[68844] FrederikSSV Ergo InfinitumAt its very design limits, the storm cellar on Ergo Infinitum—the Control deck—could fit sixteen people. Comfortably, it only held ten. With all eight crew of Ergo, including Vasquez the engineer and Ocampo the waste specialist, along with Betty Blue and Vis, there was not much space left over for the hostiles. So, all ten cramped into Control. Guarded by one guard and another invader who piloted Ergo.Each of their captors had a small weapon—not much longer than a pistol—with an attached brace that clipped to their forearm, with a little flexibility, and some hydraulic lines along its frame. Frederik figured it was a stabilizer of some kind to aim or to reduce recoil when firing fully automatic, but he did not know. What he knew was Betty Blue, Taliya, and Io would tense up if the barrel pointed anywhere vaguely in their direction.Io had cursed out a guard when it pointed at her for too long. “Get that fucking machine pistol out of my face!”“Then unseal the system controls,” the guard snapped back.Io complied only after Frederik insisted, and the captors had full control over Ergo. Free space and maneuverability were severely limited for everyone, yet the hostiles maintained total authority over their captives with arms and armor. They collected Ergo’s crew and then informed them of the rules—which amounted to don’t talk, do what we say, and no one gets hurt. Then they summoned Frederik up to the front acceleration flats alone.“No tricks. If you fuck with us, we will kill your friends,” his captor declared and pushed Frederik down into the flat. He was still in his biosuit with full EVA equipment, so it was a tight fit, but they squeezed him in and strapped him down. They secured him tightly, despite his extra bulk, allowing for little extra movement. He fantasized, briefly, that he might use the EVA jets as a kind of distraction, but his captors seemed professional, and he did not want everyone to die today. Plus, he couldn’t ever distract both hostiles, he’d only ever be able to catch one off-guard.“What do you want me to do?” he asked.The guard who had spoken before leaned in close.“You’re going to play your part, and you’re going to do it convincingly,” the guard warned, their voice dripping with a menacing edge. They pressed a thin ink display into his hand.“Recreate this system’s status and attitude. “With the ink display in one hand, his other on a control terminal, he coaxed Ergo’s system statuses to meet his captor’s demands. “Oke, now what?” “Show them to me. On EAR.”Frederik waved it over to their EAR and waited.“Good. Now send that out as a distress call and request orbital trajectory change,” the guard waved their machine pistol over the huddled crew in the back of Control. “Send nothing else. Remember what’s at stake, ye?”He felt goosebumps rise along his spine. “Oke.” He used his seal to send out a message to Orbital Control. “Jin Orbital Control, this is SSV Ergo Infinitum. Ergo actual. Transmitting a data packet of system failures, requesting emergency orbital alteration and an exception to the extreme orbital hazard lockdown,” He waved the channel shut. “I am going to need to send them an alternative orbit.”The other guard flicked something to Frederik’s EAR. “Use this. Do not send anything else. We are monitoring you in case you wanted to try some bullshit.” It was like a punch to his gut. The orbital parameters were for a burn to Fengshen. It was a reckless burn with very thin delta-vee margins. Ergo could get to Fengshen, but it would only have a little over five kilometers per second remaining. Possibly enough to get to Vas, but even if it was, it would be the slow way—a long transfer orbit, not a straight shot. He sent orbital control Ergo’s new trajectory. “Sending our requested emergency orbital change now.”There was a delay from light-lag and the general data bottleneck around Jin.“Received message, Ergo actual. Sending sealed emergency exception now.”“Good,” the guard cooed. “Now give me seal control over EAR and radio and lock yourself and your crew out.”“I can’t do that without a hardline seal—”Pain radiated out of Frederik’s eye socket where the metallic armored glove slammed into his face.“Hey!” Io screeched from the back of the storm cellar.“Quiet!” the captor threatened. “Look, Obialo. I know that’s precisely fucking backwards. You can alter the permissions over the EAR and the radio, except from the hardlines that are only on this deck. So, fucking do it. I will not ask again,” the guard stood back and pointed their machine pistol at Io. “Got it?”He complied, and they shoved him back with the rest of Ergo’s crew. Io delicately rubbed his swelling eyebrow. Her face scrunched up in concern. He smiled at her.