Chapter V
DECAYING O2BIT
“What’s the damage?” Bolt asked, calling up to Greck, who was standing in the hallway that connected the two tow-cable rooms.
Greck grumbled something in fishfolk and wiped the excess grease from the tow-cable cylinder off of his hands onto a machine shop rag, the black tar streaking across the rusted red cloth. He tossed the rag into the waste bin below, and the wet rag slapped against the metal container with a loud thwack. The rest of the crew looked up from the holo table in the HUB as the shark lumbered down the ramp towards them.
“That good, huh?” Dunny joked.
“Could be worse,” Greck murmured, his mouth barely opening, the words muffled through congested rows of sharp teeth.
Bolt lifted his shades and looked up at the shark, casting a long shadow over him.
“We coulda’ actually gone through with it.”
“So… cylinder’s shot?” Nia questioned.
“Shot,” Greck confirmed.
“Walk?” Nia asked.
“Walk.”
Greck grabbed the nearest chair and skidded it across the metal floor with a grating scratch. The rest of the crew had grown accustomed to Nia and Greck’s shorthand. It took a few more seconds, but everyone caught on quickly.
A moonwalk. Or, rather, a moonlet walk. They would have to land the DEEP REACH on top of the moonlet orbiting the gas giant in its rings, then they’d have to climb down the dark underside of the moonlet where the RES HORIZON was stationed.
“A moonwalk?” Bolt finally caught on. “We’re sure the moon’ll take the Reach’s frame?”
“No, but I’ve been running a sensor package since we started our orbit pattern,” Nia explained. “We should get some data to work from soon.”
“How soon? I may need to recalibrate our orbit around the ring,” Dunny replied.
“Soon. Do you want me to ask OMNI—”
“NO!” the crew cut her off mid-sentence. Nia raised her arms in mock-defeat, a subtle wrinkle in her lips… a hint of a smirk.
“Then we’ll wait and see.”
Little storm cloud…
Nia looked up from the grav boots on her work table. Whispers in the wind… the lattice? She didn’t know many Declanians, but, from the few she met, she knew stress could trigger memories and push them to the surface.
She had never audibly heard a memory before, though. The whisper had been unintelligible before when Dunny had triggered it on the bridge. But this time, the whisper, in the confines of the equipment room, was clear as day.
It was her mother.
The memory itself was hard to pin down. Her childhood was fuzzy: a steady hum in a sea of noise. Longshot wasn’t exactly known for its family-friendly environment; the system was full of rough ships and even rougher crews. From as far back as she could remember, she always had a tool in her hand and was crawling into spaces none of the other races could squeeze into. She had to grow up quickly, and if she couldn’t be useful…
Nia pushed her way back through memories, trying to grasp at whatever glimmer of her past might give context to the random words from her mother.
The DEEP REACH was her first senior engineering job, but that was going on five cycles. Before that, she had bounced around a lot. Apprentice-work on a larger cruiser, followed by several stints on salvage haulers, then a weird sorter/grinder gig on JUNCTION.
That’s where Bolt found her, aboard the JUNCTION, grease-covered and rolling under turbine grinders that shredded scrap for the smelter furnaces aboard the UNDARI’S INFERNO. Nia remembered her low-profile creeper, banged up but with most of the wheels still intact, rolling out from under a particularly nasty grinder, black lubricant and bits of rust smeared across her face. The overhead can-lights blinded her for a moment, then eclipsed by the fuzzball silhouette, unmistakably Pantheran. Something about him made her nervous, leery, and excited all at once.
“What’s a kid like you doing in a bulshos like this?” the young Bolt had asked in a soft but rumbling tone. He gave Nia a half-smile, a glint of yellowed gold punching like a spark from the harsh can-light glare.
Wrong memory. Nia pushed back into older sections, peeling back the layers like pages. Back and back and back. She stopped.
Not. There.
THUNK. HISSSSSS. CRACK - FWOOOOOOM. The noises were so clear in her ears that Nia flinched and fought the inclination to grab onto the table in front of her.
“You okay?” Greck’s low voice barely registered over the rattling noises that only Nia could hear.
Nia’s milky white eyes darted away from Greck’s pained face.
SQWEEEEEEEE—THUD.
Nia snapped out of the memory, Greck’s hand around her bicep, tiny in comparison.
“Nia?”
“Hmmm?” Nia murmured.
Greck’s dark eyes motioned for Nia to follow his line of sight. She looked down at her hands, pale and gripping her grav boots as if they were anchors holding her to the floor. She released them, and her fingers returned to their natural bluish hue.
