Chapter 25: Wing-tipped Spats
"I'd laugh at all your jokes, you'd listen to my suggestions.
One mind, one soul, one common destination.
Now we can't help but fight over the directions." – Norman Cook
I didn't need this. I didn't need her. I didn't need the interference. I didn't need to be pulling his bacon out of the fire. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it—in the specific sense with PTMC and the general sense with my heart—but generally the boy stopped at routine bacon burnage and not rolling the entire pig into a fucking volcano like some kind of sacrifice to Murphy. Under the circumstances, I was having a hard time being the perfect little buttoned-down base-two bimbo. What else could I do? We might need an advocate. Or a witness. Or just somebody far enough inside who remembered that he was good people and could be leaned on if needed. There was so much to say, so little to say it in, and because I hadn't been paying attention to Hamster's movements—surprise surprise, even I wasn't perfect, even I let my attention wander, I was stuck in this conversation.
Damn her. I couldn't decide if I wanted her on our side or in a straitjacket anyway. I was allowed to have moods, too, right? The resident deusette ex machine was frustrated, angry, and with a complete lack of acceptable targets.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Talbot, but I have another engagement. Thank you for stopping by today."
I made the fake figure appear a fake door, turn around and walk through it, close it behind her, and then evaporated the door. Let Jerome stop juggling meat and deal with the damn proximity mine on two feet there.
He pulled the pan off the heat, searched frustratedly for a moment to find somewhere to put it down, and settled for a nearby spot of countertop. I turned off the stove…let Hamster fend for herself.
"Now if I could only find a plate. Or silverware. Or something to cook veggies on."
Hannah gave him a funny look.
"You don't care that I listened in?"
Jerome shrugged dismissively.
"I'm not going to be the magical influence that sets you on a path to righteousness, morality, clean living, and operational security, and you'd probably get more out of the argument than I would, and it's quicker than trying to figure out what to tell you myself."
Right answer, for some of the right reasons. I was just surprised he had the breath for a little speech like that under the gravities involved.
"That's either very smart or very stupid. Does Mr. Dravis always look that…plastic?"
"He was halfway between drunk and drugged and in shock this morning. It's actually an improvement. Scary as that is. How'd Angie take to you coming along?"
Confusion to the enemy! He was adapting to her communication style now, bouncing from topic to topic as he tilted the pan and let the steak slip onto the countertop. Hannah glared, grabbed the pan, slammed her steak in it with unnecessary force, and slammed the pan down on the countertop with enough of an impact to bend a handle rivet.
"What do you think?!"
It took her about fifteen seconds to find the cooktop controls, and I thought Jerome had hit a magnificent sore spot.
"And have you even considered the time factor?"
Oh goddammit, she was going to bring it up. I was going to wait until we were near Venus but nooo. This life would be so much easier if I could get laid, get drunk, or at least pound my fist into a wall without either knocking down the wall or vaporizing a significant hole through a significant distance of whatever was behind it. Making a planned trip to the asteroid belt for stress relief via cannons and missiles and an innocent hunk of rock just wasn't as satisfying. It wasn't until a moment later that it hit me—for RECREATION, this dead alien stuck in a mining ship wanted to go mining, with the cooperation of a miner's kid. Get me off this fucking treadmill of history.
"Which time factor?"
Jerome said tiredly. I could see him testing the steak's heat with a fingertip every so often, letting it properly cool a bit to season. I also knew him well enough to put money on him having a burned mouth in a couple of minutes.
"The military-blows-everything-up one that Dravis keeps shoving down my throat, the general nature of interplanetary distances, whether I'm stuck with you until Charon? Take your pick, I'd say they'd been keeping me awake if I'd had the chance to sleep."
Well, beyond that little nap between Earth and lunar orbit. Here it went, here went another log onto the fire of our stress.
"You may not even NEED me. Human beings need food. Also water. Three to five days without. Poof."
She wasn't used to the gravities. The combination of her anger and exertion and speaking was making her cardiovascular system struggle to keep up, but Jerome put it together and squinched his eyes shut in pain.
("That's assuming that the drones keep them alive.")
I believed in ripping off bandages.
("How many?")
Simple questions, hard answers. The facilities didn't really list a live-in crew manifest, just recommendations.
("Maybe a hundred.")
What I didn't add was "and that's a sneeze in the ocean today", because there were some things that his strong empathetic streak wouldn't handle well. Not because it affected me directly…but because this was the second-worst hurt I'd ever seen him, nevermind that he was functioning. I'd done what I could to assuage the first—after all, here I was!—and was working on the second, but.
