Severance (51 page)

“It’s not.” She stood up, turned to face them, grew
infuriated by their eager expressions, and turned away. “I think we can come up
with something better than amusing methods of committing suicide.” She turned
around again and glared at Bruce.

“Well, while you’re doing that, I’m going to go find some
climbing equipment,” Bruce said, standing up. He listed to the right again.
Stein still wasn’t sure whether he was feigning soberness or drunkenness. “Climbing
equipment for one. Or two…?”

“Two,” Griese said standing up, tucking the small can up on
one hip like a ball. He patted the big man on the shoulder. They shook hands.

Stein stared back and forth between the two men,
incredulous. “You guys are insane. I absolutely forbid you from doing this.”

Griese tilted his neck to look at her. He adjusted his grip
on the small can, looked down at it, ran his fingers along the seam of the cap.
“You’re not allowed to tell me what I can’t do.” Stein’s face fell. He walked
away.

“And you,” Bruce said, pointing his finger somewhere to the
left of her. He frowned, then adjusted his aim, eventually aligning his finger
more or less with her chest. He finished his thought, “You are not my real mom.
I don’t have to listen to you.” He left in the opposite direction, kicking over
a pile of empty bottles as he left.

“Dammit, guys,” she said after they had left. She slumped
back down on to the bench and turned to the window. For a while, she just sat
there, trying to find where the sun had gone. Her terminal could probably
figure it out, assuming it was still in their field of vision. But to the naked
eye, it was gone.

She would let them sober up a bit first and come to their
senses. That was the smart play. But Griese was already sober, wasn’t he? And as
for Bruce’s senses…even sober he would still think this was a good idea.
Spotting one of Bruce’s empty bottles, she kicked it, watching it sail across
the lounge and bounce into the window. If the pair of them did actually go, there
was no doubt in her mind that she would go along with them. Not after what
happened to Ellen. They were all she had now, no more splitting up.

But she didn’t have to be happy about it.

“Man, I don’t want to die in space.” She looked back out the
window. “Fuck you, space.”

§

Sergei took a few playful bounces down the hall, still
amused by the joys of low–gravity movement, even after a couple days on duty in
it. He stopped, turned around, and bounced back. In the hall ahead of him, blue
light flickered over the walls. He stopped just short of the hatch the blue
light was emitting from, held his hand up to shield his face, and bounced past
the hatch. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Since the whole mess began, this was far and away the most
relaxing chore Sergei had been assigned. Low–gravity babysitting. Even better,
it meant he wouldn’t have to help with the cleanup on street level. After
depressurizing the ship, the Othersiders had left a real mess behind, many of
the Othersiders part of the mess themselves. Thankfully, Sergei had seen just scraps
of that, really only whatever the feeds thought fit to air. Not that he was
supposed to be reading the feeds, but this was a seriously easy task he had,
and the first assignment in weeks that gave him time to kill.

The buzzing sound from the hatch faded out, and he turned to
see the blue flickering had also stopped. He waited a few seconds, having
nearly rushed back into the path of the torch once already. A couple of long
bounds and he reached the hatch, a massive, ugly thing normally concealed
behind the soft plastic panels which lined the walls. Cautiously, he peered into
the cavity beyond the hatch. The two naval techs, clambering over the massive
mechanical whatever. They seemed pleased with themselves; one of them gave
Sergei a thumbs–up.

After examining their work, the pair of techs casually leapt
off of the mechanism to the floor of the cavity. One of them picked up the
massive cutting tool and moved to the edge of the hatch. Sergei stood back as
they climbed out, not offering to help; he had tried once, but they wouldn’t
let him anywhere near their fancy tool. It was apparently pretty valuable. “And
growing increasingly rare,” one of the techs had said, whatever that meant.

He had at least managed to convince them he should know
where they were going next, and once they were all outside the cavity, led them
down the halls to their next destination, doing his best to act the escort and
not the mascot.