“It’ll be fine Io, just a little bump.”She kissed his eyebrow, and then whispered. “They didn’t search us. Taliya and I both have cut knives.”His eyes went wide. “Nawa oh!”[93][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑She put a finger on his lips and hushed him.“Hey, that’s enough!” The guard said. “Break it up. And shut the fuck up.”They had a long burn left to Fengshen. Almost twenty hours left. Plenty of time for the guards to get lax in their attention, plenty of time to figure something out.***When Frederik and Betty Blue were called back up to the forward flats by one of the demonic figures, Io and Taliya were ready. “You have EAR access for five minutes. Seal completion of the contract, contact Fengshen like everything is normal, and nothing else,” the guard ordered. “And Betty Blue, we know your code phrases. Use nothing but the daily passcode. If you warn them, or fuck up the daily passcode, everyone here will die badly. Understood?”“Yes. I understand.”Frederik removed his seal from his seal bracelet and physically placed it in the inset along the arms of one of the forward flats. He did this to force the guard’s attention, though a hard-point seal wasn’t necessary. Betty Blue did something similar and mumbled some nonsense words over the radio that seemed to please their captors.He saw they had the attention of one guard completely, but he needed to distract both, so he pointed at the other guard and screamed. “Na yu gah gahdah lul tsow!”[94][Di Lingua]: Hey go fuck yourself! ↑The closest guard immediately raised their weapon to smack Frederik in the face, but the far guard turned to watch, taking their focus off the others. Two white hot rhenium edge cut knives thrown into the air were nothing but two white flashes, blurring across Control.Frederik launched himself toward the ceiling with his EVA pack and barely stopped his face from smacking into the overhead ink display with his hands. Crack. He heard the ink display crunch as he bounced off and flipped around. Behind him there was a blur of blue as Betty Blue almost disarmed the nearest guard in a microgravity grapple. There was a horrible bubbling, popping, hiss, emanating from the far guard, who was now slack and bolted to the deck with gecko grip, with a cut knife handle sticking from the jaw of the Oni mask.Taliya joined Betty Blue. Brzzzst. There was a deafening buzz-saw bursting out of the nearest guard’s machine pistol. Frederik flinched as lethal objects whizzed past him, tickling his skin. Controls in the flats beneath him burst apart. Sparks flew. Debris filled Control. The demon below thrashed and fought with Taliya and Betty Blue, and Frederik launched himself down, grabbing the guard’s fingers with both hands, using all the strength he could to pry the obsidian armored biosuit hands free from the trigger of their machine pistol. With ferocious strength, the demon drew their arm back, fingers still on the trigger. Taliya kicked the guard’s arm backwards at the last moment. Brzzzst. Recoil kicked the weapon up into the guard’s chin.Frederik could smell copper as gray and red mist filled Control. Blood from the guard drenched him. His face was wet. Everything smelled like iron. Fearfully, he looked around. His ears rang and there was a high-pitched buzz from the gunshots, but he still had his hearing.Io loomed over the far guard, already prying the weapon from their hand. “Fuck! It’s biometrically locked.”He saw scared faces. He saw Betty Blue panting wildly, then pushed herself back from the demonic, headless corpse at the front of Control. Taliya braced herself with gecko grip and pushed the headless body aside. Frederik took a quick look at himself. He noticed he was the only one in a biosuit. The only one prepared to do an EVA was him. There were no obvious holes or compromises in his EVA equipment, and he did not feel any pain except for his smashed eyebrow. He looked down at the shredded controls in the flat below and pulled himself back down into the acceleration flat. “What’s the damage, Eff?” Taliya asked, now in the flat next to him.His fingers were flying gracefully and purposefully as he gave back EAR controls to his crew. “Communications are out,” he huffed. “Going to need more time to regain attitude control…cannot cancel the docking procedure…pol tsow[95][Di Lingua]: shit fuck. ↑…oke, hatches to Control are locked and sealed though.”Taliya picked up a pile of shredded circuits and switches from the armrest of her flat. “Is that all we can manage?”Frederik shook his head. “No, we can also do this.”He flicked open various stream cameras across Ergo and then placed them on the overhead display. About a quarter of its surface area had broken beyond repair, with pixel glitches flickering across the cracks where he had collided with it, but most of the viewing area remained functional. “There! Four of them in the primary airlock with the rest of Absolute Horizons…two outside on the back of hab zero-one…two in here. That’s all of them,” Frederik counted out loud.