Chapter Nineteen

[68846] Frederik

Hab Zero-One

Cut-off from Ergo’s power, the spin hab was eerily quiet. Life-support systems, now in low-power mode to conserve the regenerative fuel cells, were only producing half the normal air flow. The lack of sound filled Frederik with a rising dread.

Despite some exterior damage, hab zero-one remained well insulated. Chrysotile, boron filament weaves, and a seven-centimeter layer of water were used to wrap hab zero-one, providing insulation and radiation protection. The heat build-up on the spin hab radiated out into space through a series of panels along the outer radius of the curved structure.

With emergency battery and fuel cell power, these coolant pumps had significantly reduced flow, which meant all that excess heat and humidity would build up if the spin hab was on its own for too long. They were going to get hot in the spin hab. Just one of many problems that now flooded Frederik’s attention.

He was awash in emotion. Seething with anger at Kirk. Then surprise. Sorrow for Ergo and the crew. Stunned by the implications. Shocked into silence from the gravity of it all.

“What just happened?” Vis asked, looking livid and wide-eyed.

“Bastard cut the spin habs loose,” Omolara said as she shoved off toward the airlock hatch.

Betty Blue followed.

“Wait!” Frederik said.

He turned off his gecko grip, flung himself ahead of Omolara, and blocked her path. He braced and winced, preparing for a microgravity collision. At the last moment, Omolara flew backwards with the pfft of her armor’s reaction control rockets.

“Cycling the airlock is going to use a huge amount of power!” Frederik explained.

“We don’t need to conserve power if we take the CIC by force,” Omolara said.

Frederik braced himself in a t-pose, using his arm’s length to block the exit from the maintenance room, and he shook his head. “No. By the time the airlock cycles, Control is going to be ten, maybe fifteen, kilometers out. More if Kirk uses the RCS.”

“Then let’s depressurize all in one go,” Omolara said as she connected her legs to the wall with gecko grip, looking up at Frederik.

He shook his head. Rash action was deadly in space.

“We have almost one hundred hours of life support as is—and we can extend this and optimize it. That’s plenty of time to—”

“If that pol hookoochoh made a deal with Grayson, then they’ve got a team on its way to pick us up.”

“But there’s an orbital lockdown…,” Frederik sputtered.

“And you sent a distress signal,” Omolara said. “So, any spacecraft within a few million kilometers is within their rights to render emergency aid.”

Blood drained from Frederik’s face.

“A gah tsow,”^{[113][Di Lingua]: Fuck me. ↑} Vis gasped.

“It wasn’t your fault, Dr. Silva,” Omolara said reassuringly as she continued to glare up at Frederik. “But it was probably a mistake to suggest it.”

“What’s done is done,” Betty Blue interjected and braced a hand on Frederik’s shoulder. “What happens next?”

“All that matters now is that we get back to the storm cellar,” Omolara said calmly. “From there, we can rescind the distress call and head to Vas.”

“Kirk will not let you back into Control,” Frederik said. “And anything you do to force your way in has a high chance of compromising the storm cellar. That won’t help anyone.”

“We can’t hold this position,” Omolara said as she tensed the grip on her long rifle and gestured to Betty Blue. “The storm cellar, however, is defensible. So, with or without you, I am going to retake Ergo’s CIC.”

“Not through the main airlock,” Frederik said through gritted teeth. “But you can use the elevator airlocks. They should still work, and won’t use a lot of power. I can depressurize it all in one go with a manual override.”

“Why didn’t you do this before?”

“Two reasons. Not enough time and…,” he tapped his head to emphasize he was not wearing a helmet, either.

“Oke, so you re-pressurize the elevator, let me in, then pop the top?”

“Exactly. You’ll shoot out like a missile, though.”

“Perfect. I can close the gap to the storm cellar.”

Frederik took a deep breath, making a sucking noise over his teeth. “Lots of risks to going that route.”

“They’re risks I am willing to take.”

