by M M Buckner
But Shee was in no mood to hear my warnings. The zone’s electric bliss held her fast in its grip. Eyes clenched tight, she pressed closer to the steel wall, intent on every faint vibration. Under the gray suit, her long, lovely muscles tensed and quivered. I knew how she felt—waiting for action, elevated on stress and adrenaline. Hadn’t I experienced that sweet high? Zone addiction. I had no choice but to save her—if necessary, against her will.
To do that, I needed to get outside the hull and signal Provendia. But Liam wouldn’t let me go EVA. He said Geraldine almost died the last time she used this old space suit. The punk was concerned about my well-being, can you believe it? He made Sheeba and me wear the suits just in case something unfortunate happened during the explosion. Just in case. Ye glittering gods, how that phrase ticked me.
“We gotta reinforce the hatches,” said Juani. “When that explosion come, this old tank gonna shiver. Will you help me carry the welder?”
“In a minute.” I needed to think.
For some time, my IBiS had been tingling an alert, so I slipped off my glove to check it. Oh, great news. My dental NEMs had developed a work-around for their program error. They’d given up waiting for doctors’ orders through the Net, and the little bootstrappers were going ahead with my dental hygiene all on their own. I rolled my tongue around my newly sanitized mouth. Hurrah. Minty fresh.
One more tune, I tugged at the glue crusting my derelict space suit and assured myself it would hold. Juani was trying to walk the heavy welder onto a dolly so he could move it to the ladder well. He wanted me to help, but when his back was turned, I tugged Geraldine’s mildewed helmet over my head. Shee was too immersed to see what I was doing. She splayed her body against the wall as if she were begging for sounds. Dear deluded child, she didn’t open her eyes when I slipped out of sight around the curving corridor.
Finding the airlock was easy—Liam had showed me the way earlier. I cycled through, opened the hatch and felt the cold at once. That was not a good sign. Geraldine’s old suit must have lost some of its insulating capacity. The satellite’s angular momentum didn’t catch me by surprise this time. I hung on tight and took shallow breaths through the musty old-style mouthpiece in the helmet. Then I reached back to check the air-hose connections again.
A row of handholds glinted softly around Heaven’s waist. I gripped the first one and pulled myself toward the Up side. When I emerged from the shade, solar radiation blazed around me like a nuclear burn. Sunset. A13 was just passing behind the Earth. As the sun’s fireball sank behind Earth’s gilded horizon, I quickly turned away to save my eyesight. Geraldine’s visor lacked basic photochromic darkening.
I hadn’t expected to reach Heaven’s sunward face so quickly. In the sun’s dying rays, my suit was heating up, and the hull was too silvery bright to look at. Head down, I swung back into the shadow side, where the temperature inside my suit instantly dropped to the shivering range. From this position, I had a satellite’s eye view of twilight Earth blanketed in steamy clouds. Whorls of gray and rich rusty brown marbled the ochre smog in fanciful patterns. Those whorls must have been the size of Sweden for me to see them this far away.
Beyond Heaven’s bullet point, the asteroid counterweight glowed like a yin-yang symbol, half in sunlight, half in black shade. Briefly, I paused to listen for hisses inside my suit, but so far, the glue was holding. I double-checked my safety line, then started crawling again.
Heaven’s hull seemed more pitted than ever, pocked with rust and dents. The tank had hauled fuel all through the solar system before we bought it secondhand. Had anyone checked its rated lifetime?
I noticed something peculiar. The tank appeared longer than it should have. I’d visited four levels so far, and each was three meters high at most. The fifth deck held the main factory, so it would naturally be larger. I mentally added the numbers, but the tank was triple the length I expected. Optical illusion? Distances can fool you when you’re under severe stress. Either that or the fifth deck was enormous.
Heaven raced around its track like a roulette ball. I clutched the handholds and moved deeper into the shade. Surf it. Ride it. Savor the thrill. How many seconds do any of us glide on the keen thin edge of life? War surfers do it more than ordinary people, but the experience remains rare. I drank in the scenery. One rim of Earth’s black orb still glowed where the sun had set, and beyond that, the ether of space glimmered with spectral agitation. Brain chemicals sharpened my senses to an extraordinary pitch. I thought: This will make a molto vivid blog for the Web site.
