Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  “Griese!” Stein shouted.

  “What?” he shouted back. “You’d do the fucking same,” he said. “Dammit. You’d do the same. I’m sorry, guys. Goodbye, Laura. Goodbye, Bruce.”

  “Griese,” she began, not knowing what else to say.

  “Goddammit,” Bruce said. They hung together in silence, watching the universe pass beneath their feet.

  §

  “I just realized something,” Stein said. They had reached the aft edge of the ship and were resting there before the climb back up.

  “What’s that?” Bruce replied. He was using his best feigning interest voice.

  “That big bright star there…”

  “Which one?”

  “The bright one. By your feet.” Stein waved her hand in the general direction she was looking at.

  “What about it?”

  “That must be Tau Prius.”

  “It’s so small! How were we ever going to all fit on that?”

  “I think it gets bigger as you get closer.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Like everything.”

  “Yes, Bruce. Like everything.” There was a grim deliberateness to their banter now, but by some unspoken agreement, they kept at it.

  Their plan for turning the corner of the ship was a little fussy. The aft surface curved up rapidly from the plane they had been traveling on, quickly receding out of sight, preventing them from getting a good angle to shoot a piton into it. Eventually, Bruce came up with a plan, where by manipulating the length of his two anchored pitons, he would swing out past the rear plane of the ship, from where he could plant a piton into its flank. Stein watched, feeling a mixture of awe and annoyance as the big doofus got it on his first try. It took her three increasingly desperate attempts before she was able to duplicate the feat, but she eventually managed to get a hold in the rear surface of the ship, and slowly reeled herself up. For the first time in hours, her legs were in contact with the wall. Astoundingly, they felt tired. “Stupid lazy legs,” she said, reaching down and thumping them with her fist, trying to get the blood flowing.

  Secure in her new climbing position, Stein looked up. The massive cylinder of the engine exhaust protruded from the ship’s core, almost a hundred meters above her head. Essentially an inverted tumbler glass, extending almost fifty meters from the rear surface. Playing her headlamp across the surface of it, she could just make out some white lettering emblazoned on the side, upside down.

  “We’re on the wrong side,” Bruce said.

  “Yeah.” There were two airlocks on the aft surface of the ship, one of them a massive hangar bay from which the ship’s mothballed landing craft would one day dispatch from. The other airlock was beside that, human–sized, a twin of the one they had departed from. But both of those were on the opposite side of the engine from where they were.

  “Go over it?” Bruce asked eagerly.

  “I think around,” Stein said. “Looks much, much easier.”

  “You just don’t want to crawl on the ship’s anus.”

  “Wow. I hadn’t considered that, but yeah, I really don’t want to now.”

  They began their ascent. Within a few meters, they had run out of rock and were now firing the pitons into the metal structure of the ship itself. The pitons could grab the metallic surface easily enough, but Stein wondered what kind of noise it was making on the inside. CLANG, CLANG, CLANG, she presumed, like a pair of attacking gong–pirates.

  The climb got easier as they rose, although their curving route around the engine core and the ship’s yawing motion complicated their wayfinding. No longer a simple vertical ascent, it slowly transitioned to a horizontal traverse and then a short descent as they rounded the corner of the engine exhaust.

  They had checked beforehand that the airlocks could be cycled from the outside — “That would be hilarious,” Bruce had observed when Stein brought the issue up. Opening an airlock from the outside would probably be detectable in the ship’s control center, but they were hopeful that no one inside was monitoring that particular blinking light. Given the amount of abuse the ship had taken recently, there were probably a lot of flashing warning lights right now. Stein maneuvered her way to the entrance of the airlock and found the cavity that contained the control panel. Reaching inside, she smacked the only control there, a big, red button. Despite probably not having been used in a couple hundred years, after a few seconds the outer doors slowly slid out of the way, revealing the brightest room Stein had ever seen. After a few seconds of blinking, she realized it was probably very dimly lit, and it was just her brain dazzled by the sight of any lit, confined space. She grabbed the handle on the perimeter of the door and swung herself inside, Bruce doing the same on the other side. The pair disconnected their pitons and reeled the cables inside the airlock. Finally, Stein smacked the big red button on the inside and watched the doors slide shut.

