There! After forever and ever, something she touched caused the screen to strobe. She held it outward, rotating it around the still-spinning capsule in all directions. See this tiny light flashing out into the vastness? Come and get me, she prayed silently. Come and get me, Yves.
Somewhere, she heard the distant sound of air hissing out into space.
~*~*~*~
Yves gripped the old freezer block as he floated in space. To all scans and measures, they were two dead pieces of garbage.
At least, to all of the scans and measures currently raking the debris cloud from the “rescue” sled a few feet away.
Usually a recovery team carried pressure balloons, defibrillator patches, and rebreathers.
This one carried vapor rifles.
One of the team members raised his vapor rifle. The barrel turned blue. A crate next to Yves melted into globules, crackling silently apart with little pulses of light and electricity. No sound, but the explosion made a rat-a-tat-tat in his sealed chest cavity.
He floated behind the old freezer to hide.
Twenty-two minutes, forty-eight seconds, and thirteen microseconds earlier, he had limped approximately ten feet from Mercury and realized the screen had left his possession. Something about their final conversation had distracted him, even though he ought to be impervious to distraction.
Not just her promise to give him all the data he could ever need. No, it was the way she said it. So strong and determined, her whole body seemed to glow. He wanted to lose himself in her beautiful light. And that wish, shared in a too-brief kiss, had almost made him lose his mind.
He was turning around to retrieve the forgotten screen when the frigate broke in half, launching him in the opposite direction.
Responding to his catastrophic depressurization sensors, his throat and sphincter had sealed, trapping in all remaining air. Automated processes moved the depressurized bubbles of nitrogen and other gasses from his joints to more useful reserves. His skin cells locked together, preventing the liquid from swelling up, and also making it extremely difficult to move. Space was cold, but evaporative cooling felt like a pleasant menthol rub and allowed him to save energy by shutting down his own internal cooling systems. All in all, being launched into space really wasn’t so bad for an android.
Humans encased in wet, bloat-prone, pressure-sensitive skin and muscle would not handle space so well.
Thank everything Mercury had been inside the capsule. She was safe inside; he knew she was. He accepted no other conclusion.
The “rescue” sled formed a standard V-shape, with two long grip bars attached to the center pilot seat. Team members clipped on to the bars, three per side behind the pilot, and stared outward into space. Notoriously inaccurate human vision meant so long as he didn’t wave and dance, he should avoid getting shot.
In the debris cloud, a panel began to wink.
He telescoped on the light: the small screen he had accidentally left in Mercury’s capsule.
Shit .
At least the light made only a tiny reflection. No atmosphere meant no glow. The death team would have to look up from the horizontal plane to see it.
The sled changed course on a new intercept path to Mercury’s capsule.
Shit, shit, shit.
He was still paralyzed from the waist down.
His oxygen reserves scraped critical.
This was a job for an x-class. But Mercury didn’t have an x-class. She had him.
He reached for his ankle, starting a rotation. At exactly the right angle, he flexed his nano-fiber muscles and threw the freezer.
He flew backward.
The freezer block flew over the team sled, nearly clipping the pilot in front, who didn’t notice. No breeze told the human exactly how close the freezer had come to knocking him out.
The team startled. Instead of looking to see where it had come from, they watched curiously where it was going.
It hit a massive crate.
The crate rotated, slow and lazy. The freezer, as though surprised by the collision, popped open.
The solar heater flew out.
Bright light flashed from the freezer.
Responding to the brighter, hotter, more surprising stimulus, the sled veered away from Mercury’s capsule and toward the gaping freezer.
Yes .
As Yves flew backward, away from the rescue team, he stuffed passing chunks of dead electronics into his flight suit. He caught a crate edge by one finger-pinch. The crate began spinning with his mass. He calculated his next trajectory and threw himself off, flying feet first at the rescue team.
If his calculations failed, he would sail out of the debris cloud until he hit something else. The laser-patrolled shipping lanes. A passing ship.
Or, in about forty years, the distant sun.
But this throw was perfect.
He would pass right over their heads. As the freezer had proved, despite a million years or more of acclimatization to three-dimensional space, humans still didn’t often look up or down. Taking out the pilot would give Yves control over the sled with the least amount of oxygen expenditure. As a bonus, the pilot didn’t have a locked and loaded vapor rifle. He could easily roll the other team members off and speed to Mercury. They might even be able to sneak into Hope Station.
The sled dropped two degrees.
Except this sled was piloted by an idiot.
Yves threw a plate of junk electronics upward, altering his trajectory to match.
The sled bucked up.
He threw more electronics, altering his conditions to theirs, as he flew through the frictionless vacuum.
The sled reached the open freezer and reversed thrusters to hover. Rather than saving fuel, it orbited in sync with the freezer’s rotation.
No. No. No.
Instead of hitting the pilot’s head, he would be lucky to crash into the back of the sled…now, to tangle in the knees…and now, he would be lucky to scrape someone’s feet.
