Winnifred
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The taxi shuttle coming apart doomed them.
A half-dozen other things ensured they were well fucked on their way to being doomed. The atmosphere within the ship vacated through the gaps as it opened up, and that movement of atmosphere immediately scattered things, and it wasn’t an even, measured scattering.
The first thing was that ninety-five percent of the lights went out. Space was dark. Inside, it was close to being pitch black. The silent explosion, burning fuel, and the light reflecting off of Inanna didn’t do much to illuminate the ship interior.
“Toby, lights.” There was no oxygen to convey sound, but her breath and voice circulated in the face mask. Toby was long used to taking that altered sound and making it a normal voice.
[Something has gone wrong, Winnifred.]
“I know. Lights! External, and low-light vision to assist!”
[I don’t understand.]
“Do it anyway.”
She felt herself transition to a low-color low-light vision combined with some lights mounted across her body and facemask.
Residual water vapor within and on the surfaces of the ship, kept at a modest level of humidity for the comfort of passengers, immediately boiled off and evaporated. The shifting thermals meant many surfaces and tools froze.
Winnifred reached into the ‘belly’ of her body. It was a void, and especially when clothed, she kept her tools there, suspended between ribcage and pelvis by some straps. Wire. Thicker wire than she would have wanted, but it was what she had.
The shuttle itself was a fair size, able to keep several things in the general scale of Nikhil’s gorilla suit in the bay, with a section in the middle for sitting, lounging, and making small meals. She’d been in the doorway to the bay, between the middle section and there. As things had come apart, however, the bay broke into multiple pieces, as did the midsection. Others had immediately moved toward their seats there, getting the kids seated. Nikhil, still in the bay, was on his own.
The others were already nearly gone, between the sudden pressure change, some degree of blindness- they were trying to get kids into seats, but one of the kids was already limp, surrounded by expelled food waste and moisture.
It would be a miracle if they all got seated and belted in. The fact they’d made it this far was only possible because that row of seats was being used as couch by some of the kids before.
It didn’t look like there was an emergency setup dropping down to supply oxygen or sealed coverage to the passengers in the midsection. There were no helmets, no oxygen masks, no hoods, no gloves.
There was nothing she could do for them. Not like this. While things were still coming apart, she headed straight for the pilot. She slapped the end of her tail into her hand, and at the same time, in the same way she’d raise a single finger, extruded a tool from her tail tip. Wire fed to tool. A quick glance over her shoulder.
She stapled the wire to the middle ship segment as she ran past, then to the chair of the pilot.
The pilot’s chair was already swiftly drifting away from the cockpit segment she really wanted.
She would have to be a void cowboy. Those goons who had attacked A, who leaped from space stations, across the black, to land at a distant destination.
“Help me, Toby,” she said. “Jump trajectories.”
[I don’t understand.]
A cowboy without the most basic tools they used. No onboard, no predictions. Something was broken in Toby.
She tried to make sense of what little she could see. It wasn’t even as if the lighting was good, every piece in clear view.
The fucking of the situation hadn’t stopped with the freezing or atmosphere scattering. They hadn’t been burning the shuttle’s thrusters hard, relying on G-sails instead, so that was good. G-sails were off.
But the thrusters had been on. They were no longer fixed to the rest of the ship. Fuel lines had ruptured and exploded- silent flashes and flares of gases that ignited and immediately went out. Some nebula-like pockets of burning gas stretched between the separating ship segments. Pieces of the engine had gone hot, and moved at different velocities than the rest, pushing their way through the ship segments as they split apart. Driving things radically further apart.
It wasn’t the explosion or the fire that was a problem. It was the small shrapnel and small debris that were the real problem. Even the very first wire she had stapled in place near the other passengers had broken away with ease as things pulled apart, and now flailed, nearly invisible in space- wire with a long skewer as a weight on the end. She had hoped to keep the ship segments loosely connected.
She hadn’t, but maybe the fact the wire had tugged and needed to be pulled out had slowed how fast that ship segment drifted in another direction. She hoped the decisions she was making mattered.
One piece of debris, accelerated by passage through the rocket’s wake, soared into and through the ship segment that was her destination, just as she was going through the motions of jumping.
She leaped. At the same time, a segment of shuttle that had an uneven and ungainly amount of forward momentum carried forward and through the upper portion of the shuttle. The ‘ceiling’, if the g-panels were working. As pieces had collided with one another, they had slowed, while the continued momentum of the still-burning rocket, connected to the power supply near the back end of the shuttle, had carried forward. The rocket crashed through ceiling pieces that had collided with one another, accordion-like.
More large debris. Less secure ground.
The ramifications of the debris moving around meant that Winnifred missed her target. One piece of debris striking it like a bullet was enough. There was more going on than that.
She cast out the wire, whipping her tail to send out a loop, in a motion that made her body continue to spin.
The loop went out past the ship segment- she’d hoped to cast it out behind the ship segment, and lasso it, for lack of a better word. It instead caught on a more ragged part of the edge, where metal had torn. As she reeled that wire in and pulled with her arms, she pulled herself to that piece of the pilot’s cockpit, and the cockpit segment to her.
She reached it. A part of the cockpit very near the ship’s nose, that was meant to sit right next to the pilot.
She pinned the extraneous wire to the cockpit, stapling it there, then cut it with her claws as ‘scissors’.
