Suited up, she went aft to the engineering deck. Axel himself was there, wearing a hi-viz yellow EVA suit from stores, putting the finishing touches on their homemade water mining rocket. “Ready to rock?”
“Sure thing.” She took one end of the rocket, which was basically a pipe. They exited through the engineering airlock, carrying it between them.
The Shady Lady sat on a heavily cratered plain of reddish ice. It was the Kuiper Belt all over again. Meg shivered in her leathers, remembering Mezamiria, and as swiftly pushed it out of her mind. Don’t think about the Ghosts or they might appear. Was she being superstitious? Yeah, but she had reason to worry, didn’t she? Colm’s implant. They’d been safe as long as they were on the move. Now that they’d gone static, it might be emitting its Ghost call once more.
Don’t be dumb, she told herself. The Ghosts can’t, won’t, wouldn’t dare show their faces in the Betelgeuse system.
647 light years from Earth.
The sun overhead was a pale crimson dinner-plate.
Expanding into the first phase of its afterlife as a red giant, Betelgeuse had swallowed its inner planets, while its bloated, hyper-luminous outer shell loomed close to its equivalent of the Kuiper Belt. This rock was still a lonely iceball, but nowadays it was only about as cold as Mars.
Small mercies.
Colm balanced on top of a ladder propped against the fuselage. He waved to Meg and Axel and climbed down, carrying a heavy duffel bag. He had hooked a hose up to the Corvette’s water manifold. It led to their homemade meltbox, an aeroglass cuboid which used to be the shower cubicle, now filled with ice chunks they had dug out using the heating wire from the oven. Colm bounded onto the top of the steam trap, another DIY box. To make this one, they’d demolished a couple of the interior walls and welded the alloy sheets together. “Bring on the steam gun!” Colm said, windmilling his arms for balance. This nameless rock only had a tenth of one Earth gravity.
They’d cut a hole in the top of the steam trap. In went one end of the rocket. Meg caulked the seal nice and tight. They jumped down onto the ice and stood back. “If you’d do the honors,” Colm said to Axel with a fancy bow, sticking one leg out and doffing an invisible hat.
“Three, two, one, great farts of fire!” Axel said, and triggered the rocket’s remote ignition switch. Flame roared out of both ends of the pipe.
This was the same trick they had used to dig holes in ice when they were working in the Kuiper Belt. Oxyhydrogen is a liquid rocket propellant. They’d manufactured the stuff with the onboard electrolysis unit, cracking hydrogen and oxygen out of their remaining stores of water. Burn water to get water? Yup. Everything in space is a trade-off.
But this trade-off was worth making.
Inside the water trap, the powerful flame melted trillion-year-old ice into steam, which spurted into the meltbox. There, it melted the ice chunks into water. The Lady’s pumps rumbled, sucking the water up the hose into the reaction mass tanks.
The other end of the rocket fired in the opposite direction, so that it wouldn’t simply blast off from the surface, taking their hokey little mining setup with it.
“It’s working,” Colm gloated. “Good job, people!”
They all high-fived, and Meg felt a flush of pride. When they worked together, they were a great team.
They’d made it this far, hadn’t they?
All the way to Betelgeuse.
The red disc in the sky gave her the shivers every time she looked at it. This was a sentrienza system. All humanity saw it as a last-ditch refuge. So why didn’t she feel safe?
*
TAN RADIOED DOWN FROM the cockpit, where he was monitoring the comms.
“Computer’s found something.”
Meg had been zoning out, watching the steam gun spit blue fire. Colm had been practising that stupid trick he did with a coin, seeing if he could do it in EVA gloves. Axel had been digging more ice chunks for the meltbox.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Colm said.
“It’s not in English.”
“OK.”
“But there are pictures.”
“And?”
“Looks like the Ghosts are on Gna.”
Meg let out a string of obscenities. Her head felt hot and swollen. This was their worst nightmare.
“How bad?” Colm said.
“This bad.” Tan flipped some stills to their infocals. A burning loftar. Stretchers loaded with wounded civilians. An admiral speaking from a podium.
