“Can’t have you in my way. This is delicate business, and I’m on a tight workup timeline—shit, I’m joking, sorry. You’ve already helped me out every day by doing all of my manual work. I just don’t want you to feel obligated.”
Crave entered, patted Thwip on the back, and leaned over the equipment on his flat arc. “What’s this?”
Thwip showed Crave how to strip and reconnect the suit’s default remote power supply mechs. Skregs and Charis entered, used the lab’s workstations to continue their own work. In the sleeping module Wheck awoke, appeared on their IFs, and went to the flight deck.
On the twelfth day, after the unit had shot together, Crave pulsed Thwip a message: SHADOW ME FOR THE FIRST HALF OF THIS SHIFT TO OBSERVE UNIT-PREFERRED COMMAND TECHNIQUES.
“You two secretly sending each other love letters?” Charis looked back and forth between them. “Don’t look surprised, Thwip. You got excited and your eyes shifted up to where Crave is on your IF.” She smiled her curling smile. “Let’s play poker sometime.”
Thwip laughed. “Shadow shift.”
Charis closed her eyes and made a snoring noise, earning a sideways nudge from Crave that would have knocked her from her seat if she hadn’t dodged him.
“Every unit has their own way of doing things,” Skregs said.
Charis opened her eyes from mock sleep and leveled them at Skregs. “Nobody can teach command. You just do it if you’re good at it. And if you’re not, you don’t, because no one listens to you.”
“Leadership is a part of Nova training. What do you say to that?” Wheck stood and pulsed his retracted hoodmask to reseal.
“You have to be stellar at leadership to get into Nova training to begin with, so it’s just a default Nova quality. P2 might sharpen a recruit’s leadership skills, but they’re already there. It’s something you’re born for—destiny!” She jumped up from her seat and smacked the front of Thwip’s hardhood with her open palm, making him jump, and then was gone, muting them in stride as she exited with Wheck to the V-0, to serve as confirmation that he was securely sealed in for sleep.
Skregs walked with Thwip and Crave as far as the fitness module, where he’d schedule his first duty.
Thwip waited as Crave stopped at the module to request a brief report from the on-duty combat specialist. The rest of the unit greyed out in unison. Crave went on, and Thwip walked with him, but he stopped at the food service module, the sanitation module, the stable storage module—every module they passed—to engage in the same kind of brief exchange he’d had at the fitness module. Thwip trailed Crave from module to module, report to report, reading deeper into the mission specs on his IF to make use of the lull. How much time does he have before he has to begin what he planned for his shift?
Thirty minutes later they turned up the ramp incline to the Vesper’s next level. Crave stopped at the first module, laundry sanitation, and requested a report.
Ohhhh. Thwip remembered how Disar had read him as not interested in being a unit commander. These rounds are his shift duty. I don’t think I could pretend to care what a food service technician thinks about the commissary schedule. Isn’t this what unit handlers are for?
The laundry service technician was going on about orgo-wiping and Crave was nodding. Thwip browsed the front of the module, where clean sets of greys ready to be returned to their owners were sealed in transparent containers for delivery. All crew wore their suits when deployed to space, so he hadn’t thought about the hierarchy of basic greys since coming aboard. Even with his promotion to a new shade, his basics were the lightest by a noticeable margin and still appeared near-white in comparison. He noticed them immediately in a container to the right, standing out like a snowflake in a charcoal world. The rest of the Nova unit’s basics were a medium grey that represented solid experience. There were a few sets of basics with shades between theirs and his. Leo’s, and his long time crew’s, were a shade darker than the unit’s, so the crew was a few years longer on the job.
Crave’s rounds took them next to the main hangar level, which was empty of crew at this off-shift hour. Crave let a stout flight engineer show him his team’s work progress. Thwip walked behind them, scanning the ryker fighters that were uncovered for maintenance. Twelve of them stood long and slim on the combat staging dock, their matte black exteriors refusing to reflect the hangar deck’s lights. On a whim he pulsed a local scan in search of a ryker linked to his suit’s security swipes, and got a hit on one across the hangar deck in the maintenance module. My own ryker—something else to look forward to.
