The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1)
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He knew Fitch could fly the gearship if he wanted to. Fitch didn’t have an esthesia implant, but he’d be able to work the flight controls and zero-gravity field generator manually. He wouldn’t be able to land on Gna, but he could just broadcast a Mayday once he arrived in Gna orbit, and be confident of rescue. After all, he was Crasibo Lovelace’s blue-eyed boy.
Who was planning to fly off and leave the rest of them here on this Godforsaken rock.
“Fitch!” Colm bawled. “Come in!”
The gearship cast a jet-black shadow on the ice.
As Colm approached, Fitch shuffled out of the shadow.
“There you are.” Colm braked in approved micro-gravity fashion, dragging one foot behind him in a T-stop, pitching forward, catching himself with the hand that wasn’t holding the Void Eagle. He straightened up. It suddenly occurred to him that he should not openly accuse Fitch of desertion. It was bad enough that he had a gun in his hand. He shoved it into his thigh pocket, so as not to come off as if he were threatening Fitch. “If you’re going to get something out of the ship, you need to inform me.”
Look at that—Colm wasn’t the only one with a gun. What Fitch had was actually the nail gun from the gearship, detached from its remote effector. Maybe he thought they would need it for the crewship repairs.
“I can’t have people going off on their own like this,” Colm said uncomfortably.
Fitch continued to shuffle towards him. The light of distant Sol reflected off his faceplate, hiding his face.
“Look, I know you’ve got a lot of theories about the Ghosts. And I’m sorry I’ve never really had the time to discuss that stuff. I’d like to sit down and have a proper talk about it.”
Fitch pushed off into a leap, raising the nail gun.
Colm instinctively ducked. He threw up one arm and knocked the nail gun aside. A nail burst from its business end, narrowly missing Colm’s helmet.
“Fitch! Gonna nae do that?!?”
Fitch grasped Colm’s blocking arm. He whirled him around. Fitch was a waldo jockey. He didn’t exercise. But now he had Colm’s arm in a steely grip and he was swinging the nail gun at Colm’s helmet. It still had the nail sticking out of it. The lethal steel spike scraped across Colm’s faceplate, fell out of the gun, bounced on the ice.
If Fitch fired a nail directly into Colm’s faceplate, it’d crack it. Instant death.
Colm grabbed Fitch’s right arm with his free hand and twisted it. In the micro-gravity this lifted Fitch bodily off the ground, as if Colm had executed a judo throw. Fitch spun away head over heels. Colm toppled forward. The Void Eagle fell out of his thigh pocket and skittered across the ice. He dived to retrieve it.
Fitch still had the nail gun. He scrambled back to his feet.
Colm ran.
Halfway back to the base, he looked over his shoulder.
Fitch was chasing him. No more awkward shuffling. Now he was sprinting like a micro-gravity athlete.
Closing the gap.
Colm thumbed the Void Eagle’s safety off as he ran.
No. It’s Fitch.
Gun probably wouldn’t work out here, anyway. When they say ‘specced for low temperatures,” they don’t mean 40 Kelvin.
He pushed his weary muscles harder. Crashed into the titanium-alloy shield of the base. Slapped the entry plate. Thank God, the pressurization cycle was still disabled in this airlock. The hydraulics wheezed.
Colm stumbled in and closed the hatch in Fitch’s face.
Bursting out of the airlock’s other end, he hurtled down the service corridor toward the control center. At the first angle in the corridor, he flattened himself against the wall and raised the Void Eagle. It was warmer in here than outside. There was no air yet, but there was light. Construction dust eddied in the green glow of LED emergency signs pointing to the secure bunkers.
Fitch rounded the angle, holding the nail gun out in front of him.
Colm levelled the Void Eagle. “Drop it! God’s sake, Fitch!”
Fitch lunged, driving the nail gun at Colm’s face.
Colm squeezed the trigger.
In the instant before the bullet shattered Fitch’s faceplate, Colm saw the face inside.
It was not Fitch.
