War Surf (16 page)

“Oh, I’m not especially virtuous.”

“You’re generous and trusting and very inexperienced,” I said. “How old are you now? Nineteen?”

‘Twenty-three!” She laughed and roughed up my scalp with her plastic loofa. “You never notice time passing, beau. You live the same year over and over.”

“Need help with that?” Liam’s words jolted me back to the present. He was pointing at the helmet clipped to my belt. We had already entered the airlock, and Liam had wrestled the cumbersome welding rig in between us. Chagrined, I clapped the helmet on my head and sealed the neck ring.

“Ready to go?’ he asked.

I nodded curtly. His baritone sounded muffled, and I realized the satellite phones in our helmets weren’t working. They needed the Net to relay their signals back and forth. “How’re we supposed to communicate?” I shouted.

“Hand signals,” he shouted back, though his hands remained motionless.

While we waited, I casually chinned on my helmet’s heads-up display and checked the time. And the date! Ye golden statuettes. Over sixty hours had passed since Sheeba and I crashed into Heaven. By Earth measure, we’d spent more than two days in this pestilence-ridden satellite. Breathing this air, imbibing these molecules, suffering the onslaughts of Heaven’s mysterious influence. We had to get out of here.

With a barely audible thump, the airlock’s outer door slid open. Our home planet swelled below us like a fat yellow belly, blanketed in woolly whorls of smog, and its glow blotted out the stars. I couldn’t see the gunship. The sun was not in sight. We had exited on the wrong side of Heaven.

The instant I stepped out, my body careened away from the hull. I’d forgotten how fast Heaven rocketed around its counterweight. There was no friction, nothing like wind resistance to indicate our speed, but the very blood in my veins felt the momentum. And I had no computerized thruster navigation to hold me in track with the spin.

In panic, I clutched the safety line clipped to my belt The line jolted me to a stop, men hauled me along like the tail of a kite as Heaven raced around its tight circular path. Grunting with effort, I pulled myself hand over hand back toward the hull—and felt like a dunce for drifting loose, like any green kid on his first space walk.

Liam was already heaving the welder along a line of handholds fastened to the hull. I got myself oriented and realized Liam had brought us out on Heaven’s shady side, where the ship couldn’t see us. I would have to crawl around to the sunny face where the solar panels were mounted—straight into the fire zone.

You may think Nasir Deepra, surfer ace, was thrilled to the ends of his hair follicles by the magnificent danger surrounding him. This had to be the most exhilarating war zone I’d ever surfed. Oh yes, I would have been blissed to the max—with a working sat phone in my pocket and my friends standing by with rescue robots. But Heaven was proving too actual and acute for entertainment value. Surfs were not supposed to last this long.

The almighty chief of thugs was watching me, so I had no choice but to haul myself along the safety line and scramble after him. Still I glanced around, trying to devise a plan.

One end of the dented tank terminated in a blunt base, while the other tapered to a vanishing point, beyond which, far in the distance, the white chunk of asteroid gleamed. The counterweight looked small from my perspective, and the tether stretched toward it like a shining ribbon. I couldn’t see how the tether attached, but I remembered a schematic of massive cables and bolts affixed to the tank’s bullet point.

The chieftain shook my shoulder. Well, of course I was distracted by all these sights. I didn’t go spacewalking every day, certainly not on a crazy whirling satellite. Liam grabbed my arm and towed me like deadweight toward the welder, which he had clamped into place with magnetic lock-downs. He grasped my helmet and shook it to make sure he had my attention. I batted his hand away.

Very conspicuously, he pointed to a valve mechanism attached to the welder’s gas cylinder. It apparently controlled the regulator, which released compressed gas through the hose to power his welding torch. He mimed twisting the valve clockwise, then made a thumbs-up signal. Next he mimed reversing it counterclockwise, and that came with a thumbs-down. I nodded to show I understood.

Before he left me, he pressed my fingers around a handhold. Insolent pup. As if he expected me to drift away again. Next, incredibly, he unclipped himself from the safety line. Spacewalking without a safety line! On a hull spinning this fast!