She stapled again, stabbing with her tail, embedding wire into metal. At the same time, she pried open a drawer. A drawer that was meant to be within arm’s reach of the pilot, part of the console, in case of emergency. It was now almost fifty meters away from the man.
Everyone and everything was moving further apart moment by moment. Her crew was already unconscious and dying.
This was a wasted set of moments. Wasted seconds.
The drawer was empty of everything except personal items. A drink, a small religious item that looked like a small shrine diorama in half an egg, and some cleaning spray to clear his screens and windows with.
“Toby, can you help me find…”
She guessed Toby’s response before she even finished.
[I don’t understand.]
With her eyes, in low light, she had to make sense of the picture. The shuttle was a Demiho. It was the sort of ship people hired to pack up an entire home’s worth of belongings and move to the far corner of the belt. It was not complex in shape. She had, once upon a time, considered acquiring and owning one to work her way up to the more interesting, big ships.
The ship itself was a bay, an area for passengers who wanted a ride along with their things, with immediate amenities so they wouldn’t be uncomfortable on a trip to the far end of the belt, and a cockpit area with just enough for the pilot to be comfortable without intruding on the passenger’s space.
Winnifred could look at one external ship segment with a piece of wall attached, see a door in that interior wall, and remember why – so the pilot could enter the attached bathroom, which had two entrances. The ship would keep pilot and passenger from entering the room at the same time.
That corner of the cockpit should have what she needed, if she remembered right.
Winnifred judged and leaped.
It rotated, much as she had predicted. She saw as it was pelted by small pieces of other debris, but at a lower velocity than the one that had sailed through the earlier segment. She floated across the gap.
If she got this wrong, she could maybe recover, spending oxygen and reserve fuel to stop herself, reorient, and drift back toward the most stable segment of ship. She wouldn’t be able to do anything else.
She could manage, but nobody else would. All of the rest of them were dying. They were all unconscious already, probably, with the pressure change causing monumental damage to their bodies. The degree of that damage and whether they lived or died was going to depend on the preparations their onboards had done. It was a suggestion, more to onboards than hosts, that certain changes be made, but how many actually listened? Would they do everything the way they were supposed to, if they were broken like Toby was broken?
Winnifred reached the ship segment. Metal claws slammed into metal fixtures and made no sound. There was only her own breath within her face mask, and the sounds within her own body, her ears shut, orifices sealed, skin adjusted on a fine level to keep everything safe, level, and stable.
“Cabinet, cabinet,” she muttered.
[I don’t understand.]
The sound of her own voice, processed by Toby, didn’t convey the feeling that rang through her entire body, from the ends of her hair to her tail and the wire it was attached to.
She had to mentally orient herself and the rotation of the cabin.
She stapled a wire to the wall, and it immediately pulled free. The stapler went deep, sinking a twelve centimeter bolt into metal and flash welding it, but the direction things were moving pulled that wire taut and ripped it out. The ship segment she was clinging to jerked.
That still slowed things enough. She stapled again.
Not much wire, but… This was the other place meant to hold emergency supplies. She opened the cabinet, and felt her heart sink.
Half of the cabinet was empty. Two oxygen containers, a fire extinguisher, a foam sealant, and tools. The other half of the closet, which was supposed to have more oxygen, a generator setup to remote-boot system computers, among other things? A jacket and boots crammed into it, instead.
“Fucker!” Winnifred shouted, into the black.
Toby was silent.
Those other supplies were meant to include carbon fiber wire. Thinner and more abundant than what she was using.
“Fuck, fuck.”
She had the tools already. No use being redundant. She grabbed the oxygen and foam sealant, stowing one ox box, the attached tubing, and the foam sealant into the void at her middle, zipping up the top of her coveralls. They banged and rattled within, but that didn’t matter.
People would die because of the shortsightedness of the pilot.
“Fuck!”
Couldn’t waste time. She leaped. Waiting for things to rotate to a better perspective would cost. So she hurled herself out, bent her arm, and caught the wire -invisible in this environment, even with the lighting and low light vision- in the crook of her elbow.
Why couldn’t the pilot have taken more safety measures?
Once she had the wire, she could pull herself along it, holding it between two fingers or two toes, with her tail bent into a ‘w’ shape to hold it stable, as well.
Who had done this? How?
Back to the pilot. She was so mad about the lack of emergency provisions, she was tempted to give the man nothing.
Except his onboard had taken pre-emptive measures long before this incident, and he wore a suit that helped maintain the pressure and temperature. There was minimal sign of capillary blowout on face and hands, his mouth was shut, nostrils sealed, there was no vomit or fecal matter, and there were no other signs of fluid purge from his insides inflating.
She fitted the mask to his face and made sure he had oxygen.
If she left him and went to the others, and found them all dead, then the fact she’d let the pilot die wouldn’t sit right with her.
The others…
She didn’t know what to do. She stapled a fresh wire into place, ready to leap. They were too far away.
[You’re running out of wire.]
Toby had noticed that Winnifred hadn’t noticed. It was surprising, considering how everything else was going wrong, even with Toby.
“Have you tracked where I put the other wire?
[I don’t understand.]
“Yeah,” Winnifred said, with a bit of resignation.
She cut herself off from the staple. Her head turned, taking in information, for Toby’s benefit as much as her own.