“What was that?”
“I-I don’t know.”
Carter, normally cold and detached, was struggling to keep his anxious thoughts from vibrating across Nia’s lattice. They were waves on an ocean, rippling out from singular drops of spiking emotion. Nia tried to push them back, but not into Carter, who might feel the repulsion. Carter cleared his throat and pulled a tiny flashlight up so that one of his mouth tentacles could grab it and hold it in front of Nia’s left eye.
“You were working on your grav boots?” Carter questioned, his long fingers pulling Nia’s eyelids apart to shine the light at.
“Uh-huh,” Nia grumbled. “Like I told Greck: I’m fine.”
“Sure,” Carter replied. “Still—Can’t be too careful.”
Nia squinted her other eye, tears starting to form around the milky film. “Oh, right. Careful. That’s us.”
Carter’s tentacles fluttered, a stifled Nothonian laugh if there ever was one from the squids. Carter dropped the flashlight with a loud clank on the metallic infirmary table. Nia cleared her throat, and Carter stepped away to pack up the med-tech.
“Considering the equipment we’re working with, there’s not much else to test,” Carter explained.
The “infirmary” was little more than a corner table in the large equipment room, with one of the lockers housing a bio-sensor, one x-ray wand, and a few OMNI VOX plug-ins that nobody wanted to fire up even if their arm had come off. Pirate ships rarely had medbays, and what little medical supplies that were in circulation in LongShot were so costly that the trade to acquire them would bankrupt most scavenger ships like the DEEP REACH. The stash, scraped together over years of hauls, was enough for the odd jobs and hauls the crew were used to.
“Instilling a lot of confidence there, Carter,” Nia said, then she hopped down from the table and crossed her arms, her eyes slowly tracking to her grav boots still resting on her work table in the same equipment room.
“I don’t have to remind you that I would prefer your attention while we’re on the HORIZON,” Carter moved his head into her line of sight. “If I had something to give you, I would.”
Dunny walked into the equipment room and slammed her box of wires on the work table across from her locker, and Nia could feel Carter bristle at her presence.
“What are you two up to?” she asked.
“Just a health check-up,” Nia muttered.
Dunny looked up.
“What’s going on?” Dunny questioned, her eyes squinting at the two.
Carter’s tentacles fluttered. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”
“The [REDACTED] I do,” Dunny sneered. “We’re already changing up our [REDACTED] procedures, and you’re being cryptic with me?”
“It’s not important,” Carter interrupted, holding his hands out to deter Dunny.
“Oh, of course, just like how it wasn’t important that we were flying into a ring system instead of an asteroid field. You mean not important to me,” Dunny replied back aggressively. Her voice shifted down a register, lower and more ominous. “You squids are all alike. Everything is ‘need to know’ and above our paygrade to you.”
“I told you what I cou- what I thought we were walking into,” Carter’s words, usually calculated and methodical, faltered.
“Could?” Dunny questioned angrily. “What does that even mea- Who the [REDACTED] do you think you are? Does Bolt know about whatever the [REDACTED] this is? Does he know what’s wrong with her?”
Nia shook her head and waved Dunny’s comments away at the same time that Carter nodded. Nia looked over, feeling a wave of anxious panic wash over Carter.
“What?” Nia mumbled. Carter shook his head at her, his tentacles bouncing against his face.
“You two are so concerned about whatever this haul is, that you don’t even care what happens to the rest of, eh?” Dunny shouted, her arms stretched out, accusatory hands pointing at Carter and out of the room to, presumably, wherever Bolt was on the bridge. “We’re just bits on a ship to you. Even your kin-fish…”
Dunny sucked in a breath as if reloading for another round of screaming, when…
Nia’s helmet, resting on her work table by her grav boots, suddenly revealed a digital computer screen icon of OMNI VOX. The cartoonish eyes darted back and forth, scanning the environment for Nia.
OMNI VOX: Great news! Your composite scan package has completed processing and is now available in local data storage. Would you like me to provide your synopsis and data evaluation now?
“NO!” the group yelled, snapping Dunny out of her angry tirade.
“Shut the [REDACTED] up, OMNI,” Dunny growled back.
OMNI’s eyes darted to its right, hollow lit ovals devoid of sentience… supposedly.
OMNI VOX: Your aggressive editorial has been noted, [PILOT].
^(^.^)^
Dunny rolled her eyes and kicked the helmet off the table, but, coming to her senses, grabbed it before it could hit the metal floor. She mouthed ‘sorry’ to Nia, who didn’t realize her face had flashed panic at the idea of the helmet breaking and Bolt going off the deep end.
