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

“Then,” Lien said sorrowfully, “we are both doomed.”

For a moment, silence filled the cabin.

“Maybe,” Sav answered. “And maybe not. First, let me see what I can do about the bomb. For the time being we’ll play along with Josua. He doesn’t know about your transceiver. I’d feel better if we kept it that way. Let’s keep these exchanges to a minimum.”

“Agreed.”

Sav had a sudden inspiration. “Can you transmit at ten megahertz?” The comm board on the ship wasn’t set up to monitor short wave bandwidth.

“Yes.”

“Good. Then I’ll reconfigure the transceiver in the dropship for the same frequency. We can talk in privacy that way.” And, Sav thought, that’s also the answer to my problem of getting some sleep. I can dog the airlock to keep Josua and Ruen out of the dropship. Unlike the hatches aboard The Viracosa, the hatch to the dropship could only be undogged from inside the vessel itself. “Will you be okay in the tube for a while? I have some things I’d like to check.”

“I…I do not like this confined space. But, yes. I think so.”

“Unless there’s an emergency, wait for me to contact you. Understood?”

“Yes.”

Sav was about to break the connection when something else occurred to him. “The Pro-Locutors told you about the relay station. Did they give you any details about the situation there?”

“Yes. One Speaker is reported dead. Three of your comrades are holding seven more Speakers hostage.”

“Can…can you describe the three?”

“Two men and a woman. One man is tall and thin and seems to be taking orders from another shorter, balding man. Both have filaments embedded in their skulls.”

“The woman,” Sav asked. “What does she look like?”

“She is tall, broad-shouldered and has short blonde hair. Her face is scarred heavily with designs.”

Liis had made it.

“This woman. Is she important to you?”

The question startled Sav. “Yes,” he said. He added, “They are all important.”

“Even those who did not make it to the relay station?”

“How did you know there were others?”

The Speaker laughed, a strangely lilting thing. “When I told you there were three of them, you asked me to describe them. If there were only three to begin, you would already know who they were.”

Sav said nothing, made suddenly uneasy by the Speaker’s insight.

“My name is Lien,” she said after a moment, her tone almost apologetic, as if she understood Sav’s sudden discomfort.

“Yeah, I know,” Sav answered. After only the slightest hesitation, he added, “Mine is Sav.”

“I wish you luck, Sav.”

“Thanks,” Sav muttered. “Luck to you too.” Lifting his thumb from the transmit switch, he turned his seat and stared at the patrix lying on the floor, his narrow chest rising and falling irregularly, his wheezing breath rattling in his throat. “I think we’ll both need all we can get.”

After breaking the connection, Sav moved over to the pilot’s board. He brought up the status display on the feeder tanks. A bar graph indicated five of the tanks were empty. The sixth was nearly depleted: at the current rate, enough fuel pellets remained for another ten hours of burn. The seventh tank, the reserve, showed full. If Novitiate Lien was to be believed, that would be where Josua had planted the explosives.

Sav keyed in the sequence to run the full diagnostic package on the reserve tank. Everything came up green. But that meant nothing. If Josua had sabotaged it, he would have also gimmicked the sensors to make everything appear normal. There was only one way for Sav to be certain. He’d have to check out the tank itself. With any luck, he’d be able to do it before the patrix regained consciousness.

Sav heaved himself to his feet-and stumbled, clutching at the back of his seat to regain his balance. In his fatigue, his legs had nearly betrayed him. He stayed where he was, his weight sagging against the couch, trying to regain his equilibrium. Exhaustion momentarily blurred his vision, made him sway. I don’t have time for this, he thought, abruptly angry at his body. He pulled himself up. The wave of disorientation passed. Releasing the seatback, he stepped over Ruen and made his way to the ladder belowdecks.

Descending silently through the crew quarters, he glanced at the stasis cells. Josua lay on the pallet in his cell, his back to the room, apparently asleep.

Sav continued down.

The ladder ended in a small antechamber where an airlock led to the dropship bay. Next to the lock was a control panel. Sav pressed his palm on an oversized red button and the door sighed open. He stepped through and the door slid shut behind him.

Walking over to the row of EVA suits hanging on the wall, he unclipped his lamp; where he was going there would be no lights. He trotted over to the corner of the dropship bay where a hatch had been set in the floor; he spun the dogs on the hatch and pulled it open. The engines, always a distant thrum in the background, now became a roar. Sav clambered down a short ladder and past the square propellant tanks and fuel pipes of the attitude jets, until he stood on top of the secondary radiation shield. At his feet was another, smaller hatch leading to the aftmost part of the ship: a crawlspace sandwiched between the primary and secondary radiation shields. Other than going EVA, this service bay was the only point of connection with the tanks. Josua would have been taking a chance had he cut through the tanks outside the ship-it would have left telltale scars that anyone approaching the vessel in a dropship might see. But down here, in the guts of the ship, he would have had the privacy to go about his work. Josua could have cut through the top of the reserve tank, crawled inside and set the fission weapon, then welded the opening shut. He would have worked with impunity, for no one came down into this uncomfortably cramped space unless there was good reason.

