Activation Degradation, page 15
“This won’t be a fix, you understand. Even if we don’t blow up, I can’t guarantee that it’ll work. That we’ll get any thrust at all.”
“It’s a shot in the dark, but it’s still a shot. What do you need from us?”
“Honestly, I don’t know yet. I’ve never done this before.”
“Right. I want you to jump on your idea now—give me an update in fifteen. Doc, you help Okeke and Aimsley get space-ready, I’ll get the suits.”
They all shared a sharp look, then snapped into action. Aimsley appreciated this—clearly the crew had dealt with many emergencies before, and knew how to work together fluidly.
Just like all of the platform’s AMS units, it realized. Just like me and my sisters.
Doc unbuckled Aimsley from the crash seat with an apology on their lips. “The splint, it won’t fit in your gloves, will it?”
It shook its head.
“I don’t want to numb your hand any further, will you . . . will you be able to grasp with it?”
“Yes. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’m your doctor, it’s my job. Speaking of which, we need to check your lab results.”
The three of them returned to the medbay. Doc immediately went to the black box. They hemmed and hawed for a moment before pulling off their mask. Clearly trying to be positive, despite the dire circumstances, they smiled. “Ta-da,” they said, indicating Aimsley and Maya could remove their masks as well. “The wonders of modern medicine: overnight inoculation. And apparently with no ill effects, despite your immune system working overtime. That, I suspect, might have to do with your enhancements. The average person would feel pretty wiped out right about now.”
“What’s wiped out?” Aimsley asked.
“Exhausted, drained.”
It didn’t reply, but it definitely felt wiped out. Though it suspected that was more a side effect of living than anything else.
Focused on the emergency at hand, Maya pulled a thin, flexible square from her pocket. Aimsley couldn’t immediately make out its purpose, until she took it by the corners and began unfolding layers. The square became a thin screen, which she shook out as though it were a dusty rag before flicking it flat against the countertop so that Aimsley could clearly see the expanse of it. With a few swipes of her fingers, she shuffled holographic windows across the surface until she found the one she was looking for.
“Okay, while Doc here helps us get ready, we’re going to go over some diagrams, all right? Make sure we’re on the same page out there.”
Now free of the awkward mask, Aimsley took the opportunity to also toss away the annoying, useless sheet Doc had wrapped it in, then moved to Maya’s side. She looked up at it briefly, then quickly glanced away.
The two of them huddled around the screen as she pulled up the ship’s schematics to illustrate the route they’d take across the wedge’s exterior.
It breathed deeply as she spoke. Here, close, it could detect that same, soft, sweet scent as before. So different from Doc. So different from Jonas. So strange, how each human seemed to have their own, unique scent.
“Our ships are still entangled, so we’ll take a path this way.” She dragged her finger lightly across the screen. “You shredded our umbilical, so it’ll all be open-space. The fuel tank for Violent Delight’s maneuvering jets is here.” She made an invisible X with her fingertip. “With the intake port here.” She drew a line toward the underside of the craft. “The others will double-check that we have a suitable hose extension. We might have to use two. And interfacing is bound to be a problem no matter what.”
“And even if we’re successful, if Fuentes is not . . . You have no other means of thrust?”
“Our ship has three types of propulsion systems. Maneuvering thrusters, a fusion engine, and an emergency ion drive that prevents us from being absolutely stranded. Instead of getting nowhere fast, it can get us somewhere very, very slowly. We’ve checked on it since you crashed into us, and it’s still operational. But it’s a last resort. And certainly isn’t powerful enough to counteract the kinetic energy of that impact. Only the fusion engine can do that. It’s what got us from our closest waystation to here in a month.”
“But it’s not how you travel interstellarly, is it?” Aimsley asked, trying make the inquiry sound as casual as possible.
“No. For interstellar travel we’ve got—” she pulled up short, side-eyed it. “Something more powerful,” she said noncommittally. “And this ship doesn’t have that kind of capacity.”
