by M. D. Cooper
“OK,” Leona said aloud. “We’ve got fifteen minutes to find out where Tori went before we have to pick a pontoon shaft.”
To Leona’s right, an image appeared showing New Amsterdam and the six pontoons that it rode upon as it surfed the dense clouds in the planet’s depths. Each pontoon was roughly a hundred kilometers long and fifty kilometers deep.
“That narrows down where we have to look,” Leona said, sending out a request for access to the video feeds for the strut lifts in the city. “Get the ship’s NSAI on this as long as we can. We need to look for anyone even remotely resembling Tori.”
“She’s going to have to manage on her own.”
* * * * *
Tanis had lost one of the cargo straps and now had only two: the one holding her to the safety tether, and the one she was trying to latch onto another tether near the remains of the rail.
Deep breath, Tanis. Relax, wait for the wind to ease, and toss!
She threw the cable like a shotput with the one end tied around her wrist—thinking she could grasp the straps with her hands as the winds tried to rip her from the face of the pontoon strut was not a mistake she’d make twice.
Not that she had much choice.
The cable missed, and Tanis pulled it back to make another throw. She repeated her mantra, and tossed it again.
This time, the clip hit and latched onto the safety ring.
“Oh thank the stars,” Tanis breathed in relief as she mentally prepared herself for the next step: removing the first cable and pulling herself over to the rail.
Tanis said the words with a lot more ire than she meant to, though her tone was fueled more by fear than any sort of blame she was assigning to Darla.
Tanis undid the cargo strap clipped to her waist and swung down, hanging from the strap tied around her left wrist. She pulled herself up, hand over hand, into the rail trough.
After taking a moment to catch her breath, she began to slither along the trough, the powerful winds pressing her against the side.
She felt small stings all over her body, and looked down to see her EV suit punctured in a dozen places.
Tanis shook her head and kept moving. Bemoaning her situation wasn’t going to help get her out of the mess she was in. She made it two meters up the track, to the point where it ran alongside the airlock.
There was supposed to be a caged-off catwalk that ran from the track to the airlock, but it was gone. The broken metal supports that stuck out of the strut were pitted and scored, and Tanis realized that it hadn’t been knocked off by the breaking track or the bot’s fall. The catwalk had been gone for years.
I am never setting foot on one of these Saturnian cities again. Ever.
She reached down and unhooked the cargo strap before pulling herself up the final meter alongside the broken track. Then she eased herself over the edge, the force of the wind holding her body perpendicular to the pull of gravity, wincing as more diamond rain peppered her body.
Tanis glanced over her shoulder.
Tanis drew in a deep breath and got ready to shoot her arms into the airlock as soon as it passed under her—which would be in a fraction of a second.
Darla didn’t reply, and after a minute of silence, Tanis asked,
Tanis couldn’t help but laugh. “OK, Mom.”
Then she let go.
There was no time to think before the undersides of her arms slammed into the airlock’s sill, while the winds tried to rip her free. Tanis screamed with anger, rage, and the will to live, grasping wildly for something to hold onto. The wind tore at her, dragging her back, when suddenly her left arm pulled taught.
The cargo strap…it must have hooked onto something inside the lock….
Careful not to trust it too much, Tanis got her right hand on the edge of the airlock and heaved herself over the edge, crashing to the floor once she was out of the brunt of the wind.
Tanis curled up on the deck, body wracked with sobs that seemed to alternate between joy and terror as the airlock door cycled shut, finally cutting off the howling wind.
It was still out there, though. Tanis could hear it screaming with impotent rage that it had failed to consume her.
“Not today, you fucker,” Tanis whispered at the wind. “You’re not getting anyone today.”
She pulled herself upright and removed her helmet.
“I gotta hear,” Tanis said. “Sensors on that thing suck.”
She wiped the tears from her eyes and looked down at the suit, which she now realized was torn in more places than she’d realized, foam pouring out of dozens of rents in the suit.
“I gotta get this off,” she muttered.
“Yeah. Do they have pressure suits down here? I imagine they must.”
Tanis nodded as the inner airlock door opened, and she walked on shaky legs into the dimly lit passageway and stopped at the first door, which opened into a room barely larger than a closet.
“Aw, crap,” Tanis muttered as the door closed behind her and she began to peel herself out of the EV suit, wincing as the burns and cuts on her body complained loudly about the suit’s foam pulling away.
Once out of the suit, she pulled off her dress and leggings, careful to set her lightwand aside as she looked at the device in front of her.
“I hate these things,” she said before looking over herself and pulling free a few diamond shards that were sticking out of her skin.
“Right, yeah, just reminds me of a shoot suit. I don’t have fond memories of those.”
<
br /> “Yeah, feels like you’re trapped in goo. Barely able to move—and that’s before you get into the cocoon filled with goo.”
Tanis looked down at her burned and bloody body. “Or leaking blood everywhere.”