“What do we do now?” Taliya asked.Frederik looked over his shoulder, saw Edouard was now crouched over the guard who had taken a cut knife to the face. There was some argument with Io and Kirk as the doctor gave their captor medical treatment. Vis had pressed herself into her flat, pale, and shaky. The rest of Ergo’s crew was stunned and looked at Frederik eagerly, expectantly, nervously. Frederik pointed to the stream of the primary airlock. “They’re already depressurizing the airlock, but extending the docking tunnel is going to take a while. Someone’s got to go outside and get a warning out to Fengshen since the comms panel is chook olodo.”[96][Di Lingua]: Fucked to death. ↑“That’s a gigantic risk, Eff.”Kirk shook his head, looked disgusted, and floated over to where Frederik, Betty Blue, and Taliya were.“I don’t know if it’s the best move,” Frederik furrowed his brow. “But I am not going to sit around here and watch Fengshen get ambushed without doing something about it.”“Do we have orbital controls yet?” Kirk asked, his voice nasally from his plugged-up nose.“Almost,” Frederik answered. “Taliya? Io?” He asked. “Help us get these systems back online.”“Have we completed the contract?” Kirk asked. “Once we sent our seals over, it did technically count as completed,” Betty Blue said.“Oke, well, once they get through the docking tunnel, why not just burn hard to Vas?” Kirk asked.Before either Taliya or Betty Blue could finish their curses at Kirk, Frederik shouted. “Oiya![97][Spanning Worlds]: Listen up! ↑ That won’t work, Kirk, we have more of those people gecko gripped to the exterior of a few of the spin habs.”Kirk put a hand up in surrender. “No, we’re not cutting and running. I am going outside. We are giving Fengshen the best shot it has. That’s final.”Before there were more objections, Frederik had found his biosuit helmet, saw it was still intact, pulled down the pop-up airlock that led to the Angel’s Seat, and squeezed in.Five minutes. That was how long it took for the airlock to cycle. As it depressurized, it pushed Frederik up into the Angel’s Seat. A torrent of text-based messages flooded his EAR as he waited. Kirk told him it was a mistake, so did Io, Taliya, and Betty Blue—all for different reasons. Most of the rest of the crew asked him what they should do. Sit tight, regain full control of Ergo, get ready to leave Fengshen behind if something goes wrong. Was his reply.After about two minutes, Io and Taliya both switched from pleading him to stop and had instead sent him schematics of Ergo’s exterior communications system, and developed a plan for how he could access it from the Angel’s Seat. Kirk sent increasingly convoluted arguments for why they should perform an emergency separation of the spin habs and leave immediately. Frederik didn’t even bother reading what Kirk sent.When he got out onto the Angel’s Seat, he saw the AlKapThil structure of Ergo’s docking tunnel extend out from the airlock on the front of hab zero-one. He was running out of time. Following Io’s and Taliya’s instructions, he located the main comms line and began the procedure to wire in a backup handheld interface from his biosuit. There were plentiful leads to shuffle around, ample panels to open and connect. Ergo was redundant and well designed, but there was little expectation that most of the crew would seal themselves out of EAR control interfaces at the same time the hard-wired panels in the storm cellar would get destroyed—but even in this extreme circumstance there was still a way to connect into the main radio.He panicked, but he closed his eyes and took a breath. Taliya sent him a message to remind him that slow was smooth, and smooth was fast. He removed the last lead from the bypass, placed it into the handheld radio scavenged from the equipment pouches on his biosuit. His fingers tingled as the EAR interface activated. Without hesitation, he waved open as many channels as he could, connected to his helmet’s audio system, and warned the Fengshen.