Nikhil was out there, trying to do what she’d done. Jumping. He’d gone after his suit.
“Do you see Nikhil?”
[He is exposed to the vacuum and drifting.]
“Prediction, leap, me to him.”
[I don’t understand.]
“Ignore the ship, blind yourself to it. Focus on me and him, and the angles of the surfaces I’m clinging to. Lock me in. We’ve done this ten thousand times.”
It took Toby a long second. Projected images of Nikhil’s flight through space were colored by how much time passed. Her own trajectory, depending on some standardized intensity of jump, was given the same.
The moment the two met, as Winnifred made microadjustments to her arms and legs, Toby prompted her arms and legs to fire off in that set intensity and strength.
The fact Nikhil could see and that he wasn’t unconscious meant his onboard had done good preliminary work, and Nikhil had bought into the pressures of the other miners, way back when onboards had been forced. He’d taken the crappiest onboard possible, to minimize the data collection, surveillance, and range.
Maybe it was because he had a shitty onboard that it had done all the work to prepare him for space. People with more advanced ones might have used the options, customizing more, taking up the spaces throughout the body with detailed simulations, storage, and other modifications.
His onboard, being ‘dumb’, might’ve gone through the step-by-step motions. Going into space? Prepare the body.
Nikhil was fortunate in that regard, but he had little sense of how to move without gravity. His efforts to ‘swim’ through the space made him start to spin and turn head over heels.
It took thirty seconds for her to reach him. Thirty seconds seven other people weren’t breathing. She could see them. They had strapped into their seats when things had gone wrong. Or they’d tried. Lest was tangled up in the belts, but wasn’t buckled in.
Winnifred got hands and feet on Nikhil, venting some of her precious fuel reserve and oxygen from vents along her body to move the two of them through space and correct for the spin. Operating her body in this paradigm was strange, not least because of the anxiety that ran through her head, the tubes, proprioceptive sensors. She was using systems she used every few weeks to every few months, not counting the time she had been in jail.
The light helped her catch an incoming piece of debris, that spun fast enough that the white of the exterior side seemed to strobe as it caught the light. She stuck her knee out to shield Nikhil’s neck and shoulder, and it struck her across the leg with enough force that it did superficial damage. The plate that maintained the rough shape of the leg protected the components within. Her pant leg was torn, though, and she had to start over in getting them stable.
More seconds were passing. The effect of that miniscule fuel reserve seemed so little, and so ineffectual, burning more seconds to slow them, slow them some more, not quite stopping them.
Another piece of debris hurtled past them, having ping-ponged between other segments of ship.
She seized the first opportunity that came up- one where she could leap and push Nikhil toward his gorilla suit, while she moved toward the others. She was unkind, maybe, in not fully correcting their spin or judging especially well when making the call.
She was fairly confident she could make her landing. She wasn’t as confident with Nikhil- depending on how thorough the onboard’s preparations were, his skin might be numb, or burning, or he might be in pain. He’d have one shot at grabbing onto the suit as he reached it, and holding on as he got to it, with all of the odd pressures of the suit’s movements and his own.
For a flesh and blood person, it was easy for his own body’s momentum to carry him forward at an angle that twisted his arm, or made the grip impossible to maintain. Could his other hand get a grip in the meantime? The silver and white gorilla suit with its sharp sprue-like jutting edges and work-damaged parts had its own spin. The powerful arms, meant to do heavy lifting and manage tools, were floating and flailing independently.
It wasn’t as easy as a gentle float to the neck hole, grabbing the rim, and climbing in.
She forced herself to ignore him. If he was in trouble, there was little she could do. She had her own awkward grab to make.
More long seconds passed. She reached the segment. Her body was flexible, unlike his. She reached the ship segment while the exterior was facing away from her, her claw-tips caught the ridge of a strut that extended along the shuttle’s length, and her body folded backwards, her ‘butt’ nearly touching shoulder blades as feet wrapped around. When she had three points of contact with the cut metal ridge, her tail stapled the inside wall of the cabin.
She had to fix the ‘belly’ of stored components inside her coveralls as she reoriented, moving along the interior. She could see them more clearly, now.
Anide was mostly okay, but she was unconscious, her unconscious face compressed into a constipated expression as her onboard forced her to keep her mouth shut. More work would have happened internally, to keep air inside the body. Some capillaries had blown across her face, a webwork of thin crimson lines and red dots spreading across cheeks, nose, and the tip of her chin, and she had two black eyes. Two of the four children were similar.
Aber and Lest were in worse shape, but their onboards had done something. The damage went deeper than the capillaries. Veins had split in the hands. Lest, tangled in the straps of her seat, had a split vein in her neck- a real mess, the bleeding and damage had been limited and contained by her suit’s high collar and the help of her onboard. Lights twinkled across the wounds in the dim, like a hundred lightbulbs the size of grains of sand.
[Both alive,] Toby reported.
“Back with me, Toby?”
[I don’t know what you mean.]
“Yeah,” Winnifred muttered. “Do the others know what I mean?”
[No.]
“Do they know what’s happened?”
[I don’t understand. Clarify?]
There was no use in clarifying, and she had other priorities over trying to fix Toby.