You know, kids don’t think. They’re dumb as rocks. I would’ve lectured him about the risks, but we hadn’t worked out the hand signals for scolding.

Without looking my way, he garnered up the coiled hose and slid along the hull. Not only did the punk dispense with his safety line. He also moved away from the row of handholds. He flattened himself to the pitted hull, wedged his boots against small bolts and forced his gloved fingers into tiny crevices. Obviously, he’d pulled this prank before. He moved with extreme deliberation, like a mountain climber seating a sheer face. At tunes he seemed to cling by willpower alone. I had to admire his agility. It crossed my mind that my surfer friends would pay serious deutsch to learn those skills.

With a tense grace I envied, he passed around the curve of the hull deeper into the shade of Heaven’s underbelly, until all I could see was the top of his helmet. Could I do that—crawl around the hull in the other direction, with no safety line, no handholds, hoping the gunship’s cameras would spot me? Well, Liam did it I examined the section of hull nearest me. It looked ancient, the seams ridged and knotty, the metal pockmarked by space debris and degraded by radiation. But the dents looked too shallow to provide a decent hold. It was a dicey plan.

Still, the gunship had to be right there, just above the tank’s horizon. If I could free-climb a few meters into the sunlight, I would see it This might be the best opportunity I would ever get. Surf the moment

I eased away from the handhold and grasped a cooling vane. The hull’s powerful momentum strained my shoulder ligaments as I pulled up around the curve as far as my safety line would extend. From there, I could see the tops of the solar panels glittering in the sunlight. Many were twisted and shattered. I saw only two panels left standing. The gunship’s noisemakers weren’t supposed to damage them like that. Someone was going to be held accountable.

Liam’s welder hose looped like a bowel, silhouetted against Earth’s albedo, but Liam had disappeared. A chill solitude overtook me. Distances in space are so incomprehensibly vast, they play with your mind. Why didn’t my friends circle around and see me? But they wouldn’t be looking here in the shadows. No one would look for me here.

Briefly, I imagined yanking free of the safety line and kicking off into space, flying out into view of Provendia’s gunship. I pictured the troops recognizing me as their patron, drawing me into their hold and paying homage. Huah! What a surf! Only the ace Nasir Deepra could have pulled it off. Yes, we’ll go back at once and rescue your mistress.

Conceive the reinforcements I would call in, the spaceships, the hordes of special assault troops, the lawyers and bankers. Visualize the relief on Sheeba’s face when I swooped down and lifted her to safety. Her head thrown back. Her lips moist and parted. Her bosoms gently rising toward my mouth. Oh.

But what if the gunship didn’t spot me? Streaking off at a tangent to Heaven’s spin, hardly a speck in this great black void—I might fly away too quickly, beyond the range of the Net, beyond health churches and bioNEMs, beyond the glow of the known world.

“Into the dark,” Sheeba whispered with breathless enthusiasm. And I slipped back to my handhold and gave the safety line a tug. Still secure, yes.

Then the hull exploded. A gaping rent flapped open in Heaven’s underbelly, and pressurized air rushed from the interior outward toward the vacuum, carrying twisted steel tables, water vapor and a supernova of green foliage. Among the debris, I saw a strange white shape whirling above me. It was Liam tumbling head over heels.

Like an idiot, I kicked off from the hull and hurled myself toward Liam. Why did I risk my life for this twentysomething boy? Even now, I can’t tell you. I reached the end of my line in seconds, grappled for his outstretched hand, caught hold—then lost him. Like a snapping whip, I recoiled back toward the factory. Yet our brief connection had changed Liam’s trajectory. Instead of flying away, he was now revolving toward me—but not fast enough to keep up with Heaven.

When the seam in the tank ripped wider, one of the hydroponic tables broke loose, and for a teetering instant, it plugged the breach. Then the table burst out, the hull splayed apart, and in the jet of escaping air, every class of object came tumbling after it. Leaves and roots. Shreds of partition wall. A bucket and mop sloshing great globules of dirty ice. These items flew around me like missiles.

