Zero-G

by William Shatner

  As the team watched, the head of the luggage cart speared into the open elevator shaft. There was too little air for sound to carry and it was a strangely silent crash as the vehicle’s metal framework cracked into the opening and nosed down into the elevator shaft, not quite fitting.

  The cart was now outside their field of vision. But the shuttle drifting into the big, wide bay opening was not.

  “Tower Command?” Adsila said.

  “We’re here,” a thickly accented Swedish voice replied. “Automated shuttle capture in twenty seconds, bay door on emergency shut as soon as the tail clears—re-ox commencing in eighteen, seventeen, sixteen . . .”

  Adsila heard the man but it was a big bay and it would repressurize evenly, which meant it would take much longer than sixteen seconds for Lord to be saved from the punishing pressure. Her display put the process at completion in just under three minutes. She performed two functions at once: she assumed command by Rule 8.25a—the evidentiary incapacitation of the office chief—and then used her new authority to access Lord’s real-time medical condition. A brainstem encephalogram caused a body chart to light up: he was alive but every vital sign was in crisis.

  Except for his metal leg. That was normal.

  The woman fought the urge to switch to her male identity. Adsila had found that “he” was always less emotionally invested in any problem. Just making the decision whether or not to shift was always influenced by whether she was thinking as a man or as a woman.

  She stayed put. Emotions were tough, but having two male brains on this problem was probably not the way to go. Especially when one of them was the go-get-’em mind of Samuel Lord.

  The cart stopped hard, vertically, its rear thrusters stuck just outside the open frame of the shaft. By this time Lord’s entire body was numb, so he didn’t feel, or even care, as his torso slammed forward. He turned to his right, retrieved what he needed. They were two high-pressure, ultra-condensed oxygen tanks, which, although they looked no bigger than a household fire extinguisher, were designed to keep anyone alive for two hours—assuming local pressure was above the Armstrong limit, which wasn’t the case here.

  Lord’s side of the cart was wedged too closely to the wall of the shaft, so he slid out the other side—which, as it happened, was where Kristine was trapped. He could see her just ahead and below the vehicle. He swung one of the oxygen tanks so it was in front of him and turned it on. He could feel it hissing like a demon and he swore he could see the swell of oxygen as it poured into the shaft. His purpose was not to help her breathe but to try to add at least a little pressure to the area between his position and the top of the elevator.

  He shoved the empty container back into the cart and slung the other around his neck. He clung to the cart as he made his way along the shaft wall, not sure he should be touching any of the cryogenic rails. He’d seen an MRI quench once, as he was landing his Vampire—a mushroom cloud of boiling helium let loose over his airbase hospital. He couldn’t even imagine how much explosive force lurked in the elevator shaft’s vastly greater miles of maglev plumbing, nor did he wish to find out by dislodging a rail and exposing the underlying pipes.

  Lord was dizzy but not the way he was as he fought the microgravity and his own rebellious senses. Now he really was a chimpanzee, pushing off from the front frame of the cart, floating over the stubby hood, then grabbing the front bumper. He’d stayed just conscious enough to slap the bends bubble bag onto the girl’s stomach and activate it.

  In 1.5 seconds, the bends bubble erupted from, and became part of, the bag in which it was stored. It enveloped the girl in a pale cocoon and instantly started the repressurizing process with a micro O2-generator stowed in the bag itself. Then he moved toward the top of the elevator car, just above the closed hatch, and wedged himself on the struts of the shaft to wait—not for rescue, because he was a pragmatist and the station was a bureaucracy with a sluggish chain of command. His mind on his last, very happy night on Earth—was it just two weeks ago?—he waited for the inevitable chaos in his heartbeat, and tried to work up some curiosity about whether the last moments of hypoxia were really as euphoric as the doctors said.

  And then his mind went blank.

  “Elevator,” Adsila instructed as the bay began to repressurize. “Open escape hatch.”

  “Emergency protocol still in effect,” the elevator replied with disinterest.

  “Override!” she snapped.