He threw the last junk piece. It bobbed him slightly closer. Boots passed before his outstretched fingers. Someone pushed down. Ah, yes! He snagged the dangler’s right foot tread.
The sled rocked with his mass.
Right-tread swung forward, flinging Yves into the middle of the sled V.
The others turned away from the open freezer.
Six vapor rifles centered on him.
He climbed up the struggling body, decoupled the safety line attaching it to the sled, and smacked the thruster casing. The controls flashed.
Right-tread flew away from the sled.
Yves swung on the safety line.
The released man furiously twitched the thruster controls and smacked into the open freezer. The freezer door swung closed and magnetically sealed him in.
One down.
Yves gripped the safety line and swung through the middle of the V again. The five remaining vapor rifles tracked on him.
He flew toward the biggest one.
The big guy dropped his vapor rifle and put up his hands.
Yves barreled him over backwards.
No air hose meant they carried single-user portable rebreathers with oxygen bricks. Damn. His own reserves dipped into the red. He could sustain this level of activity for only a few minutes. And then he would be dead as initially scanned.
On the big guy’s articulated neck, an old piece of magnet tape sealed a tear on the suit.
How convenient.
Yves ripped off the tape. Atmosphere puffed out into open space. His victim spasmed.
Yves detached him and wrapped the safety line around his own wrist. The big guy thrashed into open space.
Two down.
The pilot jerked the sled. It flew up in the air, lifting the others out of the danger area and putting Yves against a starry background. Their rifles glowed.
A piece of junk next to Yves’ ear exploded into globules.
Yves tightened on the safety line and yanked himself into the middle of the V
again.
The four remaining rescuers thrust outward, away from him. Two smacked into the sled’s wildly rocketing bars. A third hit a crate. All doubled up or went limp, rifles dangling, helplessly dragged.
The final rescuer expertly thrust up, away from Yves and the sled, and pointed her vapor rifle down at him. Her barrel turned blue.
Yves yanked her safety line.
She flew toward him. Her barrel returned to its regular beige color, unable to fire a clear shot.
His oxygen screamed critical.
He swung over the woman’s head. Shooting over the shoulder was awkward for most people. He willed her to give up and save them both the painful effort.
But she twisted to follow and her barrel glowed blue again.
Yves yanked himself under it and grabbed the front of her suit.
Inside the helmet, a thick woman with black cheek tattoos stared at him behind safety oculars. Her widened nostril plugs sealed tight and her teeth gripped a rebreather. Based on Yves’ understanding of human expressions, he was pretty sure the woman was screaming.
Yves cracked the woman’s faceplate into the bar.
She jerked but retained her hold on her rifle.
He smacked her into the bar again, and a third time. The high-quality, shatterproof polymer whitened, spider-webbed, and caved. Still without cracking, the whole faceplate came away from the rest of the suit.
Her gloved hands rose to cover the sudden exposure, as though cupped hands could prevent the air from screaming away. But worse for her was the loss of pressure. Her cheeks swelled like a small mammal, and her entire face ballooned to twice its normal size.
The nostril plugs and rebreather held tight, latched into place with an old buckle-and-key system, preventing her lungs—and the air inside them—from ripping out her mouth. A pressure suit kept the rest of her body from puffing up like her face, but the explosion of vapor around her rapidly swelling face suggested that nothing prevented her intestinal gasses from explosively exiting via the path of least resistance. And nothing prevented the build-up of gasses expanding and leaking into her joints, pooling into painful places they were not meant to go, heading toward her heart—or her brain. She began to shake and convulse, bending in pain.
Last one down.
He released her and turned toward the pilot.
Who slammed the controls down.
The sled jerked away from him.
Yves’ feet flew free. His arms waved for the bars, the safety lines, the limp rescuers. They slid past his fingertips. Shit, shit! The last safety line waved and flickered out of his reach as the pilot manhandled the steering and gunned for Hope Station. Yves wheeled helplessly, end over end, out of control.
He struck a passing crate hard and grabbed on, causing it to alter direction and spin.
Oxygen deprivation hit black. His body flooded with the hormone designed to put his biological cells into stasis.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck.
He really could’ve used that sled.
With any luck, the station was run by someone who valued human life and would not viciously strafe the area until after the lost team members were collected.
Speaking of lost team members…
Yves pushed off the crate and climbed through the field to the freezer. He yanked open the door. The first man drifted out, lax. His vapor rifle drifted behind him. He breathed easily in his personal nose plugs and rebreather, the bastard. Yves found the controls on the man’s gloves and squeezed.
The thrusters pushed him backwards.
Yves piloted them through the debris like a couple dancing backward through a sparkling field of dead electronics.
Mercury would be pissed about the broken faceplate. He could already imagine the argument. So long as the sled returned directly to the station, that woman should revive after a few minutes in a repressurization bath and fully recover in a week of light duty. If she died unexpectedly, her employers would have to pay for her resurrection.
