The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (30 page)

Erling started to argue back again, but it was Shaw’s turn to interrupt.

“I’ll do it.”

He noticed the hose had gone silent, and he felt the eyes of Tranq on the back of his neck. “I’ll take your place,” he said to Erling. “I may not be that mechanically inclined, but Annalise can tell me what to do.”

Wulf scoffed. “Not a chance.”

“It makes sense, I can—”

“After what you just did? You want us to put our lives in your hands? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…” Wulf scratched his chin.

“Erling can’t go, you can’t risk anyone else, and after what just happened, I’m probably dead in three days anyway.”

Wulf shook his head.

“I don’t think he could make it any worse,” Annalise said quietly.

“We can’t risk it,” Wulf replied.

“I agree with Annalise.” Tranq stepped forward, catching everyone off guard. “Volunteering to go on a suicidal space walk on a runaway spaceship that’s already hurling us to our deaths? If he wanted us dead, it seems like he could just sit in here and wait it out. Let him go.”

Shaw waited, but no one seemed to be willing to follow up.

“We’re running out of time, Wulf,” Annalise said.

Wulf nodded. “Fine. Go. But if you try anything while you’re out there, Byron, know that you’ll die in the process. We’ll just keep the airlock closed.”

Together in a small and crowded staging room, Shaw and Annalise stripped off their clothes, Shaw discreetly trying to shield his body and his gaze, Annalise undressing as if she were alone in her own closet.

“Listen,” Shaw said, “I want you to know that I’m not going to do anything stupid. I don’t know if you feel like you can trust me, but we’re on the same side.”

“Here’s your first layer,” she said, tossing a thin insulated one-piece at his shoulder.

“Annalise …”

“Don’t push it, OK? I agree with Tranq—sabotaging the ship from outside the hull makes no sense. So I believe you. Out there, we’ll be on the same side. In here … you’re just the guy who tried to blow up my ship.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I don’t care what you
meant
to do, Byron. Next layer. Hurry up.” She floated a padded suit in the middle of the cramped room. Shaw grabbed it, recognizing the material from the Lattice Installation. The fabric conducted electricity, supplying body readings to his wrap, flexible and yet instantly hardening under contact, so much so that it could withstand a bullet at point blank range.

“I’m sorry, Annalise. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure you feel bad. When I was addicted to the Lattice, I felt bad after I’d sold my mother-in-law’s antique samovar for another thirty minutes in a jump. I felt bad after I’d sold my leg, too. Junkies always feel bad afterwards.”

“I’m not a damn junkie!” Shaw yelled, turning on Annalise. She squared off with him, and—just like Tranq—he realized that she was hungry for a fight.

Before either could move, the
Walden
whirred, its motion hiccupping, like it had run over a rabbit in the road. Even just that little bit jostled them back against the wall.

Annalise shook her head. She turned around and picked up a black suit from the wall. “Your outer layer and helmet. We don’t have much time.”

Annalise was framed in the door. On the other side of her was an abyss. It was an impossible depth, the darkest of blacks. Her black suit looked gray and washed out against the true void of space. And then she was gone, disappearing down her tether, leaving only the door and the abyss.

He stepped forward and gaped at the nothingness.

Shaw was really and truly afraid.

“Get moving, Byron!” Annalise called over the comm in his helmet.

He took another step forward so that his toes were just on the edge. It felt like a fear of heights, but there was no height out here. There was nothing. When he was out there, he would only have the horizon of the hull of the
Walden
, and everything else was death.

He inched his finger out of the door and reached around to place a palm on the outer hull. Unlike the walls and floors inside, the surface wasn’t sticky. Responding to his movements, the tether rushed out of the door in front of him. He realized it was a smart tether, made of flexible metal with bots throughout its length, ready to press him against the hull of the
Walden
when he needed it, and pull him back to it should he ever somehow fall away.

It wasn’t going to break, but here on the edge of everything, he found it impossible to put his trust in the intelligence of the AI and the strength of its thin filament weave, no matter how strong they were.

In his comm again: “Shaw!”

