Kudzu, Chapter 32

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 32

 

 

Susan was glad there were no video feeds. She was still angry, and embarrassed — and a host of other things that she didn’t want to think about — after Amelia’s dressing down, and she sure as hell didn’t need anyone looking at her. Not when she couldn’t control what her face might do.

It was frustrating. Maddening. Susan knew herself well enough to understand why. She was a multitasking genius, able to juggle complex tasks without dropping a stitch, to mix a metaphor. Unfortunately, her mental acuity didn’t extend to the emotional realm, and situations that called for simultaneous contradictory emotions left her feeling like she was flailing stupidly in a failed attempt to be a real human.

The problem, of course, was that Amelia was right. Right now, the past didn’t matter. They’d all made mistakes, they’d all been stupid, and selfish, and a dozen other things besides. All that mattered now was the task at hand, and each of them had to get over themselves enough to work with the others. There was no space for error, and that meant there was no space for personal feelings or enmities.

They had a plan. If they could pull it off, they might survive. That’s what mattered, and each of them had their role, even if hers was mind-numbingly boring.

And yet, it felt like something was missing.

On the speaker on the control panel, Tharp’s voice. Nothing coherent, just the sound of a man straining to lift above his weight.

“Lift with your knees,” Jaworsky said, “not your back.”

A red light blinked on the console, and a message warning that Spoke 2:2 had been uncoupled flashed on the monitor.

Susan hesitated, wondering if anyone wanted to hear her voice, after… but she was supposed to put everything aside, so they should… Fuck it. She could second-guess herself all day. “Good job, everyone,” she said. “The system says you successfully detached the spoke.”

Jaworsky grunted something neanderthal and incoherent, and Susan cringed.

But, “Thanks,” Tharp said, and Susan let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“Let’s do four next,” Jaworsky said. “That’s the one on the opposite side, Tharp. After that, come back in so we can refill your tanks.”

“Yeah, alright. On my way.”

“I got a question,” Susan said. “When we detach all the rings from the hub, how’re we gonna fly this thing?”

“You know the airlock behind the docking bay?”

“Yeah.”

“It only takes up half the space. The other half is the cockpit from the original launch. None of the luxuries of yer fancy bridge, but it’s got everything we need.”

“Huh,” Susan said. “I never heard of it.”

“That’s ’cause they mothballed it once the ship was finished. Same reason it’s so hard to detach the rings — you don’t want some lone lunatic to be able to fuck up the ship and kill everyone.”

“When you say ‘mothballed’…”

“Locked up and disabled— Fuck.”

Jaworsky took a deep breath, let it out.

“Susan,” he said, “meet me at the airlock. Amelia, you too. Tharp, you keep on to the next spoke. Give a shout when you’re near. Fuck. No, there’s not enough time.”

“There’s a file on the server,” Amelia said. “Emergency Control System Procedures or something like that. I wasn’t able to get into it, but maybe you can.”

“Yeah, good,” Susan said. “I’m on it.”

Finally. Something useful to do. Susan jacked her mobile into the pilot’s console and took control, slaved her more powerful personal server to it, and started a multithreaded crack on the file system.

She grinned. This was a numbers game. No messy politics, or hurt feelings, or moral gray spaces. Just numbers, fingers on a keyboard, and a dance of lights. No ambiguity.

This she could do.

~

Michael and Colleen helped each other out of their space suits — or what was left of them.

It only took a pinhole to compromise the integrity of the suits. They had been built to withstand a certain amount of abuse, and to be able to provide at least some limited regional isolation in case of punctures. As long as the helmet remained intact, the unfortunate spacefarer who suffered such damage had a reasonable chance of getting to the safe side of an airlock before total decompression.

Of course, they had lost both their helmets and their gloves, and in Colleen’s case, her boots as well, so the fact that their suits were compromised enough to fill entirely with water was really beside the point.

Colleen kicked the sopping heap that had been her space suit. It spilled across the moss-covered kudzu, glittering silver in the green luminescence of the lamp leaves, and three cats rushed to investigate. They circled it suspiciously. One batted at a sleeve with one paw, then hissed and arched its back as the sleeve flopped over.