It made a note to probe further—figure out exactly what kinds of long-range ships the invaders had. Perhaps it could even pinpoint where they’d originated with that info.
“The fusion drive is what’s freaking out,” she continued. “Diagnostics says the plasma torus can’t be stabilized. But we don’t know if we can trust the sensors.”
“So when the fuel injectors are engaged—”
“The engines might go kaboom.”
Doc interrupted to hold out a white wristband to Maya. “Here, put this on.”
She pushed it away. “I don’t want it.”
“What do you mean you don’t want it? How am I supposed to treat you properly if I don’t know how many RADs you—?”
“You know how I feel about this, Doc. I don’t want to know my totals. I’ve been out there so many times . . .”
“Well then, don’t look,” they said harshly. “But I, as your healthcare provider, need to know. So you will wear it. I’ll get Buyer to order you to do it, if that’s what it takes.”
With a sigh she took the bracelet, slipped it on.
“One for you, too, Aimsley,” Doc said, slipping the small circle into its hand.
“I have my own monitoring system,” it assured them, passing the bracelet right back. “It’s likely more accurate than this. I can give you my totals right now, if you’d like.”
“Guess that’s one of the perks of the quantum netting in your noggin there,” Doc said, sounding reluctant. “But why don’t you take this anyway, huh?” They leaned in close to Aimsley’s ear, cupping their hand as though sharing a secret. Only, when they spoke again, their voice was only mockingly hushed. “It’ll make Priestess feel better if she’s not the only one.”
Maya smiled without looking at them, shook her head.
Aimsley felt adrift in the interaction. “Oh, uh—”
Doc looped it around its wrist before it could say more. “And what about your suit’s comms? Can you tune it to our channels, or is it fixed?”
“I don’t use my shell to send or receive communications.”
“Then how are you meant to communicate in vacuum?”
“The same way I communicate long distance in non-vacuum.” It pointed at its head. “My connection is implanted.”
Their features went rigid in momentary panic. “Then are you still in contact with . . . ?”
A wisp of satisfaction curled through Aimsley’s chest. It would not need to lie. “You took out the comms tower during our dogfight. I cannot hear my handler or my siblings, and they can no longer hear me.”
“Ah. Right. Good.” They shook themself. “We’ll get you a mobile unit, then. Should be able to fit it in there with you.”
The captain rushed in with the shells piled on a hovering, magnetic dolly, while Doc swiftly handed out potassium iodide and Prussian blue tablets. Maya threw her tab back without water.
“Gonna pee green for a week—bright as our spacesuits,” she said with a wink at Aimsley. “Maybe more if we fuck up with the fuel injectors and have to down this stuff for a month.”
“Green pee will be the least of your problems if that’s the case,” Doc said.
“I took the pressure hose to your suit,” Buyer told Aimsley. “Because—I’m not gonna lie—it was ripe. So, just be aware, might be a little clammy inside.”
Aimsley nodded its acknowledgment, grateful it wouldn’t be encased in a putrid prison.
Maya carefully stripped down to thin undergarments as Buyer prepared her suit for her. She glanced at Aimsley, and their eyes locked for a second, before she blushed and quickly looked away.
Aimsley didn’t understand her hesitancy, her reluctance. Robots were meant to be bare. The environment should be perfectly suited to their comfort and needs; these thin shells they insisted on walking around in were superfluous.
Besides, she had an aesthetically pleasing casing, with her vitiligo creating patterns over her arms, stomach, and thighs. There was an artistry to her design that the others, with their plain tones, did not possess.
But Buyer presented her with an additional jumpsuit to put on. It had various ports and nozzles that would line up with feeds on the inside of her suit. And a secure collar to keep her necklace from floating free about her head.
“Do you need to be naked?” Buyer asked Aimsley as he presented its shell, one eyebrow raising.