It was still a bit of a mystery to Sergei what exactly they
were doing. The techs wouldn’t tell him and had in fact gotten kind of weird
about it when he had asked. It seemed pretty clear to him that they were
repairing some sort of damage caused by Othersider saboteurs, so he couldn’t
imagine why they were being so secretive. But navy guys were famously weird,
and he didn’t want to do anything to offend, lest he lose his new, bouncy gig.

§

Stein stroked one of the nearly–ripe fruits hanging off Mr.
Beefy, hefting its weight in her palm. The little meat plant had being doing
well lately; he was almost ready to be harvested. She wondered if she would be
around to do that and whether she should drop him off on a neighbor’s doorstep
just in case.

Her terminal beeped, and she looked down, expecting to see
another horrible climbing pun from Bruce. She had told the two of them that if
they were going to insist on being so crazy, she would be forced to at least
try and keep them out of trouble. They had protested, but not seriously, and
agreed to meet in the upper–decks of the bow that night.

She sighed when she read the
From:
line; a message
from Bruce would have been preferable to this.

Hope you’re still okay. I didn’t see you pass through
here in all that mess, so I guess you probably are. Here’s the stuff I found in
regards to that matter. I tried not to read too much. It’s your business, not
mine. — Berg.

She’d forgotten about Dr. Berg and his trek through the
shadier bits of her DNA. Attached to the message was a single file, a large
archive. She opened it, revealing a bunch of documents represented with
unfamiliar icons. After a moment, she realized they indicated the files were
damaged and that she was looking at the best interpolation of what they might
be. They must have gotten banged up a bit on their long journey — she had never
even thought to be careful handling her own DNA. She crossed the room to her
couch, sat down, and began to read the first file, helpfully labeled Readme.

Hello.

Sorry for troubling you like this. If everything’s gone
according to plan, you’re reading this after seeing the words DATA GENE glow in
your eyes. I hope that’s not too troublesome. If I set it up right, it should
only bother you when you look directly at a light tower. And it was the only
way to point you in the right direction, to find this file you’re reading.

I’m afraid I had little choice. This was the only place I
could hide this message where I knew someone would read it. I’m being hunted
down because of this information and can carry it alone no longer. It pertains
to a grave threat to the Argos. See the attached files.

I pray you do something more useful with it than I have.

Dr. Harold Stein, October 28
^th
, 52 A.L.

A sharp intake of breath. She had heard that name before,
owed her own name to him. But she had never thought twice about the man, and
now that she was forced to, decided that she didn’t like him very much. Planting
junk in people’s cells like some kind of asshole. An incompetent asshole too —
he wrote his damned sign upside down, cut half of it off, and got the trigger
wrong. “Thanks, Grandpa,” she muttered.

She stared at the list of files, almost tempted to toss the
rest of them away, sick to death of ship–threatening conspiracies, only hours
away from probable death thanks to one. But it was too tempting. However
annoyed she was with her figurative father, she was holding a message buried in
her own DNA.
How do you not read that?

The next file was a note from a young naval officer called
Kevin Delise, apparently written to a reporter. He explained that he had
knowledge of a plot to split the ship in two. “Well, golly,” Stein said,
rolling her eyes. She was mildly intrigued to see that the plan was far older
than Helot, but everything mentioned in the note was all old news to her.

Kevin had also attached evidence to prove what was
happening. Most of the evidence was a mass of information on navigational
calculations, stellar drift, all of it impenetrably dense to her. But the logs
and transcripts were more accessible, detailing conversations the captain and
his senior officers had when discussing various operational issues. The section
on their fuel problems also caught her eye. One log contained a discussion
about how the matter/antimatter reaction wasn’t as efficient as they had first
anticipated — some problem with the containment. This was potentially an
enormous problem, as there was no way for them to generate more antimatter on
board the ship. They had needed to run the M/AM mixture 2.3% rich to ensure complete
reaction of the antimatter, leaving big wafts of un–reacted matter blowing out
the exhaust. This caused their supply of deuterium to be used up faster than
anticipated, forcing them to start mixing it with ‘powdered amorphous carbon.’
It took her a few seconds before she realized that meant chunks of the actual
ship.