Colleen laughed, and when Michael turned his attention away from the cats’ antics to look at her, he found himself staring as she pulled her t-shirt up over her head.

“What?” she said. “Our clothes are wet. I don’t want to survive a waterfall just to catch my death.” She unbuttoned her pants, stopped to press her fingers between her breasts. The area was red, and just starting to bruise. “This is going to be ugly.”

“I don’t know if ugly is the right word,” Michael said.

“Tomorrow I’ll be purple, from head to foot.” She peeled her pants off, then turned slowly. “Do you see any other bruises?”

Michael found himself suddenly very warm. “Your ribs, under your left breast,” he said. “Your hip, and thigh. There’s a really nasty one on your right shoulder. And, uh, your…”

Still facing away from him, Colleen stepped out of her panties.

“My what?”

“Left buttock.”

“Ass.” She turned to face him, and she was beautiful, in her damaged, crazy way. “Sometimes surviving certain death leaves you cold. Empty. Like Death made a mistake. Like you’d died, but they forgot to turn out the lights. Other times, there’s nothing like cheating Death to make you live again.”

Colleen looked down at herself. There was a bruise on her inner thigh, just above her knee. She touched it. “Kiss it,” she said. “Make it better. Make everything better.”

“I don’t think…” it would be a good idea. But she lay back in the soft green moss and spread her legs, and then, Michael reflected, as he kissed his way up her thighs, he wasn’t thinking much at all.

Colleen twined her fingers into his dreads and pulled him against her, mouth hard against her cunt, so close that every breath tasted of her. His hands cupped her ass, lifting her toward him, opening her, and she came, silently, faster than any woman he’d ever been with (though not, he mused, faster than several men).

When the tremors that shook her belly subsided, she released her grip, and Michael pulled his clothes off as fast as he could.

Colleen reached for his cock — which needed no coaxing, really — as he lowered himself over her, but when he tried to kiss her, she turned her head and pushed him away. One hand against his chest, her foot against his hip, rolling him off her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked at him with an unreadable expression, then rolled over onto her stomach and spread her legs.

“Shut up,” she suggested, “and fuck me, already.”

~

The new bridge was a problem. Or old bridge. Whatever. It was a problem. Amelia’s tail curled as she considered it.

It wasn’t just how cramped everything was. Space for six, suited, and the equipment. Six humans, that was. None of it was built to raccoon scale, so not only didn’t she have a seat that fit her securely, but she had no way get around the control panel without risking floating off — and then getting thrown around the room, and probably killed, on impact.

They had finished detaching the rings — or at least, the first three. That should be enough to survive a crash landing, as long as they didn’t strike a satellite or something, hidden under the foliage.

And with time to spare, in theory. They had a three hour window before they had to get the ship moving back toward the kudzu. The problem was, with their limited fuel, they had to get the ship’s trajectory perfect from the outset, or they were screwed. Every second of burn counted, because there were no second chances. If she lost her grip, if she slipped, the ship wouldn’t hit dead-on the kudzu ball’s axis.

And if they aimed wrong — if she aimed wrong — they’d hit the fast-spinning side, and after a quick mangling, what was left of the OPEV Beagle would be thrown off into space.

Jaworsky touched the tip of her snout.

“Why the long face?” he asked.

Ordinarily she’d have snapped at his finger, but the realization of what she had to say was crushing.

“I can’t do this.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“I mean, I need to be able to reach this keypad and that joystick at pretty much the same time. On the bridge, I just ran fast. We’ve got no gravity here. If I do what I was doing there, I’ll just fly off and bounce off the ceiling.”

“Maybe Susan could do it?” Tharp suggested. “She’s smart and quick.”

“I can give it a try,” Susan said.

“No. This is too precise, and too critical. We screw up and we die.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Susan snapped.

“No. Just… It’s not that I don’t think you can learn this, but I had hundreds of hours on a simulator before I ever touched the controls, and even then, if I didn’t have the experience of getting us through the asteroid belt, I wouldn’t be able to do this.”

“Ah, hell,” Jaworsky said.

Amelia felt his big hand grip the scruff of her neck as he swung himself into the pilot’s chair. He shifted his hold, grasping her around the torso behind her shoulders, and held her over the controls.