The engineer toured them in the opposite direction, around the leftmost partition of the HD toward a series of repetitive, rhythmic slams, rounding out his report with an update on freight weight limits. The source of the slamming turned out to be a single heavy supply operator moving containers across the hangar’s freight dock with her arrow suit.
The Vesper continued to impress. Its docks were a shift space, so their walls, floors, and ceiling were lined with different-sized, interactive slabs that could be manipulated to slide and restack, portioning the docks into smaller or larger spaces and new shapes as tasks required. Removing walls, raising them, tilting and angling them, or stacking them to raise the floor level could create a new module within the dock, or be used to move freight and ships. P2’s main dock was a showcase for shift-space engineering, but Thwip had only seen shifting performed in passing while being rushed in and out during roselaurel missions, never at length.
The HSO had shifted and stacked the dock’s floors and curved them steeply at the edges where they met a series of platforms on either side, so she had a smooth module shaped like a half-pipe. She used the added mass of the freight she carried and the momentum it afforded to sprint from side to side, picking up, swaying backward up the side and then down and forward, rushing to the other side and then dropping freight on a lift palette as she swung up that side, slowed, and then rushed back down and back across to pick up another container, using pure physics to bolster her suit’s speed capabilities—rather than the dock’s slower heavy-mech freight machines—to shift and land the freight on each platform. It was elegant and efficient work for an arrow. She sprinted back and forth so fast that it seemed her life, not just her daily duty deadlines, was under threat. Crave dismissed the flight engineer and joined Thwip in watching the HSO.
Thwip nodded in admiration. “What amazes me most about the history of humans and tools is that we don’t just make them to fit our hands. They become a part of us when we use them. Extensions of self.”
“And second most?” Crave asked.
“Ever hear sports commentators during no-tech competitions talk about ‘breakneck speeds’?”
Crave pulsed an affirmative signal to Thwip’s IF.
Thwip grinned. “Technology redefines breakneck speeds.”
Crave accessed the freight movement schedule and brought it forward on both of their IFs. The HSO was well under her shift’s deadline time, a testament to her PT skills. Next she was slated for ryker relocation. Thwip felt a tiny thrill. Maybe she’ll move my ship out of maintenance to the staging dock with the others.
“Sir”—she spoke to them through her hardhood’s external chatter without breaking rhythm—“I have to wonder if you’ve ever tried this before.”
“I haven’t,” Crave replied.
She pulsed the latches on her hardhood, removed it, and set it on the stack of freight, all without breaking the rhythm of her work. People from Timo liked huffy but sleek genoming and darker shades when they could genetically coax it out, whether in hair or skin, as well as teeth that were slightly imperfect. With broad shoulders, straight, glossy black hair and a thin, tasteful gap between her front teeth, she fit the Timo fashion. Thwip pulsed his IF to observe the physics of her movement, and his bio scans let him know that she was nervous as it gave him her name: HEAVY SUPPLY OPERATOR SAAZE KAZI.
The corners of Kazi’s mouth twitched in pleasure as she dropped freight
and rushed down the wall toward the other side to pick up another container. “It’s dead peaceful work.”
“Good,” Crave replied through his external aurals. He led Thwip out of the freight dock and then cut through the hangar deck to the service corridor that led to the double B category modules.
Charis and Skregs talked animatedly in greyscale, and then Wheck arrived on their IFs in color. “I’m off sleep shift. Pulling Charis and Skregs on a flight test I’ve just realized. Take a look.”
Their IFs rippled. Crave and Thwip looked over Wheck’s plots of adjusted flight information as they walked. Thwip wasn’t familiar enough with the mission yet to know what the change meant.
Crave nodded. “If this works—”
“That’s thirty seconds off that formation’s flight time,” Wheck finished.
He looked excited.
On Thwip’s IF, Wheck’s position read as on the hangar deck. “That means we only have to cut another twenty. We’re going to sneak out now. We’ll be no support and out of range. I’ll sub Toine and Yatin for you two, and have Leo get you the flight test schedule and readjust the sleep rotation.”
