Authors: M. M. Buckner
“How the hell do we dock? It’s spinning too fast,” Grunze said.
Verinne arched one eyebrow and spoke like a schoolteacher. “If we wanted to dock, we’d match A13’s spin and use a soft umbilical collar. But since we’re doing a flyby, we don’t need to dock.”
“What was that?” Grunze poked his finger at the thick window glass. “Did you see that?”
“I caught it on video.” For once, Verinne sounded excited. “Do you want a replay?”
In the tiny cabin, we pushed off from the window, sailed toward Verinne’s workstation, and bumped into various pieces of equipment before coming to rest. Kat was buckled into the pilot’s seat, while Sheeba floated, directly above, turning slow playful somersaults to get a feel for weightlessness. Win lay Velcroed in the passenger bunk, lightly snoring. Everyone else gathered around Verinne’s monitor to watch the replay. For an instant, tiny blue flames flashed along the side of the tank.
“Guidance rockets.” Kat elbowed Verinne aside. “They’re adjusting A13’s orbit”
The tank jerked at its tether. Then a ripple ran visibly down the length of the flexing cable toward the asteroid chunk. We knocked our heads together, watching that ripple move. When it reached the end, the rock jerked, too, and that set up a reflex wave that rippled back toward the factory. For about two minutes, an interference pattern of waves propagated back and forth along the tether, and Heaven shuddered.
Verinne checked her notes. “The factory’s guided by an Earth-based signal. That’s a scheduled orbit correction.”
Kat said, “Does it always jerk like that?”
Verinne cleared her throat. “The guidance rockets on the factory and counterweight should fire together. A synchronizer must have failed.”
Grunze bumped me and messed with my hair. “You’d think those Provendia dickheads could do a smoother job.”
“Factory owners should replace worn-out parts.” Kat looked pointedly at me. “People can’t expect things to last forever.”
“Yes, well, maybe that would cost too much.” I checked Sheeba’s reaction. She still didn’t know my role on Provendia’s board.
As the last of the waves rippled back and forth along the tether, I wondered what that adjustment must feel like inside the tank. Heaven quakes? Gradually, the ripples lost head, and the factory settled into stasis.
“How often do they make those adjustments?” Sheeba asked. Her loose blond hair drifted around her peachy face like seaweed.
Verinne let Sheeba’s hair stream through her fingers. “Every 216 hours, dear. The schedule’s regular as clockwork. I’ve checked data going back three months.”
“That’s every nine days,” Sheeba said, almost to herself.
Kat broke open her compression gun and loaded a transponder in the chamber. “Those solar panels are taking the fire. One thousand says my flag lands there first.”
Verinne dabbed moisturizer on her lips. “Eat my fumes, Katherine.”
“Yeah, two to one says I plant my transponder
by hand
square in the middle of the panel array.” Only Grunze would make a bet like that.
Win was still out cold. My turn. To preserve my status, I had to top Grunzie’s wager.
Usually, this was the point at which I began to feel the old charge of anticipation. Raw hormonal heat would spread through my loins, and I would experience a primal urge to swagger. Then I would spout some insane bet, for instance, that I would reach the zone ahead of everyone and sit smack on top of a solar panel, as still as a smiling Buddha, for a full sixty seconds.
In fact, that is the insane bet I did spout. But not with zest. Sheeba threw off my focus. There, I admit it. I was worried about her, so I kept watching her expressions, glancing aside at critical moments. Sheeba’s presence was the cause of everything that happened. She wanted to come. But still, I won’t say it was her fault.
“I’ve been timing the volleys,” Verinne said. “My calculations put them roughly 6.45 minutes apart. That’s our window.”
“Right. We go after the next round of strafing.” Kat edged her shuttle a few kilometers closer to the action, as close as she dared with that Provendia gunship standing guard. Only my stupendous bribes kept us from immediate arrest and prosecution, and we knew better than to push our luck.
Kat said, “Somebody wake up Winston.”
Sheeba kicked off the ceiling, floated down to Win’s couch, and gently shook his shoulder. “Winny, we’re about to exit. We need you to drive the shuttle.”
Win sat up and blinked. “Sheeba.”
The way he murmured her name. The way they touched foreheads. That intimate exchange. A crunching noise growled inside my head, which turned out to be my porcelain dental implants grinding together. Had Winston slept with Sheeba? When he sat up in the couch and pinched her bottom, I wanted to knock his bloody teeth in.