Sav undogged the last hatch.

The engines howled in his ears. A blast of heat struck him like a blow, made his face bead instantly with sweat. There was no ladder; the primary shield was less than a meter below, concave and set so its edges curved up to meet those of the secondary shield on which he stood. Breaking the smooth curve of the primary’s surface were the rounded edges of the seven feeder tanks. Sav lowered himself until he sat on the lip of the opening. Then, sucking in a breath like a diver, he dropped until his feet struck the rounded primary shield. He went down on all fours.

It was like an oven.

A deafening, vibrating oven. The shield beneath him was so hot his palms felt like they were searing; he couldn’t keep them in one place for more than a few seconds. Even his knees smarted through the material of his coveralls.

He clicked on his light and swung it around. The tops of the tanks encircled him; snaking around them were thick bundles of multicolored cables and square alloy conduits. Perched on the top of each tank were opposing coils of finely wound wire, the heads of powerful electromagnets that controlled the flow of the deuterium microfusion pellets into the ignition chamber. Sav swung his light over to the reserve tank.

A square, metal plate, half a meter a side, had been welded below the electromagnet. The plate had been cut crudely, the ragged edge of the blackened join uneven where metal flowed into metal. At first glance Sav knew the work was far too sloppy to have been performed by an engineering technician. He was certain that if he checked the ship’s log, there would be no record of this job. It could only be Josua’s handiwork.

Sav’s stomach knotted sickeningly. It looked like the Speaker had been telling the truth.

He was about to scramble back up through the hatch when he caught sight of the power cable to the reserve tank lying coiled on the floor in front of the tank. It had been severed. Sav played his light over the coil. The circuit board near its base had been shorted out, its surface blackened and melted. The electromagnet feed mechanism was completely useless. Of course, Sav thought. Josua doesn’t want the tank being emptied into the ignition chamber. It would have set off half a dozen alarms if the pellets hadn’t fed through properly. This last piece of evidence only seemed to confirm what Lien had said.

Sav hauled himself out of the crawlspace and dogged the hatch. He clambered up the short ladder and into the dropship bay. His breath still came in ragged gulps and he was soaked in sweat.

Making his way over to the tool locker, he pulled the door open-then stared at the empty bracket that normally held the miniature blowtorch. Where the other cutting tools had been, there were only empty spaces. He should have guessed: there was nothing left here that would enable him to begin to undo Josua’s work. He shut the door.

What can I do?

Nothing. There’s not a damn thing I can do to disable Josua’s bomb. Could it be as hopeless as that? Sav rolled the possibilities over in his mind. For a second, his spirits soared as he realised Josua would have had to rig up a trigger for the explosives._ If I could find it_, Sav thought,_ I might be able to disable it! _As soon as this occurred to him, he realised it there simply wasn’t time for a thorough search. And he’d have to be careful in the process not to alert Josua. Sav considered confronting Josua directly. This, too, struck him as a pointless, perhaps dangerous, exercise. What if Josua, in his anger, refused to pass on his half of the codes? Their slim chances of obtaining the antidote would vanish entirely.

There seemed to be no solution.

The creep of exhaustion Sav had been fighting now rallied to numb his senses; his thoughts moved torpidly. The heat from below seemed to have knocked the little energy he had left right out of him. Rest, he said to himself. Then figure out what to do.

Behind him, the dropship hatch was open, as it normally was when the ship rested in the pressurized bay. Sav stepped into the cramped vessel and sealed the door behind. One after the other, he spun the dogs shut and snugged them up, effectively locking himself in the craft. Stepping into the tiny forward cabin, he slumped into the pilot’s seat. With an effort, he raised his fingers to the keypad. In a moment he’d tied the dropship’s communication software into The Viracosa‘s net, and so to the antenna array on the outside of the vessel. The Pro-Locutor’s response to Josua’s last message was due in less than an hour. Sav set the local board to alert him the moment it came in. He also modified the board’s configuration to monitor transmissions from the Speaker trapped in their emergency tube. That finished, he let himself sink into the padded seat.

Sav closed his eyes.

Disconnected scenes came to him, flashes of memories and half-memories; people he had known, ships he’d served on.