Farlost: Arrival Page 10

  He only lasted a few seconds before his face fell, and he pulled himself back, NOW looking hollow, insubstantial. "Nobody knows where we are," he whispered. "Please, you have to tell them," he said, his voice cracking.

  He heard his weakness as clearly as she did, and his face became ugly with loathing. For her. For what she'd revealed about him, cowing him in front of the others.

  He didn't have it in him to pose a threat now, that was written all over his face, but Lou could tell she'd made an enemy.

  "I'll transmit everything we have the moment I know I can lower that field," Lou ground out, a little more of her own anger and frustration seeping out than she meant to. She pointed at his chair. He went.

  He was right. They were operating on baseless, primal instinct, keeping the shields up. How the hell would she know when it was safe?

  "Of course! Supid, stupid, stupid!" Beacham screamed.

  Lou looked at the scientist's back, hunched close to his screens. "Care to share with the class, Doctor?"

  He waved a hand and grumbled inarticulately, lost in code scrolling across his screens.

  Lou shifted her attention. "Would you translate, Mr. Renic?"

  Stan looked back, looking like a stoner at the top of his high. He grinned back at her. "Uh, he's pulling a trick out of the special relativity toolbox. Real old-school stuff. See, light is both a particle and a wave, so--"

  Beacham brayed loud and hard. He spun in his restraints and poked a finger at Burkov. "You officially can't afford me anymore. And by you, I mean all of Haskam!" Beacham reached out and slapped Stan on the arm, sending him spinning. "Watch me change the world, Stan!"

  Stan laughed crazily as he spun helplessly in the air.

  A red light on Lou's screen fought for her attention. "Would one of you tell me--" She looked down. The red light was a threshold warning for the life support reserves.

  Twenty percent. Fifteen percent. Ten!

  "Beacham, no!" She reached out to kill the process he'd initiated, even as the number dropped to zero percent.

  The power, gone.

  Their oxygen, gone!

  Her screens flared and dimmed, garbled streaks of interference melting coherence from the images and text on them. A high-pitched whine stabbed her ears, as Beacham triumphantly declared "Let there be light!"

  And there was.

  Stan was floating, still laughing, in the middle of the C&C when Lou's monitors failed. Bright light was pouring in the window now, and his face was floating, upwards. His laughter stopped. Was replaced with a gasp. He stared up, paralyzed.

  Lou slammed the belt release across her chest with trembling hands, and pushed off for the porthole above him. "What is it? Stan, what do you--"

  She reached the handhold beside the porthole. She stared up into the brilliant white light.

  "--see?"

  True to Beacham's word, Lou Montagne saw... and her world was forever changed.

  23

  The sirens blared again. "Warning. Dropship has exceeded minimum safe distance. Warning."

  “¡Quieto, elefante estúpido!” Dina slapped the alarm off -again- and wiped the back of her sleeve across her forehead.

  The Toad shook as put her hand back on the second stick and blasted orientation thrusters on two axes, keeping the ship close above the shredded skin of HHL-6.

  "What'd we do to piss you off, boss?" Raj gurgled.

  "Yeah, whatever Raj did, don't take it out on me," Murray said, aiming for a light tone through a jaw she could tell was clenched shut.

  "Quiet, boys," she muttered.

  Her fingers already ached from all the fine control flying.

  Doesn't matter, she thought, banishing her body's complaints. Gotta get this right.

  She was lucky. There was zero turbulence between her and the universe, stuck inside this freaky black egg shell. Still, the Toad wasn't meant for fine, up-close work. she was built to move things between ships in orbit, or a few hundred clicks apart on intersecting course. The mechanized EVA suits strapped into their custom slots on the dropship's underbelly were just the trick to make fine repairs, but they couldn't move as fast as the Toad.

  Right now, they needed fast. Acting First Officer Villanueva had been clear: they had less than half an hour to find the problem and patch around it. Very bad things happened if they didn't get that done.