  Stein propelled herself across the airlock and hit another big red button, this one labeled with a pictogram that was apparently supposed to mean ‘Air.’ A faint hissing sound as atmosphere was slowly readmitted to the room. The treated air heated the room noticeably, as well, Stein feeling uncomfortably warm for a moment before her suit could compensate. A few seconds later, the inner door slid open. Bruce lunged through into the airlock control room, Stein floating behind him a little more languidly. She closed the airlock door and watched it seal before taking her helmet off.

  A huge deep, gasping, beautiful breath. “Oh, wow.” Bruce had already removed his helmet and was moving around the room, kissing the floor and every other surface he could see. She allowed herself to come to rest on the floor, the odd gravity slowly dragging her into a corner of the room.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Bruce said, sitting down beside her.

  “Only two–thirds worked.”

  “Oh,” Bruce said. “Yeah.” She rested her head on his shoulder. They sat in the corner of the room for quite some time.

  Eventually, Stein got up and examined their surroundings. A big bay window dominated one wall of the room, displaying the cavernous vehicle airlock below. A dozen oddly shaped objects were visible on the floor of the airlock covered in plastic sheeting, the landing craft presumably. Beside her, Bruce stood up and stripped his enviro–suit off, revealing a matted and sticky–looking maintenance jumpsuit underneath, along with some webbing that contained a variety of hand tools, firearms, and explosives. Stein did the same, finding her jumpsuit and equipment in a similar state, albeit a bit less smelly.

  “What do you think Griese would do if he were here now?” Bruce asked.

  “Go kill a dude?”

  “Yeah,” Bruce agreed. He made a show of looking around. “He doesn’t seem to be here, though. Wanna do it for him?”

  Stein rubbed her tongue over the back of her teeth, thinking. “I didn’t think we’d get this far, to be honest.”

  “Me neither.”

  Stein watched her discarded suit slide back into the corner of the room. “I’m not really feeling in the killing mood.”

  “Me neither,” Bruce said. “So…back to Plan…A? I guess? Nuclear blackmail?”

  Stein took a deep breath before nodding. “I guess so. Though I’m having a hard time remembering how we decided that putting bombs on an antimatter reactor was our best plan.”

  Bruce shrugged. “They’re little bombs.”

  §

  They bounced down the hall to the nearest elevator, finding them all deserted. All hands on deck, just not this one, apparently. Stein guessed most of the security and naval personnel were busy tidying up various messes downstairs.

  They reached the elevator. Bruce leaned against a wall, looking very deliberately casual. Lips pursed, he blew and sputtered, flecks of split flying down the hall.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Whistling.”

  “You don’t know how to whistle?”

  “It’s harder in this gravity.” He tried again, this time producing a wobb
ly sour note and a still not–inconsiderable measure of spit.

  “You’re actually making us look more suspicious, you know that, right?”

  “Suspicious people don’t whistle, Stein. Fact.”

  With a chime, the elevator arrived, the doors sliding open. Inside was an elderly naval engineer, one Stein recognized.

  “You!” Max rasped.

  “Hi, Max,” Stein said.

  “You!” Max said again, apparently struggling with the very idea of them.

  “What are we doing here?” Bruce said, finishing his thought. Max’s jaw flapped around uselessly, now at least two steps behind in the conversation. “You know this guy?” Bruce asked Stein, his pistol leveled at the elderly engineer.

  “Yeah. He used to run the reactor in the bow.”

  “Uh–huh. And would you be upset if I shot him?”

  “What?” Max shrieked.

  “Oh,” Stein said. “I guess not.”

  “What?” Max shrieked again, a little harder and a little shorter, his wailing cut short by a shot to the chest. He fell awkwardly to the floor.

