Against A Dark Background (32 page)

She floated in the middle of it all, taking stock.

Fucking hell,’ she said.
What a mess.’

`What?’ Miz said in her ears.

Got status,’ she said, looking round. The ship was a wreck.
Good fucking grief.’ What to do first?

`Reduce spin or you’ll black out again,’ Miz said urgently.

`Oh, yes,’ she said. The spin was insane; she looked to the main tanks, but they were empty. The bow thrusts had some water left. She woke the motor up, swung it to operating temperature and pushed the fuel through. Nothing happened.

Why wasn’t the burn working?

Spinning too much. Wrong route. She closed off one valve, opened another; water hit the reaction chamber and plasma went bursting out from the ship’s nose. Miz was shouting something but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. The weight got worse and the roaring came back and became a noise like darkness.

She felt something snap.

Wrong way! she thought, vectoring the thrust right round.

The worst of the weight lifted slowly; the roaring went back to what it had been before and then gradually faded. Her body started to lift in the seat, pulling out of the squashed, crumpled attitude it had taken up. Give it ten more seconds. She opened her eyes. The inside of the face plate was smeared with blood. She closed her eyes, sought out the suit-view in the lid-screen display and shifted down into it.

The emergency controls gleamed in the back-up lighting. No holos. The flattie status screens were blown or pulsing red.

She turned her head to the left.

The port instrument bulkhead had come to pay her couch a visit. It felt like the port-rear ceiling had had the same idea. That was what was stopping her head from going right back; probably what had nearly ripped her helmet off, too. Her seat had been half-torn from its mountings by the impact, which had caught her left arm between the bulkhead and the armrest.

She stared. Could that really be her arm disappearing into all that mangled-up shit? She ignored the memory of the pain and pulled hard.

It was as though she’d slammed an axe into herself. Her head jerked around inside the helmet; she fought the scream but it forced its way out of her throat anyway.

She blinked tears away. Her arm remained pinned.

So much for that idea.

She moved her head. Looked like her right arm wasn’t in terribly good shape any more, either. She tried to move it but it wouldn’t cooperate. Numb. `Be like that, then,’ she muttered, trying to sound unconcerned.

Physically brave, she told herself. Physically brave. That was the one accurate phrase she remembered from when she’d hacked into her service file (though it had been embedded amongst a load of nonsense about her being impatient and arrogant; how dare they?). Physically brave. Remember that.

She shifted out of helmet-view. The ship’s bow tank drained, the pipes emptied and the motor cut out. She reached to the main tanks, but of course there was nothing there. The back-up tanks were dry too. The ship was still spinning, but only once every eight seconds.

`You did it!’ Miz shouted. Broadcasting on radio; the comm laser was dead.

She attempted to sort some sense out of the nav gear’s gibberish and tried the ship’s external sensors, but they came up fuzz-grey. The back-ups were out, too, apart from one non-holo camera in the bow, fixed staring straight ahead. All it showed were lots of nebulae, a glimpse of a white disc ahead with a reddish-golden disc behind it, then nebulae again, then the white-disc/red-gold disc combination again, and so on.

`Where the hell am I?’ she said.

Can’t read you,’ Miz said.
Open a data channel.’

Only got input,’ she said.
It’s open.’

Shit,’ he said.
Okay, here’s what I have.’

The nav gear started acting sensibly again. She was still on the Outside of Nachtel’s Ghost, about a quarter second Inwards from the engagement position, tumbling and twisting towards the moon.

Right,’ she said.
Just let me get my bearings here . . .’

The external view she had now - flagged as thousand magnification showed a wrecked excise clipper spinning slowly in front of her, its black hull flayed and pitted, its rear end gone, ruptured plates fluting tumorously from the craft’s waist to shred away to nothing from about three-quarters of the way back, ending in a glinting mess of shining metal.

There was something biological, even sexual about the ruined ship, its matt-black skin like dull clothes ripped apart to reveal the flesh beneath, exposed and open. She’d never seen a ship so badly damaged.

