by Phil Geusz
I cocked my head and listened. Sure enough, there was a faint, intermittent "squeak, squeak, squeak" emerging from the Dragon's main air vent. One of the air system's primary blowers was located just behind her wall, I knew. I'd fixed a very similar problem with a squirt of oil just last Tuesday. Somehow, though, this squeak sounded a bit different than that one had. I twisted the lock nuts on the access panel ninety degrees, then swung it open.
There was dust and dirt everywhere; what a mess! The electro-filter had failed utterly, and so much crud had built up that the motor was overheating. "Geez!" I muttered under my breath. "What a lousy time for this happen!"
The Dragon turned imperiously towards me and raised a single elegant eyebrow behind her black mask.
"Look," I said defensively. "This is gonna take maybe an hour. There's no choice; the air system is the air system, after all. I can't just put it back like it was."
"All right," she replied.
I let out a relieved sigh. She might be so far around the bend that there wasn't any looking back, but at least the Dragon understood about the need for air in space. "I'll have to replace the filter," I explained. "Then, once I clean up the crud around the motor, everything will probably work just fine. There's a spare part up in storage."
"I understand," she replied, turning her back once more. "What more can one expect from an insignificant worm such as yourself?" Then she turned to Jeanine. "Come," she directed. "We will relocate temporarily into Christine's old room. I am an artist; I can improvise." Then they both were gone, and I was able to work in peace at last. It was very difficult to get anything done with the Dragon looking over my shoulder, very difficult indeed.
It was just as well that the Dragon had decided to relocate her Dungeon for the evening, I decided as I began to dig through the accumulated filth. The filter was complete toast, and I had to remove it entirely from its mounting. This required me to reroute the airflow system, redirecting the ventilation through some seldom-used ducting on the other end of the station. Once that was done I was able to remove the filter without having the build-up of dust and dirt blasted all over the Dragon's precious torture equipment, a calamity whose dire consequences I had absolutely no intentions of suffering through.
It was fortunate that the control room was located just under the Dungeon; all of the really kinky stuff was kept as far as possible towards the ends of the Henhouse so that those with relatively conventional tastes need not deal with the more abstruse sexual desires of our other guests. I'd just entered to control room in order to verify with the computer that I indeed had a spare electro-filter in stock when all hell broke loose.
It started with a radio call on the Red frequency, which was reserved for life-threatening events. "Emergency!" the desperate sounding voice called out. "Emergency at the South-" Then the voice was cut off in a burst of static.
Instantly I dropped the filter on the counter and forgot about it. "Repeat!" I demanded into the microphone. "This is the Henhouse. Repeat your emergency call!"
There was a long silence. Then another voice spoke up. "Oh my God!" the woman on the other end said softly. "It's going up. All of it! There's been a whole series of explosions; I don't think there's going to be any survivors. Goddamn blueberries! This is Barbara Mitchell. If you hear my voice, please tell my family that--" Then she too was cut off in a burst off static.
Suddenly adrenaline was flooding into my system by the gallon. "What the hell's going on?" demanded yet another voice. "This is Peter Thomas four-seven, Collins, inbound from Solarium Three. I repeat, what the hell? There's debris all over!"
There was a long moment of silence, until Control's voice finally spoke up. "All inbounds," the voice began. "This is Lagrange Station control. For the past several minutes there has been-- "
Lagrange may have finished their sentence, but I never got to hear it. Suddenly the Henhouse was struck a terrific, terrible blow, knocking me off of my feet and slamming me into the far wall. I struck head-first, stunning me slightly. A precious second passed while I shook off the blow, until an icepick of pain in both of my ears caused my training to kick in. In a flash was up and moving automatically. The pressure was dropping like a rock! I was about to find myself breathing vacuum!
