Ganked In Space

by N M Tatum

  The team made to retreat to level one before remembering the electromagnetic lock that was keeping the swarm at bay downstairs.

  They were trapped.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Rever Space Station

  Cody used to have panic attacks as a kid. Whenever he faced a stressful situation—a test, a birthday party, a baseball game—he would break out in a cold sweat, and his heart would start racing. Then he met Reggie. A cool kid, by all conventional standards: popular, good at sports, good looking, charming. He had every right to torture Cody the way all the other popular kids did. But he didn’t. His niceness wasn’t an act, either. It was wholly genuine. When he noticed Cody’s attacks, he used that genuine niceness to help. He sat with Cody, talked to him, got him water. He was always calm.

  Eventually, Cody stopped having the attacks. He became more confident, more sure of himself, largely because of Reggie’s help. He hadn’t had a panic attack since junior prom.

  However, he felt like he was about to have one now.

  Cody sat on the top step, head between his knees, trying to take a deep breath. The big bugs pounded on the shield behind him. He felt the reverberations run up his back.

  Joel ran up the stairs; he’d been checking on the level one door. “Still fucked,” he said. “The swarm is clawing at that thing like there’s candy inside.” Darkness fell over his face. “I guess there is candy inside. We’re the candy.”

  “Nothing is fucked,” Sam said. “We’ll find a way out of this.” She scanned the ceiling and walls for vents or air ducts, something they could crawl through. She didn’t see anything. “Cody, bring up the plans. There’s got to be another way out of this stairwell.”

  He didn’t respond. His head was still between his knees.

  Sam clapped him on the back, jarring him. He shot upright. A wave of nausea and dizziness hit him.

  “You with us?” Sam asked. “We need those plans.”

  Cody didn’t answer. He felt like if he opened his mouth, he would vomit.

  Reggie set the Gatling down on the landing between levels one and two. He approached Cody slowly, calmly, and sat a few steps down from him. He looked up at Cody and saw the familiar look in his friend’s eyes, the look of panic, of fear, the crushing weight of anxiety.

  “Remember the VRE finals?” Reggie said.

  Cody seemed surprised by the question. He nodded.

  “I really thought we were going all the way,” Reggie said. “We worked so hard. Trained. Put in so much time and energy. I was positive that gaming was our future, and that tournament was our first step, our foot in the door. I had a vision of exactly how our lives would go after that. I don’t think I ever told you guys.”

  Reggie leaned on his elbow and stared upward like he was looking at the sky. “First, we’d win, of course. Then we’d land a major sponsorship deal. The sponsors would set us up in a sweet house with cutting-edge gaming gear so we could play together all the time. We’d join the intergalactic gaming circuit. Tour the galaxy, taking on the best teams, spreading our name and reputation. Rub elbows with celebrities. Fancy parties. People would want to know us.” He smiled like he could see that picture up there in his imaginary sky.

  “We would retire eventually,” he continued, “and use our sizable fortune to buy our own gaming team. We’d manage and coach it together. Always together. Always gaming. Always having fun.”

  He looked down from the fake sky. “Then what actually happened? We lost. Didn’t even make top ten. And all my plans went to shit.” The profanity coming out of Reggie’s mouth shocked some color back into Cody’s cheeks. “We washed out before we even really got started. And it was because I made a stupid play. I got ahead of myself, charged into the jungle before Joel cleared the lane. I went home that night and fell apart. I had a panic attack, like the ones you used to have. Then my phone rang. It was you.”

  Cody nodded. He remembered the call.

  “You said we should go get a cheeseburger and game at your place,” Reggie said. “That pulled me out. You saved me.”

  “Because I got you a burger?” Cody asked.

  Reggie stood and held his hand out to Cody. “Because you kept me moving.”

  Cody looked at his friend’s hand like he’d never seen it before. Then he grabbed it and stood, more color returning to his cheeks.