“Right. So what’s first?”

“This isn’t going to work.”

“I wish I had a camera,” Susan said.

“You give the orders,” Jaworsky said. “Left, right, top, back, middle. Something like that.”

“You’re not going to react fast enough,” Amelia said.

“We got three hours to practice,” Jaworsky said.

“And how are you going to keep me from flying out of your hands on impact?”

Jaworsky chuckled. “Think about it,” he said.

“I…”

“Oh,” Susan said.

Of course. She didn’t need to be at the controls when they hit the kudzu; all the fuel would be spent hours before. There would be ten minutes of intense piloting, followed by twelve hours of waiting. And praying.

“Okay,” Amelia said, “let’s get started.”

End of Book IV

Kudzu, Chapter 31

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 31

Eric Tharp supposed there wasn’t much point mentioning that none of this was in his job description. Tromping around the exterior of a spaceship was about as far from analyzing core samples as you could get.

One of the four spokes that connected the second ring to the hull rose up in front of him, as massive and imposing as the Washington Monument. And the task before him seemed impossible.

It all made sense when Jaworsky explained it. The Beagle had been constructed on Earth, and then launched into space. It hadn’t looked anything like it currently did now, not even counting the damage from the explosion. In space, aerodynamics don’t matter. But getting it into space was a different story.

The Beagle had started out with all its rings connected to each other, collected toward the rear of the ship. Several layers of thin material covered the rings, extending on an angle to about midway up the hull. This protected the rings during takeoff, keeping them from breaking off or being otherwise damaged. Once in orbit, the protective covering unfurled into the vast solar collectors, and the rings were moved to their proper positions.

In preparation for ramming the kudzu, they needed to reverse this process. Standing at the base of the second ring, Tharp was struck by the immensity of the project.

“This is hopeless,” he said. “It’s like trying to move the Sphinx with a pair of tweezers.”

“Piece of cake,” Jaworsky said. “All you need is to put the tweezers on the end of a big enough lever.”

“We don’t have a big lever.”

“Yeah? So we’ll use a pulley.”

Tharp could imagine Jaworsky on the other side of the radio–a shrug and a wise-ass grin preceding the words. It wasn’t helpful.

“Look, Tharp,” Jaworsky continued, “we don’t actually need to move the rings. All we need to do is loosen them. When we hit the plant, the rings’ll slide down the hull like they’re supposed to. If we don’t get them loose, they’ll do that anyway, but they’ll peel the hull apart in the process. It’s really not that big a job. It just looks big.”

It was really a twelve person job: someone in each coon-hole dealt with detaching all the systems that constituted the interface between the main ship and the ring. Four more people on each spoke–two to detach the spoke internally, and two to detach the spoke externally. The clamps were paired, interlocking, so there had to be one person on each side of the hull to detach any clamp pair.

Jaworsky had spoken in small words, like he was talking to a child. Tharp had bit back a knee-jerk response and listened; after all, two doctorates or not, he really didn’t know this stuff.

In a perfect world, Jaworsky explained, the four raccoons would get their work done first, and then monitor the systems, and then the eight humans would synchronize their actions. The ring would detach from the hull, and then robot drones would move the ring to its new location.

In the real world, they would be doing the job in half-spoke intervals. Which made the last spoke particularly dangerous.

“I’m ready,” Amelia said.

“‘Kay,” Jaworsky said. “I will be in about… now. What about you, Tharp?”

“Almost there.”

Tharp edged around the curve of the spoke. He saw an indentation in the spoke, big enough for two of Jaworsky to fit, or three of himself. It was painted red.

“You said starboard, right?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Which side is that?”

“Very funny. You’ll see a lever. You’re going to pull it until you feel a click, and then twist counterclockwise.”

“Widdershins,” Amelia said.

“Fuck are you talking about, ‘Melia? No, don’t answer. I don’t want to know. Tharp, got that? Lift until it clicks, then twist it. You’ll feel it snap into a locked open position. At that point, we go to the other side.”

“Yeah, all right.”

At Jaworsky’s word, he started to pull. Damn, this thing was heavy. Well, not heavy, but might as well be. He grunted with the effort of it.