He scrambled onto the hull, all common sense to the wind, but the tether guided him, pulled him, and once he’d reoriented himself, it wasn’t so bad. Until he looked down at his hands. There was no hull. Beneath him, above him, all around him, there was nothing but space.

He was on the hull of an invisible ship. Even at a range of a few inches, he couldn’t tell that there was a ship below him. His hands were pressed against
something
, but so far as he could tell otherwise, there was nothing there.

“Can’t we turn off the invisibility?”

“We’re risking enough being out here ourselves. Get over here!”

“Where are you?” He looked up from his hands but didn’t see her anywhere.

“Under your knee.”

Shaw looked down again—through the
Walden
, he realized—and saw Annalise spread out, her hands and fingers busy on something that he couldn’t quite see. He began crawling around the invisible curve of the ship in her direction.

“Man, this is weird.”

By the time he’d circled around to the underside of the ship, assuming his geography wasn’t too far off, he could see what she was working on. The triangular piece of metal he’d seen on the screen inside looked more like a wedge up close. It was lodged into the side of nothingness, but Shaw could see the damage caused by its impact. Around the wedge, there were glimpses of hard metal where the underside of the hull had been exposed. Jutting away from the impact site were long cracks in the invisible hull that caught the light of Earth like slim wires of blue energy.

Annalise had a small torch in her hand and was aiming it at a spot next to the wedge. Next to her a small drone floated, its tentacles moving slowly over the cracks in the hull. When it got too close to her hands, Annalise would elbow it aside but it invariably returned. That appeared to be her only distraction, though. Her eyes were fully intent on her job, and Shaw felt useless.

“What can I do?”

“What?”

“I said, what do you need me to do?”

She didn’t answer, and he began repeating it.

“Just stand there until I need you. I’m kind of busy.”

He saw through her visor that her mouth was moving, but he didn’t hear anything in his comm. “I didn’t catch that.”

This time her eyes flicked to his. “Taveena was telling me to hurry up and I was telling her she was welcome to come join me.”

Shaw suddenly felt the precariousness of his position. That Taveena and Annalise were talking without him hearing shouldn’t have surprised him, and yet it did. How easy it would be for them to just leave him out here.
What had he been thinking to volunteer for this?

Annalise put a tool aside and let the drone take it. As she grabbed another one from it, she asked, “You think you can get that thing out of my engine while I finish this?”

If she needed a grunt, he could be a grunt.

Shaw ran his fingers around the wedge. He thought there were a couple sharp edges but otherwise it was just a hunk of metal. What had this been doing on the hotel? He tugged at it once, and then pulled harder. Nothing moved.

Shaw adjusted his feet so that he was kneeling. Trusting the smart tether to provide the countering force that would keep him on the hull, Shaw pulled with all his might.

Nothing budged.

Ballast? A weight to keep things more stable? Part of the artificial gravity system? What was the point of this hunk of metal?

And how was he going to get it out of here? Was it crazy to imagine that if it stayed stuck in the hull, he would stay stuck out here with it?

He stood, at first not even conscious that he was standing—
standing!
—on the hull. Hooking a toe under a piece of the metal, Shaw grabbed behind his head, finding the tether coming out of his upper back. Once he had a firm grasp on it, he tugged hard, pulling it over his shoulder and coiling it in his hands like a rope.

He suddenly felt pressure on his toes as his body separated from the hull—the tether couldn’t keep him in place while he was holding it.

After a few coils piled up in his hand, he pulled himself closer to the metal piece and was able to get three loops solidly around the base of the debris. Pulling each one tight, Shaw thought they would hold, biting into the metal and under some of the sharp edges of the piece.

“What are you doing?” Annalise cried, looking at him like he was crazy. She apparently hadn’t noticed what Shaw was up to until he had tightened the tether’s coils.

“This tether’s got to be stronger than I am. I’m going to let it do all the hard work.”

“Shaw, that’s suicide! If your tether gets cut by any of those sharp edges you’ll be floating out here without a line!”

“I can’t think of another way. This thing’s got to get out of here, right? That little drone won’t be able to do it. I can’t do it alone. Finish what you can and then help me pull.”

