by Strong, Ray
When the shuttle reached the M22 dock, Meriel exited and jumped across the zero-g connecting tube to the maintenance console. She used the console to locate the specific berth for the Liu Yang, the Princess’s alias, among the scores of other small ships docked there.
Getting there in zero-g would be easy: jump, dodge, and repeat, just like all the drills since she was a kid. The test of skill was how far you could travel without touching the walls, and like any spacer, she could usually jump farther than any passage on a merchant ship and end with a half somersault and tuck. The dock tubes here were wide and designed for zero-g, so all of the sharp corners had been removed to accommodate the clumsiness of those more accustomed to a steady gravity.
After a few long jumps and turns, Meriel reached the Liu Yang. She checked the ship’s status on the air-lock door. N2/Argon 95/5. Inerted for preservation, she thought. Nice of them but deadly as carbon dioxide if I’m not careful. Pressure at 0.5 bar, high enough not to get the bends. 0-Power/S4 meant that some devices had reserve charge to help them power up, but otherwise the electronics were cold.
Meriel installed fresh O2 cylinders on one of the warm-suits stowed outside the air-lock door and put it on. She then put extra O2 cylinders in her bag, estimating they would give her about forty minutes, which was twice what she expected to need. Using the control module on her suit’s forearm, she set monitors for the oxygen levels and respiration rates. She closed her visor, turned on her headlight, and pushed the entry-request button on the air-lock door. The air-lock door would not respond to her, and she guessed that her ID had failed. She winced when she pressed the wound on her wrist until a yellow glow flashed under her skin. This must be the rest of Nick’s access solution, she thought while she waited. He must have found an exploit in the security database. Now she had to wait until he modified the database to log her route.
After a few seconds, her wrist flashed with a red glow, and she heard the whoosh of exchanging gasses. Then the air-lock door dilated. It was cold and dark when the door closed behind her. Her suit’s heads-up display registered N2/Ar and lowered pressure as it adjusted to the ship’s atmosphere. The hard contrast from the headlamp beam made the shadows appear sinister, and she changed the lamp from beam to flood.
On the day of the attack, Meriel and Elizabeth had entered this air-lock passage, and she remembered it clearly, her memory showing her what her headlight could not. The Princess was the foundation of her life then, as transparent as a mood, the only world she knew, and it was embedded deep below her conscious life of studies, family, and entertainments. She did not notice it until it was ripped from her, along with the rest of her childhood. Now it came to life again as familiar as her breath. The Princess was no pragmatic merchant ship. This was her home.
Though her hands were gloved, she could feel the textures of the polished-walnut railings and padded handholds from memory. The fabric walls were covered with Earth animals, nebulas, and fantasy landscapes—children’s artworks in progress. Holographic displays that once cycled through some of the finest art and architecture of human antiquity lined the walls of the promenades.
The craft studio was next door and Meriel could not resist entering. There she found a sketch of a big-eyed puppy by little Elizabeth still pinned to the wall next to Tommy’s drawing of a dragon chewing on a navy battleship. She pushed slowly down the passageway, remembering the deOx drills and zero-g games and then drifted past the mess hall, where Uncle Ed made snacks while they watched vids. Her mouth watered at the memory of the last birthday cake her mother had baked for Elizabeth’s birthday party, a cake frosted like a planet with deep-blue water and green land. Meriel coasted toward the bridge and remembered sitting next to Mom at the nav console and visualizing the stars. She rubbed the bulkhead. The Princess was not dead, just dreaming.
Meriel drifted into the bridge and stopped breathing again. Just past the decompression doors, she noted the rainbow discoloration around a hasty weld job that patched the hull breach. Meriel touched her chest where the sim-chip hung. “It’s all here,” her mom had said.
