7
ORIENTING TOWARD UP
FOR THE FIRST time in her life, Mallory was grateful for her idiosyncratic history. She didn’t like dead bodies surrounding her, but she understood them. They were a familiar unpleasantness she could focus on entirely, while not worrying about the yawning abyss that surrounded her or the planet that held Eternity in orbit hanging overhead as if it were about to drop on her.
A body floated by, and Mallory flailed her arms instinctively as if she were underwater. “Did you say something about propulsion jets? Xan?”
Xan didn’t answer. Fear clogged Mallory’s throat as she realized that this time she could be the murder victim and he could just leave her out here.
“Xan!”
He still didn’t answer.
“Christ,” she said, and swallowed. She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to quell the nausea. When she opened them, information had appeared on her HUD.
“Say 1, 2, 3, or 4 to fire propulsion jets. Combos work.”
“This is the UI?” she asked. “Okay, try 1 and 2.” There was a gentle push at her shoulders and she tipped forward and looked down into the emptiness. As she did a slow forward roll, she tried firing 3 and 4 to get straight.
“There is no upside down,” she reminded herself, sweat beading on her forehead. Her breath was loud and fast and the only sound around her. “No matter what my brain is telling me. I can help them from any angle so long as I can get to them.”
Still, when she took a moment to orient herself to be on the same relative plane as the shuttle so that its roof and her head were both pointing the same direction, the nausea finally started to back off. Her lizard brain had decided she knew where “up” was after all.
“I really didn’t want to puke in here,” she said. “Although I don’t know who I’m talking to. Can you even hear me?”
The HUD lit up. “Yes.”
“So you’ll know when I’m in trouble?”
The initial response died, then repeated itself. “Yes.”
“But you aren’t going to talk to me,” she finalized.
Again, the previous response faded, and the HUD lit up again. “Busy.”
“Great,” she said. “Well, I’m going to talk. It keeps me sane. If you can hear me, then enjoy. If not, well, I can entertain myself.”
She focused on the bodies. To her count, there were three bodies close by. Could Infinity hold them all? Didn’t matter; that wasn’t her problem. Xan could figure out a plan for that. With jerky, slow movements, she fired the propulsion jets and made her way more or less toward the first body.
“You know, this was one of my biggest fears,” she said, her breath sounding very loud in her ears. “I saw the movie 2001 when I was ten, and I thought it was the cruelest thing in the world for the astronauts to not talk to each other during the spacewalks. I mean, now I get the movie; that aspect is scary for the viewer, not the astronauts, who are trained for this. But, Jesus, at the time I thought if I was on a spacewalk and no one could talk to me, I’d go out of my fucking mind.
“You’re lucky that the other things I’ve experienced in my life put a silent spacewalk way down the list of scary things. Otherwise, I’d be filling this spacesuit with puke.”
She neared a body in a tan business suit. He was a large, muscled white man. His arms were up as if warding off something, and terror was scrawled over his frozen features.
“Sorry, man,” Mallory said, and reached out to snag his lapel. “I got one. Now what?”
Now she had to figure out how to work the propulsion while managing the inertia of greater mass with another body. “This involves math,” she muttered as she and the body began spinning, the tether getting tangled around her. “This is one of those things I have to solve myself, right, Xan? You can’t take a moment to pull us in?”
She caught sight of Infinity. It had inched over to the damaged shuttle and Xan was working a grappling arm out to grab the mangled shuttle door. Then a much smaller rod below the tether inserted itself into a recess beside the door.
“I wish you could tell me how it’s going,” she said. “But it looks like you’ve got stuff under control.”