Dunny handed Nia the helmet and stared daggers at Carter.
“You’d tell me if anything was wrong, right?” Dunny asked, her voice betraying her waning confidence. Her eyes looked up at Nia, who was not assuaging the torment Dunny was feeling. Nia put her hands around Dunny’s cupping the helmet, a flight of calm sent across the ‘wire’, more to escape the discomfort they were all feeling. Nia nodded, and Dunny returned the gesture and left.
“Okay, let’s see the data package, OMNI.”
OMNI: GREAT! You were correct to request additional findings. This is a great opportunity to—
“Just drop the report to my tablet,” Nia cut off the chatbot.
Nia cast her tablet data to the base table down in the HUB, so the whole crew could see. A holographic, three-dimensional scan of the moonlet appeared. Over 100 kilometers horizontally and vertically, the moonlet’s top was smooth, eroded by millennia of dust, debris, and astronomical phenomena pelting it like a raging river against a cliff face. On the outside, the moonlet appeared perfectly natural, aside from the HORIZON affixed to its underbelly.
But Nia tapped a few buttons, and a secondary phase revealed seismic readings:
The RHYNO Empire had bored a massive hole through the interior of the moonlet and replaced the hole with a machined tunnel. At the top was a door system to remain closed unless operated by their personnel. The tunnel was large enough for drones and simple manned shuttles to enter and exit to a flight deck at the base of the HORIZON. The natural erosion had almost completely erased the signs of the port tunnel from the top of the moonlet.
“BOTON BTVIII.r_m_ostat?” Dunny asked.
“RHYNO identified the moonlet in their ident system; the scans show an etched name on the portway door up top,” Nia explained.
“So this was more than a vessel. They turned the HORIZON into a full station,” Carter said. “Quite possible that they intended to dock here from the very beginning. At the very least, this tells us quite a bit more about their scientific exploration processes.”
Dunny rolled her eyes and mouthed Carter’s words comically to Nia, who was not really paying attention to either of them.
“I don’t like this,” Nia said softly, more to herself.
Bolt snorted a growling breath and placed his sunglasses on the table. “They came out here to hide whatever they intended to do, and that means we may be in for a major payday. What’s the plan now?”
“Considering the stability of the ringed orbit, I think a landing package is principal,” Carter explained. “Perhaps I can stay onboar-”
“No, we need you to assess the station, and whatever technology we may come in contact with,” Bolt brushed the changes aside. “We’re not changing that part of the plan. Greck will go down with you to the surface. Dunny will set up the landing vector. I’ll assist with ship adjustments. I know this wasn’t what we planned for originally, but it may be better than towing ourselves in a chaotic asteroid field.”
“We can’t land on the flight deck. The tunnel is too small,” Dunny mentioned.
Nia zoomed in on the scan markers on the hologram of the port tunnel, revealing a long, rectangular tunnel beneath the surface and a large utility area lining the sides. She zoomed in further, and layers of the grid layout peeled back to show utility boxes and a side-car elevator to the main tunnel access.
“We can access this utility room. There may be a way to open the flight deck entrance from there and connect to any residual systems the HORIZON may have stored its energy reserves in. I’m not confident there will be any juice left, but if there is… We may be able to cycle our O2 Scrubbers and bum some excess power to the REACH’s systems. But we should be prepared to travel the whole thing on foot.”
“Still, at least we don’t have to walk underneath the [REDACTED] moon.”
“Short moonwalk,” Greck gave a side smile at Nia, rows of jammed teeth glinting at her. Nia smiled back halfheartedly.
Nia, Greck, and Carter stood in the center of the equipment room, boxed in by the lockers and benches. Greck and Carter assisted each other in filling their helmets with seawater from a tank. The bonus, for them at least, was that they could briefly detach their translators and talk in their native fish tongue before OMNI booted up in their suit OS. Nia didn’t know many of the words in Nothonian, but she could gather most of the meaning from context and her psionic attunement.
She did hear the Nothonian word for Bogwater, a truly disgusting beverage, which caused her to make a matching face.
“What?” Greck asked in the common Rhyneese LS dialect. Bubbles swirled out of his gills at Nia’s continued discomfort and ensuing nauseous thoughts about the swampy, sea liquor concoction.
“I don’t want to think about the nasty [REDACTED] swill you’re going to pick up in port after we finish this job. My stomach is barely ready to drop out of the REACH as it is,” Nia’s voice trailed off as Bolt came waltzing in.