  She grit her teeth and kept the Toad coasting less than twenty meters above 6, its spotlights fixed on the reinforced column running down the ship's dorsal.

  The alarm sounded again. She screamed something the computer didn't have the anatomy to deserve as she slapped the alarm off and eyed the telltales on her helmet's heads-up display. She'd tasked the Toad to scan for electric bleed. If the main trunk from the ship's reactors had been sliced, and power was still running, she guessed there'd be some live wires radiating unshielded energy.

  If a micrometeorite had punctured the shielded trunk line, her eyes might not catch the damage. She needed to find a problem and fix it on her first pass. She prayed there was only one interruption. She prayed they found it fast enough. She prayed they could patch it with the limited supplies the Toad carried.

  Otherwise...

  She wiped sweat from her eyes again. She blinked away the salty sting and leaned forward, staring out the cockpit.

  She had the Toad flying over HHL-6 at a ninety degree angle, nose closest to the ship's surface. That would give her the best eyeball view, it let most of its cameras on the sides, front and underbelly spy for signs of damage and it would let her drop Murray and Raj's mechs as fast as possible.

  So far all she saw was amorphous blobs of emergency sealant foam, frozen in bizarre shapes through the dozens of tanks that made up the outside of HHL-6. She'd had to dodge a few, too. Looking down at all the damage, it really was a miracle the ship was still in once piece, she thought.

  "Anything!" she shouted in frustration. "Are you guys seeing anythi--"

  Her words died in her throat.

  No one spoke, but the spotlights on Murray and Raj's mech suits converged with hers, and disappeared inside a gaping black maw.

  With a trembling hand she targeted either side oft he huge hole and clicked buttons on her control stick. The image was scanned, and statistics trailed across her screen.

  Two thirds of an entire tank was simply gone. Light sparked at the far end of the devastation. Dina tapped for a reading: sixty-one meters of ship had been torn away, and the power trunk with it.

  "C&C! We've found our first damage site. Stand by!" She swiped the feed from her front camera into the open channel to C&C and ignored Nav Officer Okoro's verbal acknowledgement.

  "Raj: release in fifteen. Countdown begins." She tapped a sequence across her bottom left screen. "Tethered descent."

  Murray started laughing over Raj's acknowledgement.

  "What!" the other pilot snapped.

  One of the exterior cameras from Murray's mech was framed in yellow, on a monitor tasked for sharing data between the dropship and both mechs. The image zoomed in on the far side.

  Murray chuckled again. "There's a light at the end of the tunnel."

  Dina and Raj both cracked up. It wasn't that funny, but their strained nerves craved any release. And he was right: The actinic blue sparks were proof that this was the only patch job they needed to get the lights on, and the oxygen flowing.

  Dina cut her mic when she couldn't kill a case of the giggles that threatened to turn into tears of release.

  Crying and giggling would mess with her 'badass mama chica' image. They'd worked out what would happen next before boarding the Toad: Murray's mech held one end of the replacement cable, and as soon as he secured himself to the hull beside the closest undamaged access panel on the power line, she would traverse the damage and drop Raj, who had the reel secured to his suit, beside the first powered access panel on the far side.

  She looked at the timer at the top right of her HUD. Twenty one minutes before reserve power failed. S
he did some math in her head, and took in her first deep breath since sitting in the Toad's cockpit.

  Five minutes to secure their mechs. Another five to mate the replacement cable. They could do this, with time to spare! The weight of the world lifted off her shoulders and looked for someone else to crush.

  "Down and secure," Murray called. The tip of her tongue stuck out of Dina's mouth a moment later as she goosed the trusters to make up for the imbalance losing his mass caused. She saw the telltale for his umbilical blink to indicate he was clear, and she began reeling it in.

  She was already thrusting over the hole, watching her cameras to ensure there was no strain on the power line stretching between Murray's suit and the Toad.

  She grinned at Raj's bleat of panic, and began the final countdown for his mech's descent.

