The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  It gnawed at his gut, undiminished by the hearty meal he’d just eaten, because it wasn’t really in his gut, it was in the ship’s reaction mass tanks. It was telling him they were close to empty, and there was nothing he could do about that. Nor did he even need to. 50,000 liters of water would get the crewship into orbit and then down to the surface of Gna. He knew that. His esthesia implant knew only that reaction mass reserves were dangerously low. Hungry, hungry, hungry.

  He’d got this implant from Crasibo Lovelace. It was a generation ahead of his old Navy-issue implant. It provided richly textured sensory feedback on every system and sub-system. It also allowed him to remotely operate the gearship and the construction waldos. It was great.

  There was only one problem.

  He couldn’t turn it off.

  His Navy implant had had a mute function. This one did, too, but it didn’t work. Talking to other Crasibo Lovelace pilots, he’d learned that many of them had the same issue with the CL implant.

  The threat from the Ghosts was so urgent that Crasibo Lovelace had sent them out with betaware.

  That was the charitable interpretation. You could also hypothesize that CL had been so keen to secure the Ring Around the Sun contract, they’d cut corners in their software development, and just expected their pilots to deal with the flaws.

  Well, Colm could deal.

  For the kind of money he was making now? Hell yeah, he’d deal, rather than complain to management and risk getting blamed for the implant’s defects himself.

  They might send him home.

  He wasn’t ready for that yet. Didn’t know if he ever would be.

  He opened one of the cabinets, took out the canister of baking powder he’d used for the cake. He excavated a blisterpack of tropodolfin from the white powder. Back when he was in the Corps, he used to feel sorry for the troopers who got hooked on tropo after getting a script for some minor injury. Now he understood how that happened. This stuff was amazing. By a miracle of modern chemistry, it relieved pain like an opiate, but also boosted your energy like cocaine.

  Not that Colm had ever tried cocaine. He wasn’t a junkie. He just needed to not be in pain all the goddamn time.

  He palmed a pill, and was about to pop it in his mouth when Zhanna came into the galley. It was cramped for two, but she came in anyway.

  She raised her eyebrows at Colm. Held out her hand.

  Colm extended both fists: choose one.

  She tapped his left fist.

  Nothing there.

  Right fist.

  Nothing there, either. He could make a 3cm hex nut vanish. A single pill was easy.

  “You can’t fool me,” Zhanna said softly. “It’s the hunger, isn’t it?”

  She was the only one he’d confided in about the implant’s broken mute function. Colm leaned against the counter, suddenly feeling exhausted. “Yeah. Just the usual.”

  She nibbled her lower lip. “Well, I might have something that would help.” She squeezed past him, opened the little refrigerator. “You were baking, so that gave me an idea ...” She took out a plated object that resembled a beige paving stone. It was scored into squares. She broke one off and held it out. “Try it.”

  Colm cautiously bit into the square. “Shortbread?” he hazarded. It tasted like sand glued together with fat. She must’ve used all the sugar and butter they had left in supplies.

  “It’s a traditional Scottish recipe, isn’t it?” she said hopefully.

  Colm swallowed, with an effort, and smiled at her. “It’s delicious.” He pulled her into his arms. She knew what he was going through, and had baked this horrible ersatz shortbread to try and help. As if she could vanquish the feedback from the empty reaction mass tanks by stuffing him with fat and calories.

  The wretched fact of the matter was that nothing could vanquish the feedback except tropodolfin. He retrieved the pill from his sleeve and downed it, not trying to hide what he was doing.

  Zhanna bumped her forehead against his chest. “Goddammit, Colm.”

  “The shortbread’s perfect. We’ll serve it with the cake.” And everyone would eat it, for the same reason that Meg was wearing an awful Easter-themed sweater Zhanna had knitted, and even Fitch had on a pair of fingerless gloves with an extra thumb hole.

  “We have to fix this,” she said, stabbing him with her forefinger. “Maybe the feedback will respond to the threat of haggis.”

  Colm’s heart overflowed with tenderness. “It’s fixed,” he said. Tropo acted fast; he already felt better, or maybe that was the placebo effect of anticipation. He bent his head and kissed her.

