The Reaper Diaries: Fetch Job, Part 9
17 Dec 2015Michael Wolfe
“Well, the good news is that my ship has power.”
I had been staring off into the distance, taking in the desolate landscape on the ice planet upon which we were stranded. Behind me was Kyndi’s wrecked Diamondback. It was still on its side, resting on one of the stubby wings. Smoke was still bellowing from the exposed port engine. “What’s the bad news?”
“I could shake your hand through the damn hull.”
I made my way to the front of the ship- and sure enough, there was a gash in the side of the Diamondback’s armor plating where the laser had melted through. From the looks of it, the beam had penetrated into her pilot’s cabin, leaving a blackened trail along the deck. Just forward, the canopy was cracked and in danger of shattering.
“What about thrusters? Think you can right your ship?”
“They’re showing as damaged, but I guess it can’t hurt to try. I’ll isolate the starboard lifter and see if I can divert power to just it. Stand back.”
The lone thruster on the starboard side of the tipped Diamondback roared to life and spewed out fire, burning through the ice and melting a hole into the ground. The ship started to tip back towards its center, but the lone thruster just couldn’t provide the leverage needed to get it back upright.
Kyndi shut down the booster, and the Diamondback settled back down against its wing. “It’s no good. The ship is designed to lift using all its thrusters, not just a single damaged one.”
“It looked like you almost had it, too.”
“Yeah, but even if I did- it ain’t the only system needing attention, and I’ve still got that new window in the side of the hull.”
“Reckon we’ve got some work ahead of us.”
The Lady Luck was a total loss. I scavenged what I could from it- the spacewalk suit, the oxygen canisters, my trusty bolter rifle, and my leather jacket. I packed as many of my personal belongings as I could, knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing the ship again. I looked around the slagged, upside-down pilot’s cabin.
Lady Luck, my ass.
As I walking back to Kyndi’s ship with my gear, I could see the lone thruster again trying fruitlessly to right the ship. Like before, the ship was just starting to re-center, but the booster just wasn’t strong enough to do the job by itself. I heard her frustrated voice come over the suit’s comm system.
“The goddamn safeties won’t let me divert boost power to a single maneuvering thruster. It’s not happening.”
I looked back at my ship. “Think there’s anything we can scavenge from the Lady Luck? She ain’t worth much except for parts.”
“I don’t even know what parts we need, but if we can get the hull patched and this ship leveled, I’m pretty sure we can fly out.”
The first priority was to take stock of our supplies. We had enough oxygen canisters to last for several days, and there was a primitive recharging station on board the derelict Anaconda. Food wasn’t an immediate problem, either, what with the piles of ration bars we had left behind. Both our ships had a supply of drinking water- but if push came to shove, we could simply melt down some of the ice and snow and drink it.
Most of that first day was spent on figuring out what worked and what needed some attention on Kyndi’s ship. The two big problems were the hull breach and the problem with getting her ship upright. We eventually retired back into the derelict Anaconda (rendering my sentimental musings about abandoning the ship completely moot) and tiredly set up in the crew quarters. The mood wasn’t quite as playful as the night before when Kyndi surprised me with steak and booze- we said little, and ate in silence. Eventually, Kyndi spoke.
“We need to find a way to boost power to that thruster, or else we ain’t going anywhere.”
I chewed on a ration bar thoughtfully. “No arguments here- but how?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. There are two main obstacles: the boost drive itself, and the software that governs it. Modifying one or the other wouldn’t be enough. We would need to install a bigger feed into the thruster, and then re-write the software to allocate more juice. It won’t do it on its own.”
“I’m guessing that neither of those things are simple?”
Kyndi shook her head and scowled at her ration bar. “Calling a modern ship's computer code 'complex' is the biggest understatement in the ‘verse. There are millions of lines to go through, all highly refined, all highly interconnected. It’s giving me a headache just thinking of the algorithms.” She shook her head.
“So, patching the hull is the easy part?”
“Easy, as in relatively straightforward? Yeah. But how long can you hold a section of hull plating in place while I weld with a dinky little plasma torch? How well can a patch job like that hold? Even if we manage to cover and seal it, ain’t no way we’re flying in anything but atmo suits just in case. Even that’s going to take awhile, because it’ll be lots of little patches instead of one giant one.”