Omolara placed her foot next to Frederik’s hand. He flinched. Then she swung past his body and shoved off down the hallway toward the elevators.

“Wait,” Frederik put a hand up, palm out. “Wait a minute. Anchuan shiyong!^{[114][Di Lingua]: Handle safely! ↑} While you’re in there, someone has to override the controls manually—and I have some conditions.”

Pfft pfft. Omolara rotated to face Frederik using her RCS. “As you pointed out, time’s short.”

“Promise me you won’t kill anyone.”

Omolara’s hands fidgeted on her long rifle, but she kept her unblinking gaze on Frederik as she thought about his offer. “Fine,” she retrieved a small gray cylinder from her equipment pouch. “That’s why we have flashbangs.”

“And that won’t hurt anyone?”

Omolara put the flashbang back into her equipment pouch. “Not permanently.”

Frederik grimaced, then relented. “Oke oke…I guess that will have to work.”

“And what about me?” Betty Blue asked.

“Stay here,” Omolara commanded. “Need someone to protect our scientist.”

Omolara floated up to Frederik, detached something from her armor and handed it to Frederik.

“What is this?” he asked even as he recognized it was a holster for a pistol.

“Harris-Walker’s sidearm. In case I don’t come back.”

“No. No, I won’t carry a weapon.”

Betty Blue reached out. “I’ll hold on to it.”

“No. Get your weapons from the stowage locker,” Omolara gecko gripped the pistol holster onto Frederik’s chest hard enough to push him back. “He needs to join us in the real world sometime. I have somewhere else to be.”

Frederik pulled the weapon holster off and stuck it to the ceiling of the hallway.

***

Only a handful of hours after Omolara had shot out of the elevator tunnel airlock and hab zero-one had become a sauna, as humidity and heat built up in the well-insulated structure. It was made worse by the fact that all of them, save Betty Blue who patrolled the hallways armed and with her biosuit helmet on, had all crowded into the medbay. They had turned off the airflow to every subsection of hab zero-one to conserve power and closed the medbay hatch.

Covered in sweat, Io, Frederik, and Vis had spread out and stripped down to their pata. Edouard was still in his usual clothing, and while he was obviously sweating, he acted unperturbed. He was busy taking care of his two patients, and perversely, he looked focused and happy, like he was never happier unless he was fully under the stress of saving lives and caring for patients.

“It’s been hours,” Io groaned from her perch in the ceiling corner, wearing nothing but a pair of boots and matching black exercise pata. “There’s no way that Upper is still alive.”

Frederik saw Vis, who was in a fetal position under the worktable on the edge of the medbay perk up and listen to Io. Vis was smart, though, she would know—like Frederik and Io knew—that the largest risk to Omolara was the rapid depressurization of the elevator tunnel. Too much acceleration, too much delta-vee, too much change in pressure could cause any number of very fatal scenarios.

Clipped by micrometeor debris in transit was the second most likely possibility. Though it was still possible Ergo may have simply drifted or burned too far away for Omolara to be in range for any kind of message, or whatever Grayson had done to compromise Ergo’s systems prevented her from sending a message back—the later scenario seemed least plausible to Frederik.

He made the conscious choice to be outwardly optimistic, after all, even if Omolara failed there was little to do except what they were doing: conserving air and power, waiting for someone to respond to Vis’s distress signal. There was no utility to realism when their fate was entirely out of their control. Despair, however, could be lethal.

“Kirk must not be cooperating,” he muttered.

Io shrugged and seemed willing to believe his optimism. “Ye might give her trouble. Or he got knocked out and they can’t unseal any of the systems without him,” she gave him a crooked grin. “I really hope she knocked him out, the bastard.”

There was a loud clank and the entire hab shook. The loud clank startled everyone, except for Edouard who remained calm. Muttering at the inconvenience of the interruption, the good doctor went about his business. Thud. Thud.

“Jaw gah wetin dey?”^{[115][Di Lingua]: What’s that? ↑} Frederik asked.