  Stein bent down to look at him. “Did you see the way he fell? I hope you didn’t break his neck.”

  Bruce prodded the engineer’s body with his foot. “He’ll be fine.”

  “You can tell that with your foot, can you?”

  They entered the elevator and took it up to the engineering level. There, they stepped outside, leaving Max on the floor of the car, and continued run–floating their way to the reactor. The halls were less deserted up here, their passage alarming a few naval officers despite Bruce’s whistling. Stein had never felt more conspicuous; security would certainly be after them within minutes.

  But they reached the reactor without any confrontations, ducking inside to find two naval engineers who had barely had a chance to protest before Bruce forcefully introduced himself. Making cowboy noises, Bruce proceeded to hogtie the pair with plastic straps before dragging them into the corner.

  The room was laid out quite similarly to the bow’s auxiliary reactor room, just on a larger scale. Long and narrow, with the much larger reactor partially buried in the floor in the center of the room. Another door on the far side of the room, across from where they entered, that led to the aft’s life support section. Assuming their maps of the aft were accurate, that would be a dead–end with no other entrances or exits.

  “So, what now?” Bruce asked.

  Stein pointed at the floor panels where the fuel supply lines would be running, connecting the engines to the fuel pods. “Start there,” she said, crossing the room to the reactor control desk. Now somewhat experienced at moving around the reactor’s controls, she confirmed the location of the pressure regulators and the fuel lines, then found the lockouts that would isolate them. That was the only part of the plan that was the slightest bit sane, emptying the fuel lines before destroying them. While an explosion on an empty fuel line would be good fun, the same explosion on a line full of antimatter would be considerably less memorable for anyone nearby.

  She crossed back across the room to watch the door as Bruce leapt down into the cavity to set the charges. “Are we the bad guys now, do you think?” Bruce asked.

  “Depends on the perspective, probably. Do you feel bad?”

  “A little,” Bruce said, slapping a charge into place. “And I don’t want to be a bad guy. I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I have a very high opinion of myself.”

  “I think I heard someone saying that about you.” Stein helped pry up another panel to make more room for him. “And I don’t want to be a bad guy either, buddy.”

  “You’re not that bad,” Bruce said, shaking his head. They had uncovered the pressure regulator, which was, as Stein suspected, an exact twin of the one in the bow. “You’re not planting the bombs. Hell, you haven’t even shot anyone yet.”

  Stein’s jaw dropped. “I must have.” She frowned. “Haven’t I? In the van I shot…”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, I’ve shot…at people, certainly.”

  “You haven’t shot anyone. Your hands are clean, ma’am. That’s why you keep me around, I think. To keep a clear conscience.”

  “I’ll shoot someone if I have to,” she said. She pulled the pistol out of her webbing and pointed it at the wall, squinting down the barrel. “You just keep shooting them first! I think that’s the real issue here. My badness is simply being overwhelmed by yours.”

  “Uh–huh.” Bruce finished mining the pressure regulator and stood up. She turned to look at his work. It looked good. Or bad, she supposed.

  Behind her, the sound of the door opening. Bruce’s expression changed, hands fumbling for a pistol he had set down too far away. Stein turned, saw the gun and the security uniform behind it. She kept turning, rolling, falling to the ground, firing.

  “Laura!” Sergei hissed, the shot thumping the air from his chest. His eyes went up as the rest of him went down, face first onto the floor. The door slid shut behind him.

  “Ahahhahahahhahhahha!” Bruce laughed. He leapt out of the cavity. Three quick strides and he was over Sergei, quickly rolling him onto his back. “You got him. Ahhahahhahahhahhahaha.”

  “Fuck you, Bruce. I really liked him.”

  “Yeah? I wonder how he feels about you!” Bruce rolled Sergei onto his side and retrieved his binders, sliding them around his wrists. “Seriously though, this will make a funny story to tell your kids one day.”

  “Fuck you, Bruce.” She covered her eyes with her hand.