  Their relationship was a secret. Had to be. But esthesia guaranteed they’d never be walked in on. He could see the entire interior of the ship. The other three remained in the common room. Tan and Smythe were pulling the wishbone of the roast chicken.

  Zhanna drew back, pink-cheeked. “Don’t we have to do the cake filling?”

  Colm had made the strawberry mixture in advance. Zhanna got it out of the fridge. He spread it on the sponge cake. She dipped her finger into the filling and sucked it— “Mmm. Is this a traditional Scottish recipe?”

  “Actually, we have a different tradition involving strawberries and cream.” Colm whispered into her ear, making her laugh out loud.

  “You’re making that up.”

  “Busted ...” Suddenly, his implant fed him an alert. “Hang on. I’ve got to launch the gearship.”

  His systems checks were complete. Not a twinge from the gearship’s reactor, drive, or heat exchangers. The gearship never got as dinged up when they were out on jobs; partly because it was a tougher, field-tested design, mostly because it didn’t have people living in it.

  Reactor output to 80%.

  Initiate main drive.

  Throttle up.

  Go.

  Out on the ice, the gearship’s thrusters gouted plasma. Flash-melted ice jetted up in fans of vapor. Hidden in the prismatic clouds, the gearship sprang off the surface of Mezamiria and arrowed into space. Colm rode with it. The icy planetoid shrank beneath him. He rolled up the cake around the filling, and cut the gearship’s thrust. It settled into orbit. Mezamiria was only 460 klicks in diameter. The gearship would now orbit it once every 27 minutes until the crewship joined it.

  “Done,” he said. ”Could you grab me some plates?”

  Zhanna reached across him, standing on tiptoe. That was when Smythe appeared at the door, carrying a stack of dirty dishes.

  Colm was good at being in two places at once but three was too much even for him. He had not noticed Smythe leaving the common room.

  “Everyone’s finished eating,” she said. Her eyebrows practically touched her fringe. Colm felt a blush rising. Dammit. First of all, she hadn’t seen anything. Second of all, what would it really matter if she did? They were all adults ...

  Without missing a beat, Zhanna retrieved five clean plates from the cabinet. “I was just helping him with the cake. Doesn’t it smell great?”

  “Yummy,” Smythe said. “Wanna stick these in the machine for me?”

  Colm carried the cake into the common room, singing “Happy jobiversary to us, happy jobiversary to us!” Behind him, Zhanna sang harmonies, and Smythe carried the plate of shortbread. Fitch and Tan applauded. They poured the last of the wine they had saved for today. Colm began to slice the cake, and felt a weird twinge in his stomach.

  The tropodolfin dulled the feedback, so he couldn’t tell exactly what was causing it. He kept slicing.

  “This is my mother’s recipe ...”

  “As you’ve only told us about twenty times,” Smythe said.

  The heat exchangers in the reactor. That’s what it was. He maneuvered the thick slices of cake onto plates. The heat exchangers were losing power. He felt cold.

  “One for you and one for you, and that leaves the other half for Tan.”

  Everyone laughed. Tan was famous for devouring as much food as any two normal people, and staying skinny regardless. T
hey sat down to enjoy the cake, while Colm tried to restore power to the heat exchangers. Within seconds he’d given that up. The damn things were stone cold. The molten salt had frozen in them. He’d just have to turn off the pumps before—

  The reactor chamber flooded.

  Between one bite of cake and the next, the lights went off.

  The radiation alarms screamed.

  CHAPTER 16

  COLM BURST OUT OF his chair. “Prompt criticality,” he yelled over the deafening alarms. “We are taking rads.”

  The alarms shut off. Colm bumped into the ceiling, and then into someone else, and then a cake plate got him in the face. The power had failed. That meant the AG had failed, too. The gravity of Mezamiria, just 2% of Earth’s, carried him slowly back down into a tangle of people and chairs. A splash of wine stung his eyes. The pain in his gut overrode the tropodolfin. It felt like he’d swallowed a bowling ball made of ice. He was going to burst.

  “What the hell?” Fitch shouted.