“Good flying,” said Crave.
“It’s going to work. Hooah!” Wheck gave instructions to Leo and the hangar deck crew, and then he, Charis, and Skregs disappeared from Crave and Thwip’s IFs.
Crave returned to his customary silence. Thwip continued reading through the mission specs as he followed him in step, but Crave suddenly stopped, catching Thwip up so short he almost crashed into him.
“I received some pushback from Command about recruiting you just before a sensitive mission departure. Thwip, you proved me right. Thank you.”
“Thank you. I mean—” Thwip hit the edge of another novel situation. “Cosmos, I know I’m trained and I know what I’m doing, but… I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.”
“You might be the first Nova to ever admit it.”
They resumed walking in silence.
“Fall seven times, stand up eight,” Crave said. “Ancient military saying. You see my eights every day, but you didn’t see all the sevens it took to get here.”
Thwip caught himself just before replying Yes, sir. A few paces later, Crave continued.
“I’ve lived in this gear for years. It’s home. You’ve been in it for twelve days, and showed me a few things about it that I didn’t know. When you’re experienced enough, you’ll be able to run our PT as well as any master tech. That’s valuable.”
“I figured that’s why you recruited me.” They cut out of the service corridor toward the residence modules.
“It’s not.”
Thwip waited, but there was no explanation. His confusion must have shown on his face because Crave glanced at him, nodded as though reading him, and offered more.
“My specialty when I was a recruit was astrophysics and applied combat. I didn’t pursue leading a unit, so when I drew as commander, I was unprepared. I wanted to know why. I went to Sentinel.”
“She probably said something like”—Thwip made his voice higher, reaching for Sentinel’s metallic soprano voice and edging it even higher with his hardhood’s chatter mechs—“ ‘I don’t know how stupid or clever choosing a specialty in astrophysics was. Maybe it was brilliant; we’ll finally have a Nova who can ensure his unit doesn’t fall into a gravity well.’ ”
They ducked through the low corridor outside water services.
“Cosmos, you have a gift for that.”
Thwip ran a gloved hand over his hardhood, watching the texture of his honeycomb pattern pick up on his IF, and chuckled. “And she’d exit the module on that line, too. She always has a sharp exit summary. Leaves you thinking in her wake.”
“She’s the most loved and hated living Nova.”
“Sentinel?” Thwip considered that matter-of-fact superlative and stowed his immediate questions for the answer he wanted more.
“What did she tell you when you asked her about drawing as commander?”
“She—” Crave paused, then ran away down the corridor.
Bewildered, Thwip ran after him. They jogged back toward the hangar deck the same way they’d come, dodging through the maze of empty corridors.
Crave committed more urgently, running harder. “Leo,” he said.
They ran through the back of the hangar deck to the freight dock, and Thwip’s IF orange-framed with an evacuation warning.
“I see it.” Leo appeared on their IFs as Crave looped him through, and Thwip accepted the connection on his hood. “Support inbound. You’re close. Can you intervene?”
Crave ignored Leo. “Hash input tona sizma, Crave, shift mechs to aural mechs. Activate internal loop chatter.”
There was a crunch and scream that made Thwip’s chem balancers jump. They turned the corner around the dock partition.
The floors of the dock were in active shift, moving like hyperactive tectonic plates, sliding one on top of another to reform the dock shape from the half-pipe back to zero incline. Two of the heavy slabs had HSO Kazi’s outstretched hands and forearms trapped like a horizontal vise where they met at their narrowest point, gradually crushing her inside her suit and preventing her from using her pulse mechs. She was caught inside the gap between the slabs, bent with arms parallel over her head, and soon, as the vise closed from left to right traveling up her arms, it would crush her head and back, and then her legs. In four strides Crave hurled himself into the gap sideways next to her, using his greater width and superior suit as a wedge to bear the burden, taking the pressure on his trepid’s shoulders, just as the slab would have pinched down on her head and back. “Affirmative,” he said to Leo, “I can intervene.”
