Theft of fire, p.27
Theft of Fire, page 27
part #1 of Orbital Space Series
“Yes, it is. My ‘precious ship’ is how we are getting home. Looked out the window lately? It’s pretty empty out there, and, trust me on this, Princess, you do not wanna try to thumb a ride. The locals are not friendly. I know how bad you want this thing, and I like money, too, but you can’t spend a single bitcoin of it when you’re dead.”
As I’m finishing my sentence, Leela’s avatar appears right in front of me on the bridge. This time she’s holding an ancient mechanical stopwatch the size of her own head.
“Hey, steak people, I hate to interrupt this super-productive conversation, but the outside worlds just made it big-time irrelevant. Check your boards; we just got three new fusion drive signatures with zero, and I mean zero, neutron emissions.”
“How far?” I ask, at the same moment Miranda asks “What neutron emissions? What does that mean?”
“Drives emit neutron radiation directionally,” I say “A lot in back, a little bit out the sides, none at all straight ahead. Means that whoever’s burning those drives is headed right at us.”
I don’t know if Miranda can hear me over Leela rattling off distances, burn rates, and time estimates.
I don’t like those numbers.
“Okay, people, we just fucked up the stealth segment of this game. Or maybe someone saw us on the way in, and tipped Starlight off. Anyway, judgment call time. We either turn and run now, or we grab this thing first, and then we run. If we try for it, we’ll have... hmm... looks like about four hours, before we need to be pulling some hard gees.
“Princess, I think I know your answer, but how bad do you want this?”
“Do I strike you as a girl who gives up easy?”
“Fine, time to go loud. Everybody who’s not bolted down, brace for acceleration. I hope this thing doesn’t mind neutron radiation, cause I’m gonna use the fusion drive, get us alongside quick and dirty. You suited up, Princess?”
“Stop calling me that, and no. I can’t get the stupid electrodes in the right spots, and this stupid thing is so tight it’s impossible to seal up. I need a hand, here.”
Oh, hell. This is going to get real fucking awkward again, isn’t it?
“Okay, if it’ll save time, but try to keep a lid on your crazy this time—”
I hear something between a sputter and a snarl.
“—and I’ll be there in a few ticks. Leela, I’m laying in a course now. Can you interface with the autopilot and follow this?”
“Uh, thanks for the vote of confidence, but I’m synthetic, not omniscient. I’ve never flown a ship before.”
“AutoNav should be able to handle most of it. You just have to babysit.” I am already up and out of the chair as I speak. “All you’re doing is getting us close. I’ll be back to handle the tricky stuff at the end. Four hours may sound like a lot, but it isn’t. We’ll need every last tick. Go.”
“I need you strapped in before I can burn.”
“No you don’t. Don’t tell a monkey how to hold onto a tree. I’ll be fine. Just go already.”
The access shaft spins around me as Leela adjusts pitch and yaw at once. I kick off a wall, then plunge down the corridor fast as the main drive kicks on, catching myself with knees bent. Feels like about half a gee.
There’s a clang and some unladylike language from the observation deck airlock.
When I get there it’s worse than I thought. The suit is only up to her waist, and everything else is just... right out there... in what is suddenly zero g again. Worse, I’m up really close to her. A standard Zorgon-Pedersen economy model airlock is somewhat small for one, and for two, it’s a real...intimate... squeeze.
I try not to think about words like ‘rounded’ or ‘perky’ or the concept of curves in general. Definitely no similes involving fruit. I’m not normally the dude who gets embarrassed about looking if someone’s displaying, but I’m damned if I will let this turn into a repeat of last time.
In an oddly detached way, some part of me wonders if she contains the full complement of baseline human organs. Her stomach seems too perfectly flat, her waist too small, to fit them all in.
“Well?” she says. “Come on, let’s go!” She either doesn’t notice my discomfiture or is ignoring it this time. I stick on electrodes, trying to touch her skin as little as possible, but not succeeding. The moment the monitors are up, her stats show in the corner of my visual display. Heart rate around one-seventy-five, blood pressure one-sixty-three over one-oh-five.
