Jrill already awaited her as the elevator doors opened onto the command deck. First waved her over, asking for help.
“You’re la—” Jrill started to say, but cut herself off as First came fully into view. “What’s wrong? You look awful.”
“Thanks,” First replied. “The counter-grav’s busted on their tank, and I think I cracked a rib.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“A great big bowling ball came rolling down the hall. Can you carry our Fenax, please?”
Jrill palmed the top of the tank with one clawed hand and hauled it up seemingly without any effort at all, betraying her immense strength. First found herself grateful modern warfare was “civilized” enough to fight with bullets, beams, and ballistic missiles instead of muscle and bone, or humans would have been well and truly screwed when these people had come for Earth. Jrill, feeling their time crunch, dropped the Fenax tank roughly and unceremoniously into their socket at the center of the abandoned command cave.
“What, the captain didn’t stick around to go down with the ship?” First asked.
“They didn’t need much convincing to leave once word of Loritt’s announcement on the Monarch came through on the short-range.” Jrill shrugged. “Never thought I looked the part of an ecoterrorist.”
“You just scream threat in a more primal sense. I think their brains just fill in the gaps.” First lowered herself gently, cautiously into a chair, leaning away from her fractured rib to try to take some pressure off it.
“Your injury,” Jrill looked back at her with narrow red irises. “Life-threatening?”
“Takes a bit more than that to kill one of us,” First said. “Just hurts like hell. Don’t ask me to sing an opera for a few weeks.”
Jrill grunted approval. “Monarch already cast off moorings. We need to catch up. Fenax, prepare the ship for departure.”
“We will begin as soon as I’ve familiarized myself with the safety checklist.”
“Time is money,” Jrill barked. “Specifically, your share of the money if we don’t make formation on schedule. First, run a scan to confirm we’re the only people still on board.”
First spun around in her chair and dug through the icons and controls at her station until she found the passenger and crew manifest and ran a query on the location of everyone on both lists. It came back with only four hits.
“You, me, the jellyfish, and the crab,” First said with a smirk. “We’re golden.”
“Finally, some good news. Seal all hatches and airlocks. Cut us free from the All-Seals. The last thing we need is anybody getting brave and launching a boarding party to retake the ship at the final rakim.”
“All moorings and umbilicals cleared, Captain,” the Fenax said. Which was impressive considering they’d only just stopped spinning. “Outer doors secured. Ready to maneuver on docking thrusters until we clear minimum safe—”
“I really need you to strike that word from your vocabulary for the duration of this job,” Jrill cut in. “We’re running late and can’t afford to putter around on thrusters for a half larim. Spool up the mains and set them to quarter power. We’re leaving.”
“We risk damage to the docking installation,” the Fenax objected.
“We’re stealing both of their cruise liners,” First chuckled. “They won’t be needing it.”
“You’re not shuttling nervous business commuters between moons today, Fenax. This is your chance to cut loose and do some real flying,” Jrill taunted. “Take it.”
The Fenax went still in the carefully balanced swirl of gases and nutrients in their tank. One of their hanging tendrils twitched.
“Spooling up the mains. Setting at one-third power.”
First’s lips curled up at the edges. “Jellyfish has a spine after all.”
“That is invertophobic language, and I do not appreciate it,” the Fenax said with the utmost seriousness.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Just say you’re sorry. Otherwise, their union gets involved,” Jrill said.
“I’m sorry,” First said. “It won’t happen again, whatever it was.”
“On behalf of Fenax, I accept your apology, ramrod.”
“Okay now,” First said. “I don’t want to be picky, but that sounded like whatever you were just pissed about, except the opposite.”
“Why don’t you use your rigid digits to type a blog post about it?”
“Why don’t you take your creepy-ass tentacles and shove them up your—”
“Children!” Jrill interrupted. “We have work to do. Cruise ship to repossess? Giant payday to collect?”
“Sorry, boss,” First said.
“I will comply if it does,” the Fenax said.
“I’m not an ‘it’!” First shouted, then winced as her rib complained from the effort.
Jrill dug into her temples with the tips of two claws. “By Dar, I miss the navy. Are we getting under way or not?”
The Fenax twitched, whatever that meant. A few seconds later, the Matron reversed out of her slip and into free space as the radio squawked warnings, threats, and insults from the station’s control room until Jrill shut it off. Within a few minutes, they were in position behind Monarch and heading in convoy for their rendezvous with the Goes Where I’m Towed.
“Well done, everyone,” Jrill said over the com link. “Sheer, we’re in the clear. You can come up now.”
“I’d love to, boss,” Sheer’s voice answered. “Just one small problem.”
“Problem?”
“The door won’t open, and the compartment is still flooded with gamma.”
Jrill’s eyes snapped over to First, but she was already on top of it. “It’s in lockdown from the radiation alarm. Navigator, override the lockout and open the engine room door, please.”
“Aw, shucks. I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t do that, Firstname.”
“Why the hell not?” First fumed.
