by T. F. Grant
Tai latched down his helmet and hit the switch for the air pumps. The wheezing sigh of the air being sucked into the holding tanks became attenuated and then disappeared altogether into the vacuum that replaced it.
Kina lifted the cutting lance and raised a thumb to Tai. All set. She floated through the hatch into the baffles.
Tai unbuckled from the pilot’s seat and hefted his persuader, a lever-action shotgun loaded with chain rounds. Insulation wound around the long tubular magazine under the barrel, keeping the rounds insulated from the cold of space—for a while anyway. Tai kicked off and floated across the cabin in zero G. Using the handholds around the ship, he clambered down to the working deck, pulling himself through the hatch and into the baffles.
Kina had already slipped her feet into the straps on the deck, holding her in place, and opened the Mary-May’s hatch to expose the silver of the ship’s hull beyond.
Tai slipped his feet into the straps beside hers and plugged the intercom lead into the back of her suit. “You ready, Ki?”
“Always,” she answered.
“Light her up, me darling.” Tai turned to Tooize and closed his fist three times. He couldn’t afford another intercom lead to Tooize or the services of a telepath on this trip so had to rely on hand signals. No one had yet managed to build a radio that worked in Hollow Space.
Tooize closed the hatch into the baffles up tight, and Kina sparked the end of the cutting lance into life. Expensive thing, a cutting lance, worth it for a potential payday like this, though. Tai jerked his chin down, and the filter slid across behind the faceplate of his suit.
No way of knowing what was on the other side of that airlock. No way of knowing if there was an atmosphere or not. No way of knowing if it was toxic, corrosive, or at a high enough pressure to crush their suits like candy-whorls. No way of knowing, so the lancer burned the hole, a gunner covered her back, and everybody else stayed on the other side of the baffles.
Tooize was at the controls of the Mary-May now. Tai could hear the engines winding up. Peel away or push her closer against the hull of the hulk. Either was an option. He snapped his safety line to the stanchion, checked that Kina’s safety line was clicked on tight, and lifted the persuader to his shoulder.
The cutting lance bit into the strange metal of the hulk. Kina handled the unwieldy probe with exquisite skill. The metal glowed red-hot, then white, then it began to flow. Kina pushed the tip of the lance through.
Tai tensed. Here it came.
“There’s no pressure,” Kina said over the intercom lead, which meant there was pure vacuum on the other side of the hatch. “Cutting a door.”
At least they weren’t going to get crushed by a blast of atmospheric pressure, boil in a heated stream of plasma, or burn in some acidic gunk. Good to know.
Kina cut the door. Kicked the plate through. Tai untagged from the intercom and followed the hunk of metal into the hull. And cursed. And cursed some more.
Clean and pin-sharp on the outside, the hulk was nothing but melted, useless organics on the inside. A complete waste of a trip, money, and fuel.
Another long burn all the way back to Haven. More fuel used up, and plenty of time for Tai to wonder how the hell he was going to get out of this.
He was still wondering when he paid off the kronacs and Kina. The kronacs had bundled their spacesuits and carried them in two arms while the other two carried the rest of their gear. Kina had stuffed hers into a bag and slung it over her shoulder, leaving her hands free and constantly close to her gun belt. Suits were expensive, so nobody took any chances.
Tai had left his suit on board the Mary. Safe enough there for now.
“Want me to hang around?” Kina asked.
“Nah, go have a good time, Ki. I’ll see you later at the Gear and Sprocket.”
She bumped fists with him. “Next time, buddy.”
It hadn’t been a quarter cycle since that handshake with Kina. Felek hadn’t wasted a minute in hunting Tai down.
“The debt is due,” Felek repeated.
“I know,” Tai said. “Look, you know I’m good for it. I’m a Cauder.”
“Your mother said I should take it out of your bones.” Felek’s long lips peeled back along the sides of his mouth and curled upward in a mockery of a grin. He had some sort of meat stuck in his teeth, rotting away. Probably a piece of the last person who failed to pay his debt.