Io shushed him. “There’s someone entering the airlock!”

An ominous sequence of sounds followed. The unmistakable echo of an airlock cycle. Heavy metal against metal, physical vacuum seals disengaging, the hiss of equalizing pressure. No voice or EAR communication followed. No sign of Omolara. Churning anxiety filled his mind. If it was not Omolara, who was it? There were very few options, none of them good.

Betty Blue yelled something inaudible. Her biosuit amplified voice echoed in the hall, unanswered, swallowed by the palpably thick silence.

He called out, his voice tinged with both hope and dread. “Omolara? Hao fa?”^{[116][Di Lingua]: Hello? ↑}

But his call echoed unanswered, swallowed by the thickening silence.

Everything happened all at once.

The medbay hatch burst open with a pop, sending a shockwave into the room. Frederik’s heart pounded in his chest. A figure emerged from the doorway. Pop. Snap. The figure was a silhouette in the glowing flames of red tracers arcing in the hallway. It was a cold, skeleton-painted, armored biosuit, coilgun sweeping over the vulnerable and sweaty figures in the medbay.

Grayson Services Group had found them.

Edouard spun around at the sound of the interruption, holding the blood vacuum. Brzzt! Krump. The impact transformed him into a mess of crimson, instantly denting out the medbay wall behind where his torso had been, as if a sledgehammer had hit it.

Wet, coppery splatter was all over Frederik. His ears throbbed painfully. He flinched, waving his arms out. Vis screamed, distantly. Someone lunged and snatched Io out of the air with a gloved hand, slamming her back against the nearest wall and holding her in place. She gasped, choked, and pounded her fists against impervious armor.

Frederik reacted, pushed himself backward instinctively, over-corrected, and wound up in an uncontrolled tumble toward Edouard’s body. Something slammed into him, pinned him next to the dent in the medbay wall. From the corner of his eye, he saw Harris-Walker, prone on the medical flat. A skeleton figure walked over, pressed a machine pistol to Harris-Walker’s temple. Frederik closed his eyes before the execution. Brzzt! More wet and warm droplets splashed against his face.

There was no time to process what was unfolding. Someone turned him around, pulled a black hood down over his head, tightly bound his hands together, and pushed him out of hab zero-one. He heard sobs and whimpers and shouting. There was some gruff conversation, some laughing. Whoever was talking, it was receding in the distance.

Frederik tried to scream, to squirm, but his feet were bound too, and all he got for his resistance was a punch to the gut. He gasped, the black material around his face pulling close to his mouth and nostrils. He gagged and choked and panicked. But then he could breathe again. Just in time to be forced into the padded embrace of an acceleration flat.

He felt the bumps and thumps. People forced down into flats around him. He wanted to yell but did not want to choke again. So, he waited.

Painfully slow minutes passed until he heard a hatch close. Then pressure from the acceleration flat as a propcan disconnected from hab zero-one. A long hard press and click clack thump as the propcan’s main engine engaged. When the acceleration died down, his adrenaline had burned through, and his body did what it always did when he was in a propcan—he fell asleep.

He woke up feeling like death. His mind fogged over from exhaustion. Someone yanked him out of the acceleration flat and sent him flying somewhere. Wherever he was, it was loud with machinery and smelled like lubricants and ozone. There was a sudden change in temperature and air patterns; the sound echoed close around his ears. A hallway filled with the sounds of military crew chatter. Finally, they forced him into a hard metal chair, secured his arms behind his back, and tied them together. Then, they forcefully removed the hood from his head.

A familiar face sneered at him. It was the same face he had seen at the Absolute Horizons junkyard. It was a feminine face with shockingly white hair and skin. Sharp metal-gray eyes glared at him.

“Hello, Frederik,” with a crooked, cruel smile and gray eyes that seemed to glow brighter, she reached her right hand across the table palm-down. “You can call me Ninya Blanca.”

Frederik squirmed in his bindings. “I’m a little tied up at the moment.”