  “Emergency protocol—”

  “Stop talking,” she said.

  The elevator obeyed that command.

  “Team Leader Lawrence?” Adsila said, checking the station’s duty roster. “Where are you?”

  “Just entering the bay,” the commander of the rescue party replied.

  She turned to the drop-down. “Yes, I see you now.”

  “Dammit, there’s a luggage cart in the—”

  “Yes, I know,” Adsila said. “Director Lord and Kristine Cavanaugh are below it. Enter—request you enter,” she corrected herself, remembering who was in charge, “through C Elevator.”

  “My team is there and waiting for the huking Slammer to open.”

  Adsila searched for a manual override, found none. “Mr. Lawrence, there’s no time. Go back down the stairwell, pry open C Elevator ASAP, and crack the damn hatch.” Realizing that she did not have the authority to give station personnel an order, she added diplomatically, “Can you do that?”

  “On the way,” Lawrence replied.

  Adsila stood stiffly as she watched the three-person team double back. Lord was right: Empyrean’s security was like a well-oiled machine, as he quaintly put it, if all you wanted was an unthinking rapid-response team. They dealt with crises by the gut.

  “I’ve been breached,” the elevator interrupted her thoughts.

  “Good.” Adsila smiled. How appropriate. From everything she’d heard in bars and locker rooms, that was something for which Lord had a certain skill. . . .

  FIVE

  THE RECYCLED, REFURBISHED Empyrean air had what Lord once described as “an empty quality, like a cave at the top of a mountain.” But when he felt it on his face, it had the gentle kiss and smell and taste of a favorite lover.

  That was the first thing Lord experienced as he emerged from the bends bubble in the medbay, and the first thing Lord saw once he had emerged was Dr. Carlton “Chuck” Carter looking down at him with a half-smile—at once welcoming and critical.

  “Welcome back,” the forty-six-year-old Carter said. He flicked Lord’s medical history from his IC and looked down.

  Lord twisted his head over as the membrane finished deflating and withdrawing like a self-peeling orange. Medical science had come a long way since the days when a patient had to spend weeks in a hyperbaric chamber. Living in outer space had demanded it.

  “How long?” Lord asked.

  “You’ve been out for about twenty minutes.”

  Lord tried moving his head a little from side to side. “I feel a little—flattened, like when I used to do those high-g sustained hard turns.”

  “At a much younger age,” Carter said.

  “Define ‘much,’ ” Lord replied.

  “Under fifty, before you became a trainer.”

  Lord would have grinned but his cheeks hurt from having hit something. “I stole a few rides after that,” he admitted.

  The doctor’s narrow face grew even narrower. “Regardless, you achieved those maneuvers with a jet aircraft, I presume? Instead of trying to become one?”

  Lord smiled weakly. He didn’t know the doctor well, certainly not well enough to explain what he had just said. Back at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, the 49th Operations Group used to discuss all of their sexual activities in aeronautic terms. What Lord had just described was a hell of a night. When he was transferred to the 4th Space Control Squadron in Colorado, Lord was able
to show a whole new generation of recruits how to get around the repressive, politically maddening restrictions against public sexual dialogue.

  Lord was pleased that he could twist his head without pain. “What did you do, give me new vertebrae?” he asked.

  “You weren’t out long enough and, anyway, the Israelis won’t sell anyone spare parts,” Carter told him. “No,” he went on, “you’re just built like a Russian battleship.”

  That was both a compliment and a dig. Those vessels weren’t very sophisticated, but in terms of brute force and stability, that was where you wanted to be in a typhoon.

  Then, suddenly, Lord remembered why he was here. He rose with a start that reminded him he was, in fact, more human than cyborg, when all the cartilage in his body compressed with an indignant shout of pain.

  “Steady, dammit,” Carter said, gently pressing him back onto the cot.

  Lord yielded willingly. “Kristine,” he said. “Ms. Cavanaugh—?”

  “The young lady is very lucky,” was all Carter said, gesturing behind him with his sharp chin. “She’s only a Corvette.”