  “Right now, I’m going to keep you moving…but going forward, you need to keep us moving,” Reggie said, clapping Cody on the shoulder. “Find us a way out of here.”

  Cody nodded, finding his breath. He pulled up the floorplan and studied it again with new eyes. After a moment, he trotted down to the level one door, then back up, glancing up from the plans to the walls and ceiling as he went.

  When he reached the top of the stairs, he said, “There’s no way out of here.”

  “Goddammit!” Joel shouted. “After the touching story and everything? I got serious feels from that, and we’re still going to die?”

  “That’s not what I said,” Cody said with a smirk.

  “Now is not the time to be playing word games with me,” Joel said. “I’m freaking out, here.”

  Cody enlarged the floorplan, so they could all see. “Look here.” He pointed to several spots on the screen. “These are structural weak points. If we damage them, the entire stairwell will collapse.”

  “Not seeing how that would be a good thing,” Joel said. “Getting crushed by tons of steel doesn’t sound like a win.”

  “It does if it’s not us getting crushed,” Cody said, his smirk growing.

  Joel bit the inside of his lip. “I’m getting a sick feeling in my guts, man. I don’t think I’m going to like this plan.”

  “No,” Cody agreed. “I don’t think you will.”

  Joel placed the last charge on the final weak point at the bottom of the stairwell, then rejoined the others at the top. “Awful plan is a go,” he said, giving them all an exaggerated thumbs-up.

  “It’s not often that I agree with Joel,” Sam said. “But are you sure about this?”

  Cody scrolled through the floorplan again, muttering to himself like he was doing calculations in his head. “No.”

  Joel sighed. “You are the worst at being reassuring.”

  “This is a huge gamble,” Cody said. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got.”

  Reggie hoisted his Gatling and slung it over his shoulder. “Then we’d better get to it.”

  He stood at the top of the stairwell, his Gatling trained on the shield that held the swarm at bay. Cody knelt in front of the level one door. Joel stood at his side, his scatterblaster ready.

  “Once this lock comes off, you unleash hell,” Cody said.

  Joel nodded.

  Cody grunted then counted down from three. He removed the lock. He scurried out of the way and threw the lock to Sam, who was standing on the landing between levels one and two.

  The door swung open.

  Joel opened fire, keeping the level one swarm from pouring into the area. Sam bounded up the stairs, taking two at a time. She jumped, planted her foot on the wall next to the level two door, and used the leverage to springboard up and grab the handle of her sword, which was embedded in the wall. She used her momentum to swing forward and up and perch on her sword like a bird. She slammed the maglock onto the steel rafter that ran up the wall. It activated and stuck in place.

  “Good to go!” she yelled.

  Joel sprinted up the stairs for part two. He dropped down by the level two door.

  “Ten seconds,” Reggie said.

  Joel deactivated the shield, grabbed the shield generators, and dropped to his belly. Reggie opened fire on the big ones, keeping them back, but not killing them. Once he was clear of the fire, Joel threw the generators to Sam. She pressed the middle generator to the lock. It stuck. She activated the shield, and a glowing, blue platform appeared.

  “Cody, let’s go!” Joel shouted as loud as he could, praying Cody could hear him over the sound
of gunfire.

  He must have, because he began backing up the stairs, still unloading his dual pistols at the swarm that was now pouring into the stairwell. Joel drew his scatterblaster and fired down the stairs.

  The heat gauge on Reggie’s Gatling began to creep into the red. “I’m running hot! Got to move!”

  Cody turned and ran up the stairs. He jumped and grabbed the sword handle. Sam, dangling over the edge of the shield platform, grabbed his wrist and helped him up on top of it. Joel holstered one blaster and patted Reggie on the shoulder, signaling that he was making the climb. Cody and Sam hauled Joel up.

  The heat gauge flashed a warning. Reggie had pushed it past its limits, and the core was overheating—but if he let off the trigger, he’d get overrun. He backed away from the door, swinging around to pepper the advancing swarm from level one, buying him a few precious milliseconds. He kept backing up until he was under the shield barrier, then he held up his hand.

