Transcendence (38 page)

“
SOS,” he said, knowing full well that the tiny, subcutaneous generator-cells barely produced enough energy to transmit the signal through the ship itself. “This is Captain Pehr Jackson of the EarthCo
Bounty
. We surrender. Please respond. My entire crew of two is hurt and in need of medical attention. SOS. Please respond.”

When he turned his card’s receiver up to full gain, all he heard was a faint crackle, which he attributed to Neptune’s EM field. The gurgling and hissing beneath the pod continued, as steady as ever. At times, the hull creaked as if the temperature differential were so great it would shatter like a hot crystal glass dropped into a freezing stream.

“
Damn,” he said, keeping the feed channel open, just in case someone were to comm them.

The flashlight beam swung across an irregularity in the hull. Pehr noticed it a moment later, an afterimage, and brought the light back. There, an oval seam in the wall, with a tiny, triangular hole at about hand-level. The sound of his breath in his suit’s recyclers grew louder.

Pehr took the few steps to the seam and touched the hole. His suited fingertip barely fit inside, but nothing happened. He wondered how deep into chemical liquid the pod had sunk.

“
A key,” he said aloud. Once more, he damned himself for not studying the ship’s layout before, while its server and other computers were still online. “Where would a key be kept?”

Once more, he returned to the stowage compartments beneath the couches, this time with the aid of light. He saw many items: a coil of strong cord, a grappling-hook, and adhesion-eyes for climbing, which he removed and laid on his couch; a squat watercycler, round with a collapsible funnel for collecting dirty water and urine—he laid this beside the cord; emergency food packets, but no solid-matter cycler; and many other survival items. Just as his patience was wearing thin with fear, he found the key to open the hatch. It was stored in a container with the letters KEY stenciled on its lid in vivid orange; the container was held in a slot in the arm of his own couch, the captain’s couch. The last place he had looked. He cursed himself.

He had to bend over to fit beneath the low ceiling. The key slid in perfectly, and when he turned it a cog moved inside the wall. But that was it. The door did not open.

“
Dammit!” he yelled at the uncooperative machine. “I suppose you need electricity to work.” He began to laugh giddily, but only for a moment. He regained control of himself.

“
Okay, you damned thing,” he said, setting down the flashlight on its heavy base, “I’ll give you energy.”

Pehr stomped across the hollow-sounding floorpanels to where his laser pistol lay on the floor, picked it up, and pointed it at the stubborn lock. He pulled the trigger, releasing a beam of color at the wall where he had heard the cog turn. He was not about to search for electrical schematics and find a way to divert energy from, say, the watercycler to the lock.

Black smoke filled the room, oddly cascading to the floor rather than rising. Low air pressure, he remembered. He kept the beam on one spot until it burned through, then burned another, and another, until a large semicircle of holes were punched around the locking mechanisms. He released the laser’s trigger; his spacesuit dispersed the weapon’s heat as far up as his wrist, so he carefully set it on a metal grille in the floor.

Two kicks and the perforated section of wall fell away. Pehr re-situated the flashlight on his couch so it would shine into the hole, then slid on a pair of protective outer-gloves he had found beneath Eyes’ couch. Reaching into the jagged opening, he twisted the stuck cog’s shaft until it popped free. Then he pushed on the doorframe from inside, and it swung free, into the cabin.

He pulled the hatch wide, and saw it opened into an airlock. He repeated the process of opening the inner door, but this time two bolts had to be released. The outer door moved on sliders, not hinges, and the hull was warped. By the time he pushed it wide enough to pass a person, Pehr’s pressure-suit slid over his skin on a lubricant of sweat.

Ice boiled just centimeters beneath the doorframe, pink and blue fumes swirling around his boots and creeping into the airlock. He couldn’t see anything beyond the gas and bubbles just outside the hull.

Pehr hurried inside and tied the grappling-hook to the cord. With that over one shoulder, he wrapped Janus in a silver blanket. As Pehr carried her in the necessary but awkward slouch into the airlock, he noticed she seemed to weigh no more than a baby in the slight gravity. Liquid was beginning to roll into the airlock, spilling over the outer threshold like snakes—slow, writhing, fuming.

The flashlight wasn’t able to cast light outside, so he simply hooked it onto the suit’s belt, shining downward. With one hand, he blindly hurled the hook into the darkness as hard as he could. It sailed a long way before landing, taking most of the cord along. Pehr pulled it until the hook found a seat, then yanked as hard as he thought it must hold. It held, bonding ions with the surface.

“
I’ve got you,” he told Janus. Then he drew a deep breath.

“
Here’s to adventure!” And he leapt out over the boiling chemicals as far as he could with a woman under one arm, the other hand on the cord.

It seemed he slammed into a wall, and—

Pehr found himself sitting upright on his couch, still in the
Bounty
’s pod. The ring of light flickered, but it wasn’t out completely. He turned and saw Janus unconscious, as was Eyes to Pehr’s other side. He looked at where the airlock-hatch should be, and yes, the seam stood out to him now. But it was not open, nor had a laser punched holes in the hull beside it.

In a sort of daze, Pehr found the key in the arm beside him. He stood and listened. The ship crackled and pinged. Water gurgled and gases hissed beneath it.

“
Crash you, little bastard!” Pehr shouted at Eyes.

He reached down and found his pistol, powered it up, and turned it toward Eyes. Pehr stomped around his couch to the other man’s, placing the weapon’s barrel against Eyes’ chest. He flicked on his comm line.

