Zero-G

by Rob Boffard

  Carver is already on his feet, stumbling past me. “Move, move, move, move!”

  I get to my feet, unsteady but spurred on by adrenaline, nearly falling as the tug lurches to one side. There’s a grinding noise from below, and as I duck through the low doorway into the cockpit, I can feel it shuddering through the tug.

  There are two chairs made of bucket plastic, low to the floor, surrounded on all sides by switches and glowing readouts. Carver is already sliding into the left-hand seat, throwing switches and tapping readouts. Two control yokes jut out above the seats at chest height – for a second I can’t help thinking of the Boneshaker.

  I follow Carver, slipping into the seat next to him. I’m not sure what’s louder: the hammering of my heart, or the terrifying grinding sound from the tug’s coupling. Carver gives an experimental pull on his yoke, and mine matches its movement, nearly taking me in the chest. Someone has tied a slip of paper to the handle; I get a glimpse of the message written on it as the yoke is pushed back. Alison – fly safe, fly straight. I love you. Kamal.

  It takes a few seconds for me to tear my eyes away.

  There’s a glass screen in front of us, curving around the tug’s body. My breath catches as I look through it. The dock is a nightmare world of flying debris and whirling smoke. Bodies spin through the air, grab hold of something, are wrenched away.

  On the other side, a tug has lifted off its railings and is moving towards the breach. There’s no way to tell if its engines are on, or if it’s being dragged by the force of the vacuum. My heart feels as if it’s being physically pulled out into the dock, as if it can find Prakesh’s tug all on its own.

  Carver punches the air as our tug rumbles to life. Needles jump and skitter behind their transparent housing, and the yokes shudder with the force of the engine. “Strap in,” he says, reaching behind him and fumbling for a belt. I scrabble for mine, finding it above and behind me; it goes down over my shoulders and between my breasts, clicking into a buckle between my legs. As soon as I slide it home, the straps pull tight, forcing me into the seat and knocking a little breath from me. Another tug is moving, tumbling clumsily across the floor, spitting sparks as it scrapes across it.

  Carver has his hands on the yoke, staring intently at the readouts.

  “You can fly this thing, right?” I say.

  “Sure,” he says. But he doesn’t move, his fingers still wrapped around the yoke. Below us, there’s another metallic growl as the tug strains at its magrail.

  I close my eyes. “You can’t fly it, can you?”

  When I open them again, Carver is staring at me. There’s a small, apologetic smile on his face.

  With a final, fatal wrench, our tug tears loose of its coupling, and we’re spinning and crashing towards the void.

  88

  Knox

  Morgan Knox comes to just as the airlock doors breach.

  For a few confused seconds, he doesn’t know what’s happening. He’s pulled across the dock, and his lungs feel like they’re being crushed in a vice.

  Stop, he thinks.

  But he can’t. His hand snags something, one of the wheeled pallets the Earthers were using for cover, but he’s pulled away almost immediately. His head collides with the floor, and brilliant sparks explode across his field of view. A second later, a whirling dagger of metal buries itself in his thigh. He has no air to scream with, can only watch in horror as the shard is ripped out by the pressure, trailing a fan of blood.

  He can do nothing. He is a small child in the grip of a giant. The world around him is a roaring nightmare, a maelstrom of debris and bodies.

  And then it … changes.

  The sound dwindles, then vanishes. Knox is out of the storm, and he’s looking at Outer Earth. It’s huge, bigger than he could have ever imaged. He can see it curving away from him, see the glittering convection fins on its hull. Beyond it, the blackness of space is split by a billion tiny pinpricks of light.

  Time slows to a crawl.

  He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything. But as he looks at Outer Earth, Morgan Knox is gifted a moment of clarity. He realises what’s happened, realises that Outer Earth has suffered a breach. And that’s when the real fear grips him, pushing past the confusion.

  Because he knows what’s going to happen next.