All of the internal doors of the Henhouse were designed to be airtight, and the Control Room door was already beginning to close itself. Red warning lights were flashing everywhere, and the air was foggy from the sudden pressure drop. I forced myself to face directly into the teeth of the wind, and pulled myself through the closing portal so quickly that I drifted yards down the hallway before finding a handrail that I could use to stop my movement. Behind me the door slid solidly shut, and suddenly the terrible roar of rushing air faded away to nothing. My chest was heaving as I floated next to my handgrip, more from my close call than from momentary lack of air. I must have been very frightened indeed, because I'd taken at least four or five such breaths before I realized that I was floating in a place where I should have been standing, and it was two or three more breaths beyond that before I came to appreciate just how incredibly bad a sign that was.
Instantly I was on the move again, once I recognized that we must have suffered structural damage on an almost incomprehensible level. Somehow the part of the Henhouse in which I was standing had come adrift from the rest, I was slowly realizing, and therefore was no longer spinning for gravity.
We didn't seem to be losing any more air, or if we were at least it wasn't being lost very rapidly. Therefore, my first job was to inform myself of what was going on and how badly the Henhouse was damaged. I couldn't exactly get into the Control Room right at the moment; by now it was chock-full of hard vacuum. And I had a sick feeling that the other Control Room, located at the extreme opposite end of the Henhouse so as to ensure that one or the other would always be functional, was equally unavailable. So I decided to fall back on more primitive methods. The first boudoir on the left had a large porthole, I knew, and I tore the door open without knocking. A semi-human voice cried out in terror when I did so, and then was joined by a second.
"It's all right," I reassured the room's occupants automatically, my training kicking in once more. Alarming the passengers was a very bad thing to do. "Please, it's all right. I just need to look around here a little bit."
I was in the Menagerie, I realized suddenly, the boudoir where Trixie and Myrna plied their rather unusual trade. The fox and rabbit girls were curled up in a sort of little furball up against the far bulkhead, while their current client, who was dressed up in a sensation-suit to look like an oversized teddy bear, spun helplessly in mid-air. He looked rather as if he wanted to scream, but he was gagged much too tightly to allow for that sort of thing.
I had no time to spare for the client, however, nor even any for Trixie and Myrna, who were usually so nice to me. Instead I kicked skillfully off of the nearest object-a toy box full of big rubber balls and real teddy bears and such- that was solidly affixed to the deck. Inadvertently I knocked the lid ajar, and slowly the room began to fill with oversized child's toys as I glided across to the port.
Things were bad, I realized once I was able to force my mind to comprehend what my eyes were seeing. Very, very bad. Much of the Henhouse was quite simply gone; we had been sliced almost precisely in two at the narrow point where the long central shaft connected the two groups of orbital shacks. Our docking point was gone as well, and with it Aphrodite. We were tumbling, and the stars were near-streaks across my field of vision.
"Jesus Christ!" I whispered under my breath. "What the hell happened?"
Suddenly Lagrange Station itself swept across my view, and my question was at least partially answered by the fleeting glimpse I caught of her. Lagrange's skin was peeled back like an onion's around the South Pole, and even as I watched there was an intense flash of light from somewhere in that region. Bits and pieces of wreckage were everywhere, and for them to be visible at such a distance even the smallest must have weighed tons. It was
incredible! The explosions must have been colossal, and we'd been unlucky enough to catch a packet of debris from one of the very first.
"Marvin?" Trixie's trembling voice asked.
I turned to face her. Her ears were lowered in fear, and her eyes were open very, very wide. "Yes?"
"What's wrong?" she asked.
I clicked my beak together, trying to figure out how to answer. "There's been accident," I replied at last. "A bad one, aboard Lagrange."
"Uh-huh," she replied, though from her posture I didn't think that she was really listening my words so much as the tone that they were spoken in.
So I tried to sound confident for her. "We've been hit hard," I said. "But we're not losing air. I think we're going to be all right." Then I cocked my head and looked at the fox and rabbit girls critically. "Neither of you are steward-trained, are you?"
Their eyes met for a moment, then they looked back at me. "No," Myrna replied, speaking for them both. "We're too heavily morphed for that."