“
Let her free or I’ll burn a hole right through your lousy body.”

Eyes’ eyes fluttered open, and his face mutated from slack to conscious and twitching. No emotion seemed to register in his features.

“
What kind of man are you?” Pehr asked. “If we want to survive, we’ve got to cooperate. What crap were you trying to pull?”

An unadorned 3VRD of Eyes appeared before Pehr. “Who’s going to survive?” it asked. Eyes, himself, lay motionless, except for his mouth, which moved more than necessary to form the words. “We’re not going to survive. Might as well make something of our last moments, hmmm?”

Eyes’ 3VRD nodded toward Janus; Pehr noticed she was stirring, so he circled back around his couch to her, keeping the pistol on Eyes.

“
How are you?” he asked her.

The bat-creatures clattered closer to her. Their claws, their thousands of claws, scrabbled as they advanced. Janus kept up the defiance, even though she had found the cyborg had blocked her from editing this little show of his.

That’s all right
, she thought. She was stronger than he. She would survive anything he could conjure up for her, because she knew it was all a fantasy. All of life itself was a fantasy. Pehr had been right.

More words sprang to her lips from the dusty catacombs of her childhood. They didn’t have the strength she hoped they would, but she pressed on until her voice at last sounded firm:

“‘
. . .through the tender mercy of our God, when the day shall dawn upon us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness ’til the day of his manifestation to Israel.’”

The closest beast, taller than she, lashed out. Its clawed forearm raked across her face. It hissed at the same time, a sort of scream almost in the ultrasonic.

Janus laughed as she felt the hot blood well up and out. “It almost feels real, Eyes,” she chided. She caught a glimpse of him through leathery wings and black fur; his face was twisted in anger and frustration.

She was winning. Even so, too many images of childhood flashed before her mind’s eye.

Another blow, this one tearing free her bra. She felt her breasts fall loose, bare and exposed. She would not let that frighten her; after all, this wasn’t her real body. But the simulated tearing of her skin tired her, and the blood spilling out made her dizzy.
The sonofabitch must have half a dozen cards in his rotten skull
, she thought;
his whole neck must be filled with powercells
.

And then the sky split open, and the demons faded away into a mist of howls and fluttering wings.

“
I beat you!” she shouted as his freak city dissolved.

And then she found herself encased in a globe—a helmet, she realized. Faint light flickered on and off all around. The pod. I’m in the pod.

“
How are you?” a man asked, the words in her skull but not in her ears. His face was turned away.

She nearly kicked him in the head before she realized who it was. He was speaking through his commline—audio only, perhaps to save energy. Janus flicked on her own commline as she sat up.

“
Jack! Oh my god,” she said, throwing her arms around him, her rubbery suit frictioning with his so she couldn’t really embrace him. Then she got herself under control and released her grip.

She put her legs over the edge of the couch and stood. Every muscle in her body trembled—but only enough for her to just barely feel.

The Ticco massaccel pistol sparkled near her feet, chrome shiny in the failing light. She picked it up, holding it so Jack couldn’t see, and walked to where the filthy cyborg lay.

“
Eyes,” she said, looking down at the human-sized disease, ignoring its 3VRD, “I’m not doing you a favor. This is for the safety of Triton.” Its eyes opened wide with fear, but it didn’t speak.

Jack understood just then. “Janus, don’t!” he cried. But it was too late.

The pistol sang and jumped in her hand, spewing out microscopic pellets at massive velocity. Eyes’ suit split open along the new seam she created, and his blood boiled out like magma from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, all steam and red and watery. A few seconds later, and only a few bubbles still popped.

The 3VRD flickered and vanished. The end.

Janus felt a scene close in her life, one that had gone on far beyond its time.

“
Janus,” Jack said, behind her.

She turned to face him. She couldn’t keep the triumph off her face. If Jack weren’t here, she realized, I’d lose my mind about now.

“
I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said. He looked greatly pained. Why should he care about a psychotic cyborg?

“
Someone had to. Now let’s get out of here. Sounds as if the pod’s melting its way down into the ice.”

“
We’ll need these,” Jack said, pulling a bag of climbing equipment from his couch stowage unit.

A minute later, they stood on the outer threshold, looking across a glass-smooth crater by the pale blue light of Neptune. Liquids and gases gurgled beneath the craft, which continued to melt its way into the ice. If it still contained as much heat as it seemed to, Janus estimated it would be completely immersed in an hour.

Janus’ heart pounded; she felt herself carried forward into the future on a wave of near-insanity, terror and elation and depression and hatred and love and sadness all whipping through her like some cognitive storm unleashed during the battles with the cyborg. Her eyes drew in every detail of the crater.

The pod had dug a trench down one slope, across the bottom, and up this slope almost to the rim; fractures bordered the trench, which still steamed from the passage of the pod. The crater spanned about two kilometers, scooped down into the ice half a kilometer. A ragged mountain stood at the center, rising a hundred meters, but proportionally as narrow as a human-made skyscraper. Curls of mist swirled around the base of the mountain, gathering in the depths; a lake of ammonia seemed to have formed down there, layered in fog. The rim of the crater was as jagged as broken glass, glinting in the starlight. All was cast in near-blackness, sculpted mostly in shadow, contrasts rather than highlights.

“
We did this,” Jack muttered. He sounded tired. “What do we do now? Find something else to ruin?”