“Hold on,” Jaworsky said. “You got yourself tethered to the hull? You want to do that, in case you lose your grip. You don’t wanna go throwing yourself out into space, do you?”

“Oh, right. Thanks.” Tharp said. “Give me a minute.”

~

Stupid. Jaworsky fumed at himself. Of course Tharp wouldn’t know basic spacewalking safety procedures. As long as he was pretending to be in charge, he needed to remember not just people’s strengths, but also their weaknesses. Any forgotten detail could mean someone’s life.

“You had to go and tell him.” Susan’s voice interrupted Jaworsky’s thoughts, and Jaworsky didn’t need to see Tharp to feel him wince.

“Susan—” Shut the fuck up, he was going to say, but Amelia cut him off.

“Susan, you and me, private channel.”

“Hey, I was just—”

“Now.”

Just as well. Much as Jaworsky hated to admit it, he and Susan were assholes cut from the same cloth, and he was just as likely to set off a shitstorm as calm a situation, butting heads with her.

Susan and Amelia came back online with an “I’m sorry,” and Tharp’s “No offense taken” was ungrudging, if not entirely convincing.

“We all ready to get back to work?” Jaworsky asked. “Good. Then, on my count…”

~

Colleen stared at the thing as it watched the water, perfectly motionless but for the tip of its tail, which twitched from side to side.

“Kuh,” she said, because that’s all that would come out.

Michael sat up beside her, shrugged.

“Well, why the hell not?” he said. “We’re inside a giant plant. In space. With waterfalls, and giant goldfish, and bees.”

“Bees? What bees?”

Michael showed her his hand; three red welts marked his palm, and another decorated the underside of his index finger. One of them still sported a stinger.

“Yeah, bees. That’s why I fell. I think I used a beehive as a handhold. So, yeah, why not this, too? Makes about as much sense as everything else.”

“But, cats?”

“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m allergic to the things. They must be part of your subconscious. I certainly didn’t dream them up.”

“Do they have subconsciouses in the afterlife?”

Colleen lifted herself up on her elbows. Water poured down her suit and seeped into the moss. The rip was about two centimeters long, right over her sternum.

“I don’t remember going through a long tunnel,” Michael said. “Or, well, okay: there was a long tunnel. But no bright light or dead parents or any of that stuff. Besides, aren’t all our earthly pains and worries supposed to ease?”

“I don’t think you can call this ‘earthly.'”

Michael wiped his face, wincing. His hand came away bloody. He wiped it on the moss. The cat came to investigate.

No, it was a different cat. The other was entirely black; this one had a spot of white on its chest. It licked at the smeared blood.

“I’m pretty sure if we were in Heaven, there wouldn’t be any blood. And my fingers wouldn’t be all pruned. And there wouldn’t be any damned cats.”

“Who said anything about Heaven?” Colleen said.

“Well, I’m going to Heaven, so we can’t be dead. It’s more likely we’re all still in cryo, and this is some sort of shared dream.”

“That’s not possible. None of the studies have shown any correlation of dream-states between people in stasis. Even if they were physically touching.” Colleen winced as she twisted to reach the sealing seam of her suit. “Fuck. I think I broke a rib. Can you help me with this thing?”

Michael rolled over onto his hands and knees, and pushed himself to his feet. He extended a hand.

“Yeah, sure. None of the subjects were under for as long as we were. Or are.”

“I remember some of my cryo-dreams,” Colleen said. “None of them were like this.”

In her dreams, Henry was dying. Always dying, but never quite dead. “I forgive you,” he said. He always said, caught in a hideous loop, over and over, his lips forming words that his eyes didn’t mean.

Kudzu, Chapter 30

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 30

 

When all was said and done, Amelia managed to get them a generous three-and-a-half days to break the ship. They were still moving away from the kudzu ball, but slow enough that a concentrated burn of their remaining fuel would push them back in. She explained it all to him–something about engines damaged in the escape producing asymmetric thrust making maneuvering difficult, gravitational fields, blah, blah, blah. Jaworsky didn’t understand the details, and didn’t give a fuck. All he cared about was having enough time to get the work done. And Amelia had given him that.