  Lord turned to glance at a figure on the next thickly padded cot, a figure still swaddled in the translucent variable-pressure cocoon. She was delicate and peaceful, like one of the ladies in Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon. In repose she looked so innocent, despite her profession. In many ways she was innocent. Lord had tested her, earlier, at the reception. She hadn’t reacted to him mentioning that Ziv Levy might be a Mossad agent . . . except for a slight crossing of the eyes, indicating that she was looking up the definition of the word on her IC. She did her job, which meant keeping her nose out of an employer’s business.

  “Will she be all right?” Lord asked.

  “The data says yes,” Carter assured him. “It’ll just take a while longer.”

  Lord glanced up at the medic. “Any news from Earth?”

  “Nothing new,” Carter said. “Nothing good.”

  Lord lay back. “Your file says you were red-blooded navy, Dr. Carter.”

  “Twenty-three years, till I came here,” he replied.

  “You have anything to do with the Redox Offensive?”

  Lord was referring to an American operation during the War on Narcotics: an engineered strain of microbial corrosion that devoured white oak or carbon steel with the same ferocity. They sank cartel patrol boats, then underwent suicidal apoptosis to prevent damage to other vessels.

  “I did whatever my commanding officer told me,” he answered evasively.

  Lord looked up at the man’s rigid expression. “That’s always tricky, isn’t it?” Lord asked.

  Carter gave him a mildly quizzical look.

  “Sometimes it’s a game of leapfrog,” Lord said, elaborating. “You report to me, yet PD Al-Kazaz has told me to turn a blind IC to your bio-nanite work up here.” Lord gestured weakly toward a small adjoining room. “How do you reconcile that?”

  “Is this genuine curiosity or a turf war?” Carter asked.

  “Doctor, we’re here to gather information to avoid wars, you know that.”

  “And you’re here to recover,” Carter said. “As for Ms. Cavanaugh,” Carter said, ignoring the question again, “her condition means she will have to stay on board awhile longer.” He allowed himself a brief, disapproving glance at the shape within the bubble that slowly deflated and inflated like a lung. “Stupid, what they let up here.”

  Lord frowned. “Bedside manner could use a little work, Doctor.”

  “Spoken by a man to whom regulations are historically just suggestions,” Carter replied. “The station chief says you exceeded your jurisdiction—his words—‘by a parsec.’ He also says that the Bureau owes them a freight cart.”

  “Stanton rubs me raw,” Lord said frankly.

  “I’ll give you something for that,” Carter replied.

  “Won’t help,” Lord told him. “He doesn’t want us here in general and me in particular.”

  There was no reason to hold back. Dr. Carter would have read Lord’s physiomental profile, would be aware of the many reprimands for what was politely described as “insubordinate and unsolicited observations,” the kind that used to get him bumped from command to command. When Al-Kazaz was still the Air Force Commander, Joint Functional Component Command for Space, he told Lord, “You’re too good to court-martial, too outspoken to control.” Ironically, that frankness helped to endear Al-Kazaz to Lord.

  “Some advice,” Carter said. “This is Stanton’s command, not yours. He leaves me alone because he likes having a medic in reserve. You provoke him.”

  “If we’d followed his playgram, a young woman would be dead,” Lord replied.

  “Possibly,” Carter said. “Or we could have lost both her and you. But it’s not just that. You had a tour of the Drum. You demanded to have time at the windows, to see how they work. He declined. You had Agent McClure sneak back in to play with them.”

  “They are useful observational tools,” Lord explained. “Stanton should not withhold access.”

  “So you say,” Carter replied. He softened for the first time. “Sam, we’re not on different teams, here. I can’t discuss the bio-nanite work because, frankly, the prime director doesn’t want you trying to use it. It’s untested tech.”

  The conversation had become a sermon and Lord lost interest. He mentally ran diagnostics on his IC. The only thing more fragile than a human body in a vacuum was that body’s Cloud.