Of the other two kids, one wasn’t wearing a suit as part of her clothing. Her mouth was wide open, jaw twisted at a painful angle, and though some time had passed, it was clear she’d expelled everything in her lungs and stomach. Blood had exited the eardrums, boiled, and the process of boiling had transferred heat away from the ears, freezing them. Her eyes had lost the natural color and gained a lot of bloodshot red from the broken capillaries and veins near the surface.
[Gone. The onboard is running but Carter is deceased,] Toby said, tone of voice softening from before.
The other might have been similar, but the fact his mouth was open might have been a casualty otherwise. He sat in a seat right by the place the ship had separated, and the fire from a burst fuel line and some passing debris had scorched half his body and ripped away part of his skull.
Toby didn’t need to report anything about the boy. Winnifred had heard his name earlier, in passing, but didn’t remember it, and that made this easier to bear.
Winnifred untangled the ox box and mask from her tool bag and the foam sprayer. She pressed the mask to the face of the first surviving child.
“Can you get the onboard to-?” Winnifred cut herself off as the lights across her body began to flicker- almost faster than her eye could catch.
[Already on it,] Toby said, needlessly.
If Winnifred’s body was capable of shitting itself, she might’ve done it when the little boy suddenly convulsed, his mouth opening.
“We have to share. One breath to everyone until they’re secure.”
[They know.]
“Then I have to find another solution.”
[Something more sustainable would be good.]
One lungful of air for the surviving boy. Then the girl. Then Lest, because she was hurt and her onboard might need more resources, then Aber.
Anide last, because she was doing alright.
Toby brought up vitals, faint, in Winnifred’s field of vision. [I can only update you when we have a line of sight to them.]
“Make sure to explain to the other onboards that they need to make do. I know some older or cruder onboards might get greedy for resources, to keep their people alive,” Winnifred said. Her head turned, looking out for debris, and for Nikhil.
Nikhil had reached his suit and climbed in. He didn’t have the headpiece that protected his head from falling loads and debris, but he had a hood, and combined with the face part, he was almost totally suited up. His gorilla suit had similar resources to Winnifred’s modded body, and he was drifting her way. Slower, with more mass to move.
She checked the jutting bulkhead over the row of seats where the others were. It was emergency seating,
Things had spread out so much, now, and it was getting worse. She visually scanned things, knowing Toby was limited in what he could offer.
If the cabinet was fully stocked, she would have wire, more oxygen, and the ability to get temporary access and power to any panels she could reach.
She attached her toolbelt and the ox box to the seat Lest was slumped against, pulled her coveralls off her upper body, then pulled the foam sprayer around to her back to wear it like a backpack, before jumping to the most available piece of equipment- a piece of exterior ship that was spinning roughly at the center of things, dangerously close to fuel that had burned out of its primary, richer fuel, and now glowed a low red as a substrate burned.
She landed, claws scrabbling for a grip before finding a seam- she wedged her claw-tip in like she would stab a knife- a scary process when every attempt to push in pushed her away. Once she had leverage, she could find more.
She glanced over her shoulder to the others. Toby flashed an update to their vitals.
The two children had a minute and a half each. That meant she had to do what she was doing here in that time span. If she couldn’t, then jumping between here and there would push this further away.
That wasn’t the only risk. With the debris that was still ping-ponging around, and spinning pieces of debris that could hit other spinning pieces and go flying, all it took was one chunk of metal to hit that row of seats, and there would be more casualties.
She disemboweled herself. Backup power system.
Opening panels in the wall, she found wiring. No Supergreen here. A blessing and a curse. Supergreen filling the bulkheads meant oxygen, and could feed a relatively tight, confined area, while also being easily accessed power. It would be drag on debris, too, breaking up the pieces that were spinning independently. It would also be a lot messier, adding a ton of resistance to an awful situation.
Either way, she had to use what she had.
Connecting the wiring to her own backup power supply and quickly bypassing the warning about insufficient power, she was able to activate the panel. It was insufficient power for the g-panel and computer both, so she accessed the g-panel first, effectively touching two wires to spark it to life. Even with insufficient power to make the panel glow and have it fully activate, it did stutter with activity and it did, on a part of the ship unattached from everything else, have enough movement to be felt. A relatively intense burst of activity, for a quarter second, that pushed it in the direction she wanted- toward the others.
Then she was out of time. She leaped toward them. Mentally, she counted how long it took to even cross the distance. With the momentum she’d generated, the ship segment was on a crash course for the main group. Pushing off from it didn’t cancel that out or push it away.
Their onboards were doing their own work, shutting down non-essential systems, preserving brain health, letting other parts die. They would be breaking down carbon dioxide with nanotech systems, but that only went so far. The air they needed was composed of more than pure oxygen.
She gave them needed oxygen, then reversed course. Accessing the computer system gave her finer control.
“Can you manage systems, Toby? Pilot this hunk of ship?”
[I don’t understand.]
Meaning she had to manually change the settings.
The emotions that swelled in her upper chest made her want to cry. Toby at least had the capability and sense to prevent that. Her tears would boil away and her eyelashes would freeze. It wasn’t just that children had died, relationships were probably ruined, people she liked -her crew- were hurt. Toby was broken. Toby was acting in a way that would stay with her for- forever.
However this ended, she would remember that Toby could easily be reduced to this.