She started to propel herself toward Infinity, dragging the dead man behind her. “You know, after I dropped out of college I couldn’t even get a job doing crime scene cleanup. I worked for some private firms hired for that kind of thing, until the SBI found out. And dammit, I was good at it. I found clues that the pros missed, and I helped clean up a good deal of blood and shit and puke. I found all the perfect chemical concoctions to clean each bodily fluid. In hindsight, I probably could have been a very specific kind of social media star. The Grim Cleaner or something: ‘Hey Mallory’s Scrubbers, today’s stain is blood mixed with vomit. Make sure you don’t scrub it into your carpet fibers, or you’ll never get that smell out!’ ”
She and the load she dragged neared Infinity. She couldn’t see Xan inside it, but the ship loomed large next to the shuttle. Mallory looked through the windows of the shuttle and was startled to see people inside, floating as well, but looking a lot less frozen. Were they all unconscious?
She felt a tug and gave a yell of surprise as the dead man was wrenched away from her. Infinity had extended another arm and had taken control of the body, pulling it into some storage area underneath.
“All right, so that’s dead body storage, I guess,” she grumbled. “But why you can’t reach out and grab each of them I don’t even pretend to know.”
To be fair, the bodies were floating in every direction, and it would have taken Infinity a lot of fiddly effort to go after each one, while she was more maneuverable.
In theory, she thought, as she drifted upside down again. She righted herself and went searching for the next body. The problem was that inertia was carrying the bodies away from the shuttle, with nothing to slow them down. They’d drift that way forever until they got caught in a gravity well or hit a passing comet or starship. And Mallory had to hunt them all down before they got too far away.
Suddenly, more writing appeared on her HUD, a list of nine names in bright red script, including Jalo Kynsi, whose red name was crossed out. That must be the body she had just retrieved.
When she reoriented her head in space, the list of people rearranged itself. Every time she focused on another floating body, a new name appeared at the top of the list. “Oh, so that’s helpful. How do you know all this?” she asked. Xan, of course, didn’t answer.
Ambassador Kathleen Pilato. Billionaire tech mogul Jeremy Neander. Heiress Viv Brooks. Senator Sheryl Hayes. The public relations cleanup regarding these VIPs was going to be horrendous. Was Adrian up to the task, or was he going to focus only on getting rid of her and Xan?
She was really getting the hang of the propulsion jets and discovered that the tether to Infinity was spooling out or retracting as needed.
“All I need to do is keep it from getting tangled and not spool out too far,” she muttered. “I’m retrieving Sheryl Hayes now. Senator Hayes from California. Sorry, Senator.”
She was retrieving Ellen Klouman when she decided to tell a story to amuse herself.
“You know, Xan, I did the crime scene cleanup thing, but I did a lot of other jobs. Last year I was a bartender. That was a bad idea, considering how many people come to bars, but once I actually prevented a murder from happening. I was tending bar in a members-only lounge in Raleigh. A film studio had been filming there; Can’t Cheat, Can’t Defeat, I think the movie was called. It starred a rapper called Salty Fatts. He’s a big deal: a gay trans rapper who’s delving into acting. And he was like twenty-two when I met him.”
Infinity had taken Klouman’s body from her, and Xan didn’t respond. Mallory turned around and went for the next one.
“Our next dead one is called Christine. No last name. She reminds me of Salty Fatts. I think I recognize her name. Isn’t she a pop star or something? Wasn’t she, I mean.”
The Christine in question was dressed in flowing white linen, almost like a shroud. Definitely a rock star. Now a corpse.
“So Salty Fatts came into the bar,” she continued, as she snagged the linen with her glove and pulled the woman in, “and sat down. I remember he had on his leather jacket and he had salt tattooed on his right knuckles and fatt with two T’s on his left. He was by far the nicest person I met on that job. That night, he was really down and said he had to leave the shoot all of a sudden. He had a sick family member and no one else could take care of them. He was pissed and preparing to drive home to the mountains that night. I didn’t want him drinking and then driving curvy mountain roads, so I gave him coffee and let him talk at me. He was mostly talking about how his career was just starting to take off, his music, his videos, this film. He was really down.
“I asked him if there was anyone else who could help him and he just said no, he had no other family. So then the crew came in for drinks. Turns out their producer had bought memberships to the club just for the film. Eighteen lifetime memberships for a two-month shoot. So much stupid money.” She wrangled another deceased woman, Alex Kamachi, into the waiting robotic arm of the shuttle and headed back out.