  “Heat exchangers failed,” Colm gasped. “Molten salt froze, pumps kept delivering more, reactor chamber flooded and went critical. Reactivity went up geometrically in milliseconds ...”

  And the pressure was still building. He doubled over in agony.

  The safety plug blew out of the chamber with a bang that shook the entire ship. Zhanna screamed.

  Colm triangulated on the scream and caught hold of her in the dark. The agonizing pressure in his gut had gone ... but the icy heaviness remained. “The fuel salt’s been expelled into the safety tanks. Those are very heavily shielded. We’re not gonna die.”

  Not gonna die? They were sitting on the surface of a Kuiper Belt Object with no goddamn power.

  “I’m switching to batteries.”

  The lights came on, weaker than before. Colm let go of Zhanna.

  “Meg, get the rad pills. Everyone should take the maximum dose. Sully, with me.”

  They bounded and stumbled through the wreckage of the party, unaccustomed to the almost non-existent gravity. The cockpit of the crew ship doubled as their workplace. The waldo station behind the pilot and copilot’s seats had couches for two people at a time to operate the effectors. Colm float-dropped into the pilot’s seat. “Record a Mayday broadcast. Point the UHF antenna at Triton. But don’t send it yet.”

  “Why?” Tan said.

  “I need to get the gearship back first.” Comms cost energy, and their battery reserves were extremely limited. Retrieving the gearship from orbit had to be his top priority. It wouldn’t do them much good if help arrived hours or days after they all died of cold.

  He found the gearship coming around the curve of the planetoid and commanded its computer to calculate a reentry burn. Reentry to what? Mezamiria had no atmosphere, apart from when the methane component of its surface boiled off on the dayside and snowed down again on the nightside. That’s what they’d be dealing with in here, when the batteries died. This nice warm N2-O2 mixture would turn into snow and start to fall. He fired the gearship’s thrusters, tilted it towards the surface, and flipped it again to dump its orbital velocity.

  “Hey Colm ...”

  He ignored Tan, concentrating. He had to put the gearship down close to the newly built base. As close as he could get without actually landing on top of it.

  “Colm!”

  The gearship dropped onto its jackstands. Colm came back to himself, sitting in the dark. “What?!”

  “Batteries are dead.”

  “That was fast.”

  “They’ve been dead. Five, ten minutes.”

  “They’ve not. I’ve been using the radio.” He pulled the emergency flashlight out of the side pocket of his couch. Its beam found Tan’s face. “Did you send that Mayday?”

  “No. You were using the radio.”

  “Right. Fuck. Well, we can send it from the base.”

  They blundered back to the crew quarters and found the other three putting on their EVA suits. In two years, none of them had ever gone out on the surface of a Kuiper Belt Object, except for one notorious occasion when Colm had thought he would repair a cracked heat rejection coil. The batteries in his power tool had frozen within minutes. After that adventure, he’d resigned himself to medicating the pain.

  No pain now. Just numbness. The crewship was a dead hunk of metal, unable to provide any feedback, for better or for worse.

  Their flashlight beams crisscrossed over the wreckage of the jobiversary party. Breath clouded. The temperature had already begun to drop. Clothes fell to the floor. No one was bothered about modesty right now. Colm stripped and wriggled into his EVA suit. These suits were supposed to be even higher-spec than military leathers. The alloy sandwiched between the wicking and insulating layers conformed itself snugly to his body.

  “Take your clothes,” Tan said. As a Martian, he had grown up with regular evacuation drills. He was probably less disoriented by this sudden disaster than the other three. “Take all the warm clothes. Food. Liquids. Meds. Spare oxygen tanks. All the spare oxygen tanks.“

  On the pretext of packing his rucksack, Colm recovered the stashes of tropodolfin he had squirreled away in the galley, in the cockpit, and in his cabin. He hoped he wouldn’t need it, but he took it just the same.

  They reassembled at the airlock. The atmosphere in the ship had already got so cold it burnt the lungs. Colm put his helmet on. It synced with his Crasibo Lovelace infocals. A suit telemetry display appeared in his HUD area. He looked around at the others’ faceplates. “Radio check. Can everyone hear me?”