With adrenaline speed, I seized a long remnant of welding hose as it sailed past, then unclipped my safety line from my belt and lashed it to the hose with a single hasty knot. I looped the end of the hose tight around my forearm, and with this improvised extension, I kicked off from the flapping hull again.

The escaping air burble had shunted Liam sideways, and the welding hose gave me just enough extra length to clutch the sole of his boot, For a few brief seconds, I dragged him along in Heaven’s wake. Then he slipped from my grasp. But not far. I stretched my gloved fingers and clawed at the empty space between us.

With no conscious decision, I unwound the loops of hose from my arm and let the momentum sling me farther out. As the hose slid through my glove, I stretched my good left leg for Liam to grab. Picture me straightening every joint, elongating every muscle to fullest extension. Only at the last moment did I grip the hose’s ragged end and hold firm. Then with a startling jolt, another section of the hull blew. The panel that anchored my safety line came loose at one comer and buckled outward, sailing me another meter toward Liam. He spun, I stretched, and he caught my leg.

See us spinning together like a pair of skaters, eyeing that precarious hull. Feel my fist tightening on the frazzled end of that hose. The panel kept tearing, and the hose oscillated back and forth, jerking my half-hitch knot looser from the safety line with every tug. Liam pulled himself along my body oil we were both clinging to the hose. Only much later did I comprehend—I could have been rid of him.

Long seconds passed before Two emptied itself of air and the blowout subsided. By a miracle, the panel anchoring our safety line held firm, and the welding rig remained anchored to its magnets. With only Earth-glow and our helmet lights to guide us, Liam and I gingerly hauled ourselves in and climbed through Heaven’s gaping side, where we found scenes of madness.

Torn walls, floors warped into towering sculptures, cabinets ruptured, every surface scarred and blackened by the friction of escaping objects, which in some places had literally burned away the paint No loose items remained. Most of the hydroponic tables had been ripped off their bolts and flung into space, but a few still tilted and spun like sad skeletons. No trace of the seedlings remained.

“Geraldine and Juani must have made it out,” I said, trying to sound sure.

But in our EVA suits with the nonfunctioning sat phones, Liam still couldn’t hear me. Our helmet lights flickered silently over the wreckage, and we picked our way to the ladder well. We found the door wrenched open, but the ladder was gone. The blowout had ripped it from the wall, and the remaining bolts jutted out like a row of broken teeth.

Liam sprang lightly across the well and checked the door to the solar plant He gave the wheel a firm yank, but it wouldn’t move. Ye graven gold, what if mat door had burst open, too? Without electrical power, Heaven’s life support would wink out like an expiring star. Not a bulb in the ladder well glimmered.

I pressed my helmet to Liam’s so the sound of my voice would carry. “Did we lose power?’

“People in there.” Liam banged the door with his fist

Right, youngsters were hiding in ops bay. “What about the solar plant?”

He leaned his helmet against mine. “This door sealed tight. They probably still have air pressure. We gotta close off this well and repressurize. Then we can open the door.”

The punk’s words made sense. Only half of Deck Two had voided its air. The half with the solar plant and ops bay remained intact, and the pressure behind that door was holding it shut.

Liam touched his helmet to mine again, and his breath fogged his faceplate. “I going below to see about the people on One. You wait.”

“There are people on Deck One?” I asked, but he’d already moved away.

While he hustled down through the lock, I made another desperate call on my helmet sat phone, with no luck, of course. My EVA glove covered the IBiS, but from the way my thumb tingled, I knew it still wasn’t connecting, either. I paced and waited, working myself into a gloomy funk. A dead surveillance camera gave me a blank stare.

As a distraction, I started scraping fungus off the wall with my boot to see the graffiti better. The childish drawings had been scratched into the metal, then colored with crayon. There were lines and ranks of portraits, mostly grouped in family units, mothers and fathers with strings of neonates holding hands. It suggested some kind of genealogy record. Many portraits were stick figures, while others had been more fully drawn, either by multiple artists or by a single creator whose craft had evolved.

