Farlost: Arrival Page 12

  Whish was telling them that, unless things changed, the crew on the tram had a fighting chance at a miserable life. The crew of the Betty did not.

  Doug sighed. "So we break free. With just a few hours of breathable air, battery power and chem thrusters."

  "Look on the bright side, that Arrival will bring the Guard. If all else fails, they'll probably offer you an indentureship. We..." Whish stopped himself before saying something, Doug guessed, like "we won't even last that long."

  Doug didn't want to think about the Guard and what their rescue might bring. He almost hoped he'd freeze to death first.

  Almost.

  He pulled up a scan of the Betty, hoping to see something that might help.

  All he saw reinforced what Daisy and Whish had said. Their ship had been hit by far more debris and had indeed been slowed down a lot more than the tram.

  He felt his antenna wriggle. He kept looking for a faint hope.

  He couldn't just let the Betty and his friends aboard her go.

  Doug paused, staring at a motion capture of the marvelous black sphere. The object of his demise, he guessed. Unless the Captain and the Betty's engineer could pull off one of their trademark hail mary saves.

  He shut down the display, but left the audio feed to his hear-piece live.

  There was nothing for him to do, now.

  "Good luck, Betty," Doug said in as quiet a voice as his immense, chitinous thorax could make.

  "You too," Whish said. More pops and whistles betrayed his emotions before the line went quiet.

  Doug crossed over to fold his legs back and sit in the narrow space between Newark and Salix's crash couches. He reached one mid-legs out to each of them and clamped his digits closed around a support strut.

  The Tumblers could survive in hibernation for a few days, even at temperatures far below zero. Salix would lose mobility, and his vines would wither after a few days but he could grow them back to slave away for the Guard, if they were rescued.

  As for himself, well, Skanen could slow their metabolism, live in vacuum for extended periods of time. If the temperature plummeted far enough, he'd eventually succumb too, of course.

  Life serving the Guard, or a miserable end, freezing to death. Doug really didn't know which to choose.

  Salix clacked what amounted to his 'ankle' against Doug's mid-leg. He signed something. It took him two attempts before Doug got enough to understand him.

  We freeze or we slave?

  Doug shook his head. "Hail Mary."

  Salix cocked his head. Doug waited for him to crack two thick branches together in laughter, but he didn't.

  He nodded. "Hail Mary," he signed back to Doug, then leaned back and let leaves cover his eyes.

  Dough stared at the softly glowing windows and considered the spinning nightmare beyond them.

  The Captain had pulled off amazing feats with the help of his mysterious 'Mary' before. Doug hoped and prayed she would answer his hailing call one more time.

  27

  Sam forced his eyes away from the streaking stars and locked them on his target.

  Floating in the eerie silence of vacuum, through the guts of his ship, was hard enough without the constant distraction the hole in The Betty's side provided.

  She tumbled for most of a minute in the dark with pinprick stars streaking by, then a minute in the sickly yellow glare reflected off the Thorn, then back into the dark.

  Sam turned his head as far from the hole in the Betty's side as he could without losing his focus on his latest target in his slow trip of zero gravity leaps across the ruined deck.

  Not far enough. He winced against the sunlit Thorn coming into view again. His helmet's faceplate did its best to polarize against the glare, and for just a moment he saw it: the black spot.

  What was it? A spaceship, trapped here like all the rest? Some gigantic life form? A natural formation, caught by the Thorns like everything else that went faster-than?

  He shut it out.

  The airlock to engineering lay on the far side of this suicide run. He would reach it. He would find Ben, alive. He had to. He needed the old man to pull out one of his miracles to save the crew from the tram, knocked free during the black thing's arrival.

  A quarter of the way across the tangle of ruined metal, Sam grabbed hard at the red and yellow painted armored tubing that had until recently held comm lines and power conduits. Their guts were gone, but the armored pipes themselves were solid when his hands closed around them.

  He caught it and couldn't help one more look back before continuing on. He waited until the Betty turned back toward the Thorn, and looked past the black thing.

