by Ginger Booth
It really bothered him that every side of this chamber acted as floor. He kept looking up, waiting for those gravel piles ‘above’ to land on his head. The cart sat canted about 50 degrees off their current orientation, chosen to match the base of the dumpster.
“Think we should move the cart farther away?” the captain asked.
Remi turned back to assess the dumpster, his headlamp tracking automatically. “I think they must move the container soon. Gravel masses one point five tons per cubic meter. Over a hundred tons.” He reconsidered his wording. “It’s full.”
Turning his head 180 degrees to check the dumpster didn’t tempt Ben. Instead he assessed the activity level in the room. Sure enough, the robot agenda had altered. He figured they were cleaning up, so a replacement monster dumpster could move in.
He was about to mention this theory, when two polebots split off and headed toward his cart. “Dammit!” He blew the base off both of them in turn.
The group-mind, whatever that might be, dispatched four replacements.
Ben grimaced, and checked the charge on his blaster. “Geometric progression.” He worried his lip with his teeth, and sighed hugely. “Retrieve our gear. Bring the shields.” With that, he enabled his grav again for traction and sprinted for the cart. The engineer understandably lagged behind.
Arriving at the cart, Ben kicked a polebot over to get him out of the way, and vaulted into the cart. He swore at the need to keep his helmet tucked down to put light on his subject, as he scraped together their awkward collection of belongings. He hurled out the broken sled, which gave another polebot an occupation. The other two now made slow progress hauling him and the cart toward the dumpster. And four more polebots rolled toward him to replace the two he’d distracted.
He grimaced at their broken cases. Better to use them than risk leaving a precious air canister or battery loose to be tidied into the trash by a bot. He filled the bottom halves of them. But the cart was getting perilously close to the dumpster.
“Ben! The control board!” Remi yelled at him.
Ben blinked. “Bring it? Or use it?”
“Both!” Remi clambered in, shoving two rock-shields into him, much like the riot shields used by the Schuyler police. Ben sprawled onto his ass as the cart suddenly jerked into motion away from the waiting maw of the dumpster.
Which of course inspired the polebots to redouble their efforts. “We’re bailing out, Remi! They won’t give up!”
“Merde!” The engineer draped himself over the side, butt to Ben again, to salvage the far end of his control electronics.
Ben sourly collected the belongings he’d spilled all over again. “If they tip you into that dumpster, I won’t come get you.”
“Screw you, too.”
“Bail out, chief! That’s an order! I need to hand this out to you, or we’ll lose it!”
“Oh.” Remi yanked his wiring, and stood to coil it neatly around his control board.
Ben ripped both out of his hands and shoved them into a broken case. “Out!” He kicked a polebot out of the way to make Remi an opening, then shoved him in that direction. The moment the engineer dismounted, Ben shoved a case at him, then perched the working sled on top of it. He hauled the second case to the side, then slipped overboard halfway, grabbed the case, and dropped to the gravel.
Much lighter, the cart took only seconds to complete its trip into the dumpster.
But the polebots decided the men were also debris to be policed from the work zone. Two seized Ben by his shoulders and bore him after the cart.
“Do not lose the cases!” Ben hollered. He tried kicking the polebots away. But as others had found before him, the damned things were strong. He knew how to disable them, either with a blaster or by pulling the bolt that served as a shoulder hinge. But with his arms desperately clutching the warped case closed, he couldn’t let go to do either.
They lifted him and flipped him onto the dross heap. He tucked protectively around his box and rolled hard on his back. A rocked stabbed into the back of his thigh, and the suit automatically applied a tourniquet. “Dammit!” A wildly careening beam of headlamp advertised Remi arriving seconds before a sled handlebar rammed into Ben’s kidney. “Ow!”
“Ow,” Remi agreed, as the dumpster began rolling. “I lost the sled.”
Ben returned the favor, jamming its handlebar into the engineer’s thigh. “I need you to patch my suit.” He grabbed Remi’s hand and guided it to the leak. There were worse places to reach on his own anatomy, but that spot was hard.
