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Shasta is a very capable woman, but she is not a pilot, nor an engineer, nor
a mechanic, nor anything else that they would need to get them out of this
mess. She was able to fire the three torches because that much was obvious
from the console. Since it had been almost a minute now, and no more kinetic
drones had destroyed any part of the platform, or the propulsion attachment,
they were guessing that her initial act had worked. But they were still in
trouble, and something had to be done about it. They needed their pilot back
at his workstation. But that seemed to be impossible. The platform was
spinning like a carnival ride. Artificial gravity was down, and they were
all pinned against the wall. No one was going anywhere. Shasta was barely
holding onto the console, even if the pilot could somehow walk her through
whatever procedure needed to be done.
Suddenly, however, they found themselves slowing down. They were still
rotating, but their eyes were no longer bulging out of their heads, and what
food remained in their stomachs wasn’t threatening to follow what had
already come up. “Grab my ankle!” Shasta cried.
The pilot jumped over and took hold of her leg. He climbed her body until he
could hold onto the console himself. “Someone is controlling this,” he
announced, looking at the screen. “I can’t pinpoint where, but it’s not
remote. They’re somewhere on this ship.”
“Get me AG!” Reed ordered.
“That’s my job,” his specialist insisted. Her official title was
Transdimensional Regulator, and Reed did not understand what exactly her job
entailed. He just needed her to make it work again. She was crouched on the
wall, tapping on her tablet. “I’ve been trying to fix it this whole time.
It’s giving me so much shit!” She growled as she continued to work on it. “I
need more power. I need someone to reroute it from non-essential systems. I
don’t care which, but the portals are closed. I need one burst to reopen
them, and then they should draw normally.”
“Climate control,” Reed decided. “Reroute from climate control.”
“On it.” Shasta swung over to environmental control, and gave the Regulator
what she needed.
“Ramping gravity to thirty seconds,” the Regulator informed them. “I would
make an announcement if I were you.”
Reed placed his wrist in front of his lips. “This is Acting Captain Reed
Ellis, calling all hands. We are restoring dimensional gravity. Relocate the
floor, prepare for a sudden shift.”
“Sudden shift,” the Regulator mumbled. “There’ll be nothing sudden
about it. I do my job.” She stood up on the wall, and deftly walked
back down to the floor with perfect timing. Everyone else tumbled towards it
with varying degrees of gracelessness.
Reed got back to his feet, performed the Picard maneuver, and cleared his
throat. “Report!”
“We’re still spinning, sir,” his pilot answered, “but gradually regaining
attitude control. Soon enough, we’ll still be plummeting to our deaths, but
doing so straight as an arrow.”
“Arrows spin,” the Regulator argued.
Reed ignored her casual combativeness. She was one of the most important
people on this platform. Of course, everyone had their own job to do, but
transdimensional gravity was incredibly rare, and one could count on their
fingers how many people were qualified to operate it safely and effectively.
Again, he had no clue how it worked. Some unnamed singular genius invented
it, and doled it out very selectively. At the end of the day, his Regulator
could do or say whatever the hell she wanted, because everyone here was
replaceable...except for her.
“Did you find out who fired the thrusters to control our spin?” Reed asked
the pilot.
“Not who, but where. They’re in main engineering.”
“That should be impossible.” Reed pointed out. “I was told that it was not
survivable.”
“It might be temporarily survivable,” the pilot reasoned, “and the person in
there is about to die, or already has after fixing the issue.”
“Good point. Stay here, and get us the hell out of this gravity well. Fire
all three operational thrusters if you have to. It doesn’t matter if we have
our own gravity working.”
“It’s the elevator pod, sir,” the pilot reminded him. “They don’t have AG,
so they’re in danger as long as they’re still out there.”
“Then reel them in!” Reed turned to face Shasta. “You’re with me.” He
started walking away. “I also need one engineer.”
“Sir!” an eager young engineer said, literally jumping at the chance. He
would learn these people’s names eventually.