“They’d heard that Salty had quit the movie, and they were pissed. We damn near had a bar fight, but I was able to stop it. I took Salty out the back door and told him to get into his car and start driving, and he listened.
“What was really weird is I didn’t get any of the feelings I get around a murder. It’s weird and hard to explain: Details around me are sharper. Colors are brighter. But that night a murder did happen on the set, and Salty’s stunt double was killed. Considering how much he looked like Salty, everyone assumed Salty had been the target for the murder. A few weeks later he sent me a card with a thousand bucks inside, thanking me for getting him out of there. I didn’t really save his life, but I did appreciate the tip.”
She paused, remembering. “I liked Salty. He kept talking about his grandmother and this vast expanse of land she had in the mountains where he was going to build her a mansion when he got enough money. He was really upset about Sean Tasden, the murder victim. I remember because Salty came back to town for a day to clear up some things with the shoot, and he dropped by and asked me to toast the guy at least three times with him. That was the last good memory I have of that job. Soon after, a murder did happen in the bar, and even though I had nothing to do with it, my proximity was enough to make my boss fire me.” She focused on the last name on the list: Terence McManus. He had floated the farthest, and she wasn’t sure if she could get to him unless she pulled the tether out as far as it could go.
She fired the propulsion jets and went after him, but she felt a jerk as the oxygen line stretched to its maximum distance. The slight sound of air hissing in her suit rose in pitch as it moved through a thinner and thinner hose. “So I moved again and got a job at the animal shelter, which allowed me time to write books so I could make some actual money.”
McManus’s body was just out of reach, and drifting away from her. “Can’t you give me any more room? Drift ten feet my direction? No?” She still had slack in her tether. She got an idea.
“Fire 1, 2, 3, 4 jets,” she said, and the pull became stronger. “Disconnect oxygen and power lines.”
Xan finally spoke, alarmed, “Wait, Mal, what are you—”
The cords released and Xan’s voice cut off.
The jets cut off as well, but she’d built up enough strain in the lines so that when they were released, she shot forward. The tether started to grow tight, but she got close enough to grab McManus’s pant leg.
“Got you!” she said.
Her helmet started to fog up, and she remembered that no new airflow would make the helmet humid. Also, it would run out of oxygen. She wondered how much oxygen she had in her helmet. Behind her, out of her reach, the decoupled oxygen hose floated, whipping around, expressing air into the void. Infinity seemed very far away.
But she had her tether, and her last corpse, and she could pull herself in. Admittedly, it was harder with a body to wrangle, as she couldn’t easily go hand over hand, but she could yank on the tether with one hand, start drifting toward the ship, adjust her grip, and then pull again.
It was slow, laborious work. Harder work than she’d thought she’d have to do in zero-G. Minutes crept by, and Mallory tried hard to keep her breathing low, even with the increased effort to pull herself in. Unfortunately, her lungs started to protest that they weren’t equipped to process waste products into good air.
“This may have been a bad idea,” she mumbled. Black blooms appeared in her vision; Infinity and the rest of space disappeared through the foggy faceplate.
She tried to hold on to the tether and the corpse, but consciousness started to leave her (for the second time that day, her mind told her in a faraway, irritated voice). Maybe she had enough momentum to make it to the ship.
Maybe.
HER STRANGLED GASP was very loud in her ears as air flowed into her suit again. She coughed mightily and took great, wheezing breaths. Hands were on her, fumbling with her helmet latches. Infinity’s floor pressed up against her, giving her a vertigo-tinged version of sea legs.
Her HUD flared to life and said her O levels were dangerously low.
The helmet finally came off, and she breathed in the air of Infinity. Beside her lay the corpse of McManus, who didn’t seem bothered by air or gravity.
“How does the ship make gravity, anyway?” she asked, her voice raspy.
Xan collapsed back against the wall and rubbed his face with his hands. “Fuck, you scared me. Why the hell did you disconnect your oxygen lines?”