She grieved her best friend, and dwelt in a dark space where she was a kid again, escaping from the crowd and pressures of family by diving into engineering work. Drills and tests for situations that she’d secretly felt would never come up, they were so rare. How many systems would have to fail before she had to work with an engine on this level?
Or with a computer?
This was worse than any of those situations. Not just reduced to having to work with the computer alone in an emergency situation, without her onboard’s help, but doing it with broken tools, time pressures, and other hazards.
She arrested the g-panel’s movement as it got close enough. Then, after giving the others their breath of air, with the small amount of remaining wire, attached the ship segment to the one with the others in two places.
Some effort, full-body, counting more on the individual pieces pulling away, bouncing, then coming back together, she drew that wire taut, and used the foam sealant. As a kid, on countless cleanup jobs with family, she had cursed the stuff.
Now she filled gaps. A ship segment with a wall and a floor had now become a wall, a floor, and an opposing wall.
She began to climb around the exterior, when she saw Nikhil had reached them. He grabbed the opposing wall and pulled on the unattached top end. Not an opposing wall, like this, but a triangular prism with the ends missing.
“Tell Nikhil he’s doing a good job.”
The lights around Winnifred’s body strobed. It was clear, low-tech communication, in a sea of distorted signals from broken systems, and a void of air to speak with.
[He wants to know if he’s doing the right thing. I don’t understand the question.]
“Translate verbatim,” Winnifred said.
This entire thing was a hack job. With Nikhil clinging to the outside of the box they’d made, she passed him the foam sprayer, looping it around his neck, and she left him, going to get other pieces.
For this to really work she needed power, and that was a hard sell.
Nikhil was flashing a message.
Whatever he said, Toby ignored it.
“Translate verbatim, Toby,” Winnifred repeated.
[I don’t understand.]
Of course.
“Direct communication? Is there enough of an array throughout my body?”
[The signal will be bad.]
“That’s fine.”
[The channel is open.]
“Nikhil, how are we doing?” she asked.
No reply.
She could, in the gloom, and with lights around his own suit providing some illumination, see his mouth moving.
They were being interfered with.
They would have to work blind.
“Use the lights, communicate to Nikhil about the oxygen. He has to handle that if I don’t get back in time.”
[Understood.]
Nikhil’s help and support here made her heart soar. It gave her some freedom to go further, and take more risks in trying to reach things, knowing she might slip away.
She brought another ship segment over, her eyes scanning the surroundings for anything that could generate more power. Nikhil held it while she foamed it.
Because it was awkward for him to maneuver, she went to supply oxygen, eyes scanning the surroundings. Where could she get sustainable power? Anything that would buy them more time.
While crossing, she noted scars on the ship exterior. A punched hole with scorch marks around it.
That was right behind the group of seven -now five- inside, wasn’t it? It would be right over their heads.
She’d passed it before the thought crossed her mind, and she looked back, wondering. In the process of looking back, she saw some glowing debris stop glowing, going black against a black background. The fact it was round made her curious.
A piece of machinery, bulb-shaped, with a round lower section and a rear part that extended up and down, serving as both antenna and mounts for small g-sails. Four more framed a circular camera at the front of the bulb, above, below, to the left, and the right. Thorn-like legs protruded at the upper left, upper right, lower left, and lower right.
It moved abruptly, jerking to one side, and Winnifred’s vision filled with alerts and warning. Pain, muted and translated to signals for her brain, were passed to her by Toby. The strap of the foam sprayer had been cut. The bar that extended around her chest glowed red hot at one point.
She bolted, moving across the exterior surface of the box they’d put together.
“Drone!” she reported, for Toby’s benefit. “Tell Nikhil!”
[I don’t understand. Did you walk into a patch of burning fuel, Winnifred?]
No. It had been a laser.
Toby, as far as she could tell, wasn’t reporting anything to Nikhil.
“Vision mode, Toby, photon imaging!”
[Good idea.]
Her vision went black. She’d expected that, and didn’t lose her grip.
A moment later, she saw red- a crimson background suffused with a bright static-like haze over everything, that wavered and wobbled in places. That static was ambient radiation and the light reflecting off of the city. The burning fuel became sheets of white.
She was nearsighted, like this, and she couldn’t easily see the surface she was crawling on, but she could see the drone, the camera lens apparently a fixture that doubled as a laser cutter.
It moved with a quiet, eerie confidence, shifting direction the very moment her tail moved to point at it. She turned her head to follow it, but it moved fast, dipping out of view, moving around the other side of the ship.
Intelligence controlled. It was smaller than her head, and being that size, she doubted it was very fancy. Dumber than Nikhil’s onboard.
She did not have a lot of foam available to dispense. If it started cutting this apart… she wouldn’t be able to put anything together. She wasn’t even positive it was possible to put anything together without the interference and continued sabotage.
The drones had done the damage, butchering the shuttle. Then they had hitched a ride. Whoever had done this had done it with a plan. They had to know she could survive in space. It defined the people of the sixteen families and the mods they’d picked up.
They had two pieces of insurance, she now knew. The drones were one. If she started looking like she might find a way to secure things, then they would cut apart her work. Or catch her resting, and cut her.
The other was what had happened to Toby. Between A’s disappearance and this, she was getting a sense of what they could do.
People didn’t track this sort of thing. Not with the naked eye. They used machines and intelligences. The machines were compromised on some level. There was no flashing red light on a console down on Inanna, or out on Penobscot. Those terminals were all as lost as Toby was, marking this down as something curious, failing to pass on any messages.