“My shoulder,” Remi returned, and guided Ben’s gauntlet to the spot.
“You win.” Ben shifted painfully to his knees for access, and leaned on his case for safekeeping. Surprisingly, the dumpster-bot’s local gravity felt nearly Earth-normal. He duct-taped Remi’s tear quickly. As soon as the engineer verified his pressure was restored, Ben flipped over to present ass for his own repair.
And the dumpster beneath them creaked to life.
25
“Down!” Remi shoved Ben’s helmet into the dumpster load of gravel along with his own. He hastily swerved his hips off of his case, then kneed Ben’s butt as well. The overhead was growing perilously close.
“Get out of here!” Ben objected, trying to rise.
“Too late.” Remi couldn’t reach the loose gravel hanging above them, held there by opposing gravity. But already they began rolling into a clear tunnel. Yes, there was some scant headroom above the container. But the dumpster was a tight fit. Its corners came within a hand’s length of the round corridor walls. He turned his helmet to cast light on the rear of the container. They were near its head. A heaping slithering pile of loose rubble lay between them and slipping out the back. They’d both already sliced their suits on this sharp rubble. And if they did jump out the back, their next trick would be to follow the dumpster.
All in all, he’d rather take a ride. Then again, getting a hundred tons of rock dumped on top of him wasn’t survivable.
Ben suggested, “We could jump up into a side tunnel if we spot one.”
Remi pictured this briefly. A hole would appear above for a couple seconds. They’d grab their gear, strain their grav generators, and fall up. And then they’d chase a dumpster. “Let’s not.”
Fortunately Ben was reasonable. “We jump the second we exit the asteroid.”
“But of course.” Their powerful steed slowed for a moment, and Remi tilted sideways. “First turn, left up. We memorize.” Under these conditions, mapping their path would likely lose them the tablet.
Ben propped himself up enough for his helmet to light the view ahead past the forward rim. They jostled in silence for a few minutes, making another veer. A continuing tilt to the right suggested a slow rotation as well. Remi concentrated fiercely on memorizing the sequence. Unless they came out right on top of their shuttle – and they didn’t expect to – they must recharge their air before hiking anywhere, and their batteries as well.
The container slowed more than usual. The reason became apparent as they negotiated a sharp turn left-up. And Ben’s lamp spotted a black hole before them. “Grab your gear!”
Remi scrabbled for the broken box and the sled. As they emerged into pristine star-studded blackness, the dumpster executed another 90-degree climb out of the funnel entrance at dead slow. He tossed the sled overboard, and leapt after it.
The dumpster’s artificial gravity vanished the moment he cleared its edge. He sailed through black vacuum over a pitch dark landscape. Only an absence of stars told him where the asteroid lay. And neither of his hands were free, clutching the box. He swore at himself in French for not taking a moment to duct-tape the damned thing closed. He even had the tape out, to fix the captain’s suit.
“Remi, you’re not on a parabolic,” Ben warned him.
Right. He managed to squeeze the box closed-enough with one arm, so he could reach his grav generator and pull himself down before he flew off the asteroid altogether. He angled backward to
ward where they emerged, and very slowly drifted down to standing. He immediately set down the container and began taping it. “Can you see our entrance?”
Ben’s headlamp crossed him, ruining his sight for a moment, but informing him where the captain was. “I’m on a pyramid a hundred meters from yours. The exit is to your right, bit behind, two hundred meters.”
Remi considered this, and reoriented his body and craft project to face the tunnel mouth. His headlamp confirmed. The dumpster stood on end some ways to the left, a spill of rock before it. He caught himself watching how exactly it cantilevered itself, then got back to his knitting. “I tape my gear box. Do you see the sled?”
“Yeah. What I don’t see is a shuttle. Or Merchant. Or Merchant’s shuttle. Rego hell.”
Remi didn’t expect to see a damned thing, except in the tunnel of light before him. Only after a moment did he realize Ben referred to his instruments. “I am tired and stupid.”
“Ditto that. I’m heading down.”
“Did you fix your box? And map our turns?”
“Yes, Dad.”