But if the capsule breached, Mercury would not fare so well. Horror leaked into his consciousness as though summoned by the constant unnerving ping of his empty oxygen reserves. In nine to twelve seconds, she would lose consciousness. Air would rip from her lungs, and her lungs would in turn strip oxygen from her bloodstream, directly starving her brain. People in normal conditions asphyxiated in four minutes, but she would suffocate in seconds. And then she would die.
No one would resurrect her.
He slow-danced grimly through the thickest debris. The capsule flickered from the screen strobe, winking like a dead star.
Inside, Mercury had strapped herself into the chair. Good girl. She wasn’t even pursuing the screen, which free-floated above her. No need to waste energy.
Oh.
His guts tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the minimal oxygen warnings flashing across every alarm surface.
It wasn’t that she exercised caution against soft tissue damage in a debris field. It was that she, like the man with the thrusters, was unconscious. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were blue.
Her skin had started bloating.
All his priorities abruptly changed.
Blue lips meant lack of oxygen. Mild bloating implied a slow leak. Slow leaks meant he needed to get her air from the nearest possible source. If he had to, he would rip the unconscious man apart with his bare hands, crack the capsule like an egg, and force the bloodied rebreather into Mercury’s mouth.
But a private cruiser hovering at the edge of the shipping lane said he might not have to.
Her screen flashing must have drawn its attention. An unregistered trademark meant its owners weren’t fans of Cloverleaf Hub or the Faction. Were they scanning for survivors, rubbernecking, or conducting illegal salvage? Did they have auto-turrets engaged to deter visitors? He had no choice but to “knock” on their proximity sensors and find out.
He used the unconscious man’s thrusters to push the capsule toward the cruiser. They had to make it through the fourth dimension before Mercury’s oxygen fully ran out.
Or his did.
His vision grayed to monochrome. His movements became sluggish and took longer to course correct. He opened the full throttle. The unconscious body squeezed against the curvature of the capsule.
The throttle coughed.
Shit. He corrected, sluggish, as it coughed again, wiggling them off course.
All vision went black.
Holy fuck.
He was blind and half paralyzed in a vacuum.
Yves released the unconscious man and grabbed for the capsule as his sense of touch dulled. The capsule grazed his fingertips and then he drifted alone in space.
No!
He wasted precious oxygen molecules twisting and thrashing. His hands grasped vacuum. His arms embraced vacuum. He floated into vacuum. Mercury, his precious Mercury, drifted farther and farther—
He smacked into the unconscious man. Drifting, without thrusters.
Yves grabbed him, calculated where the capsule should be based on their last known positions, and forced the throttle one more time.
It bucked him forward. He smacked the capsule. It must have been micrometers from his outstretched fingertips. The smooth sides repulsed him, but he grappled with all his will, and his hands hooked something. The hatch! He tangled his arms and legs around it and forced the rest of his body into rigor mortis.
And then he lost consciousness.
CHAPTER TEN
“They’ve disappeared from radar.” Bobby’s pale face filled Zenya’s screen. “We’re doing the best we can. We swept the space, and we suffered some injuries.”
Zenya picked her teeth. “You know what that means.”
The woman whitened. “We haven’t given up. Most visitors are obeying the interdiction zone so we have a clear field. We are…we are considering the vapor pulse.”
“Send me the specs of the ships who disobeyed.”
They downloaded onto her screens and she inspec
ted them. A small cruiser couldn’t escape her unless it possessed a military-grade throttle.
“I would like you to affix beacons to all the ships that disobeyed the interdict order,” Zenya said. “Especially this Lion-class luxury cruiser that claimed radio trouble.”
The woman bit her lip.
“You don’t have beacons?”
“That particular cruiser has already entered the accelerator path for Onyx Hub.”
The odds that it contained her targets—or some particularly valuable debris—went up. “How swift.”
“The frigate was only just outside the shipping lanes. It was still matched to Hope Hub’s velocity and orbit.”
People didn’t think about it very often, but everything was moving in space. Planets moved around their sun. Hubs moved around their Tubes. Even particles of dust moved depending on where a person was looking.
Ships were just one of the things accelerating or decelerating to match an orbit.
Still, to pick up passengers in one orbit and then maneuver less than an hour later into another path suggested that she might have found a cruiser with an illegal throttle. Like a smuggler would possess.
“Keep sweeping and contact me if you discover anything new.” Zenya closed the connection.
She would never hear from Cloverleaf Hub again.
Who could have picked Yves and Mercury up in a Lion-class luxury cruiser?
Who knew they were there?
She hoped it was the rogue. Optimism, and all that. But that would be so easy it would almost be boring. More than likely, it was one of Mercury’s well-connected relatives.
The rogue’s final contact gave her an idea. She sent two encoded requests to the nearest Faction buoy patrolling her orbit. First, for an agent to break into the abandoned apartment on Mares Mercury and sort through Mercury’s home holos. Second, for a list of relatives and all known locations.
By the time she left the transmission window of the next buoy, she had what she needed to make a great holo. Family holos, personal diaries, and something called a “cookbook” that appeared to be reprocessor codes written in short hand.
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