Ninya Blanca laughed. Like a switch being flipped, the smile disappeared, and she stopped laughing. She slammed her fists down on the table.

“Enough. Where is the Shade?” she asked.

“Shade?”

“That navy bitch, Omolara,” Ninya Blanca flashed her gritted, shark-like, toothy grin as she growled the name. “Your friend Kirk told us about her. Now tell me where she is.”

Bam. Her fist slammed into his head. The whiplash sent the back of his head smacking hard into the metal chair. His ears rang. He was hollow and stunned. There was a tickle of liquid wiggling into a bubble as he bled in microgravity from his stinging eyebrow.

He sucked at his teeth. “Ahh, yu gah gahdah lul tsow.”^{[117][Di Lingua]: Ah, go fuck yourself. ↑}

She brought her face to within centimeters of Frederik’s. Her growling voice was a hot wind on his face, her modified eyes almost too bright to look at directly.

“Drop the cut you little piece of wannabe Martian flotsam. Tell me. Where. She. Is,” she leaned back, cocked her arm. “Or else.”

“Bin Sewang!^{[118][Di Lingua]: Died! ↑} She has to be dead! She went to recapture Control, and we haven’t heard from her for hours!”

Ninya Blanca punched Frederik anyway. He bit his tongue and blacked out.

***

He woke up chained to a medical flat disoriented. His mouth was dry and swollen. He moved his arms to touch his face, but there was not enough slack in his metallic shackles. They rattled helplessly against the side rail of the medical flat. He tried to say something, but medical weaves filled his mouth, making it muffled and unintelligible.

He couldn’t turn his head far, but he observed his surroundings, trying to get his bearings. There were four other medical flats he saw, and not a single other person in the room with him. The lights overhead flickered. He paused and listened. Snap boom brzzt. Muffled shouting. Strange groans, like metal and like something else.

“You’re awake!” Betty Blue called out from behind Frederik.

He tilted his head back, as far as it could go, so his chin was pointing at the ceiling. She was in the flat behind him. She looked rough. Paler than usual, her arm in a sling, deep purple bruises along her face and neck, her lip swollen, a large gray medical weave wrapped around her torso.

He tried to speak, but it was a muffled mess.

Betty Blue shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on now but, last I saw, Vis and Io are still alive.”

He flexed and strained against his restraints, grunting. They did not budge.

“They locked us down pretty good,” Betty Blue explained, lifting her free hand to reveal she had been chained to the medical flat.

There were more sounds of conflict, more weapons fire, and a strange almost song-like moaning coming from the halls outside. Betty Blue winced, then smoothed out her expression. Frederik felt primal fear and tried to pull with his arms and legs, but he could not budge.

“Frederik! Calm down,” Betty Blue advised.

Clang. There was wind of a hatch opening behind him, but he couldn’t quite see anything but movement behind Betty Blue. It was much louder now, as the sounds from the hall freely entered whatever room Frederik and Betty Blue were in. It sounded like bedlam, the chaos of fighting. Desperate fighting. Betty Blue’s demeanor immediately changed. Her free hand came up in a defensive, surrendering gesture.

“Get him off that flat,” a voice hissed from behind Frederik.

“Why do we—” another voice asked before being cut off.

“Fucking orders, man.”

A skeleton faceplate loomed over him. “Follow us. Do not resist. I will shoot you in your fucking kneecaps if you resist.”

Frederik nodded, then looked down to avoid direct eye contact.

“Where are you taking him?” Betty Blue asked.

“What about her?”

“Orders were to leave her to those things.”

The Grayson troops laughed, cruelly.

“Fuck you!” Betty Blue said.

A warbling, whooping and sighing came from the hallway—an inhumanly deep baseline of exhalations that reverberated in Frederik’s bones. It soaked him in profound disquietude. In order to distance himself from the source of that sound, he would do whatever these Grayson thugs wanted. Unchained, they pulled him to his feet and prodded him forward. With a glance over his shoulder at Betty Blue, he reverberated with shame and fear and concern.