“Here’s how we’ll exit” Verinne called out our names according to a random computer generation, our standard ritual.
“Huah!” Grunze and Kat answered in zone-blissed hilarity, but my mouth had gone dry. Sheeba would be exiting second, after Grunze. I was going last. While everyone ran final suit checks, I watched Win take the pilot’s chair, and the palms of my hands started aching. Had that old sod screwed my virgin Shee?
“Bring me a souvenir,” Winston joked. Lecherous bastard.
Outside the window, the factory and gunship whirled in unison across Earth’s bleary belly, and the silent tracers of gunfire looked like fairy beams. Then, in the blink of an eye, Heaven slipped into darkness, and the firing halted.
“That’s our cue.” Grunze raised his fist, and we shouted together, “WAR SURF!”
In a rush, we crowded into the airlock, and Sheeba gave me a tender, hurried hug. ‘Take care of yourself, beau. I slipped an ankh in your pocket for good luck.”
“You did?”
She pecked her helmet playfully against mine and made kissing sounds. Why had I doubted her? She couldn’t have slept with Winny. Stress was warping my imagination. My gloved fingers closed on the dear little talisman she’d dropped in my pocket, and my heart eased.
“Fly around the fire zone, Shee. Not through it. Promise.”
“God, how many times do I have to promise?” She made funny faces at me through her visor.
“On your mark.” Kat opened the outer hatch.
Then I forgot about Winston. All I could see was infinity. Cold boundless space yawned around us. At a distance beyond comprehension, Earth’s nighttime face loomed like a huge smoldering coal dotted with a billion flecks of firelight. Its eastern rim glowed amber with the setting sun, and that thin arc of light blotted out the stars. Together, we climbed out onto the hull and clung to the handgrips. Since our craft was tracking Heaven’s rapid circular whirl, the angular momentum slung me out and almost dislocated my shoulder. My mind stopped working. I think I was holding my breath.
Kat said, “Now.”
And then I was streaking full speed, pushing my thruster to the limit, over the limit, crazy to get there, make my touchdown, count sixty, then get the hell out.
Our fans in the Dolphin had succeeded in hacking our conference call, and they were critiquing our moves, but I barely heard them. All four of my thruster nozzles screamed full bore. Verinne estimated six-plus minutes between rounds of fire, but that was just an average. I wanted to make it out and back in under three.
It takes longer than you think to cover twenty kilometers in a thruster-powered space suit. Far behind, Sheeba was doing her first EVA, and I glanced over my shoulder to keep her in sight. I was still a klick away when the gunship opened fire again. So much for averages. Missiles the size of my forearm streaked around me, and as their silent glittery tracers crisscrossed my view, I imagined one of them slicing through my EVA suit and blasting me to bloody crumbs.
I might have veered off, but Verinne was right behind me. Ye golden gods, that woman had grit. Seeing her there gave me a lift, so I kept heading in, tracking through the fire zone, dodging, diving, pirouetting like a fiend to avoid those pretty beams. What a rip!
“Hey, sweet-piss, I’m winning,” Grunzie taunted over the phone.
“It ain’t over, burly boy.”
Grunze was way ahead, but I didn’t care. He might beat me to the objective, but he would never sit still under fire for sixty seconds.
Ahead, the tank swung toward me, looking older, shabbier and more dilapidated the closer we came. The gunship kept pace like a magnet, strafing the solar panels. Square and red, the panels clustered along the tank’s sunward face like a patch of poppies. One of them took a hit, and shards of plastic went spinning into space. Explosion without noise, way weird. I dodged through the debris field.
Most of the missiles detonated against the tank’s base, leaving dents and scars. I couldn’t hear them, but anyone in that satellite would certainly feel their thunderous compression waves. The gunship was laying down nuisance fire, pummeling the protes with noise. Provendia didn’t intend to do real damage to this high-ticket asset.
All at once, the strafing stopped. Did my bribes do that? Verinne shot her transponder toward the panels, then saluted me, swerved away and rocketed out of the zone. As I watched her go, the old love welled up inside and made my eyes water. Her last war surf. Good for you, Verinne. You did it
Kat had fallen way back. Too slow, she’d missed the whole firefight. Grunze was already through. And Sheeba? I went inverted and looked around, but I couldn’t see her. She must have circled wide.