I nodded. "Right." No one who was less than ninety-five percent physically human could be rated as spacecrew in any capacity, for a wide variety of reasons. I'd forced Beauregard to make me far less a chicken than he'd wanted to by waving that very fact in his face. Trixie and Myrna were both a lot less than ninety-five percent human. "All right," I said to them, trying to maintain my calm, reassuring tone. "Arnold is rated a Chief Steward. Get on the intercom and find him for me, please. Then have him round up all of the other stews and get the cattle under control."
“Right!” Trixie said, looking very relieved at having something to do. The pair leapt off in a flash, leaving me alone with the gagged, handcuffed teddy bear. I looked at him for a moment; his eyes were very wide open and frightened, too. Then I shrugged and left him slowly drifting about amidst the other toys. Someone else would have to deal with the bear; I was far too heavily engaged with other urgent business.
By this time the corridors were already turning into bedlam, the gravity having failed without any warning at all. Drunken, stoned, heavily aphrodisiac-ed johns were floating about the Henhouse in various states of undress and arousal. One especially single-minded and naked individual was attempting to complete his business with Patrice out in front of God and everybody, and she was having an unusual degree of difficulty in fighting him off in the absence of gravity. Fortunately another girl was standing nearby; I snatched the pair of fur-lined handcuffs that she was holding right out of her hands, then after a very brief struggle snapped them onto the miscreant's right ankle and left wrist. He was just an ordinary guy drugged out of his mind, I knew. Tomorrow he'd be deeply ashamed of having behaved so badly in the face of an emergency. Still, we simply had to have order. "Get these johns locked up in one of the boudoirs!" I directed Marian. "Do whatever it takes. Lock them up, strap them down, whatever!"
"Right!" she agreed, just as Winifred drifted by, kicking out frantically with all four hooves and baa-ing like a lost soul.
"And get that damned sheep locked up too!" I ordered. "Hell, put her in the menagerie!"
"First thing!" Marian agreed. I certainly hoped that they took out the teddy-bear guy first, but right at the moment I didn't have time to be terribly choosy.
When I found another boudoir with a porthole on the other side of the Henhouse, this one mercifully deserted, I finally was able to make out at least one bit of good news. Aphrodite was still lingering nearby, it seemed, still locked to her dock. However, the dock was no longer attached to the rest of the station, and the whole affair was drifting perhaps a hundred meters out, spinning slowly in the opposite direction from us. She seemed to be receding a little, as well, albeit very, very slowly. As near as I could see, my pod's hull was seemingly intact.
Arnold called me over the intercom, just then, interrupting my thoughts. "Marvin?" he asked. "Have I finally found you?"
Instantly I pounced on the little red-lighted button. "Marvin here. It's good to hear your voice, Arnold! Is everything all right in the saloon?"
"Hah! Marvin, it's bedlam up here! The drug canisters broke free when we got hit, and the goddamn powder is everywhere! Everyone except the staff is high as a kite; the goddamn johns don't even know their names any more. I think the air filtration's down."
I clicked my beak angrily. "Damnit, there's supposed to be safety clips on those lids! There are safety clips on those lids; I've inspected them myself!"
"And you've never tried to serve two hundred guests all at once, either!" the big man replied angrily. "The clips get in the goddamn way!" Then his voice mellowed a little. "Marvin, the truth is that we're in over our heads up here; I've completely lost control. They're high, they're drunk, they're horny, and it's getting worse by the second. Some of them are already fighting, and others…" His voice turned into a whisper. "Marvin, I just witnessed a rape, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. Not a damn thing"
I nodded, though I knew that Arnold couldn't see me. "Right," I agreed, once more trying to sound confident and in-control for the sake of my subordinate. "I understand, Arnold. There's only so much you can do. I'll be getting the filters back on line just as soon as I can."
"They'll be stoned for hours regardless," Arnold answered. "God, Marvin, what are we going to do? Can we get help from Lagrange?"