“Anchuan shiyong, Frederik.^{[119][Di Lingua]: Safe handling, Frederik. ↑} Go with them, I’ll be oke,” she gave him a smile, but it was entirely unconvincing.

He saw he had little choice. Armored skeleton guards pushed him out into the hall. To stabilize his motion in microgravity, he flailed around after bumping into the far wall opposite the hatch to the room they had just left. He grabbed at any handhold he could, then scouted his surroundings fearfully.

It was a spartan military structure. Not laid out for spin gravity, but curved around like the threading of a screw, with up and down laid out for thrust, not spin. Down the spiral thread, toward the noise, an orange-white glow of heat covered the hall. Death screams echoed in the hallway, coming from that place of fire and wriggling shadows cast against the walls. Whatever was that way, it was hell.

Up the threading of the screw, the lighting seemed normal and there were no blood curdling human screams, just life-support whirring and white lights.

One guard said. “Get to the storm cellar!”

They directed Frederik with a gloved hand pointed away from the cries of pandemonium. He shoved off and went up and away from the terror below. He heard the two Grayson guards follow. Each grabbed handholds and propelled themselves along the curved hallway just behind Frederik—though he could go much faster while using fewer handholds, like he was born to fly.

It was easy enough to find the guidance marks, pointing the way to the storm cellar, among all the symbols and writing on the walls. He followed directions. Whatever was happening, he knew it would be safer in the storm cellar.

He wound along the spiraling pathway for several full pitches. At the storm cellar entrance two guards waited, tense, weapons drawn, gecko gripped along the walls. They saw him, relaxed, and waved to him inside.

It was large as storm cellars went, about double the size of Ergo’s Control. Frederik guessed this was a Combat Information Center, a true CIC. It had a very different layout compared to Ergo’s Control, as it contained a central cylindrical pillar that spanned the floor to the ceiling and took up a large portion of the free volume on the deck—likely this was the spine of an ERR–AL drive.

Acceleration flats ringed the outer perimeter, underneath scores of ink displays, each flat lined by manual controls and other systems. At present, only a few crew members occupied flats. Though plausibly it was a backup, located in a secondary storm cellar for redundancy. Soldiers guarded Vis and Io in flats along the inner circular perimeter near the center of the room. Ninya Blanca floated above them near a raised pair of chair-like flats that were likely the captain and executive officer seats.

“We got Obialo,” one of his escorts announced.

“Good, get him strapped down,” Ninya Blanca said.

All over the ink displays above the flats that ringed the outer perimeter, he saw scenes of violence. Scenes in hallways like the one Frederik had just left, and scenes from large open docking bays, and from exterior views of a conical militaristic spacecraft. He didn’t understand what he was seeing.

There was a fight of some kind, that much was clear. He could only describe the aggressors as a collection of metal flakes that had formed an angry, spiraling storm. Each metal storm was throwing off radiant heat in the visible spectrum from an orange-cherry-red glow in their core where the metal splinters seemed densest.

It was like watching spiraling arms of a simulation of the Milky Way being caught up in a powerful wind, somehow coordinated and stuck close together. But this was not some random motion. The tendrils of coalesced micrometeor fragments appeared to twist and spin and undulate with intelligence, with purpose. And they were attacking, dismembering, and chasing the soldiers and crew of the Grayson spacecraft.

“Get in the fucking flat,” a guard said and pushed him down next to Io.

Snap snap snap. Hypersonic N-waves echoed out in the hall, distant but causing his ears to ring. There was more frantic shouting in the halls.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!”

With a snarl, Ninya Blanca launched herself toward the Control room hatch, pulled someone in from the hallway, slid her seal out from a bracelet on her left wrist, and barked an order back to her armored soldiers.

“Secure the engineering sections! We will secure the CIC.”

There was some hesitation, and Ninya Blanca screamed. “Do it! That’s an order!”