  He feels it on his tongue first. A prickly sensation, like a mouthful of iron. It’s the moisture boiling off. His face is swelling, the skin stretching and warping. His eyes … oh gods, his eyes. The pressure is unbelievable.

  And yet, he can still see. His vision has shrunk to two small circles, but it’s enough to see Amira Al-Hassan, floating in front of him.

  Morgan, Amira says.

  And then she screams.

  The sound tears Knox apart. What’s happening to him is happening to her as well. He can see her skin starting to stretch, the tissues in her face swelling up. Her limbs contort, bending into impossible positions. She’s dying, she’s dying again, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Morgan, help me!

  He tries to move. But his body has stopped listening to him. He needs air, needs oxygen, but there’s nothing he can do.

  Amira’s eyes are horribly distorted, swollen red bulbs with a misshapen iris at the centre. She stops screaming, and suddenly her voice is full of scorn. You can’t do it, can you?

  He tries to speak.

  You failed me.

  Then she vanishes. Like she was never there. Like she never existed in the first place.

  Knox’s vision shrinks to a pinprick, then vanishes completely.

  89

  Riley

  If we weren’t strapped in, we’d be smashed to pieces in the tug’s insides. The entire body shakes as we roll end over end, slamming again and again into the walls and floor of the dock. Another tug looms in the cockpit glass, but I barely register it’s there before we hit it. The bang throws me back into my seat again as we spin off.

  I get a split-second glimpse of the airlock doors, of torn and shredded metal. And then, all at once, we’re out.

  The only sounds are the tug’s humming engine, and my own shaky breathing. We’re still tumbling, with debris flying past us, but it’s now against a backdrop of inky blackness. Every few seconds, the side of the station swings past, huge and dark.

  “Yeah. OK. All right,” Carver says, more to himself than to me. He’s got hold of the yoke again, and is hesitantly reaching out to the instruments, flicking switches and running his finger along labels. I look away from the spinning hell outside the window, trying to ignore the lurching in my stomach.

  Something hits us, bouncing off the roof with a dull boom. When I open my mouth, my voice is louder than I intended. “Get us under control.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try harder!”

  “Why don’t you stop giving me shit and look for the thruster controls?”

  I start scanning the dials and digital readouts, but it’s like I’m looking at another language – one made of numbers and arrows and strange symbols. My finger hovers over the controls, and I have to exert real effort to move it. Zero-G. We’re in zero-G now. It’s impossible not to think back to when I ran the Core, a year ago. When I fought Oren Darnell in the microgravity.

  “Got it!” Carver says, and twists a knob on the control panel. There’s a low groan as the tug jerks itself into life. The spinning world outside the window is slowing, coming to a rest. For some reason, I expected everything to be darkness – for the blackness of space to be total. But it’s as if we’re floating in a chamber bathed in brilliant light. Objects slowly rotate, catching the light and holding it: a crate, a discarded stinger, the arm of a crane. A little way away, another tug spins gently, the cockpit dark and empty.

  And then Outer Earth comes into view, and my mouth falls open.

  We’re about a mile away from it. Part of the station is cloaked in shadow. But the rest of it is awash with sunlight, gleaming like a jewel. The convection fins o
n the hull are huge, glittering slabs. The core at the centre is a mess of protruding cylinders, all radiating out from the central reactor. I can make out the tiny puffs of fire as the hull lasers open up on approaching objects, vaporising them, preventing them from damaging the station.

  “No,” Carver says, sucking in a horrified breath. I follow his gaze, and a breath catches in my throat.

  The dock. It’s as if a deity, angry and vengeful, made a giant fist and punched out the side of the station. The breach has torn a hole right through, a jagged wound that must reach into Apex itself. There’s a cloud of glittering debris above the breach.

  “Anna,” I say, and it’s a full second before I realise I’ve actually said her name. I turn to Carver, tearing my eyes away from the station. “Do you think she…”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “She’ll have got clear.”

  But his eyes say something different.

  He rotates the tug – I can hear the thrusters shooting off, like compressed air. The station swings away. The glow of the Earth, far below us, is just out of sight.