She thought, Poor fucker; lift that driver’s chow-bucket off its hook and send it back to Stores . . . then realised that this was the view from Miz’s ship; he was following her, and what she was looking at was her own craft. She was the unfortunate pilot she’d been consigning to oblivion.

She selected trajectory forecast while she looked at the doc window. The medical unit seemed to have given up on her. Then she remembered where the doc’s tubes plugged into her. She shifted back to helmet-view, staring at where her left forearm disappeared between the bulging instrument bulkhead and the seat armrest; the gap was about three centimetres. Hmm, she thought.

She shifted back to nav; she was heading straight for Nachtel’s Ghost. The icy little world was still nearly a tenth of a light-second away and it would take her the best part of an hour to get there, but she was going to go right down the throat of the gravity well. Even if she could miss Nachtel’s Ghost she’d be pointing at Nachtel itself, with no way to miss it; seen from its barely habitable moon, the gas giant filled half the sky. She’d have to sling-shot.

Instinctively, she reached again for the main tanks.

`Shit,’ she said.

She glanced at the group-status holo which had been part of the squirt Miz had sent. ‘Miz!’ she shouted. `The others!’

Vleit and Frot are dead,’ Miz said quickly.
Zef’s chasing Cara but getting no reply. Kid, there’s nothing you can-’

`You’ve got damage, too!’ she said.

`Yeah, some laser-work from the cruiser and ice abrasion from that water-screen you left behind when you got zapped–’

‘Miz,’ she whispered, `are-?’

I’m sure, Sharrow,’ Miz said, his voice thick.
Dead and gone. Probably never knew what hit them.’

`How did they do this to us?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ Miz said wearily. ‘Cenuij wants to call War Crime on that engagement; says nobody reacts that fast and there must have been an AI in charge; I think we just got out-lucked. Cruiser took some damage and flared home; now forget about the engagement! Have you any reaction mass? We have to get you into orbit around the Ghost.’

She’d shifted into life support.
No point,’ she said.
The recycler’s wrecked and I’m losing gas; I’ve enough to breathe for about . . . two hours, then that’s it.’

`That suit or cabin?’

`Suit. Cabin’s got less; pressure leak.’

`Shit,’ Miz said. She could almost hear him thinking.
The doc,’ he said.
It could floor your metabolism and-’

The doc,’ she said,
is fucked.’

`Damn,’ he said. It was such a mild curse she almost laughed.
Could you bail out?’ he asked her.
I could match with you; you could zap across . . . or I could get over to you . . .’

I don’t think there’s quite the time,’ she said. She glanced into suitview and looked briefly at her one trapped and one . . . broken? dislocated? arm.
There might be other problems with that approach, anyhow.’

`What about reaction mass?’

She glanced around. `Nothing.’

`Come on! There must be something! Check!’

She initiated a checking routine, and looked carefully at each tank glyph in turn. The check routine said zero everywhere and staying that way. Her own senses told her the same thing. She tried blipping the feed from each tank in turn, just in case there was water there and it was a sensor or display fault.

Nothing,’ she said.
Displaying empty; acting empty.’

`Think think think,’ she heard Miz mutter. She suspected he hadn’t meant her to hear that, or had simply been unaware he was speaking. Suddenly she wanted to hold him, and started to cry again. She did it quietly, so he wouldn’t hear.

This might sound mad,’ he said.
But I could use my laser; hit you in the right place, get some reaction that way . . .’

`It does sound mad,’ she said.

`There’s got to be something!’ She could hear the desperation in his voice.

Hey,’ she said.
Want to hear another crazy idea?’

`Anything.’

`Crash-land on the Ghost.’

`What?’

`Cruise in and crash-land, like a plane.’

`You haven’t got any wings!’

`I’ve got a shape that looks vaguely aerodynamic; bit like the end of a spiked gun. And there’s the snow-fields.’

`What?’

The snow-fields,’ she said.
They’re hundreds of metres deep on the Ghost, in places; lo-grav. And there’s air.’

`Pretty thin air.’

Getting thinner all the time,’ she agreed.
Unbreathable in another thousand years; crap terraforming . . . but it’s there.’

`But how you going to fly?’

