Tritium Gambit

by Erik Hyrkas

  Chapter 11. Max

  I knew I should be downright pissed at Tyler, but all I could think about was how I was going to get Miranda out of this mess. We had been in a holding cell aboard HMS Crazy for a few hours now, and I hadn’t come up with even a remotely workable plan. Besides my bottle of pills, all the robots left me was my towel, and the only thing that occurred to me was to strangle Tyler with it if he came close enough. I had never wanted anybody to save me, but times were desperate, and I found myself hoping John would blast his way in with his array of guns and save us.

  I could see four holding cells arranged in a square, each six feet long by six feet wide and seven feet tall just like the one I was in. Buttons on the wall would extend a cot, toilet, or sink. Each cell had three solid metal walls and diagonal bars as the remaining wall.

  I paced all six feet of my cell, cleverly discovering that the bars were electrified and there was some sort of field that prevented sound from coming into it. I could see Miranda in her cell, but I couldn’t hear her and apparently she couldn’t hear me. She looked frustrated, and her wavy hair was now completely free of the bun she normally wore, giving her a wild Amazon look. I was fairly sure sound escaped the cell, though, because at one point the robot guard told me to shut up as I tried to get Miranda’s attention. The machine used the equivalent of an intergalactic cattle prod. AIs used to be so much nicer when I was a kid.

  I stopped pacing when I saw a robot drag the unconscious body of John into the holding cell adjacent to me. “Crap,” I said aloud. When I imagined the cavalry showing up, I imagined said cavalry being conscious. I could see a gash on his leg that looked similar to the spider bite I received. “Double crap.” We’d be on another planet before he woke up.

  I could see the same disappointment in Miranda’s eyes that I was sure was in mine. It looked like she mouthed, “How do we get out of here?” But she might have been saying, “Cows moo see gout fear.” It was sort of hard to tell. I showed her my towel and pills and mimed an elaborate plan to use them. Fortunately, miming isn’t an exact form of communication and so I didn’t have to know my own plan yet. My hope was that, if she thought I was all over this problem, it would calm her nerves. But when she flopped down on her cot she was not looking entirely confident.

  An hour later, a robot approached my cell and pushed a Bar-E through. The Bar-F’s might taste like crap, but the Bar-E’s didn’t taste at all and only had half the calories. I ate it in the standard two bites.

  I showed the wrapper to Miranda meaningfully and tucked it away into my pocket as if it was part of my plan, even though my plan was simply to keep her calm. I still had no idea how we were going to get out of this mess, but I noticed that she kept her wrapper too. Maybe she thought my plan needed two wrappers. Good thinking.

  I mouthed the words “don’t panic” to Miranda, but I couldn’t tell if she understood me. I pushed the button on my wall to extend my cot and forced myself to recline on it as if things were going exactly the way I planned and that I had Tyler right where I wanted him. I guess I could take some comfort in the fact that I knew where Tyler was going to be soon and that he wasn’t trying to evade me, not yet. I calmed myself with thoughts of violence: when I managed to get even a pinky free, Tyler had better fear for his life.

  I managed to doze off for some time, and when I woke, the ship’s engines were already engaged. We were leaving the Earth. As soon as we had enough altitude, Tyler would open a wormhole, and not long after, we’d be orbiting Zeta-Terra, the Wendigo’s home planet.

  The whine of the engine was so high pitched that only teenagers, dogs, and I could hear it. It’s not that I have heightened hearing. It simply never faded with age like it does for a normal human. A thirty-year-old on the planet wouldn’t have heard a thing as we took off into the night sky. Even without being able to see out a porthole, I was sure it was night because Tyler couldn’t risk being seen by humans, couldn’t risk setting off another ping before he crossed into a wormhole, where he’d be untraceable. Until the very moment the ship zipped inside the hole, he didn’t need the Stellar Command barreling up his backside with really large proton cannons to see why he was making the five o’clock news.

  I could see John stirring on his cot. He was not completely conscious yet but he was waking up. His day was about to get so much worse.

  Even though artificial gravity and inertia inhibitors kept the floor feeling like it was down, there were telltale little hiccups in the system. Every minute or so you could feel the Earth’s gravity leak in briefly and the ship would shudder. Tyler needed to get his ship into a repair yard, I thought. But because this was a stolen ship, that was probably a tall order.

  The lights flickered and dimmed, and as I glanced toward Miranda, I saw the interior of the ship was shrinking to a pinpoint and she was being sucked toward it. I knew that, from outside the ship, we had instantly disappeared; but from inside the event horizon, a half hour would elapse before we had fully passed through the exotic matter surrounding the wormhole. It would take another half hour to emerge on the other side. But to outside observers, we’d simply appear above Zeta-Terra.