Liam emerged from the floor hatch and gave me a thumbs-up. “People on One okay for now,” he shouted, pressing his helmet to mine.

Then he pulled himself up the side of the well along the row of broken bolts. When he reached the ceiling and opened the safety hatch leading to Three, he offered me a hand. Once we were inside the tiny lock, he sealed the hatch and punched a button, which started a noisy machine. A compressor. It was filling the lock with air. I offered silent thanks to the brilliant engineers who had installed these safety airlocks between the decks. They had contained the blowout and saved my Sheeba!

Liam and I squatted shoulder to shoulder for some eternity of minutes while the compressor chugged, and I began to feel the familiar letdown after a surf. My adrenaline plummeted, my brain went dull. I wanted a margarita and some nice snacks. Maybe some of my NEMs had shut down, but the others were still guzzling blood sugar. My empty bowel rumbled.

Only after we’d climbed out of the airlock and latched it securely beneath us did Liam signal to remove our helmets. Darkness drenched Three’s ladder well, just like Two. Not a promising sign. We clipped our helmets to our belts, and the lights shot off in crazy angles, dancing across the walls.

“That hull breach was a mistake.” I wiped sweaty curls off my forehead, glad for once that I had no mirror. “Provendia wouldn’t damage its own factory.”

“Mistake?” Liam spoke as if he begrudged the very shape of the word. In the dimness, I could barely make out his bearded face.

“That hull breach wasn’t anywhere near where the gun-ship was firing,” I said.

“You think we stupid enough to blow our home?”

“You were stupid enough to start this war.”

He almost answered, then gritted his teeth and slung his braid behind his shoulder.

“Look where you are,” I went on. “You live on a freaking satellite. Totally dependent on artificial life support. Even your orbit has to be controlled from Earth. You have absolutely no chance in hell. What were you thinking?”

His eyes glittered in the uneasy light, and he scraped fungus off the bulkhead hinges with his glove. Dumb brute. I was just about convinced of his utter disability with language when his baritone resonated through the well. “Nasir, why you save my life?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thrown off balance.

He touched my arm. “Thank you.” The next instant, he unclipped my helmet and shut off its lights.

“Give that back!” I shouted.

“Save the batteries.” He shut off his own lights and sank us both into pitch-darkness.

I stood frozen with rage. Were batteries so scarce? If another hull breach occurred, I would need that helmet. I heard him clipping my helmet to his belt. Next he opened the door into Three, and I heard his boots leap over the sill and run down an unlighted corridor. I couldn’t see a thing.

“Come back here.”

I’d risked my life for that punk. My very toes curled with rage. I wanted to annihilate the stupid lout. Then I remembered Sheeba, so I hurried after him into Three.

“Dark is evil. It’s ignorance and depravity. Everything wicked.”

“Yes, that’s part of it,” Sheeba admitted.

She and I were lounging in my bed, with an old movie muted and forgotten on the screen. She was waxing ecstatic about her usual theme, the dark, and I was baiting her, for the fun of it.

“In the dark, we find rest and healing.” She hugged a cushion to her chest and rocked. Her eyes got that dreamy sparkle. “Life quickens in the dark. Stars are born mere. Dark laces the universe together.”

“It’s also the underworld where nasty things slither and rot,” I teased.

“Well, Nass, you’re as slithery as they come.” She tickled the back of my arm. “And don’t we tunnel in the Earth for shelter?”

“I see. You’re calling me a worm.”

“I’m saying the dark leads us home.”

“Gilty gods, you mean the grave. Do you want me to die?”

She laughed. “You’re the one who wants that.”

I kicked off the covers and sat up. “Just because my sport’s a little dangerous, don’t assume I have a death wish. I’m very cautious, darling. I love my life.”

“Liar. You hate it as much as I do. Everything’s too cozy. It’s not supposed to be like this.”

“You’d rather live in poverty, I suppose.”

She squeezed the cushion tighter. “Maybe.”