Esther had stood bridge watch XO at the time of the attack. Meriel traced her mother’s path from there to each of the kids’ bunks and then to the cabin she and Elizabeth had shared. It was just the way they had left it on the day of the attack: zero-g and painted with tigers and porpoises, not the sterile gray she had lived with for a decade. The beam of her headlamp panned to the foot of her berth, where a net held the toys that Nick had made and Elizabeth’s doll, the birthday present she’d received that day. Meriel reached out for them automatically. Then she stopped. She could not take anything out with her.
Retracing their path to the maintenance-1 hold where they had hidden first, Meriel examined the hatch that her mother had welded shut from the inside. The hold itself was empty and appeared to have been sterilized. She took another passageway to cargo-2 and found it empty as well. The hatch to the small service tunnel where they exited was still open, and Meriel knew why: to remove her mother’s body.
Stars floated in front of her eyes again when she tried to step into the hold. Her stomach began to cramp, and her hands shook. The heads-up display blinked red with a blood CO2 crash, and the breath-rate alarm sounded: symptoms of hyperventilation. I don’t remember being this afraid, she thought, but her body remembered.
Tears can’t fall in zero-g, and Meriel saw the world through the eyes of the children in the freezing hold ten years ago: cloudy, surreal, disorienting—like looking through a nebula. But she was too afraid to cry then, too afraid of what would happen to them if she let go even a little, afraid of what would happen to her and her world. She had to hold that world together, or it would wash away with the tears, and she would lose it forever. She still could not let go and rubbed the tears from the corners of her eyes on the padding of the visor hinge and floated to slow her breathing.
When her blood monitor returned to nearly normal, Meriel entered the hold and immediately pushed back to where they first entered in maintenance-1. She found nothing and returned to the open hatch to look around. Meriel remembered all of the kids in their pajamas and Sam suspending his link in the air to distract them.
She looked down. The deck was covered in a translucent, dull brown: dried blood, her mother’s blood. They never cleaned this. “Have faith,” she heard in her mother’s voice.
The suit monitor alarmed again. Breathe, she told herself. Tears came again, and she could not continue. A new suit alarm alerted her that only three minutes of oxygen remained on that tank. That meant she was breathing much too fast. She was sweating, and ice had formed on the inside of her visor. She had to be more careful.
Meriel found nothing in the hold. She frowned, turned the headlamp to beam, and then looked down into the access way—still nothing. She cycled through the headlamp’s wavelengths used to expose service marks and carbon fiber fatigue and scanned the hold and accessway again—still nothing. Turning to leave, Meriel caught a glint off something under the dried blood. Cycling through the headlight wavelengths again, she found that a bright-blue light exposed it more clearly. It was a symbol sketched with an orange cargo marker that looked like a four-leaf clover with an open circle in the middle. Her mother must have drawn this while the kids slept, and her blood covered it. Meriel had no idea what it signified. She took a vid and copied the symbol on her glove with her own maintenance marker.
Mom left us for a while, Meriel thought, and came back with the sim-chip. She must have stopped at the alt-bridge to program the chip. The shortest path there would take her past the next room—the infirmary, where the pirates had slaughtered the adults. A dark cloud filled her vision, obscuring the passageway. She closed her eyes and blinked rapidly. No, not now, she thought. Stay here. Don’t freeze up, girl. Think. What do you need to do? If her mother had gone that way, the pirates would have captured her. No, Mom left through maintenance-1 and welded the hatch closed after she returned. So the kids and I had to leave through cargo-2.
She turned to take another route, but her link buzzed: the security sweep. The next compartments were too far away. She jumped into the infirmary and then into a closet without looking around, and then she turned off her headlamp. The light in the room came on, allowing her to see through the louvers of the closet door, and she groaned.
It was still there, the blood covering the deck and splattered on the walls. They had not cleaned it; they had only removed the bodies and devices to log as evidence. She closed her eyes, but it did not help; flashbacks filled in the scene for her.