A street strewn with corpses in khaki uniforms.
Meg let out a woebegone cry.
Axel groaned. “You weren’t the only one, Colm. There were others.” He meant other pilots with Crasibo Lovelace implants. They all knew that, but they’d been trying to forget it. Crossing their fingers and hoping.
So much for that.
“Too late,” Axel said emptily. “Too fucking late.” He looked around at the deserted icescape. “Fuck this.”
“These pics are at least a year old,” Tan said leadenly. No comms drone could get here faster than that. “If it was this bad a year ago, who knows how bad it is now?”
“The Fleet won’t let Gna fall,” Meg said, momentarily forgetting that she was on the run from the Fleet. “No way. They can’t abandon HQ.”
Colm said urgently, “Listen, Sully, I’m sure they got away.” He was talking about Bella and the kids, of course, who’d been going to follow them to Betelgeuse on a Hail Mary ship. “They were scheduled to leave right after we did.”
“What if they got bumped?” Tan said. “They’re only civilians. They’re nobodies.”
Colm turned to Axel. “That couldn’t happen, aye?”
“I don’t know,” Axel said. “Anything could have happened.”
It was a simple statement of fact. But it was the wrong thing to say to Tan, who uttered a heartfelt “Motherfucker,” and went off the radio.
Axel faced Colm. “Remember what you said once? The hardest part is living with it?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Colm said uncertainly.
“Well, I can’t live with it anymore.” Axel tossed down his tools and walked away across the ice.
Colm started forward. Meg grabbed his arm. “Stop. Give him space.”
“No shortage of that around here,” Colm said bleakly, watching Axel’s bright yellow figure recede towards the serrated horizon. He was running now, flying along in micro-gravity bounds. “Jesus, he knows better than this!” Colm said. “Axel! Come back, you fucking bampot!”
Axel kept going.
“What’s his problem?” Colm said in exasperation.
Meg shook her head hopelessly at his insensitivity. Colm did not know—or had forgotten, which was worse—that after they were discharged from the Fleet, Axel had come pretty damn close to committing suicide. But Colm did know, as they all did, that Axel oscillated between being ‘on form,’ as Colm put it, and spending all day in bed, in a private dark place. What if this latest blow pushed him over the edge?
The little yellow figure was almost out of sight.
Give him space, she’d said. But the truth was, space was the worst killer of all.
“I’m going after him.”
“He’s not worth it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. You just stay here and practise your coin tricks, ‘kay?” She shoved Colm in the chest. He staggered backwards, flailing for balance. She turned and ran after Axel.
CHAPTER 31
THE ICE ROSE INTO ridges, funnelling Meg into a valley. She’d lost sight of Axel half a klick back. And he’d turned his suit’s transponder off, damn him. He could be concealed in any one of the vacuum-black shadows that sliced across the valley. “Axel!”
She slowed to a walk. Although she had been doing 10 klicks daily on the treadmill, running in micro-gravity was tiring in a different way. You used different muscles.
“Axel! Quit fucking around!”
The red sun was setting towards the peaks behind her. T
here was some rotation on this rock, which meant that at some point night would fall.
“Axel!”
She pictured him removing his helmet, drinking vacuum. Would he really do that? Meg didn’t know. Her past distorted her ability to judge. All she knew was she was scared of losing him.
Scared of this ugly, barren place.
16 months on shipboard—yeah, it had got to her, atrophied her abilities.
“Axel?”
She climbed the steep, sunlit ridge in front of her. Maybe she’d be able to spot him from higher up.
From the top of the ridge, she got a dramatically different view of the terrain. The slope she’d just climbed was the outside of an ejecta ring. The ‘valley’ behind her was just a trough between the walls of two overlapping craters.
You never got craters like this on KBOs at home. When Betelgeuse expanded, the fiery deaths of its inner planets had destabilized the outer system. Various icy bodies had gone comet, or been catapulted into new orbits. It had been cosmic pinball out here for fifty thousand years. So this crater was new, relatively speaking. Stellar wind had yet to erode the razor-edge of rocky ice where she stood, holding onto a crag with one trembling glove.