Gaunt, pale-eyebrowed, it was identical to the dead Ghosts on the crewship’s engineering deck.
*
IN THE CONTROL CENTER, Meg and Zhanna were talking.
This rarely happened. Meg tended to keep her distance from the other woman, as she distrusted Zhanna’s tendency to mother everyone. She knew the problem was her, not Zhanna ... but she still wished Zhanna could be more professional.
Now, however, she felt grateful for Zhanna’s ability to conjure normality out of chaos. The woman had endured a terrifying experience. Now she sat crosslegged on the floor, knitting by the light of the computers. They’d powered up the all-important life support and comms consoles using batteries. Meg had also manually flipped the window’s polarization back to transparent. Zhanna’s needles click-clicked in the glow of the holo displays and the weak light from the hangar.
“What are you making?” Meg prowled back and forth, cuddling her AK.
“A sweater for Crystal.” Zhanna held up the half-finished sleeve she was working on.
“Crystal ...” The sleeve was tiny.
“Sully’s older daughter.”
“Oh God yeah, of course.”
“This is her name in Chinese characters. Um ... I think.”
Meg couldn’t help smiling. Everyone on board had already been guilted into wearing one of Zhanna’s knitting disasters. “I need a hobby,” she said. She glanced out the window. Motionless crewship. Dead Ghosts. She kept pacing.
“What about karate?” Zhanna said. “You’re a black belt.”
“That’s not a hobby. It’s my job.”
“Hmm. You’re half-Japanese, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there are loads of great Japanese crafts. Pottery ... calligraphy ... flower arranging ...”
Meg let out a belly laugh. They were sitting in the Kuiper Belt, facing a Ghost invasion, and Zhanna was trying to convince her to take up flower arranging. “I’m just not the crafty type. No offense.”
Zhanna grinned. “That’s fine. I’m not the AK-wielding type.”
Meg took a turn past the life support monitoring station. One screen showed the reactor room. There sat Tan, idly fiddling with his computer. No Ghosts. Other screens rotated views of other areas. No Ghosts. No Fitch. No Colm. Fear gnawed at her.
Zhanna clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Shit, I’m out of the blue yarn. I think I brought another ball in my rucksack, could you ...? If I put this down I’ll drop stitches.”
Meg shifted the AK into the crook of her left arm and poked through Zhanna’s rucksack. Noodles, crackers, spam, thermals, water, oxygen canisters ... Zhanna had even brought the sanitary pads. But— “No yarn, sorry.”
“Maybe I put it in Colm’s rucksack?”
Meg felt a complicated thrill of affection and resentment as she dug through Colm’s rucksack. Socks, spare batteries, tools, a pack of cards, two soup spoons ... a tin of baking powder? Meg held this last item up. “OK, our captain is officially loopy.”
Zhanna did not smile. “Oh,” she said, starting to her feet. Her knitting slid off her lap. So much for dropping stitches.
The tin rattled oddly. Meg opened it, and went cold. “Pills.” She read the back of the blister pack. “Tropodolfin. What the hell?”
“Those are mine.”
“Are you OK? You’re not sick, are you?”
“No, I’m fine,” Zhanna said, making a grab for the tin.
Meg held it out of reach. “So what’re you doing with this stuff?”
Zhanna’s lips squeezed shut for a second, and then she blurted, “All right, it’s not mine. It’s Colm’s.”
“Colm’s.”
“He’s in pain. Every day, every minute. His implant isn’t working right. He needs
this stuff just to function.”
Meg blinked, completely blindsided. “Are you saying he’s hooked?”
Zhanna pressed her lips shut again, as if she were keeping in a sob. “Yeah. This stuff is evil.”
“I don’t know about evil,” Meg said. She felt numb. Disappointed. Betrayed. “I did hear that it was invented as a pep pill, not a painkiller. This would have been back in the early days of the war. No one alive had ever done any fighting. The Ghosts were just rolling over us. We needed something to make our troopers feel like warriors.”
“Warriors,” Zhanna echoed contemptuously.