“It’s not real,” she said aloud. “It’s not real.” The heavy copper smell filled her nose, and stars appeared in front of her eyes again. Nausea reached her throat, and to relieve the symptoms, she massaged the veins of her left wrist using two fingers of her right hand. It did not work, and she grabbed a service bag from her hip and opened her visor to retch. The cold shocked her, and she inhaled only the N2/Ar environment. She gasped for breath, which shut down the nausea symptoms, and closed her visor again, but there was no oxygen left within it. After inserting her last canister, she took a deep breath and ran the safety drill. Half the reading plus half the reserve: ten plus three minutes. Ten plus three.
Near suffocation engaged her mind fully again. The incessant drills they ran as kids pulled her back from the flight response. Just like the kata, the drills helped make her next steps automatic—biological—so that conscious thought was unnecessary. She still breathed too fast, so she took a few slow breaths.
Able to breathe again, Meriel prepared to leave the closet when the lights went off. Before she opened the closet door, a beam of light cut through the room, and she heard a new sound: the skittering and clicking of a security spider. If it found her, that would be enough to get her arrested and kill her dreams. Nick did not tell her there would be spiders aboard the ship. That was unaccountably sloppy, and she made a note to complain.
She ducked below the louvers of the closet door as the light beamed through them. The spider scraped the door, testing the handle, but Meriel held it tight from the inside and held her breath. A probe from the spider snaked through the louver and felt its way around but could not reach the handle. The probe is a sniffer, not a camera: it cannot tell for sure that I’m here. The stars appeared in front of her eyes, and the nausea returned.
A part of her just wanted to let go, to let the spider tranq her. She took a shallow breath. Is this really worth it? All this just so the kids can have a chance at something more than a spacer’s funeral?
Yes.
The spider withdrew the probe, the beam moved on, and the skittering sound went away. Meriel could breathe deeply again, but she could not stay hidden in the closet after the spider left. She had to move or risk running out of air—but where? Mom was away when we heard the escape pod eject. Meriel turned and jumped to the evac bay and ePod berths.
No one believed that the parents had attempted to escape using an ePod, especially with the kids still aboard, so the empty ePod berth was another mystery. The ePods were rather useless anyway. They couldn’t jump and had few survival rations, so survivors had to depend upon someone being nearby to hear their EM screamers. Unless you were already near a station or a busy shipping lane, an ePod was a casket, and you would be buried alive. Many spacers chose not to use them after hearing graphic tales of what rescuers had found inside them.
On the empty ePod hatch, Meriel found another four-leaf clover symbol and open circle drawn within it. Drops of blood, long dried, were spattered below it. An ePod will not eject without at least one living person on board, but all the crew was accounted for—adults killed and kids safe. What happened?
The suit O2 alarmed again, and Meriel was running out of time. Alt-bridge, that’s where she went next, Meriel thought. She took the long way to the cold locker next to the galley, but the door was locked. She opened her suit and used the key on her necklace to open the hatch to the coldest, most functional room on the entire ship, the only room without ornamentation or any other sign of the children who flew her, and in this room their lives were saved.
Unlike the other compartments, someone had cleaned and polished the alt-bridge and emptied all of the drawers below the console. All signs of habitation had been removed, along with the gum and other detritus typical of places where kids have landed for a few milliseconds. I need to find something, she thought, shaking her head. But what do I expect to find that trained investigators missed?
She booted the nav computer. The OS was still there, but no data or apps. Why would they wipe the apps? Police would not need to do that. She sat at the console. Nothing. Fifteen days left and nothing. What did Mom do?
Meriel put the chip into the nav computer. A few of the nav lights blinked, and the chip ID flashed on the console. A message popped up on the screen. “Invalid coordinates. Cannot process.” So the OS recognized the chip ID. It was not physically damaged, but the data was corrupted. As Nick said, the chip must have been tampered with intentionally.
The O2 alarm sounded again. Two minutes plus three. Just enough time to get out. She hesitated, knowing that if she left now, she would have nothing. She reached out to remove the chip and saw a blinking light at the base of the chip slot and a tiny blinking icon on the display. “Click,” she said, and a message popped up.
“Backup incomplete. Continue verify?” the display said.
Did Mom pull the chip out early?
