Ditz and Sparks laughed at each other. They were high as kites, naked as jaybirds, and felt grand.
“Man,” Sparks said. “I missed this. I missed you, man.”
“Aw. I missed you too,” Ditz said, and only felt a little bit bad. He thought for a second, maybe he wouldn’t raise the alarm, maybe he’d just stay and go out with a bang. He laughed again at the double something, the word “bang” because that could mean an explosion or sex and she didn’t seem to notice or care. Wait, he hadn’t said that out loud. She hadn’t seen Screwball. Shit. He heaved a sigh. “Better get dressed. You’re gonna hate me for this.”
Her dreamy laugh died down. “What? What’d you do?” She sat up suddenly. “Is this what they’ve been bitching about on the comm?”
He fished her jumpsuit out from under the desk and tossed it over before he started tugging his pants on – he was a gentleman, after all. “Your shop’s gonna blow up.”
“What!” Her anger fought through the drug haze and confusion. “The fuck, Ditz?”
“Sorry,” he said, and really felt miserable. “You can go use Feeney’s shop if you want.”
“Fuck Feeney, why would I want to use his shop?”
Ditz was interrupted by the door sliding open and Screwball leaning into the room, his eyes wild with something between panic and triumph. “Here you are! Shit, I’ve been looking for you. Come on, man, it’s set! Come on!”
“What the fuck, Ditz!” Sparks started to slap at his hand offering one of her prosthetics, but she seemed to think better of it and grabbed it. “What’s set?”
“One of those little pocket nukes.”
She made a strangled noise, staring at him in a bug-eyed horror cutting through the remains of a fine high.
“It’s not that bad–”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Ditz? Not that bad?”
“Come on, Spa–”
“You’re out of your minds!”
“Sparky...”
“Don’t you ‘Sparky’ me, you backstabbing son of a bitch.”
“Neha, come on, we’re gonna blow up.”
She stopped suddenly in the process of attaching her leg, and stared at Screwball. “Did you actually set a nuclear bomb?”
Screwball looked sheepish. “Uh, kinda. We really better go.”
Sparks swore and set to work putting her legs on at speed. Ditz tried to help her and she swatted at him.
The other door to the office opened. Raj and–
“Woah, Mary. Holy shit, wow.” Ditz stared. “Did you, like–”
“I’m all right,” Mary said. “But I’m captive. So are you two, so put down your weapons.” She hesitated. “And zip your trousers. Jesus.”
Raj turned to Screwball, holding a pistol on him. “I remember you. You’re the little skidmark I schooled. Where’s the bomb?”
Screwball stood up straight. “I’m not saying shit.”
“Christ, I’m going to lose more IQ, aren’t I.”
Mary interrupted. “Corbell, where is it? This is serious, we have to turn that off.”
He visibly wavered. Ditz sighed. “Jig’s up, Screwy man. This was a dumb idea anyway.”
Screwball seemed to deflate, and Ditz felt bad for him. Dude finally got a chance to really look good for the old man, and it all went pear-shaped. As usual.
“Somewhere near the doors. Dunno for sure.”
They all stared at him.
“Somewhere...” Sparks started.
“Near the shitting doors?” Raj finished. “The holy hell’s that supposed to mean, my brother? How don’t you remember where you put a nuclear sharting weapon?”
“Yeah, but, like,” Screwball coughed. “There was someone in there, that chick with the sword, Mick. So I stuck it in a bot and told it to go to the doors.”
Mary and Raj moved fast for the inner hatch to the chop shop, grabbing Screwball as they went. Ditz followed. Sparks, who’d gotten her legs on, shouted, “Don’t! Gravity!”
Raj swore and managed to pull Mary back. “Boots,” he grumbled, and yanked on a locker door.
“You.” Sparks jammed her finger hard into Screwball’s chest. “Which bot did you put it in?”
“I dunno, it was just a bot. I think it had some blue paint on it, maybe.”
“Did you tell it to stop and stay at the doors?”
He furrowed his brow. “Huh?”
“When you told it,” she said, punctuating her words with more angry jabs, “to go to the doors, did you tell it to stop there and stay there?”
“Um.”
“Bots don’t just do what you tell them. When they finish one task, they get assigned another one and then they do that. When did you do this?”
“Uh, like five minutes ago. I couldn’t find Ditz, I thought he was down...” He trailed off, seeing that he wasn’t going to get a word in between the swearing on all sides. Ditz tried to give him a consoling look, but Screwball wouldn’t look him in the eye.
Sparks pulled up a console on her wall and jabbed at the air in front of it. “How much time do we have?”
“Like twenty minutes still,” Screwball said. “At least.”
She nodded once, curtly. “Go,” she commanded. “If it’s one of mine, I can find it and call it. I’ll just make them all come. Get down to the shop floor, they can’t come in here. If you can’t find it in five minutes, I’m getting out of here.”
Raj and Mary, now booted up, frogmarched Screwball out the office door. Ditz lingered. “Listen, Spa… Neha. I’m really, really, really sorry. I feel awful.”
“Go feel awful at someone else, you turncoat,” she growled, not looking away from the screen.
He pulled a pair of sandal-like mag boots out of the locker and stepped gingerly into them. They gripped the sides of his feet, felt really weird. He gave Sparks one last mournful look, then went out the hatch and down the gangway.
Ditz struggled to suppress a moment of panic as he looked out over the mechanic’s bay. Wide open spaces like that already creeped him out, and the big half-broken ship looming over him didn’t help, but the sight of dozens of robots converging on him from all directions and above was enough to make him want to bolt. Something made a loud hissing noise away down the end of the bay. Screwball grabbed the nearest bot, twisted it to see its back and then pushed it away.
“Not it,” he muttered. Louder, he said, “It had some, like, blue paint on it.”
Ditz grabbed a robot out of the air, more because it freaked him out than anything, but he turned it over in his hands. It made little plaintive beeping noises and had a green light, but no blue paint. On either side of him, Mary and Raj were doing the same. As they tossed bots away, they buzzed off.
“No,” muttered Screwball, savage in his panic.
Another one had red paint. The third, green. “Hey,” Ditz said, “You’re not like colorblind are you? I mean, it’s cool if you are–”
“I’m not colorblind,” Screwball snarled.
“Cool, cool.”
He grabbed for another bot, but it danced out of his reach. It had blue paint on it. Mary must have heard him gasp; she twisted around and grabbed for it, too. Raj was faster: he got hold of it and shoved it in Screwball’s face.
“Well?”
“That’s it!” Screwball tried to take it, but Raj held it away. He opened its cargo cavity himself. His expression turned grave.
“What are you trying to pull here, brother?” He spun it to show the cavity, empty.
“That’s the one,” Screwball said. “I’m positive, that was the one! I swear to God, Raj, I put it in there!”
“What’s that noise?” Ditz didn’t like the tone of Mary’s voice. He followed her gaze toward the source of the hissing he’d noticed before. The person-sized airlock’s red light was on, and he could hear the grumble of the air cyclers. Next to its inside hatch there were four harnesses for spacesuits. Three suits were slashed open. One was missing.
The airlock clanked once more, and lit up green. All four of them stared at it, and when the inner door finished its cycle and opened, it was empty.
Mary tried once to say something, failed, and then managed in a hoarse whisper, “Run.”