  For all Raj's theatrics, he stuck the landing and clasped one of his mech's several mechanical arms to the railing of the access panel. Like the pro that he was, he had the panel open and was at work splicing the replacement cable into the main trunk before Dina had pulled her craft back to a saner distance from the hull.

  She laughed, and swiped at her forehead again. She thought of the Doc. She remembered his blue Bahama shorts, the ones with all those ridiculous little model ships in glass bottles on them. For an older guy, he sure looked good coming out of the surf in those Bahama shorts.

  She waited, tallying the reserves in the Toad's tanks and checking in with C&C. Suddenly Okoro was on the line with her, telling her something in a tight, barely controlled voice. Something about reserve power failing.

  At that exact moment, Raj and Murray were cross-talking on another channel, and then there was light.

  Many lights! Running lights, sensor pads, airlock controls, and bright light seeping out from portholes made the ship glow.

  There was cheering on the line to C&C.

  And she was cheering too. "Get your trunks out, Doc!" she screamed.

  She wiped at her face again. This time smearing water away from her eyes.

  A background hiss and Raj's voice filled the cockpit. "Hate to tell you, Boss: worst kept secret on board."

  She laughed and cried again, digging for something suitably smart-ass to say in reply, when the blackness went away.

  She wedged her eyes shut, turned away from HHL-6, it's surface now stabbing in her eyes like hundreds of flashlights.

  Her cockpit reacted quickly, dimming the incoming rage of light, and Dina, shaken, looked again.

  The world glowed bright. Dina stared over the back of HHL-6. A planet hung there. No, not a planet: a mountain in space! Massive spikes hurled up, unclouded by atmosphere.

  And diamonds glittered all around it. No, not diamonds. Her mind accepted the truth slowly.

  Ships. Hundreds of specimens of glittering metal. All unlike anything she'd ever seen, but all clearly twisted, melted or malformed. Broken.

  Raj and Murray were screaming, asking Dina if she saw it too.

  She couldn't respond. Couldn't unfreeze her brain.

  Her eyes moved from ship to ship. She craned her head, looking up through the Toad's transparent cockpit.

  All the chaos around her was still, she realized, as if the world around her was a trick, a freeze-frame screenshot of some action movie overlaid on her canopy window.

  Massive shards of metal had been frozen in place between the ugly mountain thing and another ship, one Dina could barely see when she lifted herself to look all the way behind and up.

  This ship, more familiar than any of the others. She almost recognized its lines, but wondered at iridescent colors, and what looked like the scales of some huge animal across the bow and underbelly.

  This ship was not so broken...but close to becoming so. When the universe returned to full speed, the leftover bones of some long-dead ship would overtake the craft overhead.

  A shiver ran down her spine, and she slapped her restraints free, taking her hands off both control sticks and floating up.

  The shiver ran down her back again.

  Dina and her boys had just saved her ship from a gruesome, choking end... and a cruel universe had dropped her in the pause screen of another hell, moments away.

  There, just beyond HHL-6, lay a storm of bright shards, sharp hungry edges, poised to tear her apart.

  Dina reached for the radio, already screaming.

  24

  Lou didn't gasp. She clamped her jaw and squeezed the restraints across her chest until she couldn't feel her fingers...but she didn't cry out.

  After that first glimpse at those stars and alien ships - thousands of them! - she'd crawled back to her Command station. She was running away from the images, back to the only safe place she knew. Her brain wasn't keeping up. She needed to get a handle on so much change.

  Some small part of her mind remembered to look cool on the outside, for the sake of her crew.

  Once strapped in, she had to talk to herself before she could make her fingers move. They now trembled inches away from the Haskam Corporation logo on her screens, back in sleep mode after she'd left the chair.

  "What the fuck?" Beacham breathed. "What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck!"

  "What did we say about profanity, Doctor Beacham," Lou said automatically trough her daze.

  She watched him flip his gaze between screens. She saw the terror melt out of him, as something he read there absorbed his interest.

  He bent lower, assuming the position of someone engrossed in something with a maddening single minded focus Lou wished she could have right now.