MILD TACHYCARDIA - ELEVATED BLOOD PRESSURE - EXTREME STRESS, the display warns, flashing.
She’s really hyped about this artifact thing, whatever it is. No wonder she’s not bothering to snap at me.
Getting the suit sealed is a wrestling match again, me pulling one way, her the other, until we can get the tabs to snap down and the nanofiber starts binding.
“Marcus,” she says, her breath hot in my ear, “that’s too tight. I can’t breathe.”
“Yes you can, or you wouldn’t be able to say you can’t. Relax. The suit is squeezing your diaphragm, that’s all. Feels worse than it is. You’ve done this plenty of times before, it just feels worse because you’re hyperventilating. Calm. Slow, deep breaths. It’ll be fine once you’re in vacuum. Let’s get your hood and mask on.”
“Deceleration burn in five,” announces Leela.
I try to calculate which direction it’ll come from, modeling the Cat in my imagination, but there’s too many variables, and I get it wrong. When the burn comes, shoving me backwards against the bulkhead, it shoves her forwards against me, pressing us together in an involuntary embrace.
She’s soft and firm all at once, and the lock is filled with her scent—vanilla, tropical flowers, some kind of spice. She’s wearing that perfume again. Yes, it smells amazing, but why does she even bother while she’s trapped on a spacecraft with an AI that can’t smell anything, and a man she can’t stand?
On the other hand, maybe she’s vain enough to do exactly that.
MODERATE TACHYCARDIA, the display warns, CHECK AIR REGULATOR. Except she’s not wearing an air regulator yet. Her pulse and blood pressure are even higher. She must be nervous, or maybe just pissed off about having to actually touch one of the filthy menials. I push out, holding her away against the force of acceleration for a few more seconds before the burn ends, and we’re floating again.
MILD TACHYCARDIA, the flashing letters still insist, but her pulse is down a little. I turn off the display.
Mercifully, she’s not doing anything nuts this time, just tugging on the pressure hood and looking pensive. We fumble in the cramped space, hauling on the tight material, trying to get it over her crown of intricate braids.
Leela interrupts us.
“Um... guys? I’m not actually a qualified pilot yet, and we’re getting reeeal close, here, so whatever it is two are doing that’s making you both consume a whole lotta oxygen real fast-like, I need you to finish it yesterday and send Marcus back up here. Like, before I screw up and run us right into this thing. Or the planet, or something.”
“Just getting the suit sealed,” Miranda answers, hastily, and shoots me a look that’s almost guilty. I have no idea why. “I can handle it myself from here. Go on.”
I push out of the airlock, through observation, and back into the corridor, pulling up some virtual controls on my neural lace, right where I am. They’re not as good as the physical throttle and stick up on the bridge, but I can cancel our drift relative to the artifact easily enough. It’s within three hundred meters now, and the scope picks up fine detail... intricate mazelike patterns covering the outside surface, picked out in a faint metallic black and green which throws back the glare of the Cat’s floodlights.
I bump gently into this wall and that as I apply small bursts of corrective thrust to the Cat. I’m too distracted to brace myself properly.
“Running self-diagnostics now.” Miranda’s voice has an echoing quality, coming both through my neural lace and more faintly from back in the direction of the lock.
“Okay, Leela, I have the conn again. I want you back on sensors. Should be able to EVA in two minutes. Miranda, we’re going to rig this thing up to the cargo grapple with netting. That means we detach the magnet, deploy the crane, then you go out there with a cargo net, tie it in, attach the lines, and then we just reel it in. Smooth and easy. I’ll talk you through it. Stet?”
“Stet. Seal tests are green. Rebreather is green. Cooling system’s still running checks. Strapping into the thruster pack now.”
“Roger. Suit telemetry is up and showing all green on my end. We’re one fifty meters and holding. Leela, what are those drive sigs doing?”
“Straight for us. Nearest one’s at three gravities. These guys are serious, captain.”
“Okay, I’m powering up the railgun now. Let me know if you see any chemical booster spectra near them. Those will be drones or missiles. We’ll get some flak in the sky if that happens.”