  “There!” Carver shouts, pointing out of his side of the cockpit. I raise myself up as high as the straps will allow, my body assisted by the low gravity.

  The asteroid is so big it takes my breath away. I know it’s smaller than a single sector on Outer Earth, but at that moment it looks impossibly large. It’s steady against the blackness, pitted and pockmarked, with shadowy craters and a trailing veil of ice reaching out behind it.

  And on one side, dwarfed by its cargo and only just visible: the Shinso Maru. A tiny speck, connected to the asteroid with dozens of thin, silver threads. Each one of them will be a flexible carbon-fibre cable, twenty feet across.

  It’s hard to believe that the Earthers’ plan will work. I try to picture them entering Earth’s atmosphere, coming in behind the asteroid, using it as a shield against the intense heat.

  “How far away are they?” I say.

  “Close enough,” Carver replies, pushing the yoke forward. I can feel the thrusters kicking in. The rumble comes up through my seat.

  I push myself up out of my seat again. “I don’t see the other tug.”

  “They got a head start.”

  “Or they didn’t make it at all.”

  “Calm down, Ry. They’ll have got there. Prakesh’ll be OK.”

  He tries to make the words sound comforting, but doesn’t quite get there. What comes out sounds almost mocking, and I can see that he knows it, refusing to meet my eyes. The memory of the kiss surfaces, and won’t go away.

  “Did you see any kids?” Carver says.

  “Kids?”

  “The Earthers – they had children with them, back in that mining facility.”

  We fall silent as the implication sinks in. The children have been left behind – every one of them, including Jamal’s little girl, Ivy.

  “Hey, look on the bright side,” says Carver. “Your bombs haven’t exploded. Guess my solution worked after all.”

  I touch my ear, without meaning to. There’s no way Knox survived a dock breach. I guess Carver’s right.

  Against all odds, I feel relief. Sweet, beautiful relief. I hold onto it, just for a moment.

  Carver corrects the tug, pulling down on the yoke, but it just slides the other way, nearly vanishing below us. “I wish I knew how to read this thing’s instruments,” he says. His forehead is shiny with sweat, his mouth set in a thin line.

  We fall silent. My gaze drifts to the ship, larger now. It’s in the full glare of the sun, and what I see takes my breath away. It’s like something from a distant galaxy; from a civilisation much older than ours, one that has been around so long that they’ve evolved in a completely different direction. The ship is a huge, slowly rotating cylinder, half a mile long at least. It looks awkward and ungainly, with enormous thruster cones jutting off its body. The surface isn’t a uniform grey like I thought at first. It’s mottled blue and brown, too, with an almost plant-like texture. It’s a little below us, off to the left. I point to it. “Can you bring us around?”

  Carver pulls the yoke down, but nothing happens. His brow furrows, and he does it again, harder this time.

  “Carver?” I say, trying and failing to keep the nervousness out of my voice.

  “The thrusters.” He breaks off, pulling the yoke towards him again. “They’re not responding. They must have been damaged when the airlock blew.”

  I grab my own yoke and pull. A strange image comes to mind: a picture I saw years ago, in a school lesson I thought I’d long forgotten. A boat of some kind, the couple in it rowing hard against an unforgiving ocean current. When I pull the yoke down, the tug remains locked on its course, the hum of its engine steady. If we stay on our current course, we’re going to shoot right past the Shinso and its asteroid, with no way to make it back.

  “Can we fix them?” I say.

  “Sure,” Carver says. “If we had a few hours and I actually knew something about tug engines.”

  He’s pulling at the yoke now, hurling it in different directions, the asteroid looming large in our field of view. “Come on, you piece of shit, work,” he says. “Come on. Come on!”

  90

  Prakesh

  It’s all Prakesh can do to hold on.

  They’re flying away from Outer Earth, stars whirling past the cockpit viewport. Movement inside the tug is practically impossible. They might be floating in zero gravity, but there are at least twenty people inside, and there’s hardly an inch of free space. Earthers and Tzevyans mingle together, huddled in the dim red light.