“Fengshen, it’s an ambush! It’s an ambush! We’re being held hostage do not—” Frederik flinched as the ceiling of the Angel’s Seat exploded in a shower of sparks and molten metal in the complete silence of vacuum. Undulating water blobs sloshed out of the water tank above his head, and his radio crackled. A thump reverberated in his boots from a near-miss. He looked down at the radio in his hand and saw that the lines to Ergo’s main communications antennas had been cleanly severed. A forced connection to his biosuit from laser point-to-point caused his suit audio to crackle and hiss.“Try to repair that, and the next round is through your brain,” a hostile voice explained.Frederik let go of the now-useless radio and put his hands up as he backed away with gecko grip. Click click. In his peripheral vision he glimpsed one demon, gecko gripped along the midway of hab zero-one, with a long coilgun aimed in his general direction. He froze and hoped what he had done had been enough.In front of him, through the opening of the Angel’s Seat, he spotted part of Fengshen. An exterior elevator, which presumably took crew from the spin-deck end-caps to the central engineering region, stopped half-way. He had done it. There was a flash. Ergo jerked underneath Frederik’s feet. He lost his gecko grip, and the vibrations shook him loose. He hit the ceiling of the Angel’s seat. Ergo rotated around and underneath him. He was sliding sideways and slammed into the flexible lattice wire guardrail. “Umf,” he exhaled as the lattice guardrail pressed up against him, partially squeezing him through.His left arm was stuck outside the Angel’s Seat up to his shoulder where the wire lattice had stopped, then he slammed onto the floor. He saw flashes and plumes as Ergo’s reaction control stabilized its position. Fengshen twirled back into view. It looked like a popped open drink can. Twisted ribbons of metal spiraled out at the center like grasping root tendrils from a knocked over tree. There was the tattered glitter of AlKapThil foil from Ergo’s shredded docking tunnel. Flashes of movement were all around him, and then the debris from the Fengshen reached Ergo.Each impact vibrated through the membrane of his biosuit, producing muffled audio. It sounded like a faraway metallic rain. Sparks and puffs of metallic flak covered hab zero-two. Sparks rained down around him. He pushed himself away from the guardrail, feeling the lattice pull at his biosuit the entire length of his arm. A fist-sized ribbon of metal shot past where his arm had been.He turned to look back at hab zero-one, saw two demons stalking along its surface. Flashes of red tracers leapt from coilguns. The weapons fire looked like beams of red that reached Fengshen. As he watched, large debris collided with hab zero-two. Silent sparks and flashes swallowed the spin deck as metal-on-metal vaporized in the collisions.Red and blue tracers shot between Ergo and Fengshen. When the odd round bounced off at some wild angle, it shot out into the permanent night of space, otherwise they were like beams of light. Some struck Ergo and exploded in cones of dying flame. Many simply missed.He was in the middle of chaos and destruction, and it was his only chance to act. He remembered there were no demons on hab zero-two, at least not yet. So, he anchored himself, pulled apart the Angel’s Seat guardrail with a scream, and slipped through the gap he had made. Then he burned his EVA pack’s reaction controls as hard as they could go as he aimed himself at the airlock of hab zero-two. Beams of tracers and debris littered the space between Fengshen and Ergo.Frederik waved his hands wildly as he lurched sickeningly fast toward hab zero-two. He knocked aside pieces that were small and slow enough but had to zip and dodge with high acceleration any time anything fast or large crossed his path. A red tracer blurred past his back, its blinding light in the dark seemed mere centimeters from his faceplate, but it missed.He made it to the ledge along the spin-out edge of hab zero-two. Pocks and holes covered its surface. Large dents and twisted, melted metal beads, frozen in the vacuum from ablation, impact holes still glowing cherry red from deposited kinetic energy. But the hatch was, mostly, unscathed. Through the hatch he quickly, but cautiously, entered the spin hab.Inside, in the confines of the airlock, was a mess of metallic debris and dust, spinning and bouncing off every surface. Along the outer hull, he counted sixteen fist-sized holes. Even as he counted, he saw pieces of debris from the inside of the airlock make a lucky break, bounce out, and join the chaos outside. On the inner hull, he counted twelve similarly sized holes, though their edges were more jagged—less clean. Flame-like tongues poked out of these holes as moisture from Ergo’s interior spin deck condensed in the escaping air, making thick streams of fog-like plumes. These currents produced by