  Sam and Cody grabbed him. As they hauled him up, Reggie slipped out of his weapon’s strap and tossed the Gatling as far down the stairwell as he could.

  As he rolled onto the shield platform, he shouted, “Down!”

  They all piled on top of each other, huddling in the middle of the platform as the Gatling exploded. The rush of heat sucked away their breath and vaporized all of the ShimVens in the stairwell. The Notches foolishly allowed themselves a moment of relief before the shaft filled again.

  “Here’s hoping we don’t die,” Joel said as he took a trigger switch out of his pocket.

  Cody grabbed his wrist before he could press it. “Not yet.”

  “Why the hell not?” Joel demanded.

  Cody didn’t answer. His eyes were on the doorways, watching the bugs pile up. The volume of bugs rushing in was like water through a dam at first. Then it slowed to a trickle. Then it stopped. The stairwell was full. The entirety of the surviving swarm from levels one and two was in there with them.

  “Now,” Cody said.

  Joel pressed the button, and the entire stairwell exploded.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Rever Space Station

  Joel first blew something up when he was six. One of his action figures. He strapped the poor bastard to a rocket and launched him into space. The launch failed, of course. He never made it to space. Blew up well before breaking atmosphere and fell back to Earth in the form of hundreds of tiny pieces of plastic.

  Joel’s fondness for explosions was largely discouraged by his parents and teachers and all other adults, but he never stopped pursuing it. It was one of the things that made him a target for other kids. They thought he was a freak, that he was going to build a bomb and blow up the school. They never understood that it wasn’t about the excitement of the explosion for him; it was the excitement of understanding why the explosion occurred and knowing how to make it happen.

  He’d always been obsessed with learning how things worked, why they worked and what made everything tick. He took machines apart and put them back together. The toaster, every clock in the house, the engine in his father’s car. He took them apart as many times as he needed to in order to understand what made them function. Once he understood that, he put them back together as many times as he needed in order to understand how to make them work better.

  It wasn’t a hobby that endeared him to many people. But, eventually, he learned how to apply his approach to people as well. Essentially, people are just machines. A system of parts that function as a whole to reach preprogrammed outcomes. He learned what made them tick and learned how to endear himself to them. He learned how to charm them, to talk his way into and out of situations.

  But it was a tactic, not a natural trait. He used it, but it did not come naturally. He never had to use it on the Notches, though. Since childhood, they were the only people with whom he felt he could genuinely be himself.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Joel screamed, but he could barely hear himself.

  The stairwell was filled with dust and smoke and debris. He couldn’t see a foot in front of his face. He nudged his way through the tangle of arms and legs, toward the edge of the shield platform. He felt where it gave way to nothingness, but couldn’t see through the thick of the debris toward the ground. He wanted to see his handiwork. Though, he supposed he was seeing it, in a way—the destruction was the byproduct.

  “Everyone good?” Reggie felt his way through the haze of dirt, touching each of the Notches, making sure they were still there.

  Sam and Cody both answered that they were okay, just dazed from the explosion.

  They waited for what seemed like hours—but must have been only minutes—for the dust to settle. They needed to see the door if they were going to climb down. No sense surviving all this if they were just going to jump down into a wasteland of jagged metal and concrete and bugs that may still be alive enough to gut them.

  Joel’s legs began to cramp. All his muscles started to ache. He tensed everything, trying to stay atop the platform.

  But the dust did settle, and the door came into view. That feeling of a successful launch rushed through his veins like wildfire. He’d developed hundreds of inventions and innovations over the years, and each one had dozens of iterations, improved upon through dozens of test runs. Failure was part of the process, but there was no better feeling of success than watching your invention do the exact thing you designed it to do; become the thing that you dreamed up in the dark hours of the night.

  That feeling didn’t last.