She buried her head in her hands. “And that’s assuming we don’t run out of fuel for the torches. Or food. Or water. Or those assholes come back and finish us off. Or the geyser erupts big time and buries us, or…”
For a moment, she just sat there, face buried, breathing slowly and deeply. I sat down next to her, hand on her shoulder. I opened my mouth a few times, but I didn’t have anything comforting to say.
Kyndi looked up, eyes watery. “I just… I just really wanted this one to go smooth.” She smiled at me through her tears. “I’m sorry I got you mixed up in all this, Matty.”
I put my arm around her and held her against me. “Well, if word got ever got out that I’d passed on a job involving a beautiful woman and a big pile of money, they’d throw me out of the Pilot’s Fed.”
Kyndi weakly laughed and sniffed up a runny nose. She wasn’t crying, not quite- but damn if most other folks in her place wouldn’t be. “I bet you’re never doing another job with me again, are you?”
I gestured around the room. “Oh, I don’t know. I was tired of the ol’ bounty hunting routine anyway, right? And if all this ain’t a break from the grind, I don’t know what is.”
Kyndi took a deep, ragged breath and looked up at the ceiling. “We’ve got lot of work ahead of us if we’re ever going to make it off this ice cube.”
The light was making her black hair shine purple. I kissed it, and squeezed her against me. “We’ve also got power here, power in your ship, and plenty of food and water.” I gently tilted her chin up to look her in the eyes.
“And one more thing: we’ve got each other, too. Partners, remember?”
She smiled and nodded slightly. Then, she leaned forward and kissed me square on the lips, holding it for a few seconds. She broke the kiss and looked me in the eye.
“Partners.”
I ran my hand down the side of her face. Even trying her best to hold back tears, she was beautiful. “We’d best get some sleep. There's a long day ahead of us.”
Later, as I held Kyndi in my arms under the covers of the crew bunk, I heard her murmuring. I could barely hear it, but she repeated herself in her semi-conscious state. As she mumbled, I felt her turn around, bury her head under my neck, and huddle closer to me. With her mouth so close to my ear, I could finally make out what she was saying:
“Yeah. Partners.”
I couldn’t help but smile a little. Well, ain’t that some shit?
The entire next day was as rough as we’d imagined. We trudged out in our atmo suits, and began inspecting the damage to Kyndi’s ship in more detail. There wasn’t much that we learned about ship’s condition: the starboard engine was out of commission, the maneuvering thruster wasn’t up to the challenge of righting the ship, and there was simply no way to divert power to that side without engaging the boost- which would probably have rolled the ship over in the other direction.
Scowling, Kyndi went back into her pilot’s cabin and began rummaging around in one of her storage containers. Finally, she produced a small media drive with a red X on it. I noticed her holding it up and staring at it through the hole in her hull.
“What’s that?”
She looked over and frowned. “Exactly what I was hoping to not have to do. I plug this in, it bypasses every safety protocol and layer of encryption the ship has. Breaks everything down to the base code, and makes it re-writable.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Something tells me that gizmo ain’t exactly legal to just have stashed in a drawer.”
Kyndi snorted and started walking back to the pilot’s chair. Plugging it in, she shook her head. “Authority catches me with this, and the party’s over. You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get it.”
Sighing, she watched it go to work on her ship’s computer. “And now I get to comb through insane amounts of code while wearing atmo suit gloves. Fuck me, right?”
I was busy disassembling the maneuvering thruster, trying to get to the main boost feed. “You’re talking to a guy who called it quits at pre-calculus and barely passed welding. So what happened? You drop out of university to become a smuggler?”
I saw Kyndi shake her head through the cracked canopy glass. “Not exactly. I’ve just- well, I’ve always been around things like this. Had a few good teachers, too, but not at any fancy-ass university.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Now get back to finding that boost feed. All the reprogramming in the ‘verse ain’t going to make a bit of difference if we can’t get more juice into the thruster.”
I chuckled.”Yess’um.”
For the next several hours, I carefully disassembled parts, making sure to take careful mental note of how they all fit. I would have to put them all together again, after all. Finally, I found it: a long, thin metal line leading directly into the boost injector.
“This has got to be it, darlin’.” I removed it and held it up. “Sure doesn’t look like much, doesn’t it?”
Kyndi didn’t even look up. “How thick is it?”