  One of them floats past Prakesh, a knee half an inch from his nose, and he pulls back reflexively. He bangs his head on the wall, and gasps, tightening his fingers on the handhold. The lack of gravity is tearing his stomach apart – some of the others couldn’t take the pressure, and there are already chunks of vomit floating in the stale air, glistening, catching the light.

  He keeps seeing the airlock doors give way, keeps hearing the terrible roar as the air was sucked out. He doesn’t know if the station can survive a breach that big. Riley will be OK, he knows it, refuses to think otherwise, but what about his parents? They’re still on board.

  He makes himself focus. He’s near the front of the tug, near the two pilot seats. They’re taken up by Okwembu on the right, and Mikhail on the left. They’ve managed to strap themselves in, and Mikhail is fighting with the control stick.

  “Everybody hold on,” Okwembu says. “It’s all under control.”

  “Under control?” Syria’s voice comes from the back of the craft. “You just blew a hole in the side of the station.”

  “It’s the only chance we have,” Okwembu says. Prakesh stares at her in silent wonder – she sounds calm, almost bored, like the breach was part of her plan.

  He makes himself speak. “We have to go back. We have to help them.”

  “Help who, Mr Kumar?” She doesn’t turn to look at him. He wants to reach out and grab her by the hair, shake some sense into her, but he can’t seem to remove his hand from the wall. His fingers have stopped listening to him.

  “Everybody on Outer Earth,” he says. “They’re still there. We can’t just leave them.”

  Now she does turn to look at him. In the red light, her eyes look like black holes.

  “We can, and we have to,” she says.

  He feels anger, real anger, at the thought of following Janice Okwembu into anything. But, then, what choice does he have? What choice do any of them have?

  Preserve life, he thinks, and grips his handhold even tighter.

  Sweat is pouring down Mikhail’s face. “All right,” he says to Okwembu, almost mumbling the words. “We should be in range.”

  “Where is it?” she replies.

  “Jacket pocket. You’ll have to reach over.”

  Prakesh sees Okwembu shut her eyes, just for a second, then lean over to Mikhail. She’s exhausted – he can see that now. Despite her calm demeanour, there
are dark shadows under her eyes. She sticks a hand in Mikhail’s jacket, and it emerges holding a small tab screen, a bulky antenna jutting out of it.

  “You know what to do?” says Mikhail.

  Okwembu mutters something unintelligible, tapping her way through the opening menus.

  “Hey,” Mikhail says. “You make it work. That’s the only reason you’re still alive.”

  He doesn’t see the look Okwembu flashes him, and the pure poison on her face is enough to make Prakesh’s eyes go wide. In that instant, she doesn’t look human.

  But she says nothing, turning back to the tab screen.

  “What’s happening up there?” Syria shouts.

  “Yeah,” comes another voice. “We can’t see anything.”

  Okwembu is using a program Prakesh hasn’t encountered before: all green backgrounds and sparse text. “It’s going to take a few minutes,” she says. “I haven’t used Ellipsis since I was at the Academy.”

  “I thought you said you could do it,” Mikhail says.

  She rounds on him. “I can. I’m the only one who can. You should remember that. You just need to give me time.”

  And Prakesh understands.

  They crew of the Shinso would never let them on board. They’d know what was happening on the station, and they’d have been told to get as far away as possible. So the Earthers are using Okwembu to override the ship, using her experience of the Shinso’s dated operating system. It wouldn’t take much – all she’d have to do is force the ship’s airlocks to activate, to let them dock.

  And, on cue, the Shinso Maru slides into view, a tiny speck in the void, shadowed by the giant asteroid behind it.

  91

  Riley

  Before I realise I’m doing it, I’m unbuckling my straps. They whiz back into the seat, and I float upwards, my stomach rolling uncomfortably. Carver stares at me in disbelief. “Where are you going?”