The floor of the crater below her was domed.
A starry pattern covered the whole surface of the crater floor, picked out in red by the far-off sun.
In the middle of this dome, or mound, stood several cylinders, like chimneys. Gas wisped from them.
Petrified, Meg glanced back the way she’d come. The Shady Lady sat on the ice four and a half klicks away. She could see Colm mooching around, keeping an eye on the mining setup.
She drew breath to hail him.
Then she changed her mind.
Not just one but two of his crew had gone walkabout, on an uncharted iceball in the Betelgeuse system. It was Drumlin Farm all over again. But this time, he wasn’t coming after them.
He now cared more about his mission than he did about his crew.
She descended the inside of the crater wall, skidding on the hard ice, thankful for the retractable crampons in her boots.
“Axel,” she called. “Hey, Axel, where are you?”
The last bit was steep. She arrived on the crater floor at a run, barely controlling her own momentum. She stumbled to a halt at the foot of the mound.
One of the chimney-like structures hinged open vertically, falling into petals.
Out stepped three frail-looking humanoids, slightly taller than Meg, clad in mud-colored bunny suits. Their knees bent backwards, like dogs’ legs.
Their spiky weapons jumped down to the ground and scuttled towards Meg, snouts raised.
Too late, she wished she’d brought her gun.
*
THE 5,000TH LITER OF water sloshed into the Corvette’s tanks. Colm was nowhere near satiated yet, but the griping esthesia hunger now distracted him less than before.
He radioed up to Tan, “Another three hours should do it. Have you still got Meg on the screen?”
They were tracking her via her suit transponder. Couldn’t track Axel, as the blessed idiot had turned his off.
“Yeah,” Tan said. “She’s still outward bound.”
Colm sighed. “I’m gonna inspect the hull while I’m out here. Might as well do something useful.”
“Roger,” Tan said remotely. Colm knew he was still poring over the terrible images from Gna. He wouldn’t be paying attention to anything except the radio for a while.
Leaving the rocket flaring blue, and steam boiling into the meltbox, Colm walked around to the back of the ship. The Shady Lady’s three engine bells cast long conical shadows on the ice. You could see the ship’s military derivation in its sleek fuselage and atmosphere-capable wings, but the drive looked like it had been grafted on from an FTL hauler. This was the first time he had seen the ship from outside, with his own eyes, in 15 months. It was like seeing a hookup in daylight: Christ, I tapped that? Followed by: Well, she has got a nice rear end ...
No dents or hairline cracks, of course. No damage whatsoever. Esthesia would have let him know.
He hurried around to the other side of the ship. The ladder he had used to connect the water hose lay underneath the fuselage. He picked it up, telescoped it to half-length, and propped it against the blast deflector of the light railgun Axel had illegally installed. He climbed up the ladder and unlocked the housing with a thought.
The setting sun slanted in under the Lady, shimmered on the launch rail. He reached in and manually moved the launch cradle forward. Then he pulled a three-foot rocket out of the duffel bag over his shoulder. He’d built this prototype while Axel was working on the steam gun. Dismantle a drone, take the nose cone with the radio-guidance circuitry, and the little solid rocket booster at the back, and weld them to either end of a pipe full of ... whatever you like.
Nuclear waste.
TNT.
Or just more oxyhydrogen. That’s what had been lying around, so that’s what he’d put in the prototype.
He’d used up all Axel’s explosive rounds back at Gna, and it seemed wise to have something up the spout, this far from home.
He laid the homemade rocket in the launch cradle and confirmed that it fit snugly.
“What are you doing out there?” Tan said. “I can’t see you.” Colm had disabled the belly camera before he started messing with the railgun. He didn’t want Tan to get all uptight about it. “The steam gun’s run out of gas again.”
“Bollocks. I’ll refuel it.”
Colm snapped the housing shut, leaving the prototype inside. He jumped back to the ground and crossed underneath the fuselage. He refueled the steam gun. Ignited it again.