I peered down the length of the tube. “Pretty thick. It would be tough to even bend.”
“Good. Take it to the machine shop in the ‘conda and see if you can open it up a little. We need to max the amount of juice that can pass through that thing.”
“You going to be ok out here?”
“It’s probably for the best you stay away. This code is something else, and I’m fixing on a lot of unladylike swearing for the rest of the day. You just worry about that feed tube.”
I’m not much good with tools, but I was able to get a system set up in the machine shop. It was tricky, but I was able to find a long enough drill bit. I would char the inside with a laser cutter, and drill away the excess. The work was slow-going, and it took me the rest of the day to thin out the inner walls of the tube. I saw Kyndi poke her head through the door as I was finishing up.
“How’s it going?”
I held it up and handed it to her. “It's probably a little more delicate now, but it’ll pass more juice.”
She looked through it, telescope-style for a moment. “That’ll do. Now let’s call it a day.”
Back in the sealed, life-supported section of the Anaconda, Kyndi sat down at the table, looking at her tablet. I walked up and handed her a ration bar. “How went the coding?”
Kyndi just shook her head. “You ever hear those conspiracy-theory nutjobs going on about AIs secretly controlling everything?”
I took a bite of my own ration and nodded. “Yeah. What about ‘em?”
She peeled away the wrapper of her own bar and frowned. “Days like today, I’m inclined to believe them. Whoever wrote all that code was- well, I can’t describe it, not to someone who doesn’t code. But it’s really good medicine for days when I’m feeling just a little too brilliant. Like one of those old, sentient AIs you hear horror stories about wrote it.”
Kyndi shook her head and looked up. “I’m probably not making much sense, but- it’s clean. The code, I mean. Like I ain’t seen before.” She let out a short laugh. “I guess you have to really know your shit before you get to write ship code, huh?”
I smiled as best I could and took another bite. “I guess that means you’ve got more work to do, huh?”
“Yeah. Lots more.”
“Same here.”
The next was spent with Kyndi again hunched over her ship’s computer, and me painstakingly reassembling the engine with the expanded boost line. It would have been bad enough in a ship’s bay, but with atmo suit gloves? Fortunately, the crashed Anaconda had all the tools I needed, and I was able to reassemble the thruster after not too many mistakes.
Late in the afternoon, I noticed that Kyndi was beginning to type. That’s good, right?
I was standing in front of the gash in the ship’s hull, trying to figure out how to patch it. The Anaconda had a few spot-welders, but nothing like what would normally be used at a proper dock. Kyndi was right. It was going to be a patchwork, with little, easily-held-up scraps of hull plating.
So I got to work, welding on the largest pieces across the hull that I could. It was heavy, and slow, and I wanted to ask for help from Kyndi, but even through the canopy, I could see her look of concentration. People in that sort of trance are best left undisturbed. Even so, it was hard to find anything with the right curve to really make a decent seal. Plus, I was worried about my supply of fuel for the welding torches. It was slow going, and I had to use a lot to get an actual seal- and the hole just wasn’t being covered as quickly as I would have liked.
Kyndi, for her part hadn’t said a word since he had gotten to work that morning. This suited me- she needed to focus, and so did I. Later, when the sun finally started going down, I stood in front of the Diamondback and keyed the comm.
“It’s getting late, darlin’. You want to head inside?”
I saw her look up and shake her head. “I’ve got a little more to do. You go ahead. I won’t be long.”
Shrugging, I headed toward the Anaconda. “Suit yourself. I’ll have my comm on me.”
Back into the life-supported section, I ate a ration bar by myself, downing it with some filtered water. I took a shower, and changed into some clean clothes that I had taken from my ship. Kyndi still wasn’t back. I pulled out my communicator to see what was going on.
< You done yet?>
A few moments passed and then:
<Almost. Be there soon>
Having nothing else to do, and being exhausted from the day’s work, I laid down on the bunk to close my eyes.
I opened them several hours later, woken up by the sound of the crew quarters door sliding open. In walked Kyndi, a haggard look on her face. Wordlessly, she skipped taking a shower, stripped down, and collapsed into the bunk beside me.
“Soon, huh?”
I could see the back of her head shake. “I’m really close, but I swear I’m going to dream of orange goddamn letters and numbers tonight.”