Annalise looked like she was going to argue but she turned back to her work. Shaw kept tension on the tether, not letting it uncoil from the metal. He waited for what seemed like an eternity.

“Done,” Annalise said, standing. “Once we get this piece out of there, I just need to replace the AI that runs the engine. The drone can finish the rest while we make our way back to the airlock.”

Annalise grabbed the long side of the tether that snaked between the metal piece and the airlock. Shaw was holding the end that came out of his back.

“As soon as it’s free, the tether’s going to be limp while we’re holding it. It won’t be able to keep you against the ship until it’s acting on its own again,” Annalise said.

“So we both let go as soon as we can.”

She nodded. “And if you lose contact, don’t panic. The tether will try to reel you in. Try to ball up so you don’t get any whiplash.”

“OK.”

“Ready?”

Shaw took a breath. He was holding his lifeline in his hands.

“Ready,” he nodded.

“One,” she said. Shaw stared at the chunk of metal, trying to predict which way it would tumble out.
Would it even move?

“Two,” she said.
Even if this works, will they still let me back in the airlock?

“Three!” she cried.
Ellie. This is all to get back to Ellie.

Together they strained everything they had, pulling hard on the tether, hoping for just an inch of give, anything that would tell them they were making headway. Shaw’s body felt like it hadn’t been tested in months, even though he’d only spent a few days in micro gravity. But now every muscle was on fire, and still the metal wouldn’t budge.

Shaw felt his footing slip, and as he tried to right himself his grip on the tether loosened too. With a mind of its own, it jumped out of his hands and started flapping about, trying to get itself unhooked from the coils around the metal.

It was able to do what Shaw couldn’t. The tether’s coils tightened and pulled, slingshotting the metal debris out of the engine at a breathtaking speed—and slicing right through Annalise’s tether on its way out into space.

Shaw stared dumbly as the metal flew between them, leaving the two frayed ends of her tether floating in its wake. One of the sharp edges must have—

“Byron!” Annalise was a foot off the hull, her hand extended toward him. She had no tether, and no power on her suit to push her back. She was adrift in space.

Shaw reached out to take her hand, but the severed tether had suddenly become two live wires of energy, flailing around her with incredible force.

“They’re trying to find each other!”

Indeed, the two ends were wrapping together, twirling and spiraling, trying to knit themselves back together into a single tether again.

Annalise let out a terrible scream. She was a few feet off the surface of the hull now, her outstretched hand caught in the middle of the tether’s knots. Her hand was being crushed inside it.

“Byron!” she cried again.

In his comm, he heard Taveena’s voice. “I’m killing her tether, Shaw.”

“
What?
It’s just reforming! She won’t have any way to get back to the ship.”

“You heard her. She needs to replace the engine’s AI. You need to get it from her before the tether crushes it.”

“It’s crushing her
hand
, Taveena! Forget about the AI.”

“Forget about it and we’re all dead. The stabilizers don’t have more than a couple minutes left in them and we can’t run the ship if the engine won’t wake up.”

And as if they’d never been anything but a dumb cable, Annalise’s tethers were suddenly still and lifeless. Shaw stared. She was almost twenty feet from the ship now, silhouetted against the bright blue planet behind her.

“Go, Shaw!”

Without a second thought, Shaw leapt upward, leaving everything in the hands of his own tether. He sailed through space, his trajectory straight as an arrow.

Executing a perfect tackle, he bear-hugged her with all four limbs. His legs tight around her waist, Shaw let go and grappled with the tether knotted around her left hand.

“Forget the tether. Get the replacement AI.”

“She’s going to lose her hand!”

“She’s lost it before,” Taveena said. “Focus. We need the AI. It’s in her suit’s pouch.”

His tether was slowly pushing them both back to the hull. He reluctantly left the tether and patted at her waist. He found the slim AI rod in her pouch and pulled it out. He thought he was almost back to the hull.

“Are you awake, Annalise?”

She was nearly passed out, he thought, but she was able to let out a soft grunt.