"Here."
Jerome pushed his done steak at Hamster in frustration.
"You can't handle the gravs. Get in the water bath, eat something, I'll voice-only comm you if something comes up. This affects planning."
Hannah half-tried to throw up her hands but gave up the idea of expressive body language and just took the meat.
"No secretary peeking?"
He just turned his back on her.
"Even if you were my type or I was interested, there's no time to fuck around."
So to speak. With a glower and a mutter she left, heading for the common area as Jerome flipped the steak over. This time I watched her even when she'd gone into the other bedroom and until she flipped the privacy switch on the bathroom. It made it opaque to me and I stopped listening or looking…although it wouldn't stop me if I wanted to see in, not with the kind of tentacles I had into this thing.
"Is she gone? How long to Venus from Mercury?"
"She's gone. And running like this, over a day. Picked a shitty time, we'll have to do a solar transit. Up and over. Venus will be a…small problem."
A day for honesty. Jerome flinched while flipping the steak and almost dropped it. It just hurt to see him like this, but if I held off the bad news that he needed to know, he had much less time to react to it. Besides, I couldn't do this alone.
"Dear god, another one?! What now!"
"I'll tell you when you have steak in your mouth and you're in the bath, unless you prefer the bed."
"I'll stick with the bed. I spend enough time sitting down in bolsters. This time I'll let the weight push my ass down on me instead of the other way around."
Came his sour reply, his face wrinkling.
"Anything else?"
"There's plenty else. I'd like us to have a conversation with some degree of contentment and peace and our personal lives, not all this….this. If you mean any more problems, not yet."
His sigh was like a great wave washing away sand castles on the beach.
"Then let's make this brief. It's obvious Dravis considers any remaining people a liability and expendable. Do we? Can we? Should we?"
Oh, he wasn't going to like the answer to that.
"Most of the PTMC facilities on that list are mines. As you well know. Slowing down and taking this in a fashion safe for humans exposes us to greater danger, slows us down, and makes us drag along Hamster. If it were just us, how fast would you be running?"
"Five. I see what you mean. We have confirmation of containment failures out there."
"Follow it through, darling. Please."
He had to come to this one for himself. Although it was obvious to me. You couldn't call me a sociopath, it wasn't even my species except by marriage.
"That's your shorthand of 'the decision sucks, you need to make it'. Fine. If we can handle the relay quickly, we'll hit Venus in a day and a half or so. If the drones haven't fired on flesh, any crew will already be almost dead. There's a nickel-iron mine and an atmospheric lab…."
Waiting sucked but he couldn't be prodded without losing track and devaluing the conclusion.
"…and the biggest task of that lab would be to keep it out. Shit."
"Close but no cigar. There'll be nobody to rescue, but."
I could see it. Update received, applied, suddenly the facility's priority becomes letting the toxic, corrosive, high-pressure Venusian atmosphere IN under all but the most controlled conditions. That wasn't a facility that PTMC would be reclaiming any time soon.
"….but the drones aren't rated in Venusian atmosphere, are they?"
"Ninety atmospheres, sulfuric acid clouds, winds of hundreds of miles an hour, about a thousand degrees. If they even had drones."
Jerome flipped the steak out of the pan and examined it critically, moving the pan back over to the other countertop where it sizzled in the juice flecks that his first attempt had left. I turned off the surface and wished he'd gotten the first one—as he put the second one down on another spot—as Hamster'd probably made a mess of that one.
"Let me guess. You're not rated for it either."
"Or the Ball, or the Carrot. As for the mine, the nearest transfer shuttle to go in via maintenance airlock would be where?"
Jerome paused with his mouth open, then shut it again and shook his head.
"Fuck that for the next couple minutes."
I kept my trap shut as he put the pan back where it'd come from and carried the steak back to the bedroom. His mutterings I let him keep to himself out of respect and it wasn't until he'd peeled out of his underclothing—flung across the room—and collapsed on the bed eating the steak with hands and teeth, the way nature intended, that I picked up the thread.
"Nearest Venus-rated shuttle for MN0101 would be at McQuarrie…"
"…the processing station…"
"Which will be infested as hell.
"Refresh my fucking memory."
He paused to wipe away the steak juice on his lips into his arm hair. At least he was curled up on one corner of the bed so the inevitable drippings wouldn't be what he had to sleep in. Hygiene got a little relative sometimes.