Without another word, she laid down on her side, pulled the blanket over us, and let out a long exhale. Within minutes, Kyndi was snoring softly.
She hadn’t even grabbed anything to eat.
The next day was as busy as the last two. I was still going through lots of plasma-torch fuel trying to patch the hole in Kyndi’s ship, and Kyndi- well, she was sat in her atmo suit, staring hard at the orange screen in front of her face, typing occasionally. I had become so used to her softly-muttered expletives that I didn’t even notice them anymore.
For my part, I was holding the last patch of scrap into place, the one that should- if my welding held- seal the hull so that Kyndi could reactivate life-support. Maybe that’ll improve her mood.
I ran the plasma torch down the side of the hull scrap, holding it into place with my body weight, watching the weld slowly harden. I pressed against it, and-
It held. It goddamn held.
“Kyndi, I hope I ain’t celebrating early, but you have exactly one less window in your ship.”
I saw her look up, check behind her, and give a thumbs up. “Glad to see it. I’ll activate life support once I’m fairly certain I haven’t screwed the frame-shift-calculating parts of the ship with my little modification.”
I nodded up to her. “Change one thing, and lots of other things get affected?”
“You have no idea.”
“Well, I’m heading inside. You need anything?”
“A new ship?”
I chuckled. “You and me both. How long will you be?”
“Soon.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Right. I’ll be inside.”
Turning around, Kyndi showed no signs of quitting. She just sat there, same intent look on her face as in the morning.
I still had time to take a shower, eat a ration bar, and re-read the same hunting magazine from last time I was stuck in this cabin. I again pulled out my communicator to message Kyndi.
<Almost going to bed. When will you get here?>
Almost immediately, she answered:
<Soon>
I shook my head.
<Soon, or soon™?>
Another moment, and then:
<Soon™>
This woman.
There was no sense just sitting around, and I was even more beat than the night before. I stretched out on the bunk and closed my eyes. A little nap wouldn’t hurt anything, right?
”Matt, get out here now!” Kydi’s voice was filled with urgency.
The hell?
“What is it?”
“Just get your ass here!”
I checked the clock. I’ve been asleep for two hours, while she was still out there. I felt a moment of guilt.
Well, what the hell use would you have been?
Putting on the atmo suit as quickly as I could, I sealed the helmet, checked my air level, and ran down the little mountain of rubble. It was dark, so I ran up the shadow of Kyndi’s ship, flipped on the lights, and-
It was upright. Like nothing had ever happened to it.
Sweet Jesus. We just might be getting off this damn rock.
Out the starboard side, a bit of exhaust was still making a smoky trail into the thin atmosphere from the newly-modified thruster. So I put it together right, after all.
I looked up to see Kyndi in the pilot’s seat. She was still grinning from ear to ear.
“Nice work, darlin’. I knew you had it in you.”
I saw her get up and stretch. “That makes one of us. Now, it’s time for some sleep. Think you can stand one more night on this ice cube?”
“I reckon I can. C’mon down. You deserve some rest.”
Later that night, Kyndi and I were drifting off to sleep in the bunk. She didn’t skip her shower this time, and had managed to eat a ration bar before collapsing against me on the bunk. I was laying on my side, caressing her smooth, pale belly. Kyndi was on her back, eyes closed, smoking a victory joint.
“I hope those welds hold.”
I felt her stomach contract as she softly chuckled.
“I hope my code doesn’t fly us into a damn star.”
I sighed. I was tired, but still curious about a few things. “You given any thought to tracking those men down?”
Her free hand wrapped around mine and moved my fingers over her breast. “Of course. By my reckoning, they couldn’t have gotten far- not with only one ship, and not loaded full of those artifacts. Unless the Gold Brothers out of Novitski somehow possess alien tech-nullifying gear that CIRG doesn’t, my money says that they’re in a world of hurt right now.”
“So, it’s just a matter of where they are.”
She exhaled a cloud of pungent Onionhead smoke and guided my hand to just under her neck. “Yeah. I’m going to plot the most likely route based on a Python’s jump range, but it’s still a crap shoot. We’re going to have to get lucky, find ‘em before someone else does- if they can be found at all.”
“And then?”
My hand was slowly moved down to rest above her public line. Tiny hairs were just starting to grow back. “Depends on if they’re in a cooperative mood.”