“Yes, some of the hard-body’s responses rely on minute bioelectric impulses in my graspi—in my hands and feet.”
Everyone in the room seemed to take this in stride.
Aimsley quickly looked over the hard-body and ran a diagnostics check to make sure it was still space-worthy. Nothing seemed to have been tampered with. Some of the correctional jets were out or low on fuel, just like the ship, but there was little to be done about that now.
Maya ran similar diagnostics on her suit once she was dressed.
Fully encased, the pair exited the cube and made for the outer airlock.
“Comms work?” Maya asked as Buyer closed the inner hatch behind them.
“Check,” Aimsley replied.
“I’m sticking my neck out for you here, Aims,” she said, moving to a control panel, swiping over the screen. “So try not to . . . get my head chopped off, all right?”
It cringed, but didn’t let her see. It didn’t want her to know that one of its first acts had been a beheading. Or that it had almost done the same to her.
“Let’s both come back safe,” she said. “Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
The lighting in the airlock changed as it began to depressurize.
The atmosphere slowly seeped away, and Aimsley shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
This should be fine.
It knew it should feel more in its element now than at any other moment in the last two days, but instead, it was anxious. Its logic centers railed at it to use this opportunity to either flee or undermine the invaders. An emergency such as this was a gift: a chance to gain the upper hand while the others were already wrong-footed.
But it suppressed that instinct. Escape was no longer its best option. Even if it could get far enough away from the falling wedge, it would be left hanging freely in the radiation torus. Unless rescue was right around the corner, it would never survive.
It was better to wait. Better to be useful, to complete the task as stated.
Better to use the opportunity to gain trust.
“You guys are really going to have to hightail it,” Buyer said over the comms. “Io’s surface gravity is only point one eight gs, so we won’t have trouble pulling out of the gravity well once we can course-correct, but that’s no tiny target. Way more worried about face-planting than escape velocity. And if we get close enough, one of those volcanic jets could take us out before we get anywhere near the ground. We really need you to get this in one go, yeah?”
“That’s the intent,” Maya agreed.
“We’re getting the coil out to you,” he continued. “From the bottom hatch. It should have whatever you need.”
Aimsley didn’t understand what he meant, but Maya seemed to, and gave a thumbs-up. Then she braced herself on the outer hatch, clearly anticipating a shift.
A moment later, the gravity left, just as suddenly as it had previously arrived.
Aimsley’s nervous shuffling immediately became a nervous kicking.
When Maya opened the outer hatch, the flexible, white extension did not unfurl. Instead, she reached for a set of bars on the wedge’s hull—a long line of rungs. Quickly, as though she’d taken the route a hundred times, Maya began to climb along the side, toward the bow of the ship. Aimsley followed, keeping its head down.
After only a few minutes, Aimsley noted a strange sensation on the back of its tongue and a pressure behind its eyes. A furious crackling emanated through the comms speakers, accompanying the sensations, the noise sharp and chaotic.
Reminders of the radiation that swirled all around them.
Through them.
Even with the sirens and the warning lights, Aimsley hadn’t felt the urgency of the situation until this very moment. They were barreling into a hostile world through a hostile orbit. The radiation torus was invisible to their eyes, but the excessive static crackle made it very clear their bodies were being constantly bombarded by a barrage of radioactivity.
Aimsley chose not to call up its TID. It didn’t want to watch the number tick up, the percentage rise.
It understood, suddenly, why Maya had tried to refuse the band.
Neither of them could afford to spend an extra moment outside the ship. Despite their preparation, and their well-engineered suits, the danger was real and the threat ongoing. Every second threatened to make them sicker, to shave just a little more time off their activation periods.
Of course, if they crashed into Io, they’d hardly have to concern themselves with radiation sickness.
The hull of the Violent Delight—for Aimsley was sure now these units had given the wedge that name, just as surely as they’d named themselves—had far more features than the hull of the platform. More places for hooks and tethers. More shifting panels and places where the plating bulged—was especially thick—to protect something inside.