She shrugged, finding the movement difficult while lying down in a spacesuit. “Seemed like the only way to get the last body. It was important to you. Besides, you said you’d keep watch.”
“Mallory, there’s only so much I can protect you from, and your own damn self is not one of those things! You’re going to have to make a good decision for yourself every once in a while!” he said, then got to his feet and stormed out of the room.
“I got all your bodies, and I don’t need your protection all the time!” she called after him. “Asking for it during a spacewalk isn’t too much to ask for, is it? Shit.” She sat up and tried to free herself from the suit but couldn’t reach the lines between her shoulder blades. She realized he’d linked her suit up again because it was probably faster than unlatching all of her helmet fasteners, but now she was stuck in the airlock.
“Uh, can I release the lines and my tethers by voice?” she asked, and felt them decouple and fall to the floor.
The spacewalk plus the oxygen depletion had her worn out and aching. She struggled to her feet and put her hand on the airlock wall, swaying slightly, until her head stopped swimming.
Xan’s bedroom was a shambles. The sheets were torn off the small bed; the few belongings he had were on the floor, many of them in the airlock. What happened here?
She turned in a circle, taking in the mess, remembering the tidy room before. Before the spacewalk. Before the airlock.
He’d opened the airlock before the pressure had stabilized, and the resulting decompression had destroyed the neatness of the room, sucking anything not nailed down toward the airlock. He really had been desperate to get to her if he hadn’t waited for the airlock to be safe to open. Mallory guessed they were both lucky his airlock wasn’t bigger.
She joined Xan on the flight deck.
Xan sat comfortably in the captain’s chair, watching the screen. Infinity was tethered to the other craft by three rods stretching between the shuttles.
“So, how did your half of the rescue go?” she asked.
He didn’t look at her. “Fine. Got it secured. Got the data from the ship. Now I’m just looking for a place to take us.”
“We’re not going back to Eternity?” she asked. There was a mixture of alarm and hope in her gut, and she wasn’t entirely sure which emotion she wanted to go with. “Where are we going, then?”
“No, we’re going back. I just need to figure out where to dock. Station security has closed off the main shuttle bay.”
“I thought they wanted to evacuate,” she said.
He shook his head. “Not yet. They’re caught between wanting people safely off the station and not wanting to let the murderer go. They’re shutting the main bay. But Stephanie let me know that the Gneiss have their own private shuttle bay that we can use since this is an emergency.”
“And the station security hasn’t shut this one down?” Mallory asked, frowning.
“I guess not,” he said irritably. “I am not going to argue with Stephanie to find reasons not to let us in.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Do we know what happened to the ship yet?” she asked, indicating the damaged shuttle on the screen.
“Nothing more than we knew before. There are still folks alive on the shuttle. We just need a place to take them. I think they have significant injuries, but the shuttle’s AI is damaged, and it can’t really report on human health, so it could only tell me so much.”
“Wait,” she asked, standing up and looking over his shoulder at the console as the ship slowly turned with its new burden. “If Eternity swatted that shuttle out of the sky, what makes you think she won’t do the same to us?”
“She won’t. Trust me,” Xan said cryptically.
“Trust you, just like that?” she replied. “When you won’t tell me how you know all this stuff or how you can read Infinity’s readouts?”
“You don’t trust me, but you practically begged me to send you into a frozen vacuum. You left your life in my hands and then nearly wasted it.”
“I got your bodies! I did what you asked!” she said, putting her hands on her hips.
He rounded on her, swiveling the chair. “Mallory, I thought you were dying out there. You lost both oxygen lines and your power line, which also cut off communication with me and the ship. I had no idea if you were alive or dead when I pulled you inside. You definitely didn’t have enough air to do that last retrieval. And you didn’t even check with me to see if it was a good idea.”
“I didn’t even know if you could hear me! You let me babble to myself for an hour out there without saying one word back! At one point I wondered if you were just trying to get rid of me in a clever way.”