Winnifred could hold out for a long time out here in the black, leaning on her personal ox box. But if she waited, trusting that help would come…? She’d die of exposure, dehydration, suffocation, or lack of food.
“Vision mode,” she said, “One second, then back.”
Toby was faster with the switch. The period of blindness between modes was briefer- a quarter second, maybe. She saw the ship, illuminated by the lights around her body. She saw a small ladder that ran up the side of the shuttle, for reaching the roof when on one of the worlds, under normal gravity.
Her vision mode switched back. She re-scanned her surroundings, glancing back behind her.
Reaching the ladder, groping blindly with her feet, she rose up to walk on two legs, tail reaching down to run along the ladder’s length for stability and extra grip, if she needed it. Clawed toes of her left foot gripped one of the rungs as she turned one direction, eyes scanning with a higher vantage point, she about-faced, heel of her other foot finding open air before kicking another rung. Toes of that foot clung there. She turned, scoping out the other one hundred and eighty degrees of her field of vision.
There. With her vision shifted, she could see the glow of the g-sails. It liked to turn off and go dark when unobserved, but there was a moment it was ‘live’, after.
She saw the lens flash, then flare, a shaft of diffuse white extending between herself and the drone, and realized what it was at the same time more damage reports swept across her field of vision, pain lancing across her arm, cheek, and neck. Blister-pads of thermal protection burst and bloomed where there was exposed skin.
She used her tail and the one foot with a firm grip on the rung to pull herself down low, then propel herself along the length of the ship.
The laser kept firing. When it stopped, it was sudden, the lens at the front of the drone going dark, while the heat from the laser itself illuminated the area around it- a fuzzy, barely perceptible blur of static against a red, static-flooded background turning into a single white lens and a shaft of light. Then it was an eye, a dot of black in a white orb, almost.
That white faded, pulled into something interior.
It’s needing to cool off between cuts.
From what she knew about laser tools, there was an optimal range, where the beam was most focused. This wasn’t a weapon. It was meant to cut through metal. Those thorn-like little legs were meant to dig in, latching on, so it could do the cutting it needed. Then it would move, and cut again. It hadn’t done more damage because it was at an ineffective range- it wasn’t built to do this.
She had to come up with a plan.
She started moving along the length of the ship, grabbing onto fixtures and controlling every movement, so she wouldn’t push herself away from it and be left drifting.
Keeping pace with her, the drone turned on a flashlight beam. It was bright, comparatively, next to everything else.
Maybe it didn’t know about the vision mode she was using, and wanted to blind her. Maybe it expected something different. Either way, it was a carpet of white. Toby was too good at microadjustments for it to blind her or do any harm, though she had no doubt that was in the little drone’s capabilities, but it did make it hard to function. So she turned away, one arm shielding the throbbing, puffed-out right side of her face from the light and continued laser fire.
Maybe because of that, she noticed the other one.
The flashlight beam was a distraction, meant to pull her attention while a silent, dark drone of matching design, g-panels not even lighting up as they moved it, came up from behind.
Probably to get to that optimal range.
She pointed her tail at it, and it moved out of the way of an anticipated counterattack, just as it flared, producing its beam.
Moving away and back meant the beam was even more diffuse.
Winnifred’s hair burned, and she felt the pain cross her back.
At least there, the minimal armor and aesthetic, exaggerated ‘spine’ designs that covered her spine were thicker. The number of damage reports were a third of what they were from the prior two attacks.
She scooped up a panel from the ship exterior, anticipating the next laser blast.
A drone to the right of her, the new drone to the left of her. Taking turns.
Shielding herself from the laser with the panel cost her momentum, and exposed three claw tips to the laser’s beam. Three fingers, effectively cut off.
The panel glowed with red-white static and melted at the center, where the beam, still diffuse, had focused longest.
When its turn came, the other drone didn’t fire.
It’s waiting. It knows I can protect myself. But that’s only from a single direction.
They’d fire at the same time, from opposite directions, next.
She reached the end of the ship, used her tail to staple in a bit of wire, and reversed direction.
Then she jumped.
The wire went taut. With the wire attached to the surface, momentum carried her in an almost complete circle, from exterior of the ship, past the lip, and into the interior, through that gap at the one end of the triangular prism where a wall was still missing. She clung to the ceiling, bracing herself.
Fuck, she thought, belatedly.
The others needed their next hit of oxygen, still.
Not that it had been that long. It just felt like an eternity when her life was on the line.
Three ways this could go.
One was that she was boxed in, and the drones would come and try to kill her now. She was one of eight fish in a triangular barrel, and she was the one they wanted to shoot.
The second way was that they would retreat.
They chose the first way. Winnifred leaped. Just as she’d traveled a circle with the wire limiting how far out she could go, she traveled the reverse course.
She extended the wire to give herself a bit more range, at the last second.
She was able to catch one drone as it came down to look for her, forcefully turning it away. The g-panels glowed in her photon-vision, but her own mass was too much for it to do much.
She smashed it into the container’s exterior, breaking the g-panels and lens.
Leaving her one to deal with. Was it better to cut herself free, or try to go-
She watched as it detonated in a burst she almost mistook for a laser aimed right into her eyes and face.