“Yeah.” Meg shrugged. What hurt was not so much the revelation that Colm was hooked on tropodolfin, as the fact that he’d kept it from her. While sharing his secret with Zhanna. Getting her to cover for him.
“You guys ...” Her voice came out as a squeak. “Are you, um, involved?”
Zhanna nodded.
Meg forced a smile. “I guess I kind of knew that.”
But she hadn’t known it. She’d been completely blind to what was going on in front of her eyes. Stupid goddamn Collie Mack with his cheap conjuring tricks and his ginger hair.
She sighed. “Don’t worry. I won’t say anything.”
Her helmet radio squealed. “Meg, Sully, come in.”
Speak of the Scottish devil.
“Sully here,” Tan said from the reactor room.
“Meg here.” Meg handed the baking powder tin to Zhanna, who grabbed it like it was made of solid rhodium. Meg paced back to the life support monitoring station, where the cameras were.
“Fitch is dead,” Colm said breathlessly.
“What?”
“To be clear, I’m just guessing. But there was a Ghost wearing his spacesuit. So I’d say he’s dead.”
“Shit,” Meg whispered. She hadn’t liked Fitch much, but ... shit. “Where’s the Ghost now?”
“I shot it.”
“This is nuts,” Tan said. On the monitoring screen, he stood up and shoved his computer in his pocket, picked up his gun.
“What’s the hangar temperature?” Colm said. She finally found him on the screens, bounding along the service corridor that led to the hangar.
She checked the display. “Minus two degrees Celsius.”
“Fuck it, that’s good enough. I’m going to try restarting the crewship’s reactor. We have to get out of here.”
Meg broke in. She had just seen something on the screens that terrified her. “There’s more of them!” She flicked frantically at the display until she got it back. “I’m looking at one of the secure bunkers. It’s full of Ghosts. I can’t even count them.”
“Oh Jesus. Which secure bunker?”
“On ... on G level. It’s the one right near the reactor. Sully, you better get out of there.”
“Getting.”
Colm swore. “The secure bunkers. They’ve got an automatic priority on atmosphere. They must have pressurized even before the control center. No wonder it took so fucking long. And we stocked them with suits, and food and water, and—”
“Weapons,” Meg said. Her jaw hurt, she was gritting her teeth so hard. “What do you want me and Zhanna to do?”
Colm burst out of the hangar airlock. She turned to the window and watched him sprint to the crewship, hurdling over the frozen Ghosts. “Stay there for now,” he grunted. “If they occupy the control center, we’ll lose power to the lights and the hangar doors.”
“Got it. Out.”
She turned to Zhanna.
“Time to be warriors,” she said.
CHAPTER 20
SHIP REPAIRS IN THE middle of a Ghost invasion. Just like the good old days.
Tthe reactor’s safety plug had blown out. Colm installed the spare, working as fast as he could. He wasn’t concerned about rads anymore: the safety tanks and the xenon holding tank were shielded like bank vaults, and his suit also gave him some protection.
He was concerned about the Ghosts. How many of them were in the base now? How fast could they multiply?
Tan, standing at the top of the airlock steps, said, “Here they come.”
“How many?”
“Thirty, forty? They’ve got the suits, got the combis. They look just like Marines. Motherfucker.” Tan never cursed unless he was really shaken.
“Seal the airlock.”
Tan cranked the manual wheel. A bullet zinged past him. The hatch shut, leaving them in the dark.
On the radio, Smythe said, “They’re all around you, guys. Hope the hull is grenade-proof.”
Hollow booms shivered through the engineering deck. Colm could only pray the hull would hold. He squirmed into the snarl of pipes around the safety tanks. His headlamp cast trembling shadows ahead of him. “Any action up there, Smythe?”
“Nope. I feel ignored.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way. Sully, pass me the blowtorch.”
“It’s attached to the remote manipulator.”
“Well, un-attach it. I can’t use the remote manipulator with no power.”
Tan clanked around, swore, dropped his tools as the ship rocked under them.
Smythe said, “Guys, it looks like they’re trying to roll the ship off the cargo crawler.”
