Sissix closed her eyes in relief, then looked at the Pair again. “Hey,” she said. Ohan looked up at her. “We can do this, you and me. Together. We’re a good team.” Her throat grew tight. “We’ve always been a good team.”
Ohan blinked once, and took up their calculations with furious resolve. “We will not let you down.”
Kizzy knelt on the floor, her hands deep in the guts of the aft propulsion drive. Waves of heat pushed back against her face. “Sissix,” she shouted toward her scrib. “I’ve got a processing unit that’s about to fry. I need to shut down the secondary aft strip.”
“How long?”
She shut her eyes and shook her head, trying to think. “I don’t know. An hour, maybe.”
“Stars, Kizzy—”
“I know, I know. But if I don’t fix this thing now, you won’t have it for the exit.”
“But I will have it then?”
I don’t know. “In theory. Definitely not if I do nothing.”
“Can you get it up any faster than that?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“So will I.”
Sweat ran down her face, making rivulets through the gunk and grime on her skin. She leaned back from the heat of the damaged strip and unzipped the top half of her jumpsuit, tying it around her waist. Her undershirt clung to her back. She flipped open the manual service panel on the outside of the drive casing and punched in commands. Stars, I need Lovey right now. The voxes were still down, and since Lovey didn’t seem to be working with any systems on her own, she had to have lost access to her monitoring network. Kizzy knew she must be going nuts, stuck in the core when she knew the ship was in trouble. Maybe it was better that way. At least she didn’t know how bad it was.
The strip powered down. Kizzy leaned back, wiping her brow. This was not what she’d signed up for.
“Kizzy.” It was Rosemary, her clothes still caked with fuel, now dry. Her face was grim, and Kizzy knew it wasn’t just because of the obvious. Rosemary had never been trained for sublayer work, and even running errands back and forth had to be hell on her. “Here.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out a bottle of water and a ration bar.
Kizzy unscrewed the bottle top and brought it to her mouth. Her lips and tongue sucked up the moisture greedily. She took several gulps, and gasped. “Oh, stars, you’re a hero.” She finished the rest, ripped open the ration bar pack with her teeth, and knelt back down. “Get some to Jenks, too,” she said, taking a bite of bland, dense protein.
“Am doing,” Rosemary said. “Where is he now?”
“Algae bay. Corbin’s down there, too. The pumps are getting—” The ship rocked hard as Sissix willed them toward a new heading. Kizzy braced herself against the floor, grabbing hold of the edge of the drive. Rosemary wasn’t so fast. She hit the opposite wall and tumbled off her feet.
Kizzy waited for the rocking to stop. She could hear the voices from the control room over the scrib, Sissix swearing, Ashby firmly saying, “Ohan, stay with me, we haven’t got that much longer—” As the trembling in the floor died down, she turned her head toward Rosemary. “You okay?”
Rosemary pulled herself up against a panel, her jaw clenched tightly. A fresh cut on her upper arm started oozing red. She watched the blood run down, but her eyes were somewhere else.
“Whoa, hey, no,” Kizzy said, scrambling over. She knew that look. That was a I am completely done look, and they so did not have time for it right now. She took Rosemary’s bloody arm. It wasn’t a bad cut, just a long one. She tore a length out of the sleeve of her jumpsuit and wrapped it around the wound. “Look at me. Rosemary, look at me.” She tied off the fabric, trying to find the right words. She tried to think of something wise and clever that would snap Rosemary back. But she wasn’t wise and clever, she was just some hackjob tech who was making it all up as she went along, who might very well be killing them all with some badly patched circuit or some frying pathway she’d overlooked, and what the fuck had they done for those four-legged animals to fire at them anyway—
She took a breath. She took a breath, and thought of an Aeluon woman with a badass armored vest, surrounded by buddies dripping with guns, telling her that she was scared of fish. “Rosemary, listen. I am right where you are. I’m feeling that, too.”
“I’m sorry,” Rosemary said, her voice catching. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m trying—”
“No, listen.” She took Rosemary’s face in her hands and looked her in the eye. “Stop trying not to be scared. I’m scared, Sissix is scared, Ashby is scared. And that’s good. Scared means we want to live. Okay? So be scared. But I need you to keep working, too. Can you do that?”
Rosemary pressed her lips together and shut her eyes. She nodded.
Kizzy kissed her friend’s forehead. “Okay. So here’s what you need to do. Get to the algae bay, give the boys some water and food. Then come back to me. I’m going to need a tool runner. Got it?”
Rosemary looked back at her, her eyes more steady. “Got it.” She got to her feet, squeezed Kizzy’s arm, and ran back down the hallway.
Kizzy dove back into the drive, tools in hand. “All right, you fucker,” she said, peeling back the casing of a cable bundle. “You’re gonna do as I say.”
The exit cage was close. Its signal blinked invitingly on Sissix’s console, their port in the storm.
“We’re coming in too fast,” Ashby said.
“Nothing I can do about that,” Sissix said. With the grid patched together as it was, she wouldn’t be able to ease them in.
“Everybody, strap down.” He glanced at his scrib. “You guys get that?”
“We’re on it,” Jenks replied. “Please get us the hell out of here.”
“Ohan, exit,” Sissix said.
“Nine-point-four-five ibens, ahead,” Ohan gasped. “Six-point-five, starboard. Seven-point-nine-six… point-nine… six…”
Sissix turned around just in time to see Ohan’s eyes roll back in their head.
“Up or down?” she said. “Up or down?”
But there was no answer. Ohan was seizing.
A dozen distressed sounds burst from Dr. Chef’s mouth. “Black canister, top drawer, third from the left,” he said. “Go.”
Ashby bolted out of the room, faster than handfeet could run. Sissix looked at her controls. Everything went slow and quiet, but it had nothing to do with the sublayer. She could hear nothing but blood roaring in her ears. Up or down. How many times had she done this, and yet she couldn’t answer such a simple thing on her own. Up or down. The floor began to shake. Up or down. She couldn’t guess, even though the odds were good, even though they’d be torn apart if she did nothing. They could come out in the wrong place, or the wrong time. They could come out inside a planet, or another ship. Fifty-fifty chance, and yet, and yet—
Ashby came back, and tossed the canister to Dr. Chef. The doctor pulled out a medical device and pressed it against Ohan’s wristpatch. A second went by. Two. Three. The tremors stopped. Ohan went rigid, their mouth falling open.
“Ohan,” Ashby said. “Ohan, do you remember what you were doing?”
“Yes,” Ohan whispered, then frantically, crying out, their eyes wild: “Up! Up!”
“Ashby, strap down!” Sissix yelled, working the controls as fast as she could. “Punching in three… two… one.”