Tanis accessed the system’s parameters and set it not to coat her head before stepping into the cylinder and closing her eyes as the door sealed behind her.
Tanis wished there was time to hack the machine and make it apply just the basic protective layer, but she knew that Darla was busy breaching the networks, and Tanis didn’t have time to wrestle with the SCLSS’s NSAI.
She felt the system detach her hair, and then begin to apply the base-medlayer to her body, spraying it on in even swaths. In seconds, her skin went from feeling like it was on fire, to feeling cool and refreshed.
OK…that alone may have been worth it.
Then came the biohookups which made her wince—especially the tube that threaded down her throat and into her lungs.
Tanis silently cursed the SCLSS NSAI, but true to its word, it finished in three minutes.
The system fed her a holo, and she saw that her body was covered from head to toe in an emergency response suit. It had redundant air supplies, fire suppression capabilities, and even heat ablation plates.
It was also bright red.
She grabbed her lightwand, palmed open the room’s door, and walked back into the corridor.
Tanis began to stride as quickly as she could down the passage toward the lift bank that would take her down to the reactor level.
Tanis rushed down the stairs, annoyed that the ‘helmet’ the SCLSS system had sprayed onto her head was limiting her hearing more than she’d wanted. Luckily it had only applied tinted lenses over her eyes, and her augmented vision was able to compensate.
Four flights later, she reached the reactor level and stopped before the door into the passageway, sending out a passel of nano to scout ahead.
The moment the view came to her, she gave a soft laugh—or tried to, until she remembered her mouth was sealed by the SCLSS’s breathing apparatus.
There were two security automatons in the hall beyond, each with a pulse rifle.
Tanis grasped her lightwand in her right hand and opened the door. Then she strode out into the passage as though she had every right to be there.
The first automaton was ten meters down the passage, while the second was a dozen further.
“Halt!” the first one called out, and Tanis ignored it.
The machine leveled its weapon at her and called out once more.
“Halt!”
“Emergency personnel coming through,” Tanis said, hoping that maybe with her red SCLSS suit she could trick the automaton’s programming to let her by.
Instead, the machine fired at her, the concussive wave rippling through the corridor and clipping her left arm as she dodged to the side.
Her lightwand was active, and she considered flinging it at the machine, but knew it might be able to deflect the blade, and then she’d be weaponless.
The suit, combined with the near 1g of gravity made her feel sluggish, but she charged the machine nonetheless, knowing that close quarters was her only hope.
Another pulse blast hit her, and she staggered under its hammer-blow, silently thanking the SCLSS NSAI for putting her in the best protection it could offer.
Then she was within range of the machine, and her blade flashed out, cutting the end off its pulse rifle.
The bot dropped the gun and grabbed Tanis’s left arm in its crushing grip. It grabbed for her right arm, but Tanis’s lightwand flashed up, cutting the machine’s hand off before turning the blade on its other arm, cutting it off as well.
To her surprise, the automaton’s hand didn’t release from her arm. She was about to cut it free when the bot lunged at her, trying to crush her with its weight.
She backpedaled quickly and slashed at the machine’s torso, where she expected its power supplies to be. Her aim was true, and when the blade hit the SC battery, it exploded in a burst of energy, flinging her backward.
The second automaton was rising as well, still holding onto its pulse rifle.
It fired on Tanis as she repeated the same approach as the first time, taking two direct—and increasingly painful—blasts before she reached the machine.
This one must have paid attention to the previous fight, as it pulled its pulse rifle out of range and reached for Tanis’s arm that held her lightwand.
She was beaten, bruised, and exhausted. Instead of battling this machine, she let it grab her arm and moved in close, placing her hand over the automaton’s chest and releasing a passel of nano into it.
Darla asked.
Tanis’s hand spasmed from the bot’s grasp, and she dropped her lightwand, catching it with her other hand and slicing at the automaton’s arm
, just as it fired a point-blank shot at her torso with the pulse rifle.
The blast flung her across the corridor, and she slammed into the bulkhead, momentarily stunned as the automaton turned toward her.
It took one faltering step, and then stopped in the middle of the passage.
Tanis approached the frozen machine and wrenched the pulse rifle out of its grasp, before stumbling down the corridor to the secondary reactor monitoring room where her quarry waited.
Upon reaching the doors, she threaded a nanofilament out of her hand and through the gap between the door and its frame. When she got the view of the room beyond, she quickly took stock: the space was roughly ten by twenty-five meters. At the far end was a reinforced window that looked down on the main reactors that powered the pontoons’ systems—keeping it at the correct ballast levels, and supplying energy to the ES and magnetic fields it used to assist in stabilization.
Directly in front of the window stood her target, Kameron.
Darla’s avatar nodded in Tanis’s mind.
Tanis watched Kameron via her feeds as he set the antimatter bottle in a device next to the observation window.