“Good ol’ mom.” Tai sighed. “What do you need to make this right, Felek?”
“Two hundred credits.”
“What? I only borrowed fifty.”
“Interest.”
“It was only three cycles ago. That’s seventy-two hours! Seventy-two bloody hours.”
“So sorry. Now shut up and pay me.”
“With what?”
Felek looked at the Mary-May docked to the station unattended. Tai had paid off the crew with the last of Felek’s loan. No point in them going hungry too.
“She’s worth a thousand times that,” Tai said.
“The ship or I take it from your bones.” Felek’s tongue skated over his teeth, found the morsel of meat, and worried it free.
He was left with no real option. No one could say that Tairon Cauder didn’t try to do the right thing. His hand drifted downward to touch the butt of the revolver strapped to his right thigh. He liked revolvers; they didn’t jam like semiautomatic pistols. Only six rounds of course, but that’s why he always wore two; the short-barreled single-action Dorian, a good reliable make Dorian, on his right thigh in a quick-draw holster and the long-barreled double-action Napier in the shoulder holster under his left armpit.
He slipped the catch on the Dorian’s holster before Linus raised the carbine to point at Tai’s face. “Easy now, Tai. Let’s not be too hasty.”
“You still paying off your debt, then, Linus?” Tai asked.
Linus shrugged. “She was worth it.”
“She left you for a bresac.”
“But she didn’t leave straight away.” Linus smiled. “Hand away from that natty little equalizer of yours.”
Tai lifted his hand away from the Dorian, but not too far away. “Give me a little time, Felek. I’ll make a score; you know I will. They can’t all be duds.”
“You’ve had a bad run of luck,” Linus commented.
“The debt is due. Ship or bones. You choose,” Felek said.
It started as a shuddering whine in the solid metal frames of the dock. A shudder that ran through the soles of Tai’s feet and up into his legs. Then came the light—harsh, bright, and blazing through the steel-glass.
The perfect distraction.
Tai didn’t need a second invitation. His left hand flashed up and around, slapping Linus’s carbine away from his face. His right hand dipped down and forward, smoothly drawing the Dorian, his thumb pulling back the hammer as his finger depressed the trigger.
Felek started to yell an order. Tai released the hammer as the Dorian lined up with the vul’s face. The gunshot exploded into the juddering roar of a jump-point opening. Tai had already stepped alongside Linus, using the big human as cover against the dalgef.
Tai fanned the hammer of the gun. Three shots exploded so close together they sounded like one. The dalgef slumped to the deck with an outraged expression on his florid face. Tai jammed the barrel of the Dorian under Linus’s jaw. “Two rounds left.”
“I told Felek he should have brought more muscle,” Linus said, with a grin. “Too cheap by half.” The enforcer glanced down at Felek’s corpse. “I guess your debt to him is paid now. Mine too, for that matter. Thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Still got to deal with the debt with your mother, though.”
“Aye, thanks for reminding me.”
Linus pointed at the light still streaming through the steel-glass portals. “You might have your opportunity. Look, fresh meat.”
THREE
Sara blinked, tried to see in the darkness. No luck there, just
the weird imagined shapes the brain invents in lieu of any signal. The ship had descended into a dense silence. The generators had shut down when the lights switched off. Neither Telo nor any of the ship’s other AIs responded.
She stumbled on unsteady legs, her arms out in front of her, scanning for obstacles as she made her way around the bridge. She struck something.
“Hey, watch it, sister.”
“Books? That you?” Sara found his arm, his shoulders, felt his long, unkempt hair. “Jesus, Bookworm, what the freck’s going on? Please tell me you have some idea.”
Other voices groaned and grumbled in the dark. She recognized Parash DeLaney’s wheezing cough and the Hentian twins’ strained voices as they spoke the peculiar half-language that only they could speak.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Bookworm said, helping Sara up. Dizziness blighted her from the earlier fall, from that weirdly elongated jump, from the attack… the attack!