the escaping air jostled and pushed the flotsam of the airlock toward the outer hull punctures, and it was only the chaotic collisions between debris that prevented the airlock from entirely clearing out as hab zero-two depressurized fully.Escaping pressure pushed him back with all the other debris, but he gecko gripped himself to the floor and pressed ahead click click click. He clenched his jaw and ground his teeth as he waded through the detritus, waving it out of the way—hoping each time nothing punctured his suit. His only option was to push deeper into Ergo. More distance between him and the exterior meant more material between him and danger. The edges of the litter floating in front of him flashed with light. Red, blue, white, orange. Reflections and flashes from more combat, more explosions, filtering in through the holes in the hull.He reached the inner door, one of the few things nearly undamaged. Just as he grabbed onto the latch Ergo jolted. It was hard enough that his gecko grip failed, and his legs flew out from under him. He held onto the latch, barely. All the metal debris fell to one side, then bounced, and the acceleration was gone. He replanted his feet to the sidewall. Debris pelted him, making a clickty clack as it bounced back and forth in the airlock, but he opened the hatch and entered the dying spin hab.Ergo’s auxiliary airlock on hab zero-two was across the hall from the mess, and in the same quarter-section as the exercise room. Frederik saw craters in the walls of the mess. The chaos had shredded the mess hall accordion doors like it was AlKapThil. Doshirak tins had been burst open by the last drops of kinetic energy of whatever had holed the airlock, and strips of protein and gim flapped in the depressurization wind. Undulating fluids pulled into long tendrils and jiggled as they pointed toward the airlock, stuck only from surface tension. Rapidly, the air died down. Through the large holes in the hatch and wall of the mess, Frederik could look inside. Over the years, the crew had personalized the mess with strings of multicolored lights that ran along the hard edges of the deck plates between the top of the wall and the ceiling. They had also hand-painted the side walls to look like a celarium trellis from Arco Lazuli depicting an expansive lake with the illusion of depth, like the lake was just beyond a garden wall. The surfaces of the table on this quarter section featured an etched fractal geometric tiling, and a high-resolution, full-color ink display adorned the ceiling. It was warm and inviting, yet wide-open and voluminous—at least before any damage occurred.The mess’s current state broke Frederik’s heart. Some of the devastation was visible through the ragged windows cut into the mess doors. The lights got pulled out of their position, and carbon scoring and smears of food covered the side walls. Warnings and errors in a dozen written languages intermixed with cracks and dead pixels pulsated sickeningly over a large ink display on the ceiling. And yet, it was silent in the vacuum. This was a dead space, now, and seeing it caused Frederik physical pain.He pushed off the ground, letting his gecko grip disconnect, and floated quickly to the elevators, leaving all the destruction behind. At the elevator, he peered up through the top lid. The spinel ceramic lid on the top had dents and cracks, making it impossible to see any details, but the AlKapThil tunnel was clearly gone. Shredded teal-green flaps clung to twisted and gnarled wire struts still attached to Control, but the rest of both elevator tunnels were gone.At least, from what he saw through the cracks, the airlock entrances to Control looked intact. He pushed himself back down the hall, grabbed a few patch kits from the airlock. They were too few to save the auxiliary airlock, but he might need them to get back to Control.He took one last glance through the fist-sized holes into the airlock and waited. There was no flash of blue or red light, no signs of continuing combat. Even though he wasn’t sure what that meant, he knew he’d be safest in Control with everyone else. Returning to the elevator tunnel, he pushed open the hatch and took a moment to search for danger along his path before throwing himself out. He took his time, easing his head back and forth to maximize his viewing angle and check for outside danger. Jin was now between Ergo and the starlight of Ya Ke. The divots, bolts, and ridges along the central axis of Ergo threw long and very dark shadows. The only ambient light remaining was the radiant glow of Ergo’s own radiators. In the dark, and without the connecting elevator tunnels, the core of Ergo looked like