`Oh, I can’t,’ she said, taking another look round the ship’s systems from the highest level. What a total fucking mess. If this was a simulation, she’d be clicking out now and hitting Replay to go back to just before it had all gone so horribly wrong, and try again.

`It was just an idea,’ she told him.
I used to wake up in the night and try to think up ways out of horrible situations to get me back to sleep, and one idea I had was using the Ghost’s snow-fields to crashland on.’ She sighed.
But I always imagined I’d have some control as I went in.’

She shook her head at the unsaveable mess around her and swooped back into close-range nav view. `I think I’m dead, Miz.’ She listened to her own voice, and was amazed at how cool she sounded. Physically brave.

`Forget it. I’ll run that idea of the crash-land past the machine; see what it thinks.’

Aw, don’t spoil my fun,’, she said.
I never even ran it through mine . . .’

Fucking hell,’ she heard him say after a while.
My machine’s as crazy as you.’

`It says it’ll work?’

`Um, three-quarters empty mass . . . drag . . . need details of the snow compression, depth it becomes ice . . . depends on the angle .. . no; the machine’s not quite as crazy as you. And you’d need some fine-tuning, in-atmosphere, at the start anyway . . .’

`Run an insertion past the machine anyway,’ she said.

`Running it.’

At least it’d be spectacular,’ she said.
Burning up in the atmosphere or slamming into the snow. Better than hazing out from oxygen starvation.’

`Don’t talk like that! . . . Shit, there must be something. . .’

She had remembered some time ago what the secret was. `Hey,’ she said gently. ‘Miz?’

`What?’

`Pick a number between one and two.’

`What?’

`Pick a whole number between one and two. Please.’

Oh . . . one,’ he said. She smiled sadly.
Well?’ he said.

He said it the way he had when she’d got him to toss the coin outside the Bistro Onomatopoeia, a week earlier.

She shook her head, even though it hurt and he couldn’t see.

Nothing,’ she said.
Tell you later.’ She shifted back to the doc, down into the external read-outs. Cabin cold, external air poor and pressure falling. Aggregate radiation dosage . . . Oh, well. She felt herself shrug and grimaced as her left arm protested. She was going to die, anyway; she wouldn’t live long enough to experience the radiation sickness. And I’d have made a lousy mother anyway, she told herself.

She kept wanting to press Replay, to snap out of this disastrous simulation and start again, or just break the link and go for a drink with the guys. It didn’t feel right that she was trapped in this situation as firmly as she was trapped in the seat, pinned there by the weight of circumstance and chance.

At first, when she’d joined up, she’d thought she could never be one of the dead ones. She told herself they must have made a mistake, and she just wasn’t going to.

Later she’d started to get scared sometimes, when pilots she’d thought even better than she had died. Had she been wrong about how good they were, or wrong about skill saving you every time? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe luck did come into it. And that made it frightening, because nobody knew how to train for that. You carried a lucky tooth or a special letter or always made sure you were last out of the mess; she’d known people who did that sort of thing . . . A lot of them were dead, too.

Look,’ Miz said,
I’m still catching up with you; I’ll match velocities. I’ll get over to you. It can’t take-’

‘Miz,’ she said, quieting him.
No.’ She let out a long, ragged sigh.
I’m trapped in here. I’d have to be cut out.’

`Oh, shit,’ he groaned.

The way he said it, she knew he was talking about something else. `What?’ she said.

`You don’t need that much to take you into the Ghost’s atmosphere at the right angle,’ he said.
Just a nudge; a few seconds’ burst . . . Hey!’ His voice brightened again.
I’ll nudge you! I’ll just fly alongside and-’

`Forget it; you’ll just break your own ship.:

‘Look, if we can’t think of anything-’

`Wait,’ she said.

`What?’

She reached into the ship’s plumbing, found no read-out for the relevant section of pipe, but the. record of valves shut . . .

Hey,’ she said.
You know I put the thrust the wrong way at first; made the spin worse?’

‘Yeah?’

`I got confused because before that I tried sending the water round the loop against the spin.’

`So?’

‘So there might be water in the closed section of loop.’

`Isn’t it showing?’