A seam ran down the full length of A13’.s underbelly, and the rivets stuck out five centimeters. It was almost as good as a ladder. I could follow this seam down to the tank’s base and signal the gunship. The only problem was, halfway down the ladder of rivets, I reached the end of my safety line.
What the heck. I had made it this far without slipping. Besides, Liam did it. So I unclipped. Imagine me slithering along, clinging to those rivets for dear life, braving the deeps of space. Ye graven gold, how I wished Verinne had her cameras trained on me.
The closer I moved toward the tank’s butt end, the stronger grew the angular momentum. By the time I gripped the lowest rim of the tank, my legs were flying out from the hull, and it was all I could do to hold on. I peeked over the rim at the blunt, flat bottom of the tank.
Picture the brouhaha that awaited. A few meters away, Vlad and Liam hung by their feet from Heaven’s bottom, wearing their (my) shining white suits, and surrounded by blue-clad mercenaries. No, not Provendia troops. These were hired commandos. I recognized their logo, IVet.Com. Why was Provendia hiring mercenaries? We maintained a small army of our own security guards.
In any case, it was obvious that Liam’s plan had crashed on takeoff. He and Vlad had been spotted and attacked before they could detonate their ill-conceived explosion. To have their hands free, they’d jammed their boots into the overlapping seam of the cargo doors, and now they were stuck there, unable to maneuver. So they hung from Heaven’s butt, swinging their chains and trying to fight their way backward, sliding their boots along the seam in precisely my direction.
Visualize their chains impacting those blue IVet helmets in eerie quiet. See the sparks fly, and watch the chains bounce in loose spiraling curls. Take my word, it was fascinating. When one of the mercs spotted me and fired a flechetter, I almost lost my grip trying to duck.
Vlad struggled awkwardly. He meant well, but he wasn’t a fighter. When a mere grabbed his legs, he tried to wrench free, and his boots lifted out of the seam. After that, it was child’s play for the mercs to seize him.
Next, Liam ignited his (my) thruster and astounded everyone by zooming straight out into space. He tried to circle around, flailing his chain. No doubt his intention was to rescue his friend, but he wasn’t very experienced at steering. Four of the mercs zoomed up to surround him, and they were just about to close in when he abruptly spurted away like a meteor. Probably his accelerator hung up. He might have hit the lock button by accident. In seconds, he dwindled to a distant white speck in the sky, and the four mercs called off their chase.
They massed around Vlad like viruses, and the whole squirming clump of them drifted in my direction. The young medic writhed in feral panic, but the men in blue held him tight, and I felt an insane compulsion to try and free him. Without thinking, I rose up over the rim in plain sight.
Vlad recognized me. We were almost near enough to touch, and I could see his mouth moving. In a desperate lunge, he tossed his chain toward me. The chain swung erratically, and in reflex, I freed one hand to grasp it. Then the nearest mere spotted me.
“I surrender!” I shouted uselessly inside my helmet. Quickly, I lowered the chain and bowed to show total submission. But the damned chain kept undulating with waves of inertia. The more I fought it, the more it whipped around. So I wedged my boot in the seam and grabbed the wicked thing with both hands.
Then Vlad gave me a look I’ll never forget, and he mouthed two
words through his visor: “Help me.”
I hesitated. This was my chance to escape. Here were my rescuers. All I had to do was let them take me, and this nightmare surf would come to an end. But I stared at Vlad’s desperate expression and—ye gods—I wavered. When the mere zoomed toward me aiming his handgun, I had no choice but to bash him with the chain.
Out of nowhere, reinforcements converged. But these new troops weren’t wearing IVet’s mercenary blue. One of them wore a purple suit with silver and red paisleys, exactly like my old friend Grunze. Hell, it was Grunze. I knew that helmet. And that tall skinny person beside him in black, that was Verinne. No mistaking her willowy shape. Several meters off, Kat was hovering. The Agonists had come to save me!