a giant, free-standing radio tower. One extensive building with Control, the Angel’s Seat, and the forward water tank and communications and navigation systems on the very top. The length of this radio tower, the spine of Ergo, was really one large propellant tank with structural support.Scouring, squinting, and searching for any danger along the length of Ergo, or among the few places on hab zero-one that were being illuminated in the orange radiator light, he was determined to find any potential threats. He didn’t see any tracers, and it seemed like most of the fast-moving debris had long ago left Ergo behind. He froze, stood very still. There were still two demonic forms stalking along the surface of hab zero-one. Holding his breath, he hoped they would not see him.From his vantage point, he saw them walking toward the side where the main airlock dipped over the edge, which made it difficult to spot them. Two more demons joined them in that blind spot, one carried a sizable equipment case on their back like it was a rucksack—Frederik could just barely see the Absolute Horizons’ logo on the case. The four demons finally dipped out of sight. He was short on time. With no way to be sure, he hoped that was the last of them. Making use of the edges of the elevator opening above him, he launched himself toward Control.His EVA backpack had just barely cleared the elevator hatch when the hab zero-one airlock exploded in another shower of red and blue tracers. Before he reacted, or even moved a centimeter closer to Control’s airlock, something grabbed his arm, yanked him out of the elevator, and pressed him flat against hab zero-two. Something pressed against his arms and legs. He was pinned. He wriggled. A heavy smack against the side of his biosuit helmet knocked his faceplate onto hab zero-two’s hull. His ears rang a little as his pulse quickened. His eyes blurred as tears formed, but they stuck to his eyes in microgravity. Something rolled him over onto his back, pressed down on his chest, pinned him down again. There was nothing there. Nothing but the dark shadows Ergo cast upon itself and the brilliant stars, only visible now that Ya Ke was behind Jin. Then he thought he began to hallucinate. Above him, around him, a shape emerged. It was like the metaflage the hostiles had used to hide in the shadows of the Angel’s Seat, only far more powerful.From the emptiness there was now a flapping of wings. A flock of birds. A murder of crows. But the impossible avian flurry seemed to, collectively, imply some humanoid shape. Their bodies and beaks and wings twisted and contorted and grabbed Frederik’s arm, their form pressing down on his chest like a boot, keeping him pinned down.This flock of corvids shimmered and fluttered, partially blocking the light of Ergo’s radiators, and throwing a humanoid shadow over Frederik as he stared up in confusion and terror and pain. Even as he was just processing what he had seen, the flock dissipated, and instead there was just a gap in the light from the radiators. A cut-out of perfect blackness—vantablack—yet it had a shimmer to it. A rainbow diffraction pattern along hexagonal scaled armored biosuit with thick, angular plates on the chest, legs, and arms. An elongated sloped helmet looked down at him.He was looking up at some form of lizard-like humanoid that had grabbed his arm. And it held in its clutches a large coilgun. There was a flicker of red light—the star-like diffraction from a point-to-point communication laser shining through his spinel ceramic faceplate. It emanated from the lizard’s thick collar armor. There was a screech and a crackle, and then a distorted voice blared in his helmet.“Are you Frederik? Obialo, Frederik?”Fearfully, he gazed up into the strange faceless lizard helmet, glimpsing his own reflection in the bronze vizor. He wondered if this present appearance was itself some form of metaflage mirage. The vantablack lizard’s grip tightened on his arm, the coilgun angled closer to his faceplate. “Answer me!” The distorted and tinny voice said. “Are you Frederik?”“Ye…ye…I am Frederik,” His own voice sounded timid and thready.An actinic flash of red exploded on the left side of the lizard’s chest. Thwomp. Frederik felt the near impact. Reflexively, he rolled. There was no force to keep him on the spin hab, so his attempt to roll merely caused him to tumble away from any surface he could use to control his movement. Still blinded by the afterimage of the coilgun strike on the lizard’s armor, he pointed his body where he thought Control’s airlock had been and burned the last of his delta-vee. He hoped for the best as he launched himself away from hab zero-two.