  “Is there anything else while you’re here?” Carter asked. “Chest, ears, carboxyhemoglobin all look okay and you’re showing no more than the usual neurologic deficits.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lord said. His IC scan told him his Cloud was fine. The Zero-G commander wondered if some of his own resiliency had been passed to the device when they were cybernetically linked. It was an interesting idea, the symbiosis between humans and SimAI tech, one that scientists were still pondering. The idea was particularly seductive when people—like Lord—had cybernetic parts that had been integrated into their biological systems.

  The director winked, thrusting a mental finger at a green icon hovering in front of him. Adsila appeared, facing him.

  “Sir! How are—”

  “Fine,” he cut her off. “Question.”

  “Go.”

  “Where’s Colonel Franco?”

  The query seemed to surprise Adsila. Lord saw her eyes move. He glanced at the sleeping Kristine again while he waited. It took just a moment for Adsila to find the answer.

  “Off-station via PriD2. He left with Ziv Levy seventeen minutes ago.”

  “From the party?”

  “Yes.”

  The two PriDs were private docking ports. They were a traditional design, the same as the original Russian SSVP system from the old Salyut days. The probe-and-cone mechanism, and the airlock through which passengers squeezed themselves aboard, were as basic as the mooring cleats on a seagoing yacht. Both docks were maintained for private shuttles carrying VIPs who could afford a quarter-million-Global flight, those guests who didn’t want to wait for the twice-weekly commercial flights.

  “What’s the shuttle’s flight plan?” Lord asked.

  “Orbital run, four hundred thirty-two nautical miles up,” she replied. “Nothing filed beyond that.”

  Lord’s IC enabled an FBI program that showed him a schematic of the path, its duration, and all the satellites it would encounter. Lord pushed the diagram away while he processed the news. He had seen Franco chatting with the cybernetic man at the reception. He wondered if they were just splitting a ride or if they had business together.

  “This is why we need your bio-nanites, Doctor,” Lord said, off-IC. “Pop them in drinks, down the hatch, we hear what they’re saying.”

  Carter made no reply.

  “What about that message from HooverComm?” Lo
rd asked, still collecting his thoughts.

  “Came in twelve minutes ago,” Adsila replied. “Priority One. Prime Director Al-Kazaz asked that you contact him ASAP.”

  Priority One meant that only Lord could take the message.

  “Thank you,” Lord replied. “I’ll be there shortly.”

  “Sir, Dr. Carter has to—”

  “Declare me fit, yes,” Lord said. He looked up at Carter. “I’ll have his okay. He wouldn’t want me returning that pri-one trimmed in red.”

  The expression was one the FBI had adopted in 2033 when a field agent was shot on Christmas Eve and a country medic anesthetized him until December 26. Unconscious, he wasn’t able to share vital information about a bioengineered virus until after the disease was already released, which killed more than one hundred churchgoers. Christmas trees nationwide were trimmed with red tinsel in honor of the victims.

  Lord cut the communication. Then, with effort, he sat and waited for his flesh leg to show the same eager willingness of his cyber-leg to leave the cot. Dr. Carter loaned him a steadying pair of hands.

  Lord’s entire body was a little behind the biomechanical curve, but that was all right. Gathering his strength, he considered what the doctor had told him. Commander Stanton was a fifty-three-year-old hero of the WON. At forty-nine, he became one of the youngest generals in US military history and was put in charge of the Pan-Persian Occupation Forces. Lord suspected that Stanton was given this command out of political expediency. Stanton had been unable to crush the regional opposition there; resigning his commission and moving here was a way to save the reputation of the Pentagon’s wunderkind poster child. That left him with some ego-bruising and overcompensating. Lord understood both.

  Well, your being here is a compromise too, Lord reminded himself. Each man had something to prove and it was inevitable that they’d end up doing that like elks butting horns.

  Lord sought Carter’s eyes. “So. Am I fit?”

  “If you can stand on your own, I’ll sign you out.”

  Lord smiled, even though it hurt. “Thanks. I appreciate that. And also, the advice. Truly.”