  Done restraining her now–probably–ex–lover, Bruce dragged him into the corner with the naval engineers, cackling the entire time. “Better move quick now,” he said, returning to the floor cavity.

  “Yeah.” Stein returned to the reactor console, careful to keep her pistol handy again, lest she need to protect Bruce from any more lovers. Splitting her attention between the controls and the door, she maneuvered through the menus again until she found the controls for the fuel supply. “You ready yet?” she called over the reactor. “Come on, man.”

  “What are you gonna do? Shoot me?” Bruce yelled back. “‘Cause you’re so bad?” She whipped a shot into the ceiling above him. “Ahahahahhahhahha.”

  Frustrated, she turned back to the console, double–checking the steps she would have to take to isolate the fuel lines. Then something caught her eye. She blinked and double–checked the figure, not completely sure of what she was seeing. “Hey, Bruce, is 1.54 bigger than 1.38?”

  “Depends on the font, I guess,” Bruce called back over the reactor. “Why?”

  On the edge of the console, the current status of each fuel pod in a neat column. All operational, all about half full. At the bottom, a summary. 1.54 MT Anti–Deuterium remaining.

  “What is it?” Bruce asked.

  She grabbed her terminal, completely forgetting about the pistol or covering the door. She frantically tapped through to the files Dr. Berg had sent her, the data gene. Quickly, she zeroed in on the transcript she had read before, the two–hundred–year–old conversation between the captain and his officers. “If we need 1.38 million tons of AM to stop this bastard, that’s a number only the captain can know about.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “That fucker. Oh, shit. He’s…”

  “What?”

  “He’s a fucking monster.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bruce asked. He hopped out of the cavity and rounded the reactor to see what Stein was looking at.

  “Why do we think Helot is splitting the ship in two?”

  Bruce frowned. “You very recently were mocking me for speaking in riddles.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Because there’s not enough fuel to stop the whole ship.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “What if there is enough fuel?” She pointed at the reactor console, at the figure he couldn’t possibly understand.

  “How do you know?” he asked. “Are you sure?”

  Even if she had the
time, she would have been reluctant to tell the story. Thankfully, she didn’t have the time. “I just know. And no, I’m not sure.” She licked her lips. “But I think it’s really possible. Like it’s the kind of thing we should look into.”

  A moan from the corner as one of the naval engineers started to wake up. Bruce shot him in the neck and turned back to Stein. “Look into. What are you thinking?”

  “Okay,” she said, then stopped, her brain moving faster than her mouth. “Let’s say there is enough fuel to stop the whole ship. No one dies, everyone goes to the planet. Like we’ve been taught our whole lives, happily ever after, like a fucking fairy tale. What if we could find a way to do that?”

  “I love happy endings.” He gave her an enormous wink, and then just in case that wasn’t clear, made an obscene gesture. “So, how do we do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Stein said, not lying. “I mean Helot’s obviously cutting the ship in half for some reason.”

  “Maybe because he’s a dick?” Bruce suggested.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Regardless, he’s not going to stop being a dick if we just ask.”

  “So, we do what we’re doing anyways. We blow the fuel lines and get Kinsella to blackmail him into stopping the whole ship in exchange for the spare parts.”

  “I guess.” She looked at the time on her terminal, trying to remember how long it would be until the mayor sent his near–suicide bombers into action. “But Kinsella’s kind of a dick too, hey?”

  “He has many dick–shaped qualities,” Bruce allowed.

  “Right. And he sure as fuck doesn’t seem too interested in saving the whole ship, either. He wants to split it as much as Helot. Hell, probably more. And I’m not sure he’d change his mind if we told him we didn’t have to.”

  Bruce nodded. “Such a dick.”

  Stein began pacing back and forth. “We need to stop either of them from splitting the ship. We need to stop anyone from splitting it.”

  “You’re thinking a lot of glue?”

  She shook her head. “Too late for that. Too impermanent.” She pounded the console in frustration.