Imagine my bliss. My dear beloved friends. I waved to them in wild delight. Winston was probably back in the shuttle mixing margaritas. Lime juice and salt, good old Win, he knew my favorite poison. I waved frantically with the chain to get their attention and nearly tugged my boot loose from the seam, but they didn’t see me. All their attention was focused on Vlad, who strained less and less in the iron grip of the mercenaries.
A swarm of space-hardened cameras buzzed around—Verinne was documenting the scuffle, probably uploading it to the Net. When the mere I’d assaulted started peppering me with flechettes, my friends not only failed to intervene, they didn’t send one solitary camera to take my picture. The brawl with Vlad absorbed them. Ye images of gold, that white EVA suit. They thought Vlad was me!
I abandoned the chain and flattened myself to the hull to escape the flechettes. This old gray suit made me look like an agitator. I clawed at the globby glue and hated my life. I would have ripped the suit off there and then to reveal my true face—except that wasn’t feasible. Steady, I told myself. Improvise.
So I kicked off from the hull and let the momentum carry me toward Verinne. Close up, she would surely recognize my face through the visor. My aim was good. I sailed straight for her. No way could I miss. Any second, she would see my helmeted face and open her arms to catch me. Cara mia. I waved and smiled. She would probably win some bet at my expense, but I didn’t mind.
When she noticed me coming, she moved aside. Not far. Just enough to avoid me. Ten centimeters beyond my outstretched hand, she let me streak past without so much as a sideways glance. In this prote getup, I held no interest for her. She could at least have shoved me back toward the satellite. But she was too busy recording her Reel.
So there I was, racing into the night in my leaky gray, glue-crusted agitator suit, running out of air and losing way too much heat, while Heaven and the gunship and everyone I cared for in the world wheeled inexorably away behind me in total mind-fucking indifference. Times like these give a man food for thought.
I torqued my body around to avoid the sunset in my eyes—and managed to throw myself into a slow, rifling spin. Every few seconds, Earth rose and set around me like a fast-forward moon. Shivering with cold, I threw my head back to get a better look at A13, but the helmet limited my view. For several long minutes, I drifted, intermittently holding my bream to preserve my air supply, then hyperventilating in nervous agitation. Does mat work? And one thought orbited through my skull: What would Sheeba do?
Sooner or later, she would discover me missing. I fantasized how she would search through the factory, calling my name. How forlorn she would sound. Perhaps her voice would break and a tear would drip down her bronze cheek. Too late, she would sense the void I left in her life, and a moan would burst softly from her lips. Then she would beat her breasts, violently, wishing we’d made love. Ah Shee, we should have shared that intimacy.
Picture me gliding through the void, stately and sad. All the while, one image enwraps my shivering body like a warm pink nimbus of soap bubbles. Myself and Sheeba making love. Feel the erotic dream, replete with sounds and pinpricks of sweat running up and down my groin. Sense the rapid rhythm of my hands. See my body humping the darkness. Taste the heat.
Now envision that voluptuous fantasy whirling away down a black vortex.
Somehow, I had cranked myself into a faster spin, and Earth was circling me every second. I closed my eyes to keep from throwing up in my helmet. And I knew Sheeba would not be calling my name. She’d be playing tongue-tie with that agitator.
“She’s mine!” I shouted inside my helmet. “Let go of her!”
Then he hit me.
Out of the clear black sky, he hit me full force and stopped my spin. Before I could react, his helmet punched me in the stomach. Then he caught me in his outstretched arms and shoved me ahead like a forklift loading a pallet. My ribs impacted his chest with crushing violence, and in absolute terror, I threw my arms around his neck.
Eventually, when I gathered my wits and took note of what had happened, Liam and I were streaking back toward Heaven at an ever-increasing rate of speed, building up toward a molto vicious crash straight into the cargo doors. His thruster accelerator was still locked, although he seemed to have discovered how to steer.
Hastily, I reached for his controls and flipped off the lock, but though we stopped accelerating, our speed did not diminish. No friction, you see.
He touched his helmet to mine and asked, “Did Sheeba come outside?”
I wanted to spit in his face. Instead I pressed my visor against his and grunted, “Aren’t you interested in the braking jets?”
I showed him how to operate the controls to kill off our speed. By the time we settled back to Heaven, no one was there. No mercs, no Agonists, no Vlad. “Shit,” I heard the punk say when our helmets bumped. For once, I agreed.