“If they aren’t?”
“Then we take the artifacts by force, shoot every one of those bastards, and hope to make it back to Novitski before everything goes haywire.”
“And if they are?”
Kyndi moved my hand back to her belly, using it to trace little figure-eights around her navel. Her voice took on a bit of an edge as she finished the joint.
“I’m hoping they aren’t.”
“Well, if you’re planning to have another sentimental moment with the ship, now is your chance.”
Kyndi was powering down the systems on board the Anaconda. It would be the last time I ever saw it. Hopefully for real this time, I thought. We both took our final look around, and marched back to Kyndi’s ship. By unspoken agreement, we both walked around the ship to perform a final visual inspection.
“Son a bitch.” Anger was dripping from Kyndi’s voice.
Oh shit. Did one of my patches fall off?
I ran over to where she was. Thankfully, there wasn’t hull plating on the ground. Instead, Kyndi was staring at the small, beeping object on the underside of her ship. I walked up to her, and she pointed to it.
“Á goddamn tracker. That’s how they found us.”
I reached over and tugged on it. It took a few tries, but it came off. It felt magnetized. I held it up to inspect it, and tossed it to the ground.
“Well, as far as they’re concerned, we’re still here, right?”
Kyndi shrugged under her atmo suit. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re probably dead.”
I looked up at the ship. “So, how’s this going to work, what with there only being one pilot seat?”
All I got from Kyndi was a look of amusement.
This ain’t no way for a bounty hunter to leave a planet.
I was on my back, in my atmo suit, stretched across Kyndi’s bunk. Two emergency straps held me in place as the ship rocked back and forth from the takeoff. I could feel it pitch up as Kyndi climbed and gained altitude.
Well, my patches are holding, so that’s something, right?
“Could you go a little smoother? Feels like the ship is shaking an awful lot!”
I heard the suit’s comm crackle.
“You just let me do the flying, and try not to get my blankets dirty, ok?”
Sure enough, by boots were smearing wet dirt and ice across her pretty bedding. Oh well. Bill me for the cleaning. Let’s just get the hell out of here.
“We’re going to be good for frameshift in a just a bit. Ready?”
I looked nervously at the bumpy section of the pilot’s cabin where my patches were. “Do it, darlin’!”
The ship started to prep itself for jump, making the thousands of precise adjustments to prepare itself for faster-than-light travel. “Hold on back there!”
Shit, shit, shit…
BOOM! I felt the ship lurch away from normal time and space, entering the tunnel of witch space.
And-
Nothing.
There was the familiar feeling of deceleration. Which is really isn’t, because the ship wasn’t truly- ok, never mind. We were safe. The ship had made it. I glanced at the wall. Still bumpy, but also still there.
“Ok, let’s do our sweep.”
We did the “atom”, which is pilot-speak for a standard search pattern. It’s called that because the paths you take around a star start to resemble the orbits of electrons around an atoms’s nucleus. Clever, huh?
This leg of the trip was actually quite tedious- jump, search, jump, search, jump, search. We dropped out of supercruise to investigate anything that seemed odd- but came up empty-handed.
After repeatedly being terrified that my welds would fail and the window to space would be re-opened, I was becoming bored with the whole thing. I mean, yeah, it was crucial to the job and we both wanted to get even, but actually doing it was about as exciting as watching paint dry. I couldn’t even help, since I was strapped to a bunk in an atmo suit. A nap was beginning to sound good, if I could overcome the lurching feeling of going in and out of supercruise and jumping between stars. We must have been at it for hours, because I was suddenly snapped awake by Kyndi’s voice.
“Matt!”
It took me a moment to clear my head and answer. “What is it?”
“I think… I think we’ve got it!”
I unstrapped myself and walked up to Kyndi. Sure enough, there was a Python, drifting aimlessly. No comm signal, no cockpit activity, and no heat sig.
“How did you find it?”
Kyndi pointed to a screen. “Emergency beacon- but even it isn’t giving off a very strong signal, not compared to others I’ve seen.”
I nodded. “Seems consistent with what the artifacts do.”
She looked over her controls. “Same number, same paint job- this is it, alright.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “So what now?”
Kyndi looked up, a wicked look in her eye.
“Get that bolter rifle of yours. It’s time to do a little pirating.”