person trapped in a vacuum. There was only one in the kit and Kristine would probably need it more than he.

  “Have station medics and Dr. Carter get ERT for two to the bay access,” Lord heard Adsila tell McClure.

  “Done . . . Dr. Carter was told to stand down by Stanton’s team,” Adsila informed him. “They said he’d be in the way of their own medic.”

  “Did he obey?”

  “No, sir.”

  Lord smirked. He took great comfort in having Adsila and Dr. Carlton Carter at his back. Adsila might not have much field experience but she was already thinking of everything that needed to be thought about. As for Carter, he was seasoned and scary, a longtime colleague of Al-Kazaz. The medic was developing things even Lord wasn’t privy to.

  “Kristine’s vitals dropping below survival viability,” Grainger said.

  “Threshold?” Lord demanded.

  “Rough calculations suggest about a minute,” Grainger told him. “She will be comatose by now.”

  That’s a good thing, Lord thought. Otherwise, she might be tempted to hold her breath and her lungs would already have ruptured. If he didn’t get her repressurized within two minutes, there’d be no chance of reviving her—and she might be gone already.

  He had seen death before, a lot of it, but—and he had to acknowledge that this was driving more than a little of his haste—he had connected with that girl and whether or not a friendship came of that, he’d hoped to see her again.

  Alive.

  Lord reached the door and slapped one hand on the entry button. The light turned from red to green; that popped the regular lock. Now there was just the emergency lock—which, Lord knew, was designed to be a backup, not a primary lock, so that someone wandering the stairwell didn’t stumble in here by accident. Leaning back, he put his entire right side into the door.

  It flew in, barely hanging onto its hinges. He felt himself pushed forward by the air in the stairwell, wincing as he was slapped hard by the eardrum-sucking sound of the bay ferociously exhaling into the cold, airless expanse.

  The altitude-chamber simulations were remarkably accurate, Lord realized as he hurled himself into the decompressing bay toward something he’d seen in the drop-down: the zero-g-ready freight vehicle to the left of the stairwell. It looked comfortingly like a terrestrial golf cart, with old-style McCandless thrusters instead of wheels, and it was stowed there because the workers were expected to take the stairs, not the elevators. The lifts were for dignitaries and paying customers.

  About six feet long, Lord thought, eyeballing the cart. Perfect.

  Lord grabbed one of the yellow bars of the metal frame to support and steady himself as his head began to swim. He found the bucket seat, nearly overshot it in the microgravity up here. Settling in, his hand hit the start button and his foot slammed the accelerator at the same time, as his other hand aimed the cart directly at the door-free top of the elevator shaft.

  As the cart leapt forward, Lord felt his fingers and toes swelling as if they were being inflated. He couldn’t speak to his team: he had to keep his lungs empty or they would rupture. As it was, he felt every drop of moisture boiling from his tongue. He closed his mouth. His vision was less a bodily sense than an entertainment center: objects shrank as his eyeballs swelled, a growing, glimmering blind spot caused solid objects to look like tidal eddies. He squinted ahead at the shaft. He could get past all of that, presuming he didn’t suffer cardiac arrest as his heart seemed to race.

  At least his metal leg bone stayed in place, though it was beginning to get cold, bordering on icy.

  Normally quiet, the cart complained in a squeaky little voice as its liquid components began to thicken. Those pistons and gears pushed against cylinders and rods that should have remained inactive in decompression; pushed hard, causing plastic to scream. Lord ignored the noise as he shot the cart toward a dark, open maw.

  In Lord’s head, his ancestor Isaiah and Adsila were fighting a proxy battle. It was good to be a beaver but, dammit, there was some appeal to abrogating responsibility and just perching on the head of some other adventurer. Every part of him quickly started hurting. Lord felt the gas from his digestive tract already erupting from his orifices. ­Ignoring the primal fear and incongruous eruptions, Lord kept his foot tromped on the accelerator—one hand directing the thrusters like a runaway train, the other making sure the van der Waals adhesive on the bends bubble was secure. He couldn’t afford to lose it here. If he had to, he’d use it himself; it wouldn’t help him or Kristine if he perished en route.

  Thinking of the woman punched up his courage again. He had to get there.

  “Sir, we can see you on the volumetrics,” Adsila said. “There’s a survival kit in your cart—under the seat to your right. There are two oxygen containers and masks there.”

  Lord was glad for the message: it was something to focus on. He flashed her a wobbly thumbs-up.

  The elevator doors yawned in Lord’s distorted vision, leading into the darkness of the elevator shaft. His arms felt like they belonged to an ape, long and gangling. He’d felt like that before, when he’d pushed his F26 Vampire into a vertical ascent to a service ceiling that the sims said was impossible. It certainly wasn’t feasible for the Shenyang J-11 the Chinese had sold to the cartel force he was fighting.

  Do what you did then, Lord r
eminded himself as he forced his elbows to turn in to the core of his chi, his energy. He had spent his senior year of high school in Hong Kong, before it was turned over to the Chinese; the physical and psychological skills he had acquired there had saved his life more than once.

  In the scans, Lord looked like he was panicking—his body contorting, his lips pursed hard, his eyes bulging, his arms akimbo, his fingers clutching.

  Then his body seemed to tilt forward and the cart sped up.

  “He’s pulled out the football bat,” McClure murmured off-line, using his father’s air force lingo to describe the seemingly desperate illogic of Lord’s action.

  “What are you talking about?” Grainger asked.

  “Even if he gets to the shaft he’ll be dead before he can turn it around,” McClure replied. “His brain’s swelling up and drying out.”

  “No!” Grainger instantly countered, turning on her colleague. “There has to be a reason he’s doing this—”

  “Reason and intent,” Adsila stated calmly. She was reading her own visual displays. “His piloting skills are clearly present. There’s no course deviation, not even a millimeter. He’s not losing control of anything. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  “For a man with a desiccating brain,” McClure muttered.

  Adsila turned on him. “Watch your mouth. That’s your superior.”

  “Yes, sir, ma’am,” he replied smartly but contritely . . . and with a cover-your-ass reference to both genders.

  “Another disrespectful crack and I’ll unplug you for the entirety of your next off-day.”

  McClure’s mouth clamped shut. The features of the twenty-three-year-old techie—a vintage term he preferred to the more widespread “techer”—tensed visibly at the thought of having no electronometrics in his life for twenty-four hours. He gave the IC drop-down a mental hug.

  “Ma’am, is there a way we can brake him remotely?” Grainger asked as she studied her own figures. “He’s not going to be able to stop in time.”

  “I do not think he ever intended to,” Adsila replied with an admiring nod.