And she was a good worker, down in the bowels of the ship. She brought the same attention to detail to her work as she did to her piloting. Slim could learn a few things from her.

Fuck.

It always came back to that. All the other survivors had lost the most important people to them in the explosion. Well, not the Ash-hole and Susan. They were good at not having friends. But Michael, Colleen, and Tharp had all lost lovers, spouses. And Amelia had lost her human partner–fuck, who had it been? Matt? No, Jenny.

Jesus, he’d never even offered his sympathies.

All of the maintenance and engineering crew had been human-raccoon pairs. They’d gone through training together for a year before the mission to make sure they worked well together.

Losing Slim was like losing your best drinking buddy and your dog at the same time. And fuck if that wasn’t racist as fuck. Or speciesist. Or whatever the fuck they called it.

Jaworsky wiped something out of his eye. His hand came away wet.

Fucking air quality had gone to shit since the accident.

“Hey boss.” Amelia’s voice chittered in his ear. “I’ve got the panel open over here. Just give me the word.”

“Yeah.” Jaworsky’s voice cracked. “Yeah, okay. I’m in on this side, too. On the count of three…”

~

Captain’s Log. Day 3 after arrival in Earth orbit.

This is the first chance I’ve had to update since our first ill-fated attempt to dock with the anomaly, which Susan has started calling the Killer Weed.

Ash Hendriksson and Slim, the raccoon, are dead. Colleen Byrne and Michael Cobbs were within the Killer Weed, within the anomaly, when we were forced to break away from it. They are also most likely dead. It’s been a day and a half, and they only had maybe three hours of oxygen.

It is my fault they are dead. The record needs to show that. I need to say it now, before I chicken out. I don’t know what other choices I could have made, but my decisions led to their deaths.

Earl Jaworsky has seized control of the ship, with the full support of the others. I don’t blame them. To tell the truth, it’s a relief. Let someone else take responsibility for our deaths.

The plan now is to dismantle the ship and then ram the anomaly. It’s the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard, but the only other option is to sit in space until we rot, or fall out of orbit.

~

Colleen’s mind collected and collated the stages of death automatically, rendering it in a concise outline form.

Stage 1: I’m going to die: The first time you know you’re going to die is that interminably long half-second that you hang, suspended in time, over the crest of the falls, realizing just how far you’re about to fall, and seeing for the first time exactly what sort of road you have ahead of you.

Stage 2: We made it!: In this stage, you have plunged deep into a roiling pool, had your face rubbed against slimy kudzu roots, and popped up to the surface, gasping for air. Objectively, this stage far exceeds Stage 1 in duration. Subjectively, the inverse is true.

Stage 3: I’m going to die, again: You are swept into a rapids of whitewater rushing over and through a lattice of thick, water-smoothed kudzu trunks. You have gotten caught up on vegetation on several occasions, each of which leaves you bruised and bleeding, and with more water in your sinuses. It is in this stage that Michael breaks his nose against a protruding branch, and splits his lip, and that you sprain your wrist, and possibly break a rib or two.

Stage 4: Ow: The river spills you into another wide, placid lake. Properly speaking, this stage should be called We made it, again! But you hurt too much, and are too exhausted from the efforts of the prior stage, to take any great pleasure in the fact. If you were religious, perhaps you would call this stage, Oh God, can’t we just get this over with already? Because, ow.

Stage 5: So, there is an afterlife: In this stage, you have gotten your breath back, enough to notice that this lake is substantially different from the previous one. The ceiling is a cavernous dome, and you can see in the distance what passes for a shoreline; there is a gradual lightening of the water as it grows more shallow, and then, at the edge of that, moss-covered kudzu trunks form a gentle bank rising out of the water.

It is an easy enough swim that, or would be if your suits hadn’t become terribly heavy; the tough fabric must have torn in the rapids, and taken in water. But even as exhausted as you and Michael are, even with the waterlogged suits, the water is calm, and you manage to make it to shore, to crawl out of the water to collapse onto the soft, clean moss.

You reach out to take Michael’s hand, and are just about to name this stage something triumphant and transcendental and even existential, when something soft and dark brushes up against your ear. The breath catches in your throat with a squeak, and you jerk away as you turn your head.