Pale yellow warning lights pulsated. Ninya Blanca and a second crew member placed seals in holes near the hatch. There was more shouting, disagreement, and discordance. Figures rushed out from the CIC carrying large stacks of equipment and weapons. Armored soldiers staged around the exit, those in just the black and blue biosuits retreated to the CIC.

Snap pop pop pop. Someone in an armored biosuit burst open in a shower of sparks. Simultaneously jets of molten metal emerged off the hallway wall in sharp cones, as if created by invisible beams that had reflected from the dying soldier’s body. No sign of tracer or coilgun, just a jet of flame and sparks as the soldier fell as limp as a rag-doll in microgravity, stuck in position from gecko grip. Snap. The dying soldier’s weapon discharged. A single red tracer reached through the closing CIC hatch.

He flinched. Sparks flew as the red tracer bounced once. Twice. Two Grayson crew in black and blue biosuits, with prominent patches of a skull biting down on the letters “1624,” floated above their depressed acceleration flats. Their hearts continued to pump fist-sized globules of blood out of their wounds as their hands waved back and forth like kelp in a rough sea.

Frederik, strapped in a flat, was shaking, confused. He couldn’t hear right. Everything sounded muffled like his speech had been with the medical weaves. He looked back at the ink displays along the CIC. One exterior view caught his eye. An oval as bright and white as a star loomed in the exterior stream angles, dwarfing whatever spacecraft he was a prisoner aboard. More strange metallic shapes swarmed the exterior.

He wondered what was going on out loud. Io grabbed his hand, her mouth moving. He shook his head and pointed at his ringing ears. Ninya Blanca flew around the CIC, her face contorted as she screamed orders to her crew. Other personnel suctioned up the blood and moved the two bodies out of the flats.

Frederik glimpsed one of the exterior streams as weapon hatches opened along the military spacecraft. Missiles lifted out of the openings, moved upon plumes of white air, but the angry metal shapes that clung across the exterior hull immediately swarmed a handful. Erstwhile weapons torn apart or disintegrated in showers of sparks and flame. One missile cleared the danger, launched up and out, its primary engine burning hard. It lurched out of the stream in the blink of an eye, disappearing as a point of light from its rocket plume.

His hearing came back with a roar. People shouted all around him. Military terms, jargon, the screams of the shocked and confused.

“What’s going on?” he tried to ask, but it came out as a muffled blur.

“What did they do to you, Eff?” Io squeezed his hand again.

He looked up at her natural gray eyes. They were wet and distorted from the tear buildup in microgravity. She looked beautiful, though dreadful, and the intensity was almost frightening.

He pressed his forehead against hers, gave her the old stellah steh hand signal for “I’m oke” and leaned back in his seat.

She nodded and looked at the ink displays around the outer perimeter. “Seems we’re not alone in the universe.”

He gave Io a quizzical look. He was not following. She was about to answer when something covered the external streams, like thick polarizers. It immediately dimmed in the storm cellar. All around him, people began bracing themselves against bulkheads. Instinctively, Frederik buckled himself into the acceleration flat. He looked around, seeking context.

There was a percussive thud. The spacecraft shook, lights faltered. Ink displays rippled with static, then the polarizers that had covered the stream cameras lifted. Half of the exterior cameras showed the surface of the spacecraft as a deep red glowing surface. Twisted metallic forms of angry metal, now molten and broken, covered it and sprawled out like piles of shattered rocks glued to the dimly glowing surface. Luminescent flotsam and debris danced above the now smooth surface of what he assumed was the exterior of the very spacecraft he was inside.

Bent and buckled seams between armor plates looked like cooling rock icebergs on a lava flow. His sphincter tightened and his stomach lurched. Where the white oval spacecraft had been, there was now a white-hot bipolar nebula of streamers spreading out into two massive clouds.

“Bul hefushe,”^{[120][Di Lingua]: Ionizing radiation. ↑} he cursed, then sought clarity in the ink displays.

Io followed Frederik’s stare. “Holy shit. They fucking nuked the aliens.”