They walked in silence for a moment before Reed was finally ready to ask,
“how are you here?”
Shasta shrugged. “We’re immortals.”
“I didn’t ask how you were alive,” he snapped back.
“I had a back-up in a respawn sector. Not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal. I had to bring you into this. You didn’t have
Tangent clearance. I’ve never actually been up here before, yet you’re
telling me that you had time to construct a clone of yourself? You would
have had to do it months ago at least.”
“I had this substrate made while you were in blackout hock.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. No one can clone or print a body that
fast.”
“They can on Castlebourne,” she contended.
“Yeah, they use special technology that we don’t have. We got
artificial gravity, they got rapid bioprinting.”
“We got both,” Shasta insisted. “You just need to know where to look.”
“How did you know where to look, but I don’t?”
“You were asleep,” Shasta tried to explain. “There were many last-minute
details that you don’t know. We recruited others that you are not aware of.
Someone from Castlebourne came here to help. We don’t know how they knew
that we needed it, but we didn’t question it after they proved their worth.
I watched a copy of her materialize in a pod in seconds. It was phenomenal.
I’ve never seen anything like it. It does not look like what you’re used
to.”
“However it looks, it would not have been a software issue, but a hardware
issue,” Reed said. “You would have needed to get this mysterious savior on
the Tangent to make the secret upgrades.”
“She said that she would take care of it, and she did,” Shasta replied. “We
decided to trust her. I don’t know if she magically made her way onto a
secure yet to be operational space elevator platform in record time, or if
she already had someone on the inside, but it obviously worked.” She swept
her hands down in front of her chest illustratively.
They were back at main engineering, so Reed couldn’t press the conversation,
but he was determined to get more answers later. Random people didn’t just
help like that, and they certainly didn’t show up unprompted. He pointed at
the dented door. “I need you to tell me what’s happening in there without
any of us going in there.”
The engineer’s fingers were dancing in the air before her. She was
controlling an augmented reality interface that they could not see as it was
being projected directly into her pupils. These weren’t too terribly common,
probably because it was a little awkward, pressing buttons that you couldn’t
feel. People tended to prefer the haptic feedback of more traditional form
factors. “This way.” She walked off. They followed her around the corner,
and around the next corner, to the opposite side of engineering. “This door
is fine, but I don’t have authorization.”
“Are you sure it’s not gonna boil me alive?” Reed asked the engineer. He
glanced over at Shasta for a second. “I don’t have a magical back-up body.”
“You would if I had had time to ask for your consent,” Shasta claimed.
“I’m sure,” the engineer said. “This door doesn’t lead all the way into
engineering. It’s just a mechanical service terminal, but it’s undergoing
unusual power spikes, so I would start there. I promise, it’s safe.”
Reed opened the door.
None other than their shuttle pilot, Trilby was on the other side. He was
elbows deep into an access panel of some kind. Wires and power crystals were
hanging out of other panels behind him. Trilby looked over at them. He
quickly pushed his steampunk goggles to his forehead before going back to
the wires. “Cap’n. Nice to see you again.”
“What are you doing?” Reed questions.
“Fixing your ship,” Trilby answered.
“It looks like you’re taking it apart.”
“Oh, no sir. I couldn’t get into engineering, so I’m piloting ‘er manually.”
“Those are just the power relays,” his engineer said. “How the hell are you
doing anything from here?”
“Power is everything,” Trilby said. “It’s all just ones and zeroes, on and
off, stop and go. You can make a machine do anything if you pull the right
connections in the right sequence.” He let go of the wires, pulled his arms
out, and faced the three of them.
“That’s ridiculous,” the engineer retorted. “You would have to have an
insane amount of intimate knowledge of this platform’s systems to exercise
any semblance of control over it. Not to mention the fact that the fusion
torches are an attachment, not tied directly into the infrastructure.”
“Is the platform still spinning?” Trilby posed.
“No,” the engineer admitted.