A safety klaxon drowned out Kazi’s screams, and the freight dock’s emergency safety shields shifted upward around them, creating a quarantined module that sealed and separated the three of them from the rest of the dock. Thwip’s hood aurals adjusted to protect his ears from the noise. He scanned the scene, looking for a solution.
Crave could protect Kazi’s head and torso, extending the time to rescue her, but she was already too pinned in the slimming space between the shifts to pull out. She cried out again, and another crack rang out. Thwip winced.
Leo came back: “I was going to suggest that you shouldn’t enter, because the safety sequence seals off the area from the rest of the dock. Team working on annihilating the sequence remotely. Unknown source of problem and unknown time to intercept. Stand by to receive engineering process.”
How can he be so calm? They’re going to be crushed. Eventually the trepid will run out of patch materials, and the force of the dock shifts will overcome it.
Thwip looked to the spaces on his IF where the rest of the unit should have been, but they were blank. Charis, Wheck, and Skregs were still away from the ship.
“Back to the perimeter, Thwip,” said Crave.
Thwip moved to the perimeter. Crave’s eyes darted over his IF. His arms were pinned at his sides, so he continued with his hood’s aural-only mechs. “Sync IF to Thwip,” Crave instructed his hardhood. “Transfer Vesper master swipes to Thwip.” Thwip received the swipes. “Dock engineering. See it?” Crave strained. “We can’t override the safety sequence, but we can move the shift layers above me if the mechanism thinks you’re troubleshooting it, and that it has to correctively slide first in order to finally settle.”
“Confidence level?”
“Medium. Safety sequences are usually hashed that way. You can trick them into thinking you’re making them do what they’re supposed to. You’ll be faster at it with pulse gloves than I will be on aurals.”
“Copy that.” Thwip reviewed the engineering process that Leo had sent and pulsed through the system. “Stand by, one.”
This hash logic is similar to the hashes on roselaurel suit tethers.
“So I just execute this sequence?” he asked Leo.
“Affirmative. Confirmed by the ship’s HME. High confidence of sequence success. Cannot
be issued remotely at this time.”
“I’m ready,” Crave said.
“Executing now.” Thwip hashed the change in command through the dock’s system.
The shift slid fast to the right, grinding over Crave and Kazi. It made a terrible screeching sound against Crave’s trepid, louder than the safety klaxon as it scraped sideways and upward like a pendulum, momentarily letting off its downforce, freeing Kazi’s arms and widening the gap as it swung far right. Crave leveraged the window, grabbed Kazi’s arms, and exploded off the back wall, dragging her forward and out of the shift with him. They slid across the floor and into the shield wall next to Thwip, Kazi facedown and silent, Crave on top of her. The shift swung back to left, then right, aligned to the rest of the stack, and slammed downward into place where Crave and Kazi had been. The klaxon ceased.
Crave’s voice was even as he tidied up his suit’s controls. “Shift mechs back to standard. Reset aural mech verbal code.”
There was a deep crack up the back of Kazi’s hardhood—only Crave’s intervention and superior suit caliber had prevented her hood from being crushed along with her skull—and she wasn’t moving. Crave turned her flat on her back, taking care to keep her head, neck, and spine in a line. He leaned over her, scanning. Her face mech was set to transparent and sweat gave her face a sick, glossy look.
“Thought that was that,” she managed.
“Too much work ahead for that to be that.” Crave put the top of his mask mech on transparent, showed her his eyes. “Don’t move. Stay awake. Your arms are broken in multiple places. You’ll be down for a few weeks.”
“Arrow’s taking care of pain. Hurts less now. Sir, I can’t move my hands.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t move my hands to pulse my IF to release the module’s safety shield mechs. It’s tied to my swipes, as the current dock operator on duty. It’s a security precaution. I can’t unseal us. The medicas can’t get in.”
“Understood. Leo, need the head mechanical engineer to—”
Thwip used the Vesper’s master swipes, broke Kazi’s connection to the module, and performed the task for her. The sound of the module’s safety shields unsealing and dropping cut Crave mid-sentence.
Astral Fall Page 14