Bolt slapped a fuzzy hand on Greck’s shoulder, barely moving the hulk in his padded suit. He came around to Greck’s barrel chest and checked a few of the readouts, double-checked the knobs - not that he knew what any of it meant - then padded both arms as if to check off his imaginary list.
“I envy you three. Nobody’s been in that thing in hundreds of years. Could be anything in there. Tech, artifacts, a vault full of cash--”
“On a science station?” Nia asked incredulously. She would roll her eyes if she could.
“-- you never know,lil blue. Whatever it is in there… worth a fortune.”
Greck’s helmet was eclipsed by OMNI’s load-in bells and whistles, then the incessant chatter started. Bolt waved Greck to leave the room.
“Take that little wispy [REDACTED] with you,” Bolt joked, his large canine teeth peering out from his smarmy grin.
OMNI: What did he call me? <(-’.’-)>
Greck stepped out of the room, waving his beefy arms in front of himself as if he could swipe the chatbot out of his way. Carter leaned in to Bolt and said something, but Nia didn’t catch it. Carter’s obsidian eyes briefly glanced at Nia as he stepped through the doorway and left Bolt and Nia in the equipment room.
Nia grabbed her tool pack, locking it into a hinge set on the utility belt circling her suit. She hooked an additional set of worn screwdrivers, a crowbar, and a small flashlight onto a bandolier strap that stretched across her torso. She snagged at both belts, ensuring they were locked in place.
Bolt checked Nia’s helmet hinge, and she dropped the helmet down into place. The helmet hissed, and Nia felt a soft current under her chin as air flow switched from the artificial atmosphere to her suit’s tank.
“Everything looks good,” Bolt said, and he knocked his fist on the top of Nia’s helmet, welcoming the hearty thunk sound. Nia nodded, then turned her head left and right to feel the suit’s weight.
As Nia was about to head out to meet Carter and Greck, Bolt gently grabbed her arm. It wasn’t a firm grasp.
“Hey,” Bolt paused. Nia looked over at him. Bolt looked out of the doorway at Greck and Carter, who were stepping through the HUB doorway that led to the hatch room down to the REACH’s undercarriage. “I-”
“Yes?” Nia questioned; her lattice started pinging with heat and anxious palpitations from Bolt.
“I’m trusting you to handle this…”
Nia’s eyes fluttered, and everything went dark.
Nia was looking up at a much younger Bolt, nearly adolescent, the same anxious look on his face. He was looking at Dredge, a weathered captain of the LongShot ship, the Argis Furnace. Nia didn’t know this. Bolt did.
“Handle… this…,” the Captain’s words were filled with exasperated anger. His frustration was spilling out into Nia’s childhood lattice, emotions swirling and snarling… a swarm of blind rage and invisible violence gnashing at her younger self.
Nia returned to the present. Bolt had pulled his shades down, resting over his muzzle.
“You can handle this,” Bolt said, this time shakier than before.
Nia just nodded. She couldn’t say or do anything else. Her legs just moved on their own, propelling her through the doorway and across the HUB. Her eyes met Dunny’s, who gave Nia a confused head bob with eyebrow raised quizzically.
But Nia was on rails, her legs floating their way past the HUB and down into the hatch room. The airlock door was still open, Greck and Carter standing near the debris release hatch. They were hastily pulling the tow line together that they would use to tie themselves together to ensure no one floated off into the inky black.
Nia could feel her skin bristling, tiny pores pricked by pins all over her face. Her chest ached. Her lungs like pistons, firing staccato, ragged breaths. She could tell her helmet was starting to fog, the heat from her adrenaline fanning flames, like a furnace. The Argis Furnace…
Nia turned to look back as Bolt shut the airlock behind her. Her eyes twitched.
Bolt was young again, behind the airlock window. But not aboard the REACH… Nia was seeing Bolt’s younger face through her mother’s eyes behind the airlock.
“See you on the other side…” Bolt said. Now or back then? Nia couldn’t decide.
THUNK. HISSSSSS. CRACK - FWOOOOOOM.
The airlock door opens. Nia’s mother vanished into the endless darkness.
The vacuum hit. Nothing. The rush of air in sights… but no sounds. Nia’s eyes remained locked with Bolt’s as she fell backward, tethered to her crewmates as they fell toward BOTON VIII. Her eyes rolled back, upward, to gaze upon the surface of the gas giant, a tempest of raging yellow bathing her face in warm light.
Don’t let go of the sky, little storm cloud.
TO BE CONTINUED!
THE CREW OF THE DEEP REACH