They came across the occasional dark blast pattern—a burn mark and deep gash almost certainly caused by the boat’s cannons.
As they passed a large gun—protruding from the ship like a bent insectoid, dark and craggy looking—Aimsley thought it heard a voice calling to it. But the comms were quiet.
Likely it was nothing but its mind matrixing the static into familiar sounds.
Aimsley glanced up to mark Maya’s position, to note how close they were to the boat, and Aimsley gasped.
It was not Jupiter that stole Aimsley’s breath—though it was prominent, hulking. Its sky as turbulent as ever.
No, what made its lungs hitch and its mouth go dry was the moon.
Io.
A huge, pock-marked ball of sulfur, swelling before its eyes.
Volcanic plumes spewed rock and dust and gas high above the small world. The ship was close enough for Aimsley to make out the blue-green sulfur dioxide aurora flaring across its darkening side, tinged red on the fringes by the oxygen aurora. Lava flowed across its surface, adding new, molten sulfur to the planes, and the orange ring of fallen volcanic ejection that circled the dark vent of Pele sat almost directly beneath them like a bull’s-eye, waiting for their impact.
And the nose of the wedge was angled like a spear tip, aiming for the heart of the moon.
“Come on!” Maya shouted over the comms, waving her arm in a wide arc.
Something sped by overhead, and Aimsley caught a flash of twisted metal hurtling away. A chunk of debris that size moving at that velocity likely wouldn’t hurt the wedge, but it could certainly scrape an AMS unit off the hull.
Aimsley refocused on its climb.
The boat was its own, smaller disk against the disk of the moon—its turquoise and purple clashing with the oranges and yellows of Io—as was intended. The coloration of both the boat and the shells was meant to make the soft robots easily distinguishable from the environment when observed in the visible spectrum.
“Un——r?”
Aimsley frowned, shook its head.
Was there a signal hiding in all this noise? Was that voice . . . real?
“I’m going to climb down there,” Maya called, pointing farther down the side of the wedge, to something new protruding out of the ship. “Grab the hoses and anything else I think we’ll need. You find the fuel panel and point me to it when I come back, yeah?”
From the underside of the wedge, an arm had been extended. A great coil of a thing—as Buyer had described—which held various tools, a zero-g pump that Maya now assured Aimsley was rated for various fuel transfers, connectors, and hose lines.
“A lot of our harvesting is automated,” Maya explained, “But we have to personally break down our haul. We’re all used to these kinds of spacewalks, just . . .”
“You don’t tend to go out in radiation storms.”
“Right.”
Maya went in one direction, Aimsley another. It found itself wishing for the drums again as it continued to approach the boat alone. It needed that steady, rapid beating in its ears, that metered pounding in its brain.
It soon realized there was something pounding in its brain, in its mind.
Some other sound.
“Unit—?”
A voice, for certain. Faint, but there.
More crackling. More hissing.
“Unit Four?”
Either the signal was weak or the torus was interfering with the connection—but it didn’t matter. It was there, and it was real.
Its handler had found it.
“Unit Four? Unit Four, can you hear me? I just saw your feed go live again a few minutes ago. Are you there?”
Aimsley longed to call out, yes, yes I’m here!
But it couldn’t risk alerting the invaders.
“If you can hear me, stand by. I’m trying to get the signal boosted. Maybe then—”
Static cut them off again.
Aimsley did its best to tamp down its elation. Finally, finally it wasn’t alone in this. Contact had been reestablished. That must mean help was on its way.
But not the kind of help it needed in this very moment.
As it approached the sphere, it reminded itself it had to hurry. No matter how badly it wanted to stop everything and talk to its handler, there wasn’t time. No matter how badly it wanted to take stock of the boat—to catalog each triangle’s damage, to examine the biological portions within—there simply wasn’t time. Aimsley had to focus on its task and think of little else.