Remi grimaced and finished his chore. He stood and pointed his helmet at Ben, skidding down his gravel pyramid. “Bad for your boots.”
“Hey, Remi? Do me a favor. Pretend I’m in command.”
“Sorry.” The old mining hand settled on 0.2 g, and bounded lightly off his hill, to sail in slow motion toward the gaping funnel hole. He had time to kill in the not-air. “We could be far from the shuttle. Curve of the asteroid between us?”
The captain sighed. “That’s pretty far. I guess that would explain Merchant, too.”
“No,” Remi reasoned, touching down a few meters from him. “The problem with Merchant is a weak signal.”
“Spherical broadcast?” Ben realized sadly.
Their suit transmitters had only so much power. The power of their signals fell off as the cube of the distance. Which meant a few klicks was too damned far to hear them unless someone was listening awfully hard. “But surely they’re looking for us!”
Remi put down his box and kicked it. Then he retrieved his utility knife and cut the dratted thing open again. “I erect a signal. SOS. We leave a battery and the lights here to cry for help. And we mark tunnels.”
“You have the shop light.” Ben joined him and sat on his own box. “Mine holds batteries, air canisters, toolbox, and the water thermos.”
“Would your toolbox have a transmitter?”
“Sorry, no. Just the suit. We can’t spare our suit radios.”
“No!” Remi agreed. The perennial blackness sapped his spirit as the cold wore down his batteries. To be unable to converse would be hell. Then he recalled it was his companion who so recently suffered a nervous breakdown. He asked gently, “How are you, Ben?”
The captain was slow to answer. “I’ve been happier.” After another lull, he added in a reedy voice, “The headlamp lights are beginning to get to me.”
“Me too. You are OK?”
Another answer was slow coming. “Sure.”
“Would you tell me if you were not OK?”
“Sure.” Remi read that response as a bald-faced lie.
Ben continued, “So are you rigging an SOS light?” His head lamp crossed Remi’s briefly to double the illumination on his toolbox. “Can I help?”
“Almost done.” The engineer finished programming a sequencer, and attached it to the powerful work-site lamp.
He decided the captain was still tracking, functioning well enough. “We need rest. At the nanofab, or the bat cave.”
“Yeah. This is disappointing.”
“Yes,” Remi murmured. “I thought, we stick our heads out, we see shuttle, call Merchant. Wilder and Nico are here on the asteroid looking for us. They bound over with fresh air and emergency blankets. Joey flies the shuttle to us. We are home safe in minutes.”
Ben dropped his helmet onto his arms. “That sounds nice.”
Remi added a battery to blaze forth his SOS Morse code signal. “The range on this…”
“Is next to nothing,” Ben agreed. “And the battery will die of the cold. Sit and rest? Or back to the conveyor belts? We don’t have time to wait.” The dumpster was gone now.
“Agreed.” Remi kicked his head back and took in the stars. They slid across the sky quickly because of the asteroid’s fast spin. But none moved or flickered. They shone across unimaginable light years, in frigid indifference to their plight. And they’d face the brutal sun soon. “There is a transmitter. And receiver. Somewhere. For Loki to speak his thoughts from one asteroid to another. But it’s tightbeam. We won’t detect it.” No atmosphere would scatter a laser here.
Ben murmured, “If we come back up, if I can’t see a shuttle to head for…”
No, it wasn’t Remi’s imagination. The captain was in trouble. But who was he to fix it? “You need a friend. I don’t know how to do that.” He sighed hugely, then spat out his frustration.
“Never anyone likes me. As a kid, I am aristocrat, but not really. No friends, only my sisters. I go to school in Landing. But my family has a secret, we don’t keep slaves. So, no friends. I go to the orbital, finally people like me. But no, they take drugs, I don’t like them. I get arrested for the revolution, sent to Hell’s Bells. More drugs! And only men! I don’t want men! I want women! Sass’s ship, still a year before I have friends. Spaceways it’s better, but still no one likes me! So I talk to machines! I know you need help! But I don’t know how to help you!”