  Because the wormhole trip is one way even for light and electricity, the ship’s electrical systems were at their weakest while crossing the event horizon. So the only power is the segmented electrical backup systems. The primary power had to be shut off until the ship had crossed. The robot guards were suspended to protect their circuitry, and Tyler wouldn’t have a video feed to the back of the ship.

  There would be a brief moment when the power weakened while the next segment adjusted to the additional load. I saw Miranda pulling out her Bar-E wrapper and stretching it along the floor next to the electrified bars. I realized that the wrapper must be an electrical conductor. “Damn she’s smart,” I said.

  I pulled my Bar-E wrapper out and flattened it to make sure it would span the bars when my cell crossed the wormhole. I realized that, after the electrical field on the bars shorted, the door still wouldn’t open because it had a mechanical lock—the cell designers weren’t that stupid. Maybe Miranda had a way to open the cell door if she could touch it. That made sense. After all, I still had my towel, so maybe she had a portable hacksaw that the robots had overlooked in their search. If the bars did short circuit, at least we could hear each other and she’d be able to explain the plan.

  Time went by agonizingly slowly as I watched Miranda shrink. Eventually I couldn’t make her out in the kaleidoscope of colors collecting at the pinpoint of the wormhole. I pondered the idea of exotic matter and negative mass while I waited for my turn, but the effort hurt my brain. The feeling of crossing an exotic matter barrier into a wormhole is just plain odd. There’s a brief moment of no sensation, followed by a feeling of being exceptionally heavy, and then suddenly you are on the other side.

  When the lights flickered, I connected the bars using the wrapper, feeling electricity course through my fingers as I let go too slowly. Electricity arced, crackled, and then went silent. The air stunk of ozone.

  “Max!” Miranda called.

  When I looked in her direction, I saw her lying in the rubble of her cell, a robot’s body parts strewn across the floor, its limbs still twitching. My bars hadn’t exploded when they shorted out.

  “What the hell happened?” I demanded of the remaining guard, not expecting answer, of course.

  The guard tried to stop me, but I pulled it into the electrified bars and it sizzled and spat flame for a few seconds before collapsing to the floor. Miranda gestured feebly at the rubble, and I was thankful to see her move. “Well, this is what happens to robots that are overloaded.”

  I grabbed a shard of metal alloy off the ground. “Can you get to me?”

  “I think so.” She started crawling through the debris toward me.

  When she was close enough, I raised the shard and Miranda looked away, knowing what I was about to do. I slashed my arm with the shard and allowed the blood to drip into her open wound
s. She had so many injuries and my wound healed so fast that I had to slash my arm open a second time to finish the job. She looked up as I smeared some of my blood on her forehead injury, and I could see the pain in her eyes as her body healed. Then I tucked away the shard in a pocket. It might be useful as shiv later.

  She smiled at me. “What? You aren’t going to stab me?”

  “You don’t need it this time.”

  She was still healing but now had enough strength to stand up, and she started working on the lock on my cell with wires and pieces of metal from the robot wreckage.

  She shook her head in frustration. “It’s jammed!”

  “Get the sheriff free first,” I insisted.

  She fiddled with the lock for another few seconds.

  “Miranda!” She looked up at me. “Get the sheriff first.”

  She grimaced at me but turned and used a piece of wire to short out John’s electrical bars. It only took her a few moments to pop his lock open.

  John still wasn’t fully conscious, and so she hauled him out of the cell. He was much bigger than her, but she managed admirably. She set him down outside my cell, and as I raised the shard to cut myself again, John muttered something.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your blood is poisonous to me.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know,” I replied. “I thought it worked with anybody who is part human.”

  John groaned and rolled over onto his hands and knees. “Now you know.” He stood up with what looked like tremendous effort, and he looked drunk when he was finally on his feet. I guessed that the spider venom hadn’t completely worn off.

  The lights in the room turned red, and all three of us looked around.

  “There isn’t time. You guys need to find a way off this ship or a way to get safe. Most ships like this have an escape pod for the crew in the rear. Find it and get out!”

  Miranda looked distressed. “We can’t just leave you!”

  I gave her the most stern look that I could manage. “You need to go or you’ll be Wendigo chow. Go!”

  John shook his head like he was trying to clear the fog out of it. “He’s right. We’ll all die if we stay. We need to get out of here.”

  The electricity came back on and I got a sufficient jolt to bring me to my knees. The electricity only made my grip tighter and I could not release the bars. I saw Miranda and John slipping out the back door just as I lost consciousness.