“Normal vision, please, Tobes,” she said.
Peering over the edge, she could see that Anide, still strapped into her seat, had a gun, and the tube that connected to her smoke pen clamped into the corner of her mouth.
They were programmed or instructed to be aggressive. That was lucky. Had they taken option two and retreated, that would be a nightmare scenario. Had they taken option three, which was to cut the wire she’d attached there, she wasn’t sure what she would have done.
Lunged? Thrown something?
She looked at Anide. Anide’s eyes were clear, though puffy and surrounded by bruising, and the capillary damage was worse, but Winnifred didn’t see anything venous. Anide was administering the oxygen from the ox box, and had armed herself. Maybe as a just in case.
No use trying to communicate and asking about the gun- there was still too much to do and secure. Nikhil was one of those things. Winnifred went to him.
He hadn’t been left alone. While he clung to the outside of the ship, a drone had raked his back and cut at his shoulders, destroying all three. Unable to hold on, he drifted. He’d brought a hatch down over his head, and the drone that was after him was perched on his chest, cutting into the material there, lengthwise.
Winnifred jumped, detaching the wire from the ‘staple’ fixture on her tail – more of a bolt-welder, aimed her tail while the drone was fixated on Nikhil, and when she was close enough, fired.
It saw her, spotting her with cameras that weren’t its main ones, too small or obscured for her eyes to see.
It took off, at the same time the bolt, meant to be ejected with enough force slam deep into metal and be fixed in place, careened through it.
Normally not possible, she thought. Even against machinery. Rules prevent tools from being used as anything but tools.
But those rules, which were built into the tool itself, and which were meant to keep the staple from being fired at anything, even other machinery or property she didn’t have a claim to, didn’t recognize the drone as being there, any more than Toby or the judiciary could.
The drone taking off meant her aim wasn’t square-on. It still caught the lowest point of the drone, shattering one of the thorns, at least.
The drone retreated, floating away.
She barely had any fuel left, and so she accessed Nikhil’s ruined suit, and got access to the systems to trigger his own fuel jets.
It was not a fast trip back, and she kept scanning the surroundings, trying to see if the drone was making a return trip. She couldn’t be sure how superficial the damage was.
She gave him some rudimentary control over his arms, and helped manipulate them to get them to latch on, then helped him out, detaching the suit’s built-in ox box from the gorilla suit’s internals so he could bring it with. She brought a power supply, bigger than her own, from the inside of the suit, while she was at it.
Constantly, she looked back over her shoulders, checking for the drone.
Would it make a surprise reappearance? Would it cut apart their not-quite-made-yet makeshift shelter? Would it latch onto her back out of nowhere and paralyze her from the neck down?
Nikhil joined the others. They were left largely in the dark when she left to get more pieces. She was able to be selective, because they had two ox boxes, now.
She chose a section of ship with an exterior door and some individual pieces of sheet metal.
Still watching for that drone.
Still sick, in gut and heart, at knowing Toby was compromised, here.
She thought of A, and A’s place in this- disappeared, the same way Winnifred and the destroyed ship had been disappeared. How A had a best friend too, that she clearly still missed. Quinn.
Sheet metal helped bridge the ragged edges. When she ran out of foam, she welded.
It didn’t look like that other drone was coming back. She didn’t relax. After something like this, that wasn’t remotely possible.
Once the area was effectively sealed, she could access the hatch above the seated crew that had been lasered from outside. There was a setup in there, with a larger ox box and masks that were meant to deploy from it. The ship’s systems that were meant to handle all of that had been neatly lasered from outside the ship. Something that would normally set off ten different alarms.
The cuts had been made strategically, outside, at strong points where the bulkheads met, to avoid the emergency foam from flowing out and minimizing the damage. Ninety percent of the material had been cut through. Then, all together, they had done the final ten percent of the damage, or most of it. Torsion and shear stresses had ripped open the rest.
That, or there were more drones. More drones that were hanging back and waiting, still?
Or more drones that hadn’t survived the explosion, debris, and hot fuel?
The questions yawned wide, adding to her anxiety. Answers weren’t forthcoming. Answers might never come.
She made sure the area was sealed off, then got the larger ox box running, supplying the contained space. As air was added, she could hear, and she could trace some of the escaping air and flash-weld the gaps and cracks, which included a hairline fracture along a metal wall.
“I’m sorry,” Winnifred said. Her voice sounded hollow with the lack of atmosphere. They still hadn’t reached saturation.
“You saved us,” Nikhil said, looking more bewildered than she had ever seen him. Bewildered because she’d managed to save him? Or bewildered by present circumstance?
Anide’s breath wheezed.
“I’m sorry,” Winnifred said, again.
Anide’s expression was unreadable, because there wasn’t yet enough air for her onboard to properly unseal her orifices.
Her eyes were wet, though. There was enough air pressure that the moisture wasn’t boiling.
The kids. The deep and severe injuries to the others. Eyes could take a while to rebuild, especially if resources were thin.
“I think they were after me,” Winnifred said.
“My onboard is broken,” Nikhil said.
“Corrupted. I was looking into what was going on with some weird information manipulation, before.”
“If you-” Anide said, and her voice was a thin croak. She winced in pain.
“I think that’s why they were after me, yeah.”
“If you tell me,” Anide tried again. “That this is because of A…”
“I’m sorry.”