He finally met Ben’s eyes on this last, and the words died. Tears welled in the captain’s eyes, failing to fall in zero g. “You’re like me, Remi. And I like you fine.”
The engineer scoffed. “You? Like me?”
“Stop!” Ben begged. “At twenty, Sass found me in Poldark. My dad paid her to take me away. I was the first university student Poldark ever produced. Only four settlers on the whole rego moon went to university. Poldark shunned me. Not a single friend in that town.”
He was crying in earnest now. “Even Thrive’s crew – Abel hated me. I was smart, hyper, a wise-ass. But Sass likes everybody. Then she hired Cope, seven years older, a real man, hardened. He adopted me. Kind of like a pet. Taught me how to act. I had friends for the first time. And that meant the world to me. That’s what I try to make Spaceways. A home for smart misfits. You’re home, Remi. With us. And don’t you ever think I don’t mean it. That I don’t care. Because I do, dammit!
“But I’m a captain! I lead by example. Whether I’m OK or not.” He stumbled over the last of that. Then in violent reaction, he stood from his case too forcefully. He bounded off the asteroid again. He swore floating down. “You have a friend. A real one. Because you and me? We’re the same.”
“From different moons.”
Ben shook his head lightly, not enough to shift the helmet. “Roy Dome, Poldark, Landing, SO. That was half our lives ago. You and me, we live in the Rings.” He added sheepishly, “Let’s go.”
Remi fell in beside him as they retraced their steps to the nanofab whose siren call led them to shipwreck. After they etched another turn, he ventured, “I would like a friend here. Captain, not so much.”
“Deal. I don’t know what to try next, anyway. I don’t know what direction to walk on the surface.”
They’d counted on a clear line of sight, a comms beacon to follow. “They’re looking for us, Ben. I believe that.”
“Yeah? Then where are they?” A moment later, he whispered, “Sorry.”
26
Ben wondered where the bats went. They entered their favorite bat cave for stage two of recharging, after collecting air from the nanofab. The room seemed mercifully light on the flapping nuisances.
Remi skimmed the floor past him, to the section they’d claimed for charging ports. He propelled himself by grasping bat ‘heads.’ They plugged in by their nether ends.
Ben followed hopscotch-fashion, stepping through vacant bat-slots at low g. He made a mental note that his gravity generator
and blaster needed charging as well as the battery bricks. “About an hour?” He checked the time, past midnight.
Remi agreed, already plugging items in, inconvenient bat-bots evicted.
Ben added his bricks to the first wave of recharging, then sadly added his grav generator. That meant he was stuck with zero-g for the duration. He amused himself with attempting to set both himself and his case of belongings at perfect rest relative to the floor. That never worked. “I’m getting dopey. We need sleep. Trade off, I think.”
“Why?” Remi countered. “Takes twice as long for half the sleep that way.”
“I fear cleaning bots,” the captain explained. “I wouldn’t sleep unless someone was watching. You can sleep first if you want.” His narrow light beam fixed on a nearby bat. “I am mortally tired of living inside a narrow beam of light. I’m starting to jump every time your beam swings around and surprises me. Spooks me. Do you think dark would be better?”
“No, I do not.”
Without sound effects, Ben didn’t realize his companion was up to something until it was complete. Suddenly, he was bathed in a cone of light, as though hovering in a bright teepee surrounded by black night. He laughed aloud and looked up. “Remi, you’re brilliant!” His helmet light sliced across the room, and he turned it off. His companion had affixed his utility flashlight to a bat above them, and set it to a wide beam.
The engineer sketched a bow. This left him in a poor position to ‘land’ on their chosen ‘floor’. The chamber was fairly spherical, no particular orientation, just tiled with bat charging ports all around, about half presently occupied. Ben grabbed a bat head for anchor and extended his other arm to fish his friend down.
Remi sighed as he came to rest. “That does feel better. You sleep. I don’t like the bats.”
Ben plucked a bat from their chamber of light and pitched it into the black periphery. “I don’t either.” The next one, he unplugged, then turned on its back to inspect. “What are these rego things?”