Lying on his back, with a pressure meter digging into his kidneys, Colm unscrewed one of the safety tanks and replaced it into the reactor’s fuel loop. The ship kept rocking back and forth. If the Ghosts managed to roll it over, that would be very bad. In fact, it would be fatal. “Smythe, can you think of any way to distract them?”
It was Zhanna who answered. “I could flash them,” she suggested brightly.
Colm laughed. “Worth a try. Maybe they’re just mad because they’re sex-deprived.”
“Are they always like this?”
This time Colm and Tan both laughed, hysterically. Are they always like this? Eighteen colony systems gone. Yeah, I’d say they’re always like this, except when they’re worse.
“What did I say?” Zhanna demanded.
“You make the universe a better place just by existing,” Colm told her.
Tan passed him the blowtorch. It spat out a hydrogen-oxygen flame, electric blue in the vacuum. Colm directed the flame at the bottom of the safety tank he’d just moved. The tank measured one foot square but most of that was shielding. Inside, two liters of frozen, radioactive salt resided in a container. He needed to heat that salt up to melting point. It was going to take a while.
Smythe came back on the radio, laughter in her voice. “She is doing it! This crazy chick is dancing in front of the window with her top off.”
“Part of me is always going to regret not seeing this,” Tan sighed.
“What are the Ghosts doing?” Colm said.
“Um ... this is interesting. They’re staring at her. And ... sort of swaying back and forth. It’s really spooky.”
“At least they’re not trying to roll the ship anymore,” Colm grunted.
While he was melting the salt in one tank, Tan replaced another one into the fuel loop. Their arms and legs got in each other’s way. There wasn’t really even room for one person to work back here. Colm redirected the blowtorch flame to the second tank.
Smythe said, “It could be that our distraction is working too well.” The laughter was gone from her voice.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re leaving the hangar.”
“And?”
“Grenading the door of the control center.”
Fear stabbed through Colm’s gut. “Time for you to get out of there.”
“And let them in? I thought you said we had to hold the control center.”
“Not if it gets you killed,” Colm yelled. “There’s another exit, I saw it. Use that.”
“That’s not an airlock. It’s just an engineering hatch. I don’t even know where it goes.”
“Well, call up the schematics and find out where it goes! Then go there! Now!”
“Got it. Out.”
*
“SHOWTIME’S OVER,” MEG said. “We’re out of here.”
“I was having fun,” Zhanna complained.
“You took a hit of tropo, didn’t you?”
Zhanna looked down. “I wanted to find out what it feels like to be a warrior,” she said quietly.
Meg’s heart broke a bit for her. In a better universe, Zhanna could’ve cooked and knitted and analyzed rocks and that would have been enough. But in this universe, Zhanna’s drug-fueled topless dance had bought them time to repair the reactor. “This is me lecturing you about drug abuse,” Meg said, making air quotes. “Done. Now put your suit on. By the way, how do you do that thing with your hips?”
Zhanna cheered up. “It’s belly dancing. I took classes back home. I’ll show you later if you like.”
Another low-pitched boom shuddered through the control center. How many grenades could the airlock withstand? Suited up, Meg clicked through the base schematics. “It’s a crawlspace. We’ll have to leave the rucksacks. They won’t fit.”
“But—“
“Get under that desk.” When Zhanna had taken cover, Meg raised her AK and sprayed the computers. Metal and plastic fragments ricocheted around the control center. Her suit registered a couple of minor damage reports. The computers were totaled. Hopefully that would prevent the Ghosts from screwing with the base’s systems.
“Here we go.” She led Zhanna to the engineering hatch in the wall. “When I open this, the atmosphere is going to vent out of here. So hold onto something.”
She had hardly finished speaking when the airlock at the other end of the room buckled, and the atmosphere found an easier way out.
Meg grabbed the edge of the hatch. Escaping air buffetted her. Zhanna was holding onto her around the waist. She thumped the hatch’s manual release.
Out tumbled the body of Fitch Reynolds.