His mouth fell open. “Are you seriously telling me that you thought I would kill you? Do you think I’m capable of that?”
He no longer looked angry; she’d hurt him deeply, and she didn’t know why. In my defense, he doesn’t tell me anything. How should I know what hurts him?
“You dropped me into a vacuum and then ignored me for an hour. I only volunteered because I trusted you to be my lifeline!”
“You disconnected that lifeline!”
“I’m using a metaphor, Xan. You gave me no information, no advice. Not even any company while I was floating out there, even after I told you how freaked out I was.”
“I can’t—” he started to say, and then stopped, a muscle twitching in his jaw. He turned back to the screen. “I can’t tell you. Not yet. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“When do you think—” she started, and then sucked in her breath.
On the screen, Eternity had swung into view. The station was a horror show, nothing like the calm, pleasing spheroid that Mallory had seen as she had approached Eternity for the first time. The station had grown pseudopods, giant tentacles as big as skyscrapers, which waved in space as if in distress. Its surface, previously shifting between a blue and pink iridescence, now appeared to be a hard, bio-metallic exterior going from black to dusky red to a sick yellow.
“She’s not happy,” Xan said grimly.
“Jesus fucking Christ, ya think?” Mallory said, standing to peer over his shoulder in frozen distress. “Do we even want to go back in there? What is wrong with her?”
Xan didn’t answer any of the questions, but instead powered Infinity’s engines to pick up speed toward the station. “We have to try. We’ve got injured people and a shuttle full of dead bodies. There’s not a lot of places we can go.”
Mallory got up, eyes still latched on the station, and put her hand on his shoulder. “Xan. Someone on this shuttle could be here to arrest you. We’re heading into what looks like—I don’t even know, but right now running into a burning building sounds safer. Is this really the best way to go?”
His shoulder went tense under her hand. “We’re in too deep. We can’t run now. You know that.”
She removed her hand and took a small step back. “Getting the hell out of this situation feels smart,” she said. “But I guess smart isn’t always the virtuous thing to do.”
“It’s not,” he agreed, sounding like he knew all too well. “At least there’s no mystery with these bodies. It’s pretty clear who killed all these people.”
Mallory looked thoughtfully at the station as they neared. “I don’t think Eternity is responsible for this, not fully. I think it all goes back to whoever killed Ren. That was the first thing in this chain of events.”
“That we know of,” he said. “Still, Earth isn’t going to look kindly on this. The first time they send a big diplomatic shuttle, and half the passengers die? This is going to get ugly.”
“And our diplomat sucks at his job,” Mallory said. “But it’s not like Earth can do much. Alien technology outstrips ours in every way.”
Xan muttered something under his breath.
“What’s that?” she asked, leaning over him again.
“Nothing,” he said.
She stepped away again, staring at the back of his head thoughtfully. She was pretty sure he had said, “Not every way.”
And goddammit, there was the familiar feeling. Her headache lifted and everything around her got sharper edges and brighter colors, and she felt a slight buzzing in her ears as she thought about Ren’s murder, who the suspects might be, and what pieces she had yet to uncover.
Motive wasn’t hard; she didn’t know anyone who’d liked Ren, not Xan, not Stephanie, not Adrian. Aside from being just plain insulting to the humans and implying he’d like to send them home, Ren had also been accused of interfering with Gneiss residential areas on the ship, restricting shuttle bay hours, and enacting prohibition on only one of the races aboard (the Silence, whose food and drink were legendary, although she’d never sampled anything), as well as several other complaints ranging from being petty and insulting to downright obstructing a sentient’s way of life aboard.
According to rumor, some of his fellow Gurudevs resented such an unpleasant person being a symbiont to such a powerful station and felt he should be replaced. Apparently, the three sentient stations within one jump of Eternity (named Omnipotent, Alpha, and Omega) all had welcoming hosts.
And no matter who had killed Ren, if Earth found out about the attack, they might send word to their military personnel to finish killing the station, if their military-affiliated passenger was one of the survivors.
She’d find out soon enough.