Since the fairy beams were on pause, I took my time steering down toward the center panel, pinging the hull with a locator fix, and setting my thruster navigation to synchronize with Heaven’s spin. Once my trajectory stabilized, I arranged myself in a slightly unhinged lotus position just above the center panel and set my stopwatch for sixty. Still no sign of Shee. Dear child, she’d kept her promise and steered clear of the zone.
Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven…easy as falling off a log-on queue. I placed my magnetized transponder and made sure it stuck fast to the panel frame. Score! Then I shook my fist in the air for the fans’ benefit. Next, I considered what gift to buy for Sheeba with my winnings.
No way could she have slept with mat old puttybrain Winston. She was mothering him. A nurturer, mat was my Shee. Once, believe it or not, she confided to me that her ovaries were still fertile. Does that appall you? When I asked why she hadn’t suppressed her hormones like any normal executive girl, she said she was keeping her options open. She actually considered live mammalian birth an
option
. I knew Shee went in for fringe theories, but that was molto screwy.
Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Thirty-three.
Her flaky ideas had made her a target for sexual predators before. Father Daniel, for one. That smarmy con artist, with his yoga chants and chest hair. Of course, I’d hired investigators and brought his devilish tricks to light. The dear girl needed a guardian. When we got back from this surf, I would invite her to live in my condo. She’d be safe there, and I would—
Noisemakers fractured my thoughts. They rained down on the panels where I sat and shook me like tactile megaton thunder. The compression waves vibrated through my spine. Missiles peppered the butt end of the tank, and I could hear in my bones how the factory rang beneath me like a xylophone. Nearby, a solar panel took a solid impact, and jagged pieces flew in all directions. Something heavy walloped my thigh.
Pain fell like an axe blow. My IBiS started vibrating, but I couldn’t look at my thumbscreen. Then a wild keening noise shrilled inside my suit. Escaping air. That shard had ripped my Kevlax. Ye graven gold, I was losing compression! The jet of escaping air whipped me around like a toy, and I had just enough wits to grab the solar panel so it didn’t spin me out of control. Missiles continued to pound the panel array, and my thigh throbbed with anguishing pulses, as if someone were amputating my leg with a nail file.
“Nasir’s hit. He’s bleeding.” Winston was monitoring everyone’s biosensors from the shuttle. At least, the old fart was still awake.
“Fifty thou says he blacks out, and we have to send a robot,” said Kat.
“It’s a bet,” Verinne said.
“Better deploy it now,” said Grunze. “Sweety-pee faints at the sight of his own blood.”
“Nasir?” That soft, dewy voice.
“Sheeba,” I wheezed. In my compromised suit, drawing breath took hard labor. After seconds that felt like eons, my suit finally self-sealed, and the shrill noise faded. “Norphine,” I croaked, hooking my good leg around the collector panel to hold my position. The satellite’s powerful angular momentum pulled against me like gravity. Those noisemakers must have knocked out my thruster’s synchronization with Heaven’s spin. As the array vibrated under the flogging of Provendia’s guns, I struggled to hold on. Then the Norphine kicked in, and my leg felt numb relief. Twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-five…
“Deepra! Deepra! Deepra!” the fans were chanting over the phone. Verinne would be uploading the Reel to millions. And Sheeba? Where was she? Bright missile tracers blocked my view, but I imagined her drifting just out of sight, watching.
Yes, I could do this. Be here now. The sharp copper tang of the zone curled my tongue, and I grinned. I no longer felt pain. Numbness crept up my chest and made me shiver. “Heat,” I told my suit. Only a few more seconds. Wedging my good leg under the solar panel, I resumed my Buddha lotus, and the fans erupted in cheers. I gripped the bouncing panel frame and gazed defiantly up at the light-streaked blackness. “Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen,” the fans counted down.
Then I caught something in peripheral vision. Movement. A shadow. I turned and saw figures crawling up between the panels. They wore faded gray space suite with old-fashioned, collapsible helmets and clunky external air hoses. And they were carrying something heavy and menacing that looked like—chains?
“Protes!” Kat shouted.
“Fuckin’ agitators,” Grunze said at the same time. “Get out of there.”
“Ten, nine, eight,” the fans counted.
Two agitators, one tall, the other short, they circled and flanked me. When the short one swung his chain, the heavy metal links lashed across my helmet and hurled me backward. Stunned, I gazed at the villain through a burst of sparks. At first, I thought his chain had damaged my visor, but the light trick was inside my head. Another chain whacked across my armored ribs and knocked the wind out of my lungs, but my boot stayed wedged under the solar panel. Then the short agitator tried to shake my boot free and drive me off.