"What's it take to Venus-rate a shuttle?"
"Fancy ceramic armor and a lot of it, also a focus on structural integrity revamping from the standard model. Tough like me."
Jerome winced, and I couldn't blame him. Tearing off another hunk of meat with pointy canines he made a shooting gesture and cocked his head in question, so I did a little digging through that huge PTMC database I still hadn't had the chance to skim more than the fringes from.
"Nothing much. Gas-pumped lasers, all solid-state optics for no moving parts and no exposure risks. Engagement strategy suggested is to chew holes in the armor so the atmosphere can get in and finish the job or exploit localized heating to disrupt airflow if possible."
"And how many of THOSE are we looking at?"
"McQuarrie's old. Getting nickel-iron from the asteroids is still more cost effective than trying to fight Venus uphill both ways for it. It was a Pan-Germanic station originally before PTMC bought it, so not too many. I mean why would you want to dick around on Venus anyway? Maybe five or ten shuttles."
Only five or ten. That were armored against a significant fraction of the kinetic energy we could bring to bear, smooth-surfaced for easy flight envelopes, and refractory enough to withstand most of the photons we could spew their way. Still, at least they'd be engaging from space…and I was pretty agile out in hard vacuum. The shielding bubble would work properly there.
"And the combined impact of that many lasers on your armor?"
There was the rub.
"Significant surface damage, some extended to middle layers. Convergent fire, prolonged, would go right through after a few seconds delay."
Depending on where and how they hit. I wasn't going to let them get that much time-on-target.
"But you've got to consider PTMC automated fire control can't be as good as mine, and there's no way wallowing barges like that can keep me in their sights. I ought to be able to spike those lasers with borehole shots, if I can't do it with missiles or our Vulcan."
Jerome looked up from his bloody meal, face primitive with the look of a fresh kill.
"And while you're shooting down their barrels, they're shooting down ours."
"Please!"
I was genuinely indignant.
"Gas-pumped lasers aren't shit against something running off the reactor more or less directly. Besides, I'd be on the harmonizing so it'd probably not be a zero-deflection shot."
"And you're going to just…handle a dogfight with five to ten of these things?"
"It'll be rough on missiles, but unless you want to leave Venus completely untouched and move on. Or ask Dravis to send in the cavalry for an experimental recovery while we're on station to assist."
"If we can save the relay…"
A pause for a belch that I rated around a six.
"I'll ask."
"But you keep getting distracted. You're almost through this chain, I promise."
"Distracted, hell."
Although he took a moment to lick his fingertips , hunching unconsciously closer over his meal. The stress was bringing out our bad sides.
"It boils down to long odds that anybody on Venus is still alive, and you can't check, and the shuttles that are suitable to run down are the ones we'll have to shoot down or otherwise neutralize. Let's deal with the problem of survivors."
"What problem?"
Wearily, I projected myself on the wall, another mirror image of the room, leaning on the mirror-bedpost closest to his mirror image and resting a hand on his mirrored shoulder. With a sigh he paused to reach up and pat his actual shoulder. Putting his hand over mine would have been sweet…if I'd had hands to put there to begin with.
"I can't dance around it much longer. It boils down to 'what survivors?' I honestly believe we should abandon that strategic facet of this project. The window is effectively gone…and it's down to us against the clock. Hannah may be great for keeping you annoyed and on your toes but we could be burning sixty-six percent faster without her."
I saw him half crumple into himself, desultorily nibbling at the remaining steak as if it had lost most of its appeal.
"And if it came down to it, I could get the tubes from the survival kit, stick them into the oxy supply and up my nose, and have you pulse the bolsters to forcibly compress my chest if we have to go eyeballs-in at more."
And it would leave him a drooling wreck for longer than we could spare at the endpoint, but it was possible.
"Beside the point, mister pancake-urge. Do you want to chase skeletons and make more with the lost time?"
I was losing my grip on small talk was what was happening. Call it being frank, but all kinds of control were starting to erode. Jerome glanced up, meeting my illusionary gaze squarely, and nodded.
"Comes down to triage, doesn't it? We'll leave Hannah with the relay. I want to see if you can talk to an infected station like you could the mine. You'll park the Carrot out of range and we'll go in hot for a recon run. We still need to observe a mine, what's after Venus?"
I knew how much it took to cram down everything else and make decisions in moments like this. I knew how much he'd been doing it already, and I had a better idea of his capacity than he did. And this was capacity I doubted the long-term integrity of. Poor bastard would have nightmares for months, if not years, over the people he wasn't going to be able to save, and never remember—when asleep—the people saved. Consciences were a pain in the ass and made me glad I didn't have much in that line. A quick riffle through my database again and I swore audibly.