Only 40,000 liters to go.
“Meg’s static,” Tan said. “She’s stopped walking. Her signal’s weak.”
“Still no Axel, right?”
“Nope.”
“I am so sick of this bullshit.”
“You’re just jealous,” Tan said.
“What’s to be jealous of?”
“You could’ve hooked up with Meg anytime, but you missed your chance.”
“Don’t be stupid. I see her as a sister.” And he was worried about her, too worried to admit it.
“When I met Bella, she was in the Navy, too. Did I ever tell you that story?”
“Only about a thousand times.” Colm forced a hearty tone. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.” It was a prayer, offered to whatever saint watches over dumb humans in space.
CHAPTER 32
“PLEASE,” MEG SAID. “I’M looking for my friend. Have you seen him?”
She knew that the humanoids confronting her were sentrienza. Everyone knew what they looked like. The fragile bodies, the slightly oversized heads, the four-fingered hands, those creepy backwards-bending knees. Owing to their drapey, weirdly elegant EVA suits, she couldn’t see their faceted honeybee eyes. But otherwise they could have stepped out of the pages of her second-grade history book.
Every child learned how the sentrienza had made contact with humanity in 2052, after many years of gathering intelligence about our species. They had given Homo sapiens the gift of the zero-gravity field. Goodbye to the petty squabbles of 10 billion people crammed onto one run-down planet. Hello, galaxy! By enabling us to spread across the solar system and then the stars, the sentrienza had saved Earth from various impending calamities—mass extinctions, nuclear war, all that fun stuff. Meg’s teachers had reinforced the lesson that the sentrienza were intrinsically nice and good, if too busy with their own empire to pay much heed to us. If you ever meet one—although you probably won’t—you must be polite.
No one ever said what to do when you were caught trespassing on a sentrienza outpost, as Meg now realized this rock must be.
The three sentrienza stood halfway down the slope of their mound, gazing at her. Their sentient guns danced around her like yappy dogs, although they made no sound that she could hear.
“I’m very sorry to
bother you,” she said, bobbing her head apologetically, a Japanese reflex that only came out when she was trying like hell not to cause offence. “I’m looking for my friend. I think he came this way.”
A high-pitched, trilling voice spoke in her helmet. If a butterfly could talk, it might sound like this. “Are you human?”
“Yes!”
“You are not ... a Ghost?”
“No, no!” Meg said. “Look at me!” She remembered poor Zhanna’s observation that all the Ghosts seemed to be male. Her leathers clung tight enough to prove she was not. “I’m female. Ghosts don’t come in this variety. Ha ha.” She wondered if the sentrienza might have taken Axel for a Ghost, and killed him.
“You are taking our water,” the smallest of the sentrienza said.
Meg’s gut knotted. “Sorry. Um, we’ll put it back?” And then how would they ever get away?
High, buzzing laughter. “It is only water. We have more than we need.” The same sentrienza gestured languidly at the peaks of rock and ice around the mound. “Take it, take it.”
Meg stammered thanks, and then ventured: “What about my friend?”
“Oh, him. He will remain here, to pay for the water.”
“What? But ...”
The small sentrienza picked its way down the mound. It had a graceful, bobbing gait. When it got close to her, Meg saw that its bunny suit was semi-transparent. It clung like a shroud to the alien’s childlike features. Abundant pale purple hair framed the sentrienza’s face in complicated loops and twists. Huge, faceted eyes blinked at her. “I am Emnl ki-Sharongat.”
“Uh ... nice to meet you?”
“The water is ours. You may take it, but you must pay for it. This is our way.”
“We don’t have any money,” Meg said in despair.
“We do not want money. Water is life. You must pay with life.”
“That’s why you’re keeping Axel?” A disbelieving laugh escaped Meg. “Listen, you don’t want him. He can be a real asshole sometimes. He has issues. His father is one of the richest men on Earth.” Too late, Meg realized that was probably exactly why the sentrienza had decided to hang onto him.
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 19