In taut silence, he steered us back to Two’s airlock, and together we climbed inside and cycled through. We had nothing to say to each other. Sheeba was waiting.
Ha. She hugged me first. Her long arms clamped around me like a vise. “You risked your life defending us. Dear Nass, your karma’s totally primeval. You’ve got old, old spiritual layers going back to Genesis.”
While I ruminated on this strange praise, Sheeba hugged the chief of thugs. Of course, I counted the seconds to see which embrace would last longer. They broke apart almost immediately, blushing and lowering their eyes. A less experienced rival might have been pleased by their awkwardness, but I knew what it meant. Ye deities, budding lust. I wadded my gloves in my pocket, longing to stuff my fist down Liam’s throat.
“Where’s Vlad?” Sheeba peered into the airlock.
“They took him,” I said.
Liam, with his usual linguistic eloquence, merely slammed his (my) helmet to the deck, where it bounced hard and rolled.
“They got Vlad?” Sheeba searched the airlock, as if the medic would magically reappear.
I picked up my helmet and took note of the unsightly new scuff mark. Then, biting my lip till it bled, I watched Sheeba stroke Liam’s back. “Calm down. It wasn’t your fault.” Her large, dimpled hands moved along the gaunt lines of his shoulderblades, and she whispered in bis ear, ‘Tell me what happened.”
“They all slipping away. I can’t protect them,” said the punk.
“We’re still here, beau. We believe in you.”
As her hands massaged his back, brutal hatred washed through me, sharper and more potent man any war-zone rush. It boiled in my stomach like acid and threatened to lift off the top of my skull. She called him her “beau” again. Watching Shee comfort that snot-nosed mug right in front of me, without any attempt to conceal her conduct, why, it made me quiver. My fists clenched, and my toes curled in my boots. I felt capable of bloody acts.
Then a new inspiration struck me. Like a bolt of genius, the idea materialized in my head—a clean, simple way to get rid of the punk forever.
“We have to board that gunship and rescue Vlad,” I said. “You and me, Liam. Let’s go now.”
Naturally, I didn’t mention that the Agonists had taken Vlad away, not the gunship troops. All I wanted was to see Liam captured. If I could persuade him to go aboard Provendia’s gunship—my gunship—then I
would take command, and oh what vengeance I would wreak. I sucked my minty teeth and visualized Liam slumped in the euthanasia chamber.
“Nass, you’d go there to free Vlad? You have a deeper spirit than I ever knew.” Sheeba danced across, holding her arms out toward me. She gave me another hug and a big wet kiss on the ear that rang through my head like a tym-panidrum.
I grinned at Liam. “We should hurry.”
Shee bobbed up on her tiptoes. “Nasir’s right. There’s not a minute to lose.”
Juani had been waiting to speak. Now he came forward, grinned and punched me gently in the arm. “You amaze me, blade. You righteous.”
Surf it. Ride it. Improvise. This was developing much better than I could have planned. As we waited to hear Liam’s response, Sheeba beamed and fidgeted, while Juani nodded proudly and waited with a knowing smile. But Liam clenched his mouth in a tight line and studied the fungal rings on the floor.
I’d spiked him on the horns of a no-win dilemma. Either he would accept my generous help and set off on an impossible mission to board a fully armed Com gunship—during which he would be captured and euthanized while I would surely escape. Or he would reject my brave-hearted suggestion and lose major status points with Shee, not to mention his leadership credibility. I sidled a little closer to my beloved and watched the punk’s face.
“All right, Nasir, we go,” he said at last.
“Parabolic!” Sheeba jumped up and down like a kid. “You guys are rip!”
“But I need time to work it out in my head,” Liam added.
Molto slippery tactic, I had to give him credit. But this was excellent. Better and better. As Shee waltzed off with the punk, I watched them hold hands with a smidgen less than my usual bitter despair. In a little while, he and I would find ourselves on my gunship, surrounded by my executives. Then I would deal with the juvenile chief of thugs.
Suddenly, we heard pounding, and everyone halted and turned. Was the hull trembling apart. Was this the end?