  The ship was still rising, along with everything else the Arrival had shaken loose from the depths of the Thorn.

  He'd never seen it this close with his naked eyes before. He could make out the spires and elegant wings.

  The Eternal was a beauty. He feasted on her for the seconds before the ship blocked her out again, then got back to work.

  He took his time zig-zagging down the hall, making careful jumps to other secure handholds until he was in sight of the dooway to Engineering.

  No one was around to award him points for style, of which he had little, but he made it. "Finally!" he panted, licking sweat off his lips inside his helmet and wrapping his cybernetic arm around another railing beside another airlock control panel.

  "Hope you're zipped up, Ben," he murmured, and tapped a command override into the panel. The airlock opened and something invisible punched Sam in the chest. He was prepared for the assault of escaping gases, but the ride wasn't as bad as it had been when opening the last airlock.

  He saw inside: a few meters away the inner airlock door was also closed. He looked up at the imaginary gods that were screwing with him this day, and gave them equally imaginary thanks.

  He saved the real gratitude for his engineer, who might play fast and loose in many a way, but remained a stickler for safety protocols in his engine rooms.

  He reversed his mental course and considered prayer again when the innner door of the airlock opened onto vacuum, or near enough. A few small scraps of paper whirled towards him as the pressure drop equalized into the space inside the airlock.

  The Betty had patched whatever damage, Sam knew.

  Had she done it in time?

  "Ben!" He screamed inside his suit, running into the first room in the section, which still had gravity.

  He slapped an arm control and shouted out again, hearing his voice echo back at him, amplified by his helmet speakers.

  Nothing.

  Not you too, Sam thought, fighting down the stone that was growing larger in his throat.

  He wasn't dead, Sam believed that. The old man wasn't easy to kill.

  He and Ben were the last surviving members of the Betty McKenna's original complement. They'd survived the Betty's own horrific arrival in-system after Corona corp's death sentence of an FTL test flight. Together, they'd endured the vultures that swooped down on them after that, and all the years in between, while watching so many others die.

  The stone was getting harder to swallow.

  Sam raced through open corridors, screaming his engineer's name and getting no response. "Get your ass out here! What am I gonna say to your kids?"

  He froze. A muted sound, a human voice, echoed from somewhere far off. Somewhere below.

  He ran to the nearest ladder and slid down the rails to the lower level. He froze at the bottom, listened again.

  There. To the left. Sam ran past an empty reactor service room, past the interconnect room leading to the massive engines even further aft.

  He halted there, turning slowly. There was nowhere left to--

  "This ain't hide and seek! Get in here, Travis!"

  Sam turned to face a small metal door he hadn't opened yet. The bathroom.

  The fear in his gut evaporated and Sam laughed. He couldn't help it, even though he knew Gruber would make him pay later.

&nbs
p; He slammed the engineering intercom beside the bathroom, grateful when it lit up. "You okay in there?" he called over the line, which would feed his voice into every room in this section of the ship. "Need a match?"

  A click, then Ben Gruber's voice came back. "Very funny. My captain is an asshole."

  Sam leaned against the wall and laughed again, but sobered quickly. "Are you in a suit? Can you open the door?"

  "It ain't a pressure door genius," Ben muttered. "But I'm not in a suit. You have to get the door."

  Puzzled, Sam unlatched the door and pulled. The second he turned the handle, the door exploded open and clear plastic ballooned out.

  Sam fell backwards, laughing again as Ben Gruber rolled out, safe inside one of the tough, transparent life support balls placed around the ship in case of depressurization.

  Gruber's voice was thin in the minimal atmosphere, but Sam could hear his friend's grunts and barks of annoyance as the ball now freed from the tight confines of the bathroom closet, rolled down the corridor, its spherical shape reinforced by the pressure inside that was sustaining Ben's life.

  "Get me outta this hamster toy!" Ben roared as he struggled for balance and failed, his long white hair fluttering around his head.

  Sam sidestepped the ball and found one of the extruded handles that dotted the outside. He grabbed hold and leaned into the ball, killing its momentum.