“Wait.” Leela suddenly sounds a lot less cocky. “You think they’d just—fire on us? Like, right away?”
“They might. We’re in the no-fly zone. They fought a war over possession of this place. Most valuable secrets in the universe out here. You think they’re keen to share? Corporations don’t give a crap about human life where their bottom line is concerned.”
I hear Miranda scoff in my ear. I don’t care. Not starting this argument again. I check her suit telemetry. It’s still green across the board. Her pulse is still quick, but way down from before.
It’s time.
“Okay, Princess, I show you good to go. I’m purging the hold now. Walk across the hull, save your thrusters for getting out to the artifact. The bay doors should be open by the time you get there. Cycle the lock when you’re ready.”
When her comm cuts in, it’s obvious she’s way ahead of me. I hear her breathing coming through loud and heavy, with that particular shut-in sound that any Orbital knows like an old friend. She’s cycled the airlock. She’s in vacuum already.
“Already on the move,” she says. And she sounds... happy. Out in the void, millimeters of laminated nanofiber separating her from the Big Empty, God-Knows-What streaming in on course to intercept us with hulls full of weapons and ill intent, and she’s not scared, she’s excited. Like this is a treat.
She may be impossible, intolerable, and completely insane. She may have grown up having everything handed to her on a silver plate. She may be crazy enough to insist on not being looked at one moment, then strip down bare-ass naked and chase me around my ship the next. She may have no fucking idea what she’s doing out here, and she may show up for EVA work wearing fucking perfume.
But she’s ballsy as fuck.
And I wonder why I didn’t even ask myself, didn’t even argue with her for a moment, when she didn’t want to run. Why it didn’t even occur to me. Why my reluctance to take this thing aboard suddenly vanished. When did I stop wishing I could escape this clusterfuck, and start wanting to actually play the game for real?
I eyeball the drive flares on the orbital map, check their trajectories, the intercept computations. They’re all pulling in excess of three gravities now; their crews will be pinned in acceleration chairs, breathing an enriched oxygen mix through masks. Coming to stop us. Perhaps even coming to kill.
Fuck you. Fuck all of you. You don’t get to win. You don’t get to take this prize, and keep it secret, and hold onto it for yourselves. I’m not robbing you, because what I’m stealing, whatever it turns out to be, was never yours to begin with. You didn’t build it. You didn’t even find it. We did. Leela and Miranda and I. It’s ours, you grabby bastards.
Maybe this cockeyed, threadbare, ass-backwards plan wasn’t my idea to begin with, but it is my idea now.
I’m not going to let these assholes create another tech monopoly. Whatever, if anything, comes out of this thing, I’m going to make sure ordinary people can afford it. Make sure Belters can afford it. Even if I have to drag it back to civilization with my teeth.
My nerves dance, and blood sings in my ears.
“Okay, Miranda,” I tell her, over the link, with a grin she can’t see, “it’s go time.”
**
“Okay, magnet’s detached and stowed.”
“Great. Stand clear, I’ll kick in the hydraulics in ten. Leela, how are our new friends doing?”
“Holding steady. Clock’s at three hours seven and a half minutes until firing range.”
“Good, about what I expected. Miranda, watch your head. Crane’s coming out.”
**
“Okay, Marcus, tow lines are bundled and hooked. Now I fly out to it?”
“Yeah... ah, let’s slave your thrust pack to the Cat’s systems and I can guide you out from here. I want you focused on keeping all those lines straight and unfucked.”
“Forward takes you out, out takes you back. I can handle this, Marcus.”
“Yes, you can. But we’re on the clock now, and we need to move as fast as possible. Trust me, there’ll be plenty for you to do.”
“Right, fine. Opening a remote channel now.”
**
“Princess, I show you twenty-five meters out. You all good?”
“Yeah... uh... wow. I mean, this thing is... alien. It’s covered in... I don’t know, they look like hieroglyphs. Or some sort of... maze? None of the angles are square, or the same. I mean, it looks symmetrical from far away, but it’s not. I can’t see the damage on the corner too well. It’s spinning pretty quick.”