“The Markesians,” Sara said. “Did they make the jump too? Did Telo manage to cloak our destination? Anyone? DeLaney?” Her chest heaved with an oncoming panic attack. Her breath became shallow as she imagined a wolf pack of those scorpion-like fighter ships descending upon them and cutting them apart like nothing more than old paper. What if the bigger ships were out there now, stalking them, lining up their heavy disrupters? What if the battleship was preparing a boarding party? What if—
“Sara, calm down, you’re gonna have a heart attack or something,” Bookworm said, his arms stiff around her, his body held at a distance. Not the intimate type, at least with anything alive, Sara thought. If one of his precious books were in trouble, he’d be caressing it like a galaynian whore.
“Calm down? We don’t know where we are, we’ve just seen pretty much the last of our race exterminated, and now we’ve lost the one thing that we all rely on—Telo and its sister AIs. Nothing’s responding, and the ship has no power. Not even the backup gennies are running.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” DeLaney said, his voice coming from behind Bookworm, somewhere by the navigation computers. “Give me a moment to think.”
Sara’s eyes had started to adjust. Through the series of small viewports used for organic astronavigation, a meager beam of light brought with it a shade of silver.
DeLaney hunched over the control panel, moving his hands across it in practiced arcs. Sara looked around the bridge area, saw the pile of… bodies? People piled up on the floor like discarded driftwood.
“Bookworm, help me, please.” She clambered down into the well of the bridge. They couldn’t all be dead. The first body she touched had no pulse, and the next. Bookworm was dragging corpses out of the way.
Then the Hentian twins were there, helping to check the bodies.
“He’s alive,” Margo said.
“And this one,” Bookworm called out.
Two out of how many? Two more lost souls in the darkness. “Who?” Sara asked.
“This one’s Prescott,” Bookworm replied. “That snot-nosed kid on holiday from the stasis pod.”
“Humphrey,” Margo said.
“The waiter?” Bookworm asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh, we have a fine pair of do-or-die spitfires here, then.” His tone was disgusted, but with an edge of fear.
DeLaney had completely ignored the frantic search for life signs among the pile of corpses. He stayed at his console. Finally, he turned and dropped his head into his hands before slumping back against the panel.
“What is it?” Sara asked.
“I’ve got nothing. Nothing at all. No reading of any kind, zero power. It’s dead, the AIs have gone, our people have gone, and the charts were right. We’re nowhere in the known universe. Look out there… there’s nothing. We’re in a void.”
The two Hentians finished laying out the unconscious forms of Humphrey and Prescott, smoothed their blue and orange casual uniforms, tidied their blond hair, and turned to the others. Margo, the elder of the two—by approximately fifteen minutes, which was enough for her to gain rank on her brother—wiped a tear from her cheek before saying, “We have to remain calm. Take stock, and plan the next logical step. For all we know, we’re the very last of humanity, and it would be wise not to do anything rash.”
“Face it,” Bookworm said, stepping away from Sara and leaning casually against the rail that ran around the circular bridge. “It’s the plot of the Antequetes Incident. We’re screwed. Well and truly. All our food and water went with those poor bastards, apart from what’s left in our cabins, and considering Telo had us do inventory recently, I doubt any of us have anything stashed away. That leaves just the seven of us on a dead ship.”
Sara sighed. “So what happens in that book of yours? Some idea that could help us out perhaps? Some amazing insight to save the Goddamned day?”
“What happens? The surviving crew eat each other.”
“Oh well, that’s just brilliant, really damned useful.”
DeLaney looked up and shook his head. “If you lot don’t shut the hell up… wait… what’s that?” He turned to the viewport, ran a hand over his bald head, and whispered a holy epithet. Bookworm dashed across to look. He stood on his toes, pressing his face against the steel-glass. “Jesus, this isn’t how the story went.”
DeLaney grabbed Bookworm and rushed to the center of the bridge. “Brace yourselves!”
***
For the second time in as many hours, Sara hit the deck hard. The Venture crashed into another dead ship, skewing it to an obtuse angle.