The thing stares at you with slitted eyes and butts its whiskered nose against your forehead. Then, black question-mark tail held high, it turns and struts to the lake’s edge, where it sits with one paw raised, staring into the water. And waits.

 

Kudzu, Chapter 29

Tags

book 4, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 29

At a certain point, Colleen no longer needed to do more than tread water; the current picked up and moved them fast enough that she felt safe conserving her strength for whatever came next.

The massive fishes continued to investigate her, but so far, none had tried to take a nibble. Some of that might have been her space suit. She couldn’t imagine the puncture-resistant reinforced polyfiber would be particularly tasty. Mostly, she worried about Michael’s hands.

He was still unconscious, and while she was able to keep his head above water, there was nothing she could do about his dangling arms.

It was impossible to gauge the size of the lake. Walls rose from the waters, she was certain, but for the most part, the curvature of the chamber occluded them.

For her first month on the Beagle, this sort of inverted horizon had really thrown her off balance. She kept walking into things, misjudging distances. Henry had teased her mercilessly. She had gotten used to it, though, gotten used to the ceiling being the horizon line that everything disappeared behind, and not the floor.

But being used to it didn’t help her see around corners. Now, as the current picked up, it became obvious the walls were getting closer. They were approaching the far side of the lake.

There was a noise, a rumbling, rushing sound that grew as she came closer to the walls. The current moved faster. The previously placid surface of the lake became choppy with little wavelets.

“Shit.” Another waterfall.

They’d survived the last one because of the low gravity, but who knew how far this one would go, or what the gravity would be at the bottom.

Not gravity, Henry would have said — had said, over dinner in the mess hall once, maybe six months before the accident — because he was a stickler for these things. It’s centrifugal force, and operates on completely different principles.

Bill had rolled his eyes, laughing silently. Winked at her.

That night, while Henry was on shift, Bill explained gravity.

“Aristotle knew the truth of it,” he said. “Everything in the universe has an essential nature, and it is the nature of things to seek their natural place. It’s the nature of a rock, for example, to want to be as close to the center of the earth as possible, while fire reaches for the moon.”

His lips were at her ear, his hands pushing her pants down over her hips. His cock hard against her. She leaned forward and reached to open herself for him.

“Bodies are attracted to bodies of like nature,” he said, slipping deep inside her. She pushed back against him. “Everything that is, is set in motion by bodies seeking their natural place. The place where they fit. And the motion of the heavens is a reflection of bodies in motion.”

What was it about him? She didn’t even like him. Even now, the thought of him…

Michael groaned, spat water. Started to thrash.

“Michael! Michael, stop! I’ve got you. You’re not drowning.”

He didn’t hear her, or in his panic he didn’t understand. He twisted in her arms, and Colleen went under. His elbow caught her in the solar plexus, and all her air went out of her in one great bubble. She gasped, involuntarily. Cold water hit her lungs.

She let go, pushed herself away from him. Coughed and retched as she surfaced.

Michael was still floundering.

Colleen had lost hold of the loop of rope holding them together. Not good. If got caught up on anything, in this current, they could drown. They were moving faster — even with everything else going on, she could tell — and that meant it wouldn’t be long before they’d be tumbling through treacherous waters again. The best thing she could do for Michael right now was gather the rope.

Eventually, Michael would stop thrashing. As soon as he stopped panicking, he’d realize their suits gave them a little bit of buoyancy. The only problem was that the air reserves in the back of the suit were bigger than those in the front, so they naturally tipped face-forward into the water.

The sound of rushing water was loud now. Colleen had almost gathered all of the rope up. Tugging on it pulled her closer to Michael.

Michael finally stopped waving his arms around like an idiot.

“Hey,” he said, “I’m not drowning.”

Colleen had just enough time to register the irony.

And then all there was, was water. No direction, no up or down. Hard and urgent as a lover’s lies, the current’s enthusiasm caught them up and flung them over the edge, to tumble, dizzy and battered, into an uncertain future.

~

Jaworsky leaned over the conference room table, peering into the holographic blueprints. Frowning. Across the table, face shimmering through the holographic image, Susan sat with a touchpad computer. She watched him with hopeful eyes. Tharp slouched sullenly in the chair at the head of the table, ice pack held to his face.