“Yeah, it’s about five revolutions per minute. We’ll slow that down with your thruster pack if we need to, once we get the net wrapped on and fastened. Let’s get it unfolded, and I’ll start walking you through it.”
**
“Unknown vessel, Starlight Zulu One Niner. You have violated the Starlight Coalition Sedna Exclusion Zone. Under the terms of the Artifact Treaty, you will immediately shut down your reaction drive and any onboard fusion power sources, power down any and all weapons aboard your craft and stand by in your current orbit for boarding.
“Failure to comply will result in capture bounties being registered with Lonestar Enforcement, Northwoods LLC, and any other appropriate contract enforcement firms. It may also result in revocation of any Starlight device leases, and direct enforcement actions up to and including lethal weapons fire. You will immediately signal your intent to comply.”
“Starlight Zulu One Niner, Foxtrot Uniform Two. Impressive recitation, dude. You have all that memorized? Before you bother with any more threats, you might wanna take a look at that Artifact Treaty you’re going on about.”
“Ah, Foxtrot Uniform Two, what the hell are you talking about?”
“You might notice it’s a contract. And if you read to the bottom, you’re not gonna find my signature on it, bro.”
“Foxtrot Uniform Two, you will—”
Click.
**
“Okay, it looks straight. I think it’s ready to go.”
“Pan your view around, lemme see... yeah, looks good. Okay, now you’re going to unhook guide line one from your belt, and attach it to the carabiner on the upper right corner of the net. Then number two on the next one, just working our way down the side. Okay, good, try not to jostle it too much, it hasn’t got much mass.”
“Okay. All the way down, like that?”
“Yeah. Then once you’re done there, we’re going to hook the opposite side, and just let its own spin momentum wrap it in the net. Watch your spacing.”
“Okay. Marcus, what are those other ships doing? How much time do we have?”
“Don’t worry about it. I have an eye on them.”
“Yes, but—”
“Princess, you need to concentrate. Let me worry about our guests. I’ll let you know if anything changes, okay? Just get those lines hooked up.”
**
“That look about right?”
“Yes! Now clamp it off. Okay, pan your view around a bit... Okay, that looks tight. Get clear and I’ll start reeling it in.”
“Okay, just let me check these connections. How much time do we have?”
“Plenty. Little over an hour and a half. That was quick work. Signal when you’re clear.”
“Uh, Marcus?”
“What?”
“I think I have a problem.”
“What?”
“Uh... my tether. It’s tangled in the tow lines. I think I accidentally threaded it through some of them.”
“Damn. Okay. We’ll need to re-rig the artifact then. And we’ll need to work fast, okay? So—”
“No. Marcus, you said we only get one shot at this. I’ll just unhook my tether at this end, and untangle it from here, then hook back up.”
“No. No way. Princess, playing it fast and loose gets you killed out here.”
“Marcus, there’s no time to argue. The thrust pack still has sixty-five percent charge. If anything goes wrong, I can just fly back to the ship, or switch to remote and let you fly me back.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll keep one hand on the net the whole time, okay?”
“Alright, yeah, just be careful, stet?”
“Stet.”
17
Anomalous Trajectory
In space, everyone can hear you scream.
At exactly one hundred megahertz, the common emergency radio band is easy to remember, easy to tune to, easy to find. Your vacsuit, miracle of modern technology that it is, may not be sentient, but it is certainly smart. It monitors your heartbeat, your blood pressure, the electrical activity in your brain, the oxygen saturation of your blood. It knows when you are injured, when you are afraid, when you are in distress. And it knows when to cry for help on the 100MHz emergency band.
And by default, everywhere, everyone is listening.
Every suit radio. Every spacecraft. Every robot probe. Every relay station. Every gas planet dronescoop mining Jupiter’s upper atmosphere for hydrogen or hydrocarbon plastic. If there’s a company on Ganymede making baby monitors for professional-class working couples on Mars, there’s decent odds their product is listening on the hundred megahertz band.
