Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

Liis accepted his order impassively, as she had all her orders. All of this meaningless hubbub was simply a way of winding down her life. I’ve got nothing to lose, she had thought back then. After all, I’m already dead. How much more dead can you be?

At first Liis thought she was waking from another longhaul. But when she attempted to roll over onto her side, her left arm vibrated with a pain so sharp it made her lightheaded. She opened her eyes, looked down, and saw her arm had been wrapped in a plasticast. Then everything came back: the descent, the impact, Hebuiza’s words. Her heartbeat quickened; she fought back a rising nausea.

She lay above a cryostasis cell on what had once been the wall of the crew quarters. The pallet on which Penirdth had left her (a moment ago, an hour ago, a day ago?) was rucked up underneath her. The sideways cabin was empty, the doors to the galley and washroom sealed. A lamp had been left in the far corner behind an emptied crate; it cast a pale, yellow glow. Thin strips of white emergency lights, girding the bulwarks, still burnt. Pieces of clothing and equipment lay strewn around the space, giving the cabin the look of hasty abandonment.

They’ve gone! Liis thought, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. Using her good arm, she grabbed the door of an open locker. With a grunt she pulled herself to her feet.

For a second she thought she was going to be okay. But the sidewise cabin began to spin, a long lazy twisting. Bile crept up her gullet, thrust hot fingers into her throat. She shuddered once-a body-wracking spasm that almost made her lose her grip on the locker-then vomited. She felt the splash of warm liquid on her feet.

“Shit.”

Blinking back her tears, Liis looked up. Light from the galley haloed a figure in the doorway. Stepping over the lip formed by the top of the door, Penirdth climbed into the cabin. He wore only shorts and sandals; wiry grey hair covered his head and tufted his chest.

“Come on,” he said, stepping forward and sighing. “Let’s get you cleaned up and into your suit.”

Liis sat on an overturned crate, her broken arm cradled between her legs. Penirdth poked around inside an open medikit in front of her. Her stomach, having loosed its contents, had ceased troubling her. But her head still ached, and an occasional shudder passed through her, making her teeth chatter.

From amongst a collection of plastic envelopes, Penirdth pulled out a yellow one. It was filled with analgesic patches. He shook a patch into his palm, dropped the envelope back into the kit. Then he peeled the backing off the patch and placed it on Liis’ forearm above the plasticast. Within moments Liis felt the pain ebb; it was replaced by a tingling sensation that spread from her shoulder to the tips of her fingers. An unnatural warmth settled on her like an invisible mantle. Her heart beat steadily.

Penirdth retrieved the envelope. “Here,” he said, proffering it to her. “You should have enough room in your suit to apply the patches. If you ration them, you might be able to stretch them out to two weeks.”

She took the envelope from him listlessly; after staring at it a moment, she slipped it into a pocket on her coveralls.

“Can you manage?”

“Yeah.” Pushing off from the crate Liis rocked to her feet, and, before she could stop herself, she rolled onto her toes. Her momentum carried her forward like a collapsing building. With her good arm she flailed out, trying to counterbalance the motion of her weight; but Penirdth’s chest rushed towards her. Her cheek thumped against it, and she gasped as her injured arm was pressed momentarily between them.

“Careful!” Penirdth’s hands clutched her shoulders, held her firmly. “Gravity is only a third normal here.”

Liis pushed away from him. “Yeah,” she said, her face colouring. “I forgot.” She slipped from between his hands, stepped back until her heels banged against the crate on which she’d been sitting. “Sorry.”

Penirdth waved away her apology. Then he said, “The others are outside already.”

He half-walked, half-hopped to the doorway. After he vaulted easily over the lip, he waited for Liis on the other side. “I’ll give you a hand.”

Liis shuffled slowly towards him, stopped in front of the arc of the door. Penirdth extended a hand.

Liis stared at him. “Did you mean it? When you said you thought I was already dead?”

He seemed unfazed by her question, but he dropped his proffered hand. “Yes.” He shrugged. “You aren’t the most sociable person I’ve ever met.”

Liis felt a prickling of anger, but it vanished almost as quickly as it arose. Could she blame him for thinking that? As long as Penirdth had known her she’d been withdrawn. She hadn’t spoken to any of the others except to bark orders or to accept them sullenly. All of her free time she’d spent alone, in her room at the facility. What she recalled of the last year was like a dream, as if she’d been sleepwalking through the preparations, carrying out Hebuiza and Yilda’s orders like an automaton. The only thing that remained clear was the strength of her feelings towards Josua-and the pain when she finally understood his indifference towards her and the depth of his rage at Shiranda’s death. But they were here now, sitting on this frozen world, Josua light years away. She looked at Penirdth. “Then why didn’t you leave me? Like Hebuiza wanted.”