“I will fucking throw you into-” Anide started, before wincing in pain again. “-the fucking sun.”
It didn’t sound like she was joking.
“It’s about something bigger, I think. Going back to the prison. Before the prison, maybe.”
Anide leaned back, her head turned. Lest’s neck wound was crusted over, but Aber was too still to be merely unconscious.
Winnifred moved him, checking, and Anide looked away, because she already knew. Black and brittle residue puffed out from beneath his collar. Evaporated, dessicated blood. His body was stiff and twisted at an uncomfortable angle, as it had slumped over. Skin too dry.
Dead. Something had wrenched, warped, and torn.
Winnifred undid his straps, then the straps for the two other children.
It wouldn’t be good if the other kids became conscious with dead bodies to the left and right of each of them.
She found a nook in the triangular, cramped room to place them in, and covered them, fixing the covering panel in place.
Then, her hair drifting around her face, Winnifred fixed her hair. Toby had canceled out the ongoing pain Winnifred could do nothing about, but didn’t stop her from feeling the cut as a claw tip that had been lasered off had dragged against the distended, puffed-up portion of her own laser-scarred, puffed-up face. Shorter than expected, with a sharper edge at the corner than the longer claw should have.
“What do we do now?” Nikhil asked.
“I’ll check the exterior,” Winnifred said. The exterior door had a fabric tunnel that could stretch between ships to allow passengers to depart. She could use that as an airlock. “Let’s make sure there are no more drones. Then… we need to get their attention.”
“The people who did this?” Anide asked, voice hoarse. She drew heavily on the smoke pen.
“No,” Winnifred said. “Help.”
Anide nodded, started to respond, and coughed. She took another hit on the smoke pen.
“Should you be inhaling that?” Nikhil asked.
Anide moved her leather jacket aside, and showed the numbers at the top of the attached box. It was ninety-nine percent oxygen. She’d had a shitty, tiny approximate for an ox box all along. She must have roused after getting a few hits of oxygen, then set that up.
“Loaded it with compressed oxygen from the other box,” Anide said, exhaling without any smoke. “The gun was Aber’s, for the record. I found it while trying to find where he was hurt.”
Was he planning to use it to steal my ship? Winnifred wondered.
She might never know, now.
“Won’t get attention,” Anide said. “Even if you somehow hit Penobscot station from here, I don’t think they’d notice.”
What a mental image.
“No,” Winnifred replied. “We’re sitting ducks out here, I don’t think help is coming. But… maybe something similar. Something they can’t ignore.”
Anide nodded.
➨
In the end, what she had built wasn’t that different from what Winnifred had done to set up this container. The others had woken and grieved while Winnifred went in and out, and ultimately, she decided to stay out. It wasn’t her crowd, and between the cramped, windowless space, general anxiety, frustration, and the grief the others were experiencing over the dead children and Aber, Winnifred had decided to stay out here, give them their privacy, get the work done, and then wait, pacing, looking out for trouble. Trouble that would take the form of more drones. Or, if the people who’d attacked them had plans to clean up the bodies and worst debris, any arriving ships.
With Toby not responding to the important questions and subjects, she was alone in the darkness here.
A simple box, some g-sails, power, and a computer system, aiming to crash into Penobscot station. Inside the box was a message.
It took two hours for the box to reach them, people to find the source of the damage, and work out the angle of attack.
They came armed, and they came in numbers.
She put her hands up as they made their approach. They sent a machine, and she cooperated, allowing herself to be searched, studied for any possible explosives or weapons, and brought onboard.
“I have crew inside. Some injured. They need immediate help.”
[The machine will relay that,] Toby said.
She had to wait in the airlock with the machine, and a half dozen judiciary officers with guns watched her through the crystal. A group of four were getting suited, presumably to investigate. Two of the other machines stood by to join them, presumably to be the first to enter, in case of a trap.
She recognized one of the officers from watching A, and she was very glad it wasn’t Carlen Holder. The man was trim, hair tidy, and wore a regal cape over his bodysuit, his oxygen mask dangling beneath the cape’s folds, in easy reach. No weapon in reach. He was accompanied by the squadron of machines: three in primary colors, one teal.
She remembered the name from seeing the investigation into A’s disappearance. This would be inspector Wodehouse, and the four multipurpose enforcement and investigation robots he kept around. Or… three and one Dog.
Recognizing them was eerie, in the same way meeting A had been. Like stepping from reality into the games and movies she’d grown up with.
“You haven’t connected back to the belt network since getting the message, right?” she asked.
That had been one of her instructions.
On the other side of the crystal pane, the man shook his head.
“I got too close to finding her,” Winnifred said. “We’ve already lost so much time. If we wait too long, the trail will go cold.”
He didn’t respond or move. He studied her.
After a few seconds, he murmured something to the blue investigation machine. She couldn’t hear, but she could tell from the reactions of others nearby that it had spoken. Nothing blatant; It was only minor changes in expression and the positions of their heads.
She dearly wished it wasn’t the judiciary.
“I want to find the people who did this. They killed two kids and a relative of one of my crewmates, and nearly killed the rest of us. I want them stopped, I want to blow what they’re trying to do wide open, I want it to hurt. I’ll tell you what I know.”
Wodehouse said a single word, and the airlock door opened.
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