"I'm working on that," I replied calmly. "And I'm working on the air, too. You just maintain as much order as you possibly can up there, Arnold, and hold out. I'll be up soon. All right?"
"All right," he replied, sounding a bit more confident at last. "But Marvin… These drugs can be toxic, you know, if the doses are large enough. And you can't hardly see up here for all the stuff in the air."
I nodded; he was right. Air filtration was now my highest priority. "I'm working on it, Arnold" I said again. "I'll send help when I can. Marvin out."
IV
Winifred was still baa-ing and kicking out in the corridor as I passed by, though three of the girls were making a valiant effort at getting her under control. The only johns in sight were all handcuffed or strapped neatly to railings, and each was efficiently and effectively gagged. I grabbed one of them by the hair and turned his head to face me; the man's eyes were glazed badly, I could see, and the pupils mere pinpoints. Clearly, the effects of the drugs were spreading quickly. Then I turned to look down the long corridor; there was a faint white mist in the air.
"All right," I said decisively, pointing to the nearest three girls. "You, you and you. I need help fixing the air system. Come with me." Then I turned and darted down the hallway, not giving them a chance to argue.
There were two separate reasons why our air was no longer being filtered, I knew. One was that much of the air plant had been located on the detached other half of the Henhouse. The other was that, through the most cursed of luck, I'd been busily engaged in changing a filter when everything had gone south. I'd temporarily rerouted various vents to make my job easier, I remembered, though it suddenly seemed like it had happened a thousand years ago…
…and had left the only filtering element in our half of the ship in the control room, where it was now totally unavailable.
I froze in mid leap at the realization, and then the Dragon slammed into me from behind. "You incompetent fool!" she cursed as we tumbled down the passage together, end over end. "Why did you stop short like that?"
"My fault," I murmured as I untangled myself from the leather-clad woman. "I'm sorry!"
Her narrow eyes glowed in rage, then blinked twice. "It was my fault too, perhaps" she said. "I am informed that you are on your way to repair the air filtration system. That is what you took apart in my dungeon, is it not?"
"Yes," I answered.
She nodded soberly. "Then perhaps I might be of use? Finding things and the like? No one knows the Dungeon like me."
I cocked my head to one side; ordinarily the Dragon was the last person I liked to have around when I was working on something. Yet she seemed to have a much clearer head than any of the other girls. "Ri
ght," I agreed decisively. "You're my assistant. Got it?"
"Yes," she agreed. "I will help in any way that I am able." With a surprisingly lithe motion the Dragon caught a railing under her spike heel, using it as an anchoring point to halt our slow rotation. Then she pushed us off together down towards her working quarters. "I have worked in zero-gee environments before," she explained. "In other establishments, for other employers."
She moved beautifully, I had to agree. Carefully I separated myself from her, then almost simultaneously we grabbed the doorway and pivoted, making our way inside. Our three helpers followed with considerably less grace.
The Dungeon was an absolute mess; I'd left the electric blower motor encased in dust, and my tools were nowhere to be seen. Right in the center of the mess was a big cavity, where the filter itself had once been mounted.
"All right," I said aloud, as much to steady myself as anything. "What we have to do here is first to clean things up. If all of this dust gets into the air, we're going to have even more troubles than we've already got." I turned to the Dragon. "I need some kind of bag."
She cocked her head to the side for a moment, then turned to Gwen, one of our youngest and newest Artists. "You!" she declared, snapping her fingers. "In the green cabinet! Get me one of the black bags there! Now!"
Instantly Gwen leapt to obey, and in seconds I was holding a large body-shaped nylon bag, just about large enough, I judged, to be used to encase a recalcitrant slave. It held dust just fine, however. "Find my tools," I directed as I began to scoop the soft gray goo up into the sack. "They are the last ones aboard. Most likely they've drifted off."
"You and you!" the Dragon demanded, snapping her fingers once more. "Search the Dungeon immediately! You, go out and look in the corridor!"