Trilby showed a cocksure smirk that was eerily serious. “You’re welcome.”
“You were supposed to leave,” Reed reminded him.
“I got held up,” Trilby replied.
“Good, I’m glad,” Reed said.
“No, I literally got held up at gunpoint,” Trilby clarified. “But then
someone shot them, and I ran off. I’m not sure whose side they were on.”
“It’s all settled now,” Reed determined. “Please report to auxiliary
engineering. I know you didn’t come here for this, but no one gets in and no
one gets out. We won’t begin hostage negotiations until we’ve broken orbit,
so you might as well keep yourself busy.”
“Aye, aye.” Trilby began to walk away, but stopped. “Hey, you know you have
five hours to keep from crashing into the atmosphere, right?”
“Yes, we’re working on it,” Reed concurred. “Thanks for help with that.”
“Sir, I think...” his engineer trailed off.
“You should go to aux engineering too,” Reed interrupted. “Keep and eye on
him for me, but don’t get in his way. We may really need him.”
“Aye, sir.” The engineer left.
Reed turned back to Shasta. “I need to see this crazy advanced bioprinter.”
“I can take you to it,” Shasta promised, “but I warn you, it’s not going to
make sense. It’s not just the same ol’ technology made faster. It’s entirely
unrecognizable.”
“Stop teasing me, and let’s go.” Reed went down the hallway, figuring that
he had a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the right direction.
“It’s this way,” Shasta countered.
“That’s all you had to say.” He spun around, and followed her down.
As they were walking, they listened to updates from engineering, the bridge,
and other sectors. It wasn’t going to be easy, but they were making it work.
They would get out of this mess and finally be on their way to the Proxima
system. Everyone was doing a fine job, and the hostages weren’t giving them
trouble after having reawoken from being stunned. The two of them ended up
in the bowels of the platform; precisely where you would expect to find a
secret respawn chamber. It was dark and damp, until it wasn’t. They entered
a different section, and found it to be pristinely new, sleekly designed and
sparkling.
Shasta stopped. “Okay. I warned you that it was different, but nothing can
prepare you for actually seeing it with your own two eyes. Nonetheless, I
assure you, it works. I woke up not an hour ago, and I’m fine.”
“Just open the door,” he urged.
She punched in the code. The door slid open.
Reed walked in first, slowly, and very confused. He was looking at something
rather gross hanging from a pipe on the ceiling. It had come out of there
apparently, and grown afterwards, and according to Shasta’s claims, it had
done it impossibly fast. “What is that, a cocoon?”
“A chrysalis,” she corrected.
“It’s organic?”
“Yes.”
“That’s even more outrageous than I thought,” Reed began. “If anything,
something like this should be slower.”
“The Castlebourner said the growth acceleration was a separate thing from
the medium. It doesn’t have to be that fast. In fact, it usually isn’t. As a
senior...rebel, I was granted the fastest development time, but not everyone
has that luxury.” She jerked her head over to another empty chrysalis a few
meters away. “I didn’t have time to learn who this was, but it was sealed up
when I was here, so they must have eclosed since then.”
Reed stepped over to the second open chrysalis. He looked around it, and on
the ceiling, but didn’t find any sort of interface, or anything that might
point to who this would have been. “Wait. Are all of our people in
the system?”
“Almost. Notable exceptions include you. Our mysterious benefactor said that
she wouldn’t allow it since you couldn’t give your consent in person. A few
others just straight up refused, since it freaked them out.”
“What about Vasily? Was he a holdout?”
“No,” she answered. “He was a junior rebel, so he qualified for fairly fast
growth time; just not as fast as me. Why, did he die in the fight?”
“You could say that. Vasily, this is Ellis, report in,” he spoke into his
comms. “Vasily, report in. Where are you?”
“Why do you look so nervous?”
“He murdered someone,” Reed explained. “A normal human.” He went back to his
comms. “Vasily, report in right now!”