“For your protection, the lockdown is in place to prevent further contamination of the ship and can only be overridden by senior-level staff from the command cave.”
“But my friend is trapped inside that compartment!”
“Please enter the access code and hold out your eyestalk for biometric authentication.”
“I don’t have one of those.”
“Sheer,” Jrill asked, “how long?”
“You mean how long until I’m cooked inside my own shell? Not long. Quarter larim?”
“Can you disable the door manually in that time?”
“It would take longer than that just to torch through the outer casing.”
Jrill looked at First again. “Can you hack the biometrics or reprogram the lockout protocols?”
“If I had a couple of hours.” First shook her head. “Not in twenty minutes. Hang on, there’s got to be something…” First pulled up a ship’s schematic and scrolled through to the engine room, looking for a solution.
“There.” She stabbed a finger at the screen. “There’s an airlock two levels down. We can swing the Goes Where I’m Towed around and dock with it.”
Jrill glanced over the diagram. “That’s a cargo airlock, not standard size. Even at maximum expansion, the All-Seal on the Towed is too small to cover the opening.”
“I can jump it,” Sheer said. “Open the cargo bay and scoop me up.”
Everyone froze.
“Are you serious?” First asked.
“You know I can survive in vacuum,” Sheer said. “You’ve seen me do it.”
“Yeah, but if you miss, or if the Towed doesn’t catch you, you’ll be drifting. The sun will cook you before they can swing back around and spot you to make another grab.”
“I’ll take it over being boiled alive in a radiation bath. Besides, Fenax flies Towed like it’s part of their body.”
“But our Fenax isn’t flying it, remember?” First said. “The newbie Fenax is because they’re the most inexperienced and pulled the easiest gig.”
The line went quiet for a few seconds. “I really wish you hadn’t reminded me of that,” Sheer said at last. “Nothing for it. Get them to turn around.”
“This is a bad—”
“Don’t say it,” Sheer said. “Let me know when we’re ready. I’m going to look for some cable or rope or something to use as a tether.” The link cut off.
“Fenax,” Jrill said, “we’ll need to cut thrust and coast so Towed has a clear path behind us. First, get that airlock unlocked. I’ll get Loritt up to speed on the plan.”
They got the whole harebrained scheme set up and ironed out with three minutes to spare. First sat by with her finger hovering over the purge button for the cargo airlock that would very soon spit Sheer out the back of the ship at several dozen meters per second.
Now that she thought about it, spit was wrong by a letter …
“Thrust to zero. We’re ballistic,” the Fenax said. “Goes Where I’m Towed is on final approach. Entering recovery window in twelve, eleven, ten…”
“Shit!” First said as she hurriedly recalculated her time to trigger the airlock for the base twelve math the Fenax used instead of her own base ten. Rookie mistake. Like transposing feet for meters. Who did that?
“Nine. Eight.”
Five was right out.
“Seven.”
Six, obviously the answer was six.
“Six.”
“Showtime, Sheer!” First stabbed the button. At the Matron’s aft end, electric servos came to life and spun screw jacks under immense torque, dragging the airlock doors open with impressive speed. First hadn’t cycled the air out of the lockout for two reasons. One, she wanted Sheer to be able to pull in oxygen until the last conceivable moment, so she’d last as long as possible in vacuum. Two, the decompressing air would give her a powerful boost away from the ship and toward salvation.
Instantly, the camera feed from the airlock went white as the moisture in the escaping air condensed into a thick fog, then froze into snow. Somewhere inside it, Sheer tumbled into free space, protected only by her thick shell.
“Five. Four.”
First switched to an external camera feed and furiously searched for signs of Sheer. The Ish hadn’t been able to find any cable or rope long enough to matter during her brief search but had managed to find and fix several survival flashers to her carapace. As the frozen fog cleared, an impossibly small, blinking object resolved into existence.
“I’ve got eyes on her!” First blurted out.
“Three.”
“Towed, she’s drifting left,” First said.
“Two.”
“Fuck! Correction, adjust right. Your right! My left!”
“One.”
From the only available camera angle, the tiny point of blinking light disappeared underneath the silhouette cast by the Goes Where I’m Towed against the churning colors of the nebula.
“Zero,” the Fenax announced. “Initial recovery window has closed.”
“Towed, do you have her?” Jrill demanded, but she was met with static. “Towed? Status report?”
First’s stomach did a triple salchow as the silence stretched out to infinity. Had she screwed up the release point conversion after all? Did she just kill a friend?
Long, torturous rakims later, the answer came.
“Package received,” the junior-most Fenax said from the Towed’s command cave. “Repressurizing the cargo bay.”
First melted into her chair like a Madame Tussaud’s statue in a kiln.
“First,” Jrill said quietly. “There’s a reason sailors say port or starboard to indicate direction instead of left or right.”
“Well, I’m not a sailor, am I?”
“You are now.” Jrill settled back into her own chair with a satisfied exhalation. “Like it or not.”
No one commented on the fresh new claw marks on Jrill’s armrests.