“They’ve shut off the centrifuge,” Moore confirmed. “We’re spinning down smoothly. That suggests the rest of the ship is more or less okay.”
Brüks’s ears popped again. “We’re not. I think—I think there’s an air leak somewhere.”
“You noticed.”
“Shouldn’t we be patching it?”
“Have to find it first. Tell you what: I’ll move the cargo, you tear apart all these bulkheads.”
“But—”
“Or we can go downstairs, suit up, and get out of here.” He split Brüks’s cocoon open the rest of the way, helped steady him as he sat up. “Can you walk?”
Brüks swung his legs over the edge of the pallet, trying to ignore the subtle sense of pressure building behind his eyes. He gripped its edge to keep from staggering down the skewed deck. Myoelectric tattoos ran the length of his naked body like an impoverished exoskeleton. They traced the bones of his arms and legs, forked out along his toes and—(he flexed his right foot; the left hung insensate at the end of his ankle like a lump of clay)—over his heels and across his soles as well. Every movement met with rubber resistance. Every gesture was a small exercise.
Isometric muscle toner. They used them in Heaven sometimes, to keep the Ascended from curling into flabby fetuses. They still used them on those rare deep-space missions where the crew hadn’t been preseasoned with vampire genes, to help in the rearguard fight against the shortening of tendons, the wasting of muscles during hibernation.
Moore helped him stand, offered his body as a crutch. Brüks bounced uncertainly on his good foot, his arm around the other man’s shoulders. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Pseudograv pulled everything in the wrong direction but it was weak, and getting weaker.
“What am I doing here?” Hop-step-lean. Soft crimson light pulsed from the hole in the ceiling where the ladder emerged, staining the adjacent bulkhead.
“Getting to safety.”
“No, I mean—” He gestured with his free arm, took in the containers stacked on all sides. “Why am I in the hold?”
“The hold’s aft. We’re using this for the overflow.”
The rails of the ladder were the color of rawhide, and smooth as plastic; some elastic polymer that stayed taut along a range of lengths. Brüks reached out and grabbed a rung, looked up through the ceiling and discovered the source of that bloody glow: an emergency hatch sealed tight, flashing a warning to any who might be contemplating passage: UNPRESSURIZED.
“My point is—” He looked through the hole in the floor: more metacubes down there, assemblages of smaller units stuck together. “Why did you wake me up in the basement?”
“You weren’t supposed to wake up at all; we had you in a therapeutic coma.” Brüks remembered being scalped: that skullcap, stippled with electrodes. “You’re lucky I happened to be in the neighborhood when things went south.”
“Are you saying you stored me with—”
The hab lurched, jumped in some sideways direction Brüks’s inner ears couldn’t parse; suddenly the ladder was slipping diagonally past, suddenly he was falling through the floor (the edge of the hatch bit his ribs in passing). A giant’s building blocks, stacked together, would have snapped his spine under earth gravity; here they merely bent it and bounced him back into the air.
Moore caught him on the rebound: “Well, that’s one way of making the trip…”
Brüks thrashed in his arms, pushed him away: “Get the fuck off of me!”
“Calm down, sol—”
“I’m not your fucking soldier!” Brüks tried to stand in the crowded space; his wounded ankle twisted under him as though attached by rubber bands. “I’m a parasitologist, I was down in the goddamn desert minding my own business. I didn’t ask to get caught up in your gang war, I didn’t ask to get my ass shot into fucking orbit, and I sure as shit didn’t ask to get stored down in your basement like a box of Christmas ornaments!”
Moore waited until he’d run out of words. “Are you finished?”
Brüks fumed and glared. Moore took his silence for a yes. “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said drily. “Once things have calmed down a bit, maybe we can check in with your wife. Tell her you’re working late.”
Brüks closed his eyes. “I haven’t checked in with my wife,” he said through gritted teeth, “in years.” My real wife, anyway.
“Really.” Moore refused to take the hint. “Why not?”
“She’s in Heaven.”
“Huh.” Moore grunted. Then, more softly: “So’s mine.”
Brüks rolled his eyes. “Small world.” His ears popped again. “Are we going to get out of here before our blood starts boiling?”
“Let’s go, then,” Moore said.
Up past a leaning cityscape of cargo cubes, man-size alcoves flanked an ovoid airlock, two to each side. Spacesuits hung there like flensed silver skins, held in place by cargo straps. They billowed gently at the knees and elbows. Moore helped Brüks across the slanted deck, passed him a loose cargo strap to cling to while unbuckling the suit in the leftmost alcove; it sagged sideways into the soldier’s arms.
A breeze hissed softly against Brüks’s cheek. Moore held out the suit: gutted from crotch to neck, a split exoskeleton shed by some previous owner. Brüks stood angled and bouncing slightly on his good foot, let Moore guide his bad one into the suit. The low gravity helped; by now Brüks couldn’t have weighed more than ten kilos. He felt like some overgrown pupa plagued by second thoughts, trying to climb back into its husk.
An itch crawled across the back of his free hand; he held it up, eyed the blood-brown tracery of elastic filaments webbed across the skin. “Why—”
“So what’s she in for?” Moore asked, jerking Brüks’s leg hard to seat his injured foot in its boot. Bits of bone ground against each other down there—his tibia carried the vibration past whatever nerve block Moore had installed. It didn’t hurt. Brüks grimaced anyway.
“Uh, what?”
“Your wife.” The right leg was trickier, without the left to stand on; Moore offered himself as a crutch again. “What’s she in Heaven for?”
“That’s a strange way of putting it,” Brüks remarked.
I’m sick of it, she’d said softly, looking out the window. They’re alive, Dan. They’re sapient.
Moore shrugged. “Everyone’s running from something.”
They’re just systems, he’d reminded her. Engineered.
So are we, she’d said. He hadn’t argued with her; she’d known better. Neither of them had been engineered, not unless you counted natural selection as some kind of designer and neither of them was woolly-minded enough to entertain such sloppy thinking. She hadn’t wanted an argument anyway; she’d been long past the verbal jousts that had kept them sparking all those years. Now, she’d only wanted to be left alone.
“She—retired,” he told Moore as his right foot slid smoothly into its boot.
“From what?”
He’d respected her wishes. Left her alone when she’d lobotomized her last victim, left her alone to tender her resignation. He’d wanted to reach out when she’d started eyeing Heaven, would have done anything to keep her on his side of the afterlife, but by then it was long past being about what he wanted. So he’d left her alone even when she leased out her brain to pay her rent in the Collective Conscious, withdrew from the outer world to the inner. She’d left a link behind, at least. He could always talk to her, there on Styx’s farthest shore. She always honored her obligations. But he’d known that’s all it was, so even then—after she’d stopped slaughtering artificial systems and started being one—he left her alone.