  “Copy,” from Smythe and Tan. Nods from Zhanna and Fitch.

  “I need you all to verbally confirm.”

  “Aye aye, Captain,” Zhanna said with forced lightness.

  Fitch grunted, “Got it.”

  “We are going to take refuge in the base. It’s got its own reactor. We will start that up using the gearship, and proceed to electrolyze O2 from water stores. This means our first destination is the gearship. We need to run cables from its reactor to the base.”

  Fitch said, “Why can’t we just restart our own reactor?”

  “Because it’s FUBAR. I don’t know exactly what went wrong. I’ll have to get in there with a screwdriver.”

  As they bounded across the ice, Fitch said, “Why don’t we just get the fuck out of here in the gearship?”

  “It’s an unmanned craft,” Colm said. “No life support. I suppose you could pressurize the drive controls compartment, but it’s not big enough for five.”

  “We can live in our suits until we get to Gna. Two days. It’s completely doable.”

  Colm did not answer, as they had reached the gearship itself. He connected with its computer and lowered the steps. He led the others into the warren of maintenance corridors that he had often visited in spirit. The engineering spaces felt even more cramped in real life. Colm kept bumping into things that he was used to ‘walking’ straight through. They found the power cables and hooked them up to the ship’s generator.

  Fitch picked up his argument again as they retraced their steps through the gearship, unreeling the cables behind them. “There’s plenty of room in here. Let’s just fucking go.”

  “I need to repair the crewship.”

  “Why? Just ditch it.”

  “We’re responsible for our equipment. I’m not gonna just ditch it.”

  “This isn’t the fucking Navy, Mackenzie.”

  Colm jumped down to the ice. It was insanity to linger out here. “Are you gonna give me shit, Fitch? Are you?”

  Fitch shut up. Colm hoped he would not make any more trouble. Their lives depended on cooperation.

  Mezamiria rotated as they dragged the cables across the ice to the base. The sunlight caught the top of the domed shield and then went away, plunging them into darkness. The temperature dropped from 70 Kelvin to 35. Their suits could not withstand this for long. Frantically, they plugged the power cables into the ports at the bottom of the dome. Their lives would now depend on whether they
had done their jobs properly.

  A door-sized section of the shield slid back.

  Smythe whooped joyfully.

  They tumbled into a lightless corridor. It was dark in here, and almost as cold as outside, but they had built this base themselves. What’s more, it was identical in layout to every other KBO base. They quickly found their way to the reactor, nestled in its own shielded room. Colm said, “All right, the gearship is providing bootstrap power to the reactor. We should be able to get to criticality in an hour or so. Fingers crossed.”

  As they stood around watching the criticality meter, Colm started to feel nauseated. He wondered for a second if the strawberry filling of the cake could have gone off. Then he remembered the rads.

  They must each have absorbed half a Gray when the crewship reactor flooded.

  Rad pills for everyone, he’d said, but he had been so busy landing the gearship, he had forgotten to take his own dose.

  He could not throw up in his helmet. It might block his air supply. He’d die.

  Could not, could not ...

  Oh, no.

  CHAPTER 17

  COLM UNSEALED HIS HELMET.

  Pink-streaked vomit flooded over his gloves and splattered onto the carpet of the Mezamiria Base Control Center.

  “Oh God,” Zhanna said. “You vomited blood!”

  “No, he didn’t,” Smythe said. “That’s strawberry cake filling.”

  “Where is the sympathy?” Colm said. It was a huge relief to breathe air that didn’t stink of his own puke, even if it was cold enough to numb his nose and cheeks. He looked at the inside of his helmet. Ginger strands clung to the liner. “Tan, gimme those rad pills.” He swallowed the dose he should’ve taken hours ago, hoping he was in time to avoid losing all his hair. He’d copped a heavy gamma-ray exposure in the Fleet once. He’d been bald and shitting for months. Not an experience he wanted to repeat.

  They had powered up the reactor and started the electrolysis unit. After hours of trial and error with the valves and pumps, the unit had got cracking. Now it was pumping out oxygen. Colm had vomited repeatedly, provoking remarks from Smythe about ‘too stupid to live,’ while they waited for the control center to pressurize.