  As visibility grew, and his hearing returned, Joel realized that, though the charges he rigged did blow, they didn’t fully succeed. The stairwell still stood, but barely. A huge portion of the swarm had been killed, but enough still lived that they didn’t have a clear path from the platform through the door.

  He had failed.

  And they didn’t have much time on that platform left. The battery monitor on the generators flashed, indicating that they were dangerously low. They had two minutes before the shields died. And then they’d die.

  “Shit,” Joel said.

  The others hadn’t noticed yet. Well, the guys hadn’t noticed yet; he could see it on Sam’s face, the realization of their predicament.

  His mind raced off in a dozen different directions, the same way it did whenever he faced a problem that needed resolving. A dozen different roads toward the solution. Six of them ran into walls immediately. Three more fell off cliffs a little ways down the road past that. Then two wrapped around and collided into each other. That left one.

  The initial plan to bring down the stairwell was sound. Blow the weak spots, and the structure would crumble. The concrete along the walls would come down, too, and only the girders, to one of which the shield generators were attached, would stand.

  But the force of the explosions hadn’t been enough. By just a touch. The cracks ran from the weak points through the walls, nearly joining, like arthritic fingers reaching out for each other. They just needed one solid jolt of force.

  Joel placed a hand on Reggie’s shoulder and one on Cody’s, and stood, careful not to displace any of the others and push them over the edge of the platform. As soon as he stood, he saw the twitch on Sam’s face. She knew what he was about to do, and she was going to try to beat him to it. He knew she would. She’d only been part of the team for a short while, and she tried to hide behind the façade of the cold, badass mercenary, but he saw through that. Like his own disguise, hers slipped around the Notches because it wasn’t necessary.

  They would need her. Even after he did this, the others wouldn’t be out of the woods yet. They needed to still clear the station, and who knew what they’d find on the rest of level two? Sam would make sure they were safe. Cody and Reggie needed a badass, not an engineer. Sam would get them to safety. That’s all he cared about.

  He jumped.

  Cody and Reggie both screamed, but they were so surprised that they just made noises of shock instead of words. The fall felt like a slow
descent. Too many thoughts flashed in Joel’s head, things he didn’t want to see. His home. His family. Gaming with the guys. Things he wanted to hold on to when he needed to be letting go.

  His feet slammed into the landing between levels one and two. Some ShimVens shrieked with surprise and fell over themselves as they skittered backward. The stairwell shook. Joel had landed on a fault line, triggering the final shockwave they needed. Chunks of concrete fell off the walls, striking the stairwell, adding to the momentum of destruction.

  Vibrations ran up his legs. And then he was weightless. He would fall among the thousands of pounds of metal and rock and bug. This dank, musty stairwell would be his grave.

  The stairwell finally gave way. It let go. He let go.

  Chapter Thirty

  Rever Space Station

  But something didn’t let go.

  Joel froze in place as everything fell down around him. Sam had grabbed him by the collar. She had pulled her sword free and jumped the second after he did, stabbing her weapon into the girders on the way down, then she had grabbed him by the collar. They dangled over death.

  “Sorry I ruined your moment,” Sam said, coughing through the cloud of debris.

  “You’re forgiven,” Joel said.

  Cody and Reggie climbed from the platform to the level two doorway. Reggie found an emergency firehose just inside level two, and they lowered it down to pull Sam and Joel to safety.

  The Notches collapsed, exhaustion and relief getting the better of them.

  “Well,” Joel said, his voice hoarse from inhaling the concrete dust. “That happened.”

  “How about we get through this job without any more noble self-sacrifice?” Cody said.

  They all chorused, “Agreed.”

  After a moment of rest, the Notches stood.

  Joel was out of grenades. Reggie’s Gatling was gone. They were all banged up and could barely breathe from inhaling the remains of the collapsed stairwell. But they were feeling good. None of them could explain it. They had very little to feel good about. They were always teetering on being broke, they almost died all the time, they stank of dead bugs, and every bone and muscle and joint screamed at them. But they were alive. And they were together. And that’s all that mattered.