Which sure made it sound like the ship had the fuel problems
that Kinsella had described. And a few pages later, she found confirmation in a
transcript of a conversation between the ship’s senior officers. Huge chunks of
the dialog was missing, but one of the surviving sections jumped out at her.

Medical Officer Kinison: “…doesn’t
have to be us that decides?”

Captain Higgins: “Right. If we go with
a Modified–B, we just set it up so that the captain at the time has the ability
to make the call. He can evaluate the situation better than we can now.”

Security Chief Hatchens: “And the
fuel?”

Medical Officer Kinison: “It’d be the
same deal! We don’t have to decide. Just kick the can down the road. If they
need to tell people about the fuel, let them.”

Captain Higgins: “Okay. But these
calculations have been public for a long time. Burn rates, the delta–v budget,
all of it. We’ve got to start quietly reeling that in off the network. If we
need 1.38 million tons of AM to stop this bastard, that’s a number only the
captain can know about.”

Security Chief Hatchens: “I’ve already
got someone working on that problem.”

But you didn’t think to look in my fucking DNA, did you?

Stein sighed and scratched her head. She was intrigued and
at the same time annoyed with herself for being intrigued. She didn’t have time
for this. Another beep from the terminal saved her from considering it further.

Wait till you see what I’ve rigged up. It will give you
an incredible climax. I am being totally serious here. I have already made a
huge mess of my pants. — Bruce

Fucking Bruce.
And fucking Bruce’s plan.
She suddenly
went rigid, thinking about what they were going to do.

“Come on, Laura,” she said. “Positive thinking.” She entered
her bedroom, stripped out of her street clothes, and put on her spare orange
jumpsuit. It was early yet to head to the bow, but she was done hanging around.
Back in the living room, she picked up Mr. Beefy, took a step towards the door,
then stopped. Setting him down on a neighbor’s porch was just as likely to
result in him getting caught up with the local morons in a rousing game of
Kick
The Plant
. “I’d never let that happen to you, Mr. Beefy,” she cooed. She
turned and set him back down on his shelf. “You sit tight. I’ll be back.”

§

Stein looked down, the headlamp on her e–suit playing across
the craggy features of the outer hull of the ship as it curved away beneath
her. A long way down. Or a long way left. Bearings were a little hard to come
by up here. She was looking towards her feet, that much was certain, and reason
enough to call it down.

Below — or to the left of her — the outer surface of the
ship’s bow stretched away out of sight. She was standing on the edge of an
airlock mounted just below the axis of the ship’s rotation and not feeling good
about it. Along with the weakened gravity, there was a more alien feeling
dancing around her inner ear. The ship now had a distinct yawing motion, caused
by the sudden explosion of air from the aft, and was now slowly flipping around
front to back. The normal rolling rotation of the ship wasn’t affected by this,
so the pseudo–gravitational effects weren’t readily apparent to those on the
first four decks. But near the ship’s axis, it was causing a very noticeable
tilt of gravity away from the vertical.

Beside her, Bruce stood in his enviro–suit, decked out
identically to her, each with a small arsenal of weapons strapped to their
bodies. Three piton guns, all fastened to a harness securely strapped around
their suits. In the back of the room, Griese finished tightening his straps,
identically equipped as the other two, with the minor addition of a small can
strapped to his leg with some tool webbing.

The three of them had spent the last hour familiarizing
themselves with how the piton guns worked, swinging around in the floatarium. The
only preparation they would get before attempting the most ridiculous stunt in
the ship’s history. “Feels like there should be cameras here to record this,”
Bruce said via the commlink wired into his suit.

“I think that’d defeat the purpose of this, Bruce,” Stein
observed.

“Amusing suicide?”