Jaworsky stuck his hand into the hologram, pointing.

“Can we take a closer look over here?”

“Sure.” Susan poked at her mobile and the image hovering over the table shifted, expanded.

“A little more… hell, just bring up that conduit there so we can see it good. Yeah.” He tapped his finger on it, or tried to; it was air and light, and the gesture lost its impact.

This is why I’d make a crappy captain, he thought. Put me in charge for fifteen minutes and I’m already embarrassing myself.

He sank into his chair. The cushions sighed under him. A far cry from the plastic benches and folding chairs the working class got.

“All right. So the deal is, all that stuff we spent a month doing to get the ship running after the accident? We have to undo that shit in… How long do we have, ‘Melia?”

Amelia’s voice crackled over the speaker. “I don’t know. It depends on how we spend our fuel. I can time it the way you said, but if I screw up, or if anything goes wrong, we might end up floating out here, just out of reach.”

“You said before we have enough fuel to get back.”

“I said we had just enough fuel to get back. That’s assuming we headed back using one long burn, with a short burn to slow us down for docking. I’ve been reading the specifications on the engines. Each time we fire one up, it uses thirty liters of fuel just to spin up. There are twenty-four engines, so starting them uses seven-hundred twenty liters. That’s fuel that isn’t providing propulsion.”

“I see. What if we use really short burns?”

“Well, that’s the other thing. Seems this model doesn’t reliably start if fuel goes below a certain threshold.”

“Those cheep, fucking bast… How much time do we have if we play it safe?”

“Six hours. Maybe eight, at the most.”

Jaworsky shook his head. “Not enough time. We need at least a day just for the ring to spin down once we get the motors halted. We’re going to have to do the approach in two burns.”

“Well, that’ll get us there, for sure. The deceleration is going to suck, though.”

“It’ll suck more if we get there with the rings still rotating. That’ll just tear us apart. So, yeah. What can you give us?”

“I dunno. Two and a half days? Maybe more, maybe less. The engines aren’t real efficient, or real precise, when they’re running this low. I’ll be flying by feel as much as by instruments.”

“Yeah. So here’s the other half of the problem. That fucker there, that conduit? Half of what we gotta do is in there. Problem is, there’s only one person on this ship can fit.”

“What do you mean?” Tharp asked. “Oh. Right.”

Confused, Susan glanced back forth between Tharp and Jaworsky.

“It’s a coon-hole,” Jaworsky said. “Just big enough to fit a raccoon with a tool belt. Whole ship’s filled with them.”

“What?” Susan zoomed in on the conduit some more. “That’s crazy! Who the fuck would design a ship—”

“There were some funding issues,” Tharp said. “It started with international politics and went south from there. Then the GMO corporations got involved. They wanted to prove their product was safe and stable, so they funded the project as long as it was built to ensure that their product was indispensible.”

“Their product?” Amelia’s voice held daggers.

“You. Slim. The other raccoons.” Tharp rubbed his forehead. “Cheap, subsidized labor. Low maintenance cost. Non-union, and not recognized as persons in any nation. Good for low-to-medium skilled, high-risk positions. That’s all straight from their whitepaper.”

“When were you going to tell us? When were any of you going to tell me?”

“Never. There were only three of us on board who ever saw that—Captain Vasquez, Jerisen, and me–and after we met you, we knew there was more to you than that. We knew you were people, and we swore we’d always treat you just like anyone else.”

“Enough,” Jaworsky said. “We don’t have time for drama, or theory, or grief counseling, or even good fucking manners. We have a spaceship to break. And Amelia, I’m going to need you to do Slim’s job.”

“Who’s going to pilot the ship?”

“Susan. She’s smart, she knows how to work things with buttons and dials, and she’s good at describing shit. You’ll be in the coon-hole, describing to me what you see, and doing what I tell you. At the same time, Susan’s going to be coming to you for instruction. Got it?”

“You want me to get you more bandages?” Tharp asked.

“No. I’m going to need you on the outside. There’s some critical stuff that has to happen out there at the same time we’re working in here.”

“Great. I can’t wait.”