She saw the edge of a disintegrating black pane of metal arc by the viewport.
Bookworm and DeLaney tumbled past her. She reached out a hand. Bookworm grabbed it, stopping himself from hitting the side of the bridge. DeLaney held onto Bookworm’s legs.
The grav-plates on the deck were locked into their last orientation. How was that even possible? The artificial gravity should point directly to the keel of the ship, no matter what the orientation of the ship, but now it was almost like the ship had a specific fixed direction. Up was up, and if the ship tilted, then the decks, the walls, and the ceilings tilted in relation to that fixed direction.
It didn’t make any sense. The gravitic generation of the grav-plates was built into their nanostructure. It required no power, no information. Down was always pointed toward the keel. But not now. Now Sara, Bookworm, and DeLaney dangled on the edge of a deck that should be flat.
The pile of bodies had tumbled down, with Humphrey and Prescott lying on top of their soft landing, moaning.
The terrible shearing of rending metal echoed around the ship. Sara looked at the earlier repair, hoping the liquid titanium had had time to harden up. If it cracked now…
She thought about their life-suits. They would still be in storage within the small room off the bridge. The Hentians were already clambering their way to them. Bookworm let go of Sara’s hand and grabbed hold of a standing computer station. DeLaney had shifted on his ass to the edge of the bridge. The hull had tipped nearly ninety degrees on its side.
The screech of hull on hull had stopped, and Sara held her breath as if her breathing would somehow elicit a fracture. When her vision started to blur and bloom, she breathed out, gasping for air. It tasted stale.
Before she could say it, Bookworm shouted, “The air-scrubbers are down. Jesus, we’re gonna suffocate.”
“The suits,” DeLaney said, “they’re still here. Just calm down. Follow the twins.”
With the grav-plates orientation screwed and the way the ship had shifted on to its side, they’d have to climb up the bridge floor to get to the storage room. Margo and Murlowe were standing on top of the rail and reaching up to open the door. The problem was that it opened inward, and they didn’t have enough height to push it up. And that was assuming nothing had blocked it from the other side.
“They need help,” Sara said. “DeLaney, you’re the tallest here, you go first.”
“Hey, I know, I’m responsible here no
w, okay? Just give me a moment.”
“I’m not challenging your authority,” Sara said. “I don’t want your job, just, you know, we’re going to run out of air soon, so we should probably get things sorted quickly.” She winced at the tone of her voice, didn’t mean to sound so aggressive. The thought of taking responsibility for this lot frightened her as much as suffocating. It’s why she turned down the vice-captain role the first time around. She was a navigator, and that was that.
DeLaney took a boost from Bookworm until he could reach the rail. He hefted himself up and, using the metal grating of the floor, climbed until he reached the twins. They held out a hand and lifted him up.
While DeLaney busied himself with trying to get the door open, Sara let herself slide down until she stood on the side of the bridge. She checked the pulses of the two unconscious men, though Prescott was barely out of his teens. They were still breathing, their hearts pumping strongly. So why weren’t they awake?
Humphrey’s eyes flickered open and looked at her. “What? What happened?”
“Stay calm,” Sara said. “You’ve been unconscious for a while. Best not to move yet.”
Humphrey’s eyes closed again as he nodded and followed her orders. Sara checked his pulse and then stood up. This was a part of the hull she’d often stared at during their long journeys. It held a hologram screen where she’d input Telo’s navigation instructions.
That process was entirely unnecessary, of course. Telo could alter any aspect of the ship with just a few cycles of his quantum core. Sometimes Sara thought it was they, the humans, who held the AI and his kind back. And now he was gone. She felt as much grief for Telo’s passing as she did her fellow humans.
“He was one of us,” she said, not realizing she spoke out loud.
“What’s that, sister?” Bookworm reached out for her shoulder to steady them both. He must have climbed down to her after boosting DeLaney into the storage locker. The ship rocked back and fourth, their inertia using up the remaining energy as they burrowed further into the other ship they had crashed into.