  Lou's perspective was shattered. She was terrified. She was a bug and she'd just learned how very big and very crowded the world was.

  "This is... you've got to be kidding me!" Doctor Beacham let loose a cackle at his station, muttering and poring over data. "Oh, shit, wow!"

  She got angry, watching the little piss-ant having fun. Angry at herself for hiding from all that new information he was reveling in.

  Enough! she told herself. She felt the familiar burn of shame and pride on spin-cycle deep in her guts, like she had in boot camp, and before her first solo desert patrol, and she dug into it.

  She slammed the side of her fist onto her display to wake it from sleep and roughly called up the grid of external cameras.

  Take it in small bites, Montagne!

  The biggest object caught her attention first: a big white and silver ship. She laughed for just one second, a hysterical laugh she quickly buried.

  'Big' didn't cover it. The made thing out there looked for all the world like an elegantly carved curio or pendant, like some beautiful, one-of-a-kind artwork she could hold in her hand...save for the superimposed data the computers provided.

  The thing was kilometers wide, and tens of kilometers long! It was incredible engineering.

  Beautiful. Impossible.

  One bite at a time, she reminded herself.

  She shook her head and cycled to another camera feed: the ruined thing near them and just beyond it, a ship that looked like it was still in operation. Those two were very close by, frozen in the moments before more of the ruined hulk's debris slammed into the ship.

  Several pieces had already been ripped off the hulk by some kind of shockwave. Whatever it was was invisible, but she could see its effect on untold pieces of debris that hurled them at the ship nearby, still bright with running lights, glows from what looked like propulsion engines. And small explosions where its skin had been penetrated just moments before the moment she saw frozen on the screens.

  There was something almost familiar about that ship. She recognized lines, could imagine what the insides looked like.

  It had to be human, she knew instinctively.

  Or had once been human, she thought again, unable to account for the colors, shapes and function of bulkheads or devices all across the vessel.

  Small. Bites.

  Lou ignored Beacham's manic bellow for Stan's assistance and looked to the cameras on the far end of 6.
Spikes extended from something far below, reaching higher than Everest. Higher than ten Everests stacked on top each other. Yellow and gray.

  And wrong.

  Lou shuddered.

  Spikes, hungry to impale HHL-6.

  "Where--" Lou swallowed to get her throat working. "Where did you take us, Doctor?"

  Beacham's shoulders rose and fell. "Not a clue! Extrasolar, obviously. Looks like someone's space ship junkyard." His eyes never stopped scanning his screens.

  Lou narrowed her eyes, drew a breath to yell for his complete attention, when Rose spoke.

  Rose droned on automatic, providing information. "Computers tracked 2,300 unique artificial constructs before running out of system resources. Spectral analysis indicates we are in vacuum. Object tracking data indicates we're in a low orbit around a high gravity mass. We are exhibiting forward momentum." Her voice got very small. "That's all I can--"

  Beacham kept his head down, frantically tapping and nodding his head. "Red sun, too!"

  Burkov began to weep. Shaking, he released his straps and pushed himself towards the duty officer's cabin.

  That's right, Lou remembered, there are no portholes in there.

  She refocused. "Beacham, how are we seeing anything? It's your light show itself isn't it? Rendering a view outside the force field on its inside?"

  "Close. Not bad, Ms. Commander!" he said, approvingly. "I had to create a second field to do it," Beacham crowed. "It's a lot smaller, almost touching the ship in fact. Wasn't enough energy for another bigger bubble, but all the visible light outside at the moment I created the field was recorded and displayed on inside circumference. It's the world's biggest screen capture, ever!"

  Beacham turned to her and froze. "We can fly straight through the sun with this tech," he said in a hushed voice.

  Great. If we survive this, Lou thought.

  Choosing another small bite, Lou leaned forward, highlighting the camera feed with the spiked planetoid and the sea of ships between it and them. She pushed it across to Beacham's terminal.

  "What am I looking at?"