  He stared through at Ben, a look of queasy gratitude on his face. The engineer's face clouded with a different worry. "The crew?" he asked.

  Sam's face tightened. "Alive, but the wave that hit us cut them loose. They're moving up and out faster than we are."

  Ben was on his knees now, tying his hair back. His eyes darted around, indicating a staccato rain of thoughts.

  "Betty?" he asked. "Know why the power's offline?"

  Sam sighed. "Power's not offline, it's gone." He described the hit that had destroyed the power generation section as he hauled Ben forward, back the way he'd come. Careful of pointy bits, he pushed and pulled Ben and his plastic shell past the ladder to another airlock.

  "The arrival?" Ben asked as Sam initiated the airlock, grateful to see pressure inside.

  Waiting for the pressure to cycle out of the airlock this time, Sam leaned against the wall and put what he knew together for Ben.

  "Big black egg. Totally black, totally spherical, totally smooth. It's like--I don't know Ben, like a force field from the movies. It's being blown out with us, riding its own shock wave, though Daisy says it's not going fast enough to clear the Thorn." Sam's voice dropped. "Daisy says we aren't either."

  "Fat lot of good that description does," Ben growled, his face still shaped by what was going on behind his eyes. "We won't stop falling for a while yet, let's find a way to save the souls on the tram, first. No, second. First, get me out of this bubble jail!"

  Sam smiled at his engineer. The man never quit. Sam needed that attitude right now. "I missed you, old man."

  Gruber's face twisted like he'd eaten something off of Doug's plate by accident. "Don't make me toss my cookies in this thing!"

  The airlock hissed open. Sam kneed Ben's protective ball forward into the square space and joined him, enjoying the sound of his engineer's yelp and curse.

  He smiled and cycled the airlock closed.

  Time to manufacture a miracle.

  28

  Rose Okoro winced and pulled her earbud out.

  Lou could hear Dina Rodriguez’s scream of warning on the radio from her station.

  "--ships all around, and some kind of debris field! Are you seeing this, C&C??"

  She tapped into the line, waving Okoro to stand down. "We see it, pilot." Lou told Dina, her tone a cold splash of water sent via radio frequency.

  Dina's voice died out. "...yes, Commander," the pilot replied a moment later, calmer now.

  Good, Lou thought. Panic killed people.

  "Keep your team on mission, Dina," Lou said, her tone reassuring now. "Good job restoring power. Finish up your patch job and bring your boys home."

  She killed the circuit without waiting for an answer. Rose smiled over to her, relief showing on her face.

  Lou half-smiled back. Right then, she was grateful no one could hear her inner voice, which sounded a lot like she had in tenth grade, the time 'Junior' Murdock had dropped a cricket down the back of her dress.

  She swiped through camera feeds, staring incredulously at the many, many ships.

  The big one, down closer to the spiky planetoid, called to her imagination with its smooth lines and waves, its whites and silvers and eerie glows. It was massive, kilometers long and wide, and crafted like art.

  Alien art.

  She shook her head and exploded the image of the closest craft to fill her monitor. The long-lost Betty McKenna, frozen mid-turn, atmosphere bleeding from her side, an entire segment on the top side torn away.

  But still crewed, she thought in amazement.

  After a hundred years, the Betty McKenna was still crewed and flying.

  A red square flashed once on the outskirts of the image. A tag from Stuart Beacham's monitor appeared. "If that old rustbucket is still flying," he shouted over his shoulder, "then we've got a shot too, right? Right?"

  "Is it still flying?" Rose asked.

  Everyone looked at her.

  Rose sent each screen a picture of deadly metal fragments frozen on their way to the Betty McKenna. "If we're looking at a freeze frame, how do we know they survived that?"

  "The Nav Officer's right," Lou said. "We need to know everything we can about the environment, including whatever shit storm we've landed in the middle of."

  "How, commander?" Rose asked. "Sensors are all flatlined in this bubble."

  Lou swiveled to face the Doctor. "Your 'light show' kept us alive, Beacham, but we need more than this freeze frame."