“Captain, sorry, I know you’re looking for Vasily, but we got a major
problem on our hands,” Sartore, the elevator tech interjected. “The tethers have snapped. The pod is in a steeper decaying orbit. I
hesitate to say, but...I think they were sabotaged.”
“Sabotaged by someone here, or in the pod?” Reed asked.
“Definitely here.”
“Security, get to the tether sector,” Reed ordered. “Search the entire
complex. Shoot anyone who isn’t a part of our group.” He paused. “And if you
find Vasily, bring him to me.”
“Sartore,” Shasta spoke in her own comms. “Can we get the pod back?”
“With a shuttle, sure,” Sartore replied. “But every second counts.”
“We’re very close to the shuttle bay,” Shasta told Reed.
“Let’s go!” He ran out of the room.
“Thanks, Sartore!” Shasta yelled into her comms as she was running out too.
“Take stock of the tethering that we have left! We need to make sure we have
enough to actually help on Doma!”
They raced down the corridors, and into the shuttlebay, but Vasily was one
step ahead of them. He was standing at the top of the ramp of the shuttle,
his gun up and ready to fire. Once they were close enough, he tensed his
arms, and aimed at Reed’s head. “I know you’re not in our chrysalis system
yet, Captain. If you die, you’ll end up off-world.”
“Are you so mad at me, Vasily, that you would ruin our chances to help the
Domanians?” Reed asked him. “I didn’t tag you as that petty.”
“Well, I am. Have you ever been stabbed in the head before, sir? It’s not
pleasant. It’s the worst way I’ve ever died.”
“You killed someone in cold blood,” Reed reminded him. “I would have shot
you cleanly if I could have, but the gun wouldn’t let me, so I improvised.”
“You tried to banish me back to Bungula, where the authorities likely would
have been waiting!” Vasily screamed.
“I’m sorry about that, but we need that shuttle to go retrieve those VIPs.
The mission isn’t over yet. Let us finish it. Help us finish it.”
“Nah, I’m done with that. I knew you would come here, so I didn’t come
alone.” Vasily slammed his palm against a button on the inside. The door to
the cockpit slid open. Someone was in there, tapping on the console, likely
running the pre-flight check. “How are we lookin’?” he called back.
“We’re just about ready to go.” The shuttle pilot turned around, which
showed Reed and Shasta that he was not one of theirs, but a hostage. “I just
need to run diagnostics on the hook that we’ll use to grab the pod. It’s
never been deployed before.”
“Hook?” Vasily questioned. “We don’t need the hook. We’re just gonna crash
into it. I have no interest in dropping the VIPs off on the planet. I just
want to prevent him from using them as leverage.”
“Hey, that’s not what I signed up for,” the shuttle pilot argued. “I thought
we were gonna save them. Some people on there aren’t even backed up.” He
tried to continue arguing, but couldn’t finish.
Vasily quickly swung his arm around to shoot the shuttle pilot dead, which
was just enough time for Reed to take out his own maser, and point it into
the shuttle. Vasily smirked at it. “You can’t shoot me, remember?”
“But I can shoot the junction box, which will disable the shuttle, and if I
aim it just right, it might even blow your body up.”
“You’re not that good ‘a shot,” Vasily contended.
“But I am.” Shasta lifted her weapon too. “Put your gun down, and step out
of the shuttle, Vas. We need it.”
“You’re not getting it.” Vasily looked over his shoulder. “Shoot the box for
all I care. I don’t need it to fly. This is just a bullet now. You’re the
one who needs a fully functioning shuttle to retrieve it.”
They heard a gunshot. Vasily seemed to be hit in the chest. They all looked
over to find Ajax behind them, walking up fast. He shot again, and again,
and again, and again. Vasily’s whole body shook like a cliché as he stumbled
backwards towards the cockpit. He fell to his back, and was struggling to
breathe. “You should have gone for the junction box.” He reached his hand up
and tapped on the console. The shuttle suddenly shot forward, through the
plasma barrier, and headed straight for the floating elevator pod.