“I don’t know. Before that I hadn’t thought much about you at all-except when you pissed me off. But I guess when I saw you there on the floor, all beat up and looking like hell, it got to me. I couldn’t help imagining myself in your place, left alone in this rock to die. No one deserves that.”

“Not even me?”

“No. Not even you.” A brief smile flickered at the corner of his lips.

Liis looked at him, and he stared back, it seemed, without judgement. “Thanks,” she said gruffly.

He smiled again, only this time it wasn’t brief. “Come on,” he said, offering her a hand. “Hebuiza’s going to have a stroke if we don’t shut down the ship soon. It’s been almost twenty hours since we hit. I managed to talk them into waiting that long, but they won’t wait much longer.”

They passed through the airlock and into the dropship bay. The shuttle had been jettisoned before they’d dug into the meteor, making the bay the largest open space on the Ea. It was hot in here, and a sheen of sweat covered them both in seconds. Their lockers, now on the floor of the room, were open. The regular EVA suits had long since been ditched, replaced with ones designed for a very different purpose: much bulkier, they were nonetheless far lighter and designed to be as self-sustaining as possible. Only two remained. “We’re the last ones,” Penirdth said.

In silence, they undressed. Penirdth discarded his shorts and T-shirt and then helped Liis struggle out of hers. He dragged the larger suit over to her and undid its harness. Gripping it beneath the arms, he raised it. The front of the suit was split open from the neck ring down to crotch, revealing layers of white cloth alternating with silvered insulating material. “Welcome to your new home.”

Liis turned and stepped backwards into the suit. She ducked down under the lip of the neck ring and ran her right arm into the sleeve, wiggling her fingers into the glove. The helmet slid over her head and the weight of the suit settled on her shoulders. Through the polarised visor, the room appeared smoky. The suit had been designed so that its occupant could, while inside, move his or her arms in and out of the sleeves and into narrow cavities in front of the torso and behind the back to connect waste catheters to tubes on the trunk of an inner suit. Straps at the shoulders, chest, waist and thighs adjusted the internal volume. Liis let the chest straps out slightly to accommodate the cast on her broken arm; when she checked, she found she could still stretch her good arm the necessary distance to work the recycling units.

“Here.” Penirdth held out the analgesic patches.

Liis took the envelope and stuck it in a utility pocket inside the suit. Penirdth sealed the seam. A status display appeared, framing the faceplate with glowing numerals. A small sucking sound filled the helmet as the material bound itself into insulating layers from which heat-or other telltale radiation-couldn’t escape. Once on the surface of the planet, she would deploy the tail now coiled on her back. Any excess heat her suit couldn’t handle would be radiated through the finger-thick cable. Twenty meters long, it would disperse heat in tiny increments through its hundreds of flexible joints as she dragged it behind her. The suits would make her invisible to any sensing devices in the orbitals-or so Yilda had assured them.

Moving the thick legs slowly, Liis tested her new skin. Because of the lessened gravitational pull, the suit wasn’t nearly as heavy as she had feared it would be. In fact, it seemed to weigh no more than heavy winter clothes, and far less than when they had trained back on Bh’Haret. It was only a matter of getting used to the ungainly limbs again. And to the empty arm that hung uselessly from the suit’s left shoulder. Behind her, Penirdth had already climbed into his suit and was now rebuckling his harness. When he finished, he turned to Liis-who was fumbling unsuccessfully with her own-and helped her secure the straps. Then he clipped the empty arm to the side of the suit to keep it from swinging free. With Penirdth’s help, she clambered over the lip of the exterior hatch into the small chamber they had hacked from the heart of the meteorite. They stood on what had once been the wall, but now served as a tilted, uneven floor. The roughly hewn chamber was illuminated by the dull yellow glow of the dropship bay lights. Only a small part of the Ea around the hatch was exposed; the rest had been buried in the sleeve they’d excavated. On the walls around it jagged bands of silver-white streaked darker stone. Here and there small deposits glittered with iridescence. Liis’ status display ticked up an abrupt rise in temperature. It would be weeks before the meteorite cooled to the ambient temperature.

In the centre of the room stood a cutting laser on a tripod. Cables snaked from it, running back to the Ea’s interior through the dropship bay hatch. Opposite it, on the far wall, a meter wide tunnel sloped upward at a gradual angle matching the laser’s barrel. Penirdth stepped up next to Liis, his face invisible behind the dark band of his visor. He tipped his head down and touched his helmet to hers; it was their only way of communicating. The suits had been designed without transceivers-without anything that might emit radiation and betray their presence to the orbiting satellites. “They’re waiting outside.” His voice came to her, deadened by the intervening layers of material. In his hand he held the end of a cable connected to a data port on the Ea‘s hull. He offered it to her.

Liis nodded, but realised he could see her no better than she could him. “Okay,” she said loudly, taking the cable from his hand. He walked over to the mouth of the tunnel and