  A creak from the duty compartment drew everyone's eyes. Burkov hovered silently in the door. His face haunted, eyes sunken. Broken.

  She felt no threat, and no pity for the man.

  She turned back to the image of the century-old ship, torn between horror and curiousity. It was obviously still manned--as recently as half an hour before, at least.

  Beacham was slapping at his screens again. "We have to see, Beacham!"

  "I get it, okay? Just, shut the fu-"

  "Beacham!" The warning came from Nav Officer Okoro.

  Lou kep the surprise and gratitude off her face. The defense was hardly needed but the gesture, from the ordinarily quiet girl, warmed her.

  Quickly remembering that she was responsible for their lives tempered that warmth.

  The doctor's eyes darted to hers and his face twisted with some emotion. Was that embarrassment, Lou thought? It just might be. "Just gimme a minute, here." He flipped his eyes back to his work.

  "Sorry, Commander." Stan was hovering beside Lou's station now. "He gets pissy when he has to admit he doesn't know all the answers." Stan kicked off back towards Beacham's station.

  Lou had a harder time keeping her grin off her face this time, watching Stan go. Worth his weight in gold, she thought again.

  Now, Beacham slammed a fist into one of his screens, and looked at her angrily, nostrils flaring. As she watched, bracing herself for another petulant male response, the doctor screwed up his face, and then pushed out a deep breath.

  "It's Lou, right?"

  Lou raised an eyebrow and cooled her voice. She had experience in heeling crew who didn't respect her authority. "Excuse me, Doctor?"

  Beacham sighed. "I'm the smartest person on this ship. Can we get that out of the way?" He looked around. "I can analzye, tear down and innovate faster than anyone on the planet." He looked at the screen and a short laugh escaped. "Well, our planet. But what to do with the tech I come up with? How it should be used? I never cared."

  Beacham looked back at her. "You kept us alive. You know what you're doing. I don't want to die. I don't want any of us to."

  Rose and Stan had grown
quiet. Lou saw Rose's eyes grow wide, while Stan beamed at his mentor.

  "Look, look." His face screwed up again. He took another cleansing breath. Beacham's entire body was cramping up with effort of expressing himself.

  "I don't know how to keep that shit from--I mean, I can't keep us safe. I can do the tech but I --we-- need you to keep us safe. I'm no good at this--" He licked his lip, a clear twitch of worry. "I'm sorry for being me. Tell me what you need. And--just call me Stuart when you need my attention fast, ok?"

  Lou was surprised. How much must it cost such an arrogant man to talk like that? Near-death experience had revealed a vein of self-awareness in Stuart Beacham she'd never guessed at. Buried and stagnant, but it was there. Likely some sociopathy too, for sure, but Beacham was really trying to reach out.

  She wondered if Beacham had even known he had it in him.

  "Just don't call me Stuart unless we're about to die, okay?"

  Lou stifled a laugh. That wouldn't do in the face of Beacham's vulnerability. She still didn't like him, but she understood him better. That was enough, for now.

  "You have a deal, Doctor Beacham. Now tell me what you know about," she waved her hands at her monitors.

  "Okay," he said, turning back to his monitors. His shoulders back and head high again, on-task.

  "We're moving over a thousand klicks an hour but rapidly losing speed. That big, spiky thing behind us is actually below us: it has a huge gravity well. It's also got something else going on, a weird broad-spectrum effect." He splayed his fingers on one screen, and the image exploded. Lou saw ships blossom then disappear off the sides of the screen. Other ships even further away appeared, looking even more broken.

  Beacham exploded the image again and yet more ships appeared, these ones looking...she supposed 'dusty' was the right word.

  He exploded the image again. Vaguely ship-like swirls appeared.

  "They're disintegrating. That big planetoid sucks things down and gravity, pressure and some other effects I haven't nailed down are breaking down matter. Far finer grain than just gravity and pressure." He pointed at the screen. "There's some kind of wind or current inside the gravity well that keeps some ships from falling this far, but whatever does gets... fuck if I know. Broken apart at the subatomic level? Eaten? Maybe."