Scatterbrain. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, I almost yelled. Our discussion was getting edgy. Shee and I had never argued, and I didn’t want to begin, but her tomfool remarks upset me. Too cozy? My friends and I practically sacrificed our souls to give her this comfort. I tried to laugh it off.

“Be serious, Nass. You’re hurting all over. I feel your muscles every day.” To prove her point, she started kneading my tense shoulders. “It’s our nature to scream and fight and tear things. We need the dark.”

“But Shee—do you seriously want evil in your life?”

Her eyes sparkled. “I want some of everything.” Simple child. As I felt my way along Heaven’s pitch-black corridor, her words resonated. You might say, they
haunted
me. Sheeba had no idea how ugly and dangerous the dark could become. My shoulder brushed an unseen wall. The air tasted of long stale enclosure, and I couldn’t see three centimeters in front of my nose. Somewhere ahead, Liam twisted another creaking wheel. Despite the fact mat I loathed him, his nearness reassured me, so I hurried to catch up.

A flash of light showed a door opening, and his silhouette darted through. Then the door slammed, and darkness engulfed me again.

Punk. He could have left the door open. The very thought of the risks I’d taken for mat twentysomething thug made me want to bash his teeth in. I should have used the blowout to make my escape. With that extra length of hose, I should have sailed out and signaled the gunship. Instead, I helped that—that agitator.

At that very moment, he was racing ahead to meet Sheeba, with who knows what ulterior purposes. No way would I let him get there first. I slid my glove along the wall, grumbling under my breath and searching for the door. By feel alone, I located the wheel and fumbled to open it.

“Catch.”

Geraldine hurled a bulky object toward me the instant the door fell open, and I caught it by reflex. It was a heavy, ten-liter can of stew. I glanced around and recognized the same drying room I’d visited earlier, only now the rows of ovens stood open. Emergency fluorescent tubes buzzed from the ceiling, and Geraldine stuck her head in one of the oven doors. All the lids had been folded back, so I peeked inside. Each oven contained a hoard of food cans marked with Provendia’s logo. Standard employee provisions. They must have been stockpiling their rations for months.

Geraldine and Juani were transferring the ovens’ contents into a handcart. I read the label on the can Geraldine had tossed to me: chili diablo. It was some kind of spicy protein mixture, and the description on the label made me salivate.

“We’re taking everything up to Four, just in case.” Geraldine hurled another steel can in my direction. Behind her, Juani sang a song about moonlight.

Just in case. I didn’t like that phrase. As I ducked to let the next can fly over my shoulder, Juani gestured for me to help him push his cart. It was severely overloaded, and apparently, he wanted to move it to the ladder well.

I said, “Where’s Sheeba?”

“Nasir, I’m here.”

In the breathless moment that followed, I turned and saw her framed in a nearby doorway, lighted in the jittery halo of fluorescent green. She’d changed. Her appearance shocked me. Only after my eyes adjusted to the light did I understand. Her pale skin dye had faded even further, revealing more of her complexion’s true olive tone. She gleamed a deep burnished bronze. And those eyes, sparkling with all the shades of a northern lake stirred by rain. It made a jarring combination.

“We’re moving these supplies up to sick-ward,” she said.

I ran across the room and seized her in my arms, but at first I couldn’t speak.

Gently, she released herself from my grip. “We’re going to seal ourselves in and make a stand.”

“Make a stand? Sheeba, listen to yourself. You sound as if you’re siding with these protes.”

“Of course I am, Nass.” She checked out the EVA suit I still wore.

“Dearest.” I pressed my mouth to her ear and whispered, “We have to leave. This place might blow any second.”

“I know,” she whispered back, “but first, we have to help these people. Their situation’s heinous.” Then she hurried to help Juani push his cart.

By accident, the cart tipped over, and when Sheeba launched herself bodily to catch the spilling cans, I recognized what had happened. She was caught up in the thrill of war surfing. The ardor shining in her eyes told the story. The chemicals of fear, the need for fast action, the deep salty urge to fight, these instincts had overwhelmed her reason. Zone bliss had so completely captivated her that she’d forgotten which team she belonged to.