“Yes,” Meriel said.
“Thank you, Meriel,” the console replied, and Meriel smiled.
“Verify invalid. Recopy?” the console asked.
Recopy? That meant the copy buffer might still contain data. The copy buffer was part of the operating system, and the OS was not wiped. An image of her mom’s data might still exist in the copy buffer, and no one would know unless someone inserted a chip with the correct chip ID.
“Verify invalid. Recopy?” the console repeated. A recopy would wipe out all similar files on the sim-chip. If it saved the old, a recopy still might wipe out anything that the computer did not associate with another file. That might wipe out just about everything except the file names, but she did not have another chip or the time to get one.
“Archive old. Recopy,” Meriel said and crossed her fingers.
“Thank you again, Meriel.” The copy icon came up and spun. Meriel’s suit O2 now blinked red and beeped continuously. She was out of air and sucking dust. Zero plus three, zero plus three, she repeated to herself.
“Countdown from three minutes,” she instructed her suit.
“Copy complete,” the console said. Again, there was not enough time to verify. She removed the chip and stuck it in again to check its integrity.
“Jump destination: Enterprise,” the console said. “Initiating jump prep.” Lights on the console winked, and the computer behind the smoked plastaglass wall lit up.
“Negative! Abort jump!” Meriel said. Her mom had loaded a self-executing nav program.
“Countermanding. Idle,” the console announced and dimmed its lights. “Continue validation?”
Yes or No? Meriel watched the suit’s countdown clock. She had less than a minute’s worth of air. “No,” she said, gasping for breath as the rebreather only scrubbed out the CO2 now. The chip could be trash, but she was out of air. She’d have to take a leave from the Tiger to get another shot at this.
She scrambled to the air lock and tried alternative O2 cylinders but found only empties. She struggled for air and dropped to her knees, looking back to the alt-bridge, but there was no time left to go back and validate the chip. She hit the exit-request button on the air-lock door and lunged inside and then opened her helmet and gasped for air that flooded the lock. Unseen by Meriel, a small iris blinked at her, the iris of the camera on the security spider that had tucked itself into a dark corner of the air lock.
After wiping the warm-suit to remove hair and sweat and contaminate any DNA samples she might have left, she jumped back toward the
maintenance shuttle to return to the station. At the turn of a corner, she noticed two other maintenance personnel behind her jumping in her direction. Meriel approached the shuttle dock, expecting the air-lock door to open, but the door remained shut and did not acknowledge her ID. Did the ID dissolve already? she wondered. The others approached quickly. If the door did not open for her, they would know she did not belong there and alert security.
The security ID. Nick had not cleared the ID this far, and she had not reset it after leaving the Princess. Meriel hurriedly pressed the wound on her wrist, and it blinked yellow under the skin, but her wrist started to bleed again. She turned her back to the approaching workers and watched her wrist blink yellow.
“Hey, newbie,” someone behind her said. “Having problems?” Just then, her wrist blinked blue, the door opened, and she turned.
“No,” she said. “Just not in a hurry to get back home.”
“Let me know if your boyfriend needs a sub,” one of them said and laughed.
“Sure,” Meriel said.
“Better have that looked at,” the other said pointing to the blood soaking her shirt cuff.
“Will do.” She dripped with sweat and breathed too fast as she entered the shuttle, gripping the hand-hold to steady her shakiness until the artificial gravity settled them onto the deck. With gravity restored, the blood flowed preferentially downward to the edge of her cuff and a small drop fell to the floor of the shuttle unobserved. The three rode to the Enterprise red-zone dock in silence.
Leaving red-zone as fast as possible was imperative, but she would not make it to the exit like this, clammy and faint. She walked quickly to the bathroom across the hall. Once inside, she splashed cold water on her face and washed the blood from her shirt cuff. She held onto the sink to steady herself, but that did not help, and she ran into a stall and threw up. God, what am I doing here? she thought. When she could walk, she went back to the sink and wiped the mess off her coveralls, but they still reeked.