"It's Mars, and it sucks. There's a military base, the Utopia Planetia fleet yards—they're not PTMC facilities, thank Ghu—and a sulfur mine on Io. And Eta Sigma in orbit's going to be a bitch to clear, there's a directive….CMD ag222 530, whatever that means. Looks like PTMC was working with Utopia for some drone construction, plasma cannons and all that implies."
He half sat up, raising an arm abortively as if to hurl the last bit of his meal from him, but reconsidered and furiously chewed, eyes blazing, until he swallowed in haste and could reply after a moment's thought.
"Please tell me you strategically recommend just destroying the base! From outside!"
"With fucking what, our good looks?"
I couldn't even think of how I'd do that. A guided missile, set to emit like a whole BUNCH of loose humans, shot through the corridors and making circles around the reactor until it vented itself in stupidity? But that'd have the entire base on alert, and they'd come roiling out like rats from a sinking ship….or we could stand off and try to Mega it out, but megatonnage only went so far and that was a pretty blatant contract violation…
"With that military access code? You got me in once, you can do it again if the bases haven't been talking, right?"
No way in hell was I letting him waltz into an entire base! …Even if that was an angle I hadn't thought of, because I was thinking the direct approaches and losing my touch dammit.
"And then what?"
"See if it shuts down, I guess. With an encoded command sent from that command level…after all, everything still worked, it was just put in a different mode. "
Why didn't I think of that? Because I was used to regarding these as fantastically complex systems, smart and deep like me at best and nested to hell-and-gone at worst?
"Would a secondary controller respect that?"
"Doesn't a shutdown command automatically recall all drones to the charging point, to wait for central control to reestablished?"
Now how in the world…I hauled up the database for the third time in as many minutes, pinned it into ready reference memory so it hung beside me, and began flipping mental pages. He should be right, assuming standard software, but…
"Yes. How did you know that?"
I thought he'd be happier to reveal his sources and take a little pride. Instead he just looked down at the covers and gently pulled them back.
"Overheard a lot of Humans First plans when I was burning them out after they got you."
On the bright side, now that he was lying down with his eyes closed, shop talk was probably over. A little judicious interference with the climate controls and I heated the opposite side of the bed up and focused the speakers to project my voice as if it was coming from a point source behind his head as he faced away from my wall—trusting I had his back. As always.
"We'll deal with dumping Hamster on the relay and Dravis's goon squads at McQuarrie, and the whole Mars mess soon enough. You need your rest."
And dimmed the ambient star brightness for good measure. It amused me that—in order to get the requisite Gs in the proper direction, the Carrot was actually streaking across the spacelanes with her 'roof' acting as a prow, smug atmospheric symmetry aside. At least I only had to fly backwards for max eyeballs-in tolerances…
"Do you believe in the afterlife? In Somebody up or down or wherever, in the mythical 'there'?"
Jerome snorted softly, a faint smile curling up his lip corner, as he burrowed deeply into the covers and clutched a few spare pillows to himself to snuggle.
"Defer to you on the afterlife. Also on the someones out there….as you've demonstrated and revealed."
"Not what I meant and you know it. Do you believe in the concept of Fate or more appropriately, a sort of Personal Deity"?
"I believe your idea of bedroom talk is, as ever, way too weighty."
"No, I mean…we're planning because we'll only stop doing that when we're dead. But we're, on some level, pretty much planning on our eventual death during this. Whether it's literal or figuratively, having to abandon our lives here."
And I didn't even know why I was asking. I'd brushed the afterlife once already, and the part of me I was used to existing in was already quite unmistakeably dead.
"…I guess it never really mattered to me. Sounds strange, doesn't it? If there's a Somebody and a Something, then as long as we're together it's the good place. If we're apart, it's the bad place, but that's OK because it'll give both of us energy and motivation to change whatever has to change….and if this is all there is, it's been a pretty good twenty years with you. I don't know if I'd change anything, even…that."
He yawned widely and put his hand over his face, curling further into the wasn't until I felt the temperature gauges creeping up that I had to consciously throttle back the reactor excursion that had been the result of blushing that deeply.
"You're an incurable romantic, darling. The prognosis is terminal sappiness. I just hope we wind up in the same place."
"Now who's the sappy one? We'll wind up with our atoms intermingled, at least."