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

Leaning over the board, he punched in the sequence to power up the engines and open the dropship bay doors. The pumps beneath the decks hummed as they began sucking out atmosphere. It would take twenty seconds to complete the cycle. He glanced down at his wound. There was a blood-stained tear below his knee; a splinter of white bone protruded. He thought he was going to be sick.

“Sav?” Josua’s voice piped in over the speaker in the instrument panel. “Can you hear me? I’m watching you on the dropship bay monitor.”

Swallowing back his pain, Sav focussed on the control panel. Green lights came on across the board as system checks finished successfully. The sound of the pumps had faded with the dwindling atmosphere, and now the final light winked on, indicating pressure equalization. The outer doors split revealing a scattering of alien stars. Sav disengaged the magnetic locks holding the dropship to the deck. A trail of small red spheres drifted in front of his nose; Sav wondered briefly how much blood he had lost.

Halfway open, the doors stopped. “Nice try,” Josua said, as the doors reversed their course. “But you should have known I could override your commands from here.”

Sav rammed the control stick forward and the craft lurched ahead on the power of its tiny attitude jets, the blunt nose jamming itself into the rapidly diminishing space. Metal screeched on metal, and the whole dropship vibrated so violently in the maw of the airlock doors that Sav thought it would shake apart. The craft canted slightly as the doors pushed together; the cabin was filled with the groans and creaks of stressed metal. If the integrity of the dropship’s hull hadn’t already been compromised, it would be shortly. In desperation Sav wrapped his hand around the slider that controlled the thrust of the main engines. “Stop the doors!” he shouted over the squealing metal, “Or I’ll kick in the engines!” Fired in the bay at full thrust, the ship’s exhaust would likely tear The Viracosa apart.

“After all you’ve done to prolong your miserable life for a few more hours?” A rivet popped in the bulwark behind Sav and shot across the cabin; in seconds the ship would buckle. “I don’t believe you have the nerve.”

Sav felt lightheaded, detached, as he pushed the slider to half power and the engines came to life. The craft shuddered and seemed to rear up and strain against the door, widening the gap slightly. Sav focussed on the stick, blocking everything else out, trying to keep the ship from slewing off to the side and spinning in a circle like a fiery pinwheel, turning the bay into a deadly inferno. When he felt he had control, he switched the screen to the aft camera: a gout of yellow flame was erupting from the rear of the ship and scouring the inner bulwark, heating the metal until it glowed red and warped.

Josua was screaming hysterically, like he was the one being seared by the flames. “Stop! You’re ruining everything!”

“Let me go.”

“We’ll die of the plague! Don’t you understand? This is our last chance!”

Everything seemed unreal, dreamlike. Josua’s irrational ranting; the obstreperous control yoke trying desperately to twist itself free of his grip; the roar of the engines, humming and vibrating in the hollow of his bones. He eased the thruster forward a quarter of the way and the nose of the dropship edged ahead half a meter, widening the gap. Then the motor controlling the doors must have overloaded, for the ship lurched forward and, with a horrific screech, burst free of the bay.

The partially melted lens on the aft camera showed a distorted image of The Viracosa rapidly receding.

“Come back, you thief!” Josua shrieked. “You don’t deserve to die with us! You don’t deserve to die for Bh’Haret!”

“None of us does,” Sav answered, cutting the circuit.

A second later, the request light began to blink furiously. Sav stared at it, fascinated. Confused thoughts drifted in and out of comprehension like the globes of blood that slid in and out of view. He looked at the screen: The Viracosa was no thicker than his small finger; on its nose a tiny sliver caught the light from the double stars, flashed it brightly. Abruptly, he remembered the Speaker.

Killing the engines, Sav pulled the control yoke sharply; the attitude jets fired, swinging the nose of the craft back towards The Viracosa. Stars wheeled past, and the brightness of the binary suns swung into view. He raised his arm in reaction, but lowered it a second later. The double stars were still far away, only thumb-sized and dimmed by the polarised windscreen, so that they seemed a pale imitation of what he’d experienced on the bridge. He looked for The Viracosa, spotted it dead centre, a thin line against the fuligin backdrop. He pushed the slider forward and the engines kicked in, slowing the dropship, then reversing his course. In moments he began closing.

Ignoring Josua’s flashing request light, Sav keyed in the Speaker’s frequency, pressed the transmit key. “Lien?”

“Sav!” She sounded nervous, but not panicked. “What is happening? The tube was shaking and I thought it was going to be torn off.”

Another flight of blood obscured his vision. He batted the bubbles away. He could make out the emergency tube more clearly, a silvered cylinder thrust in front of The Viracosa and hanging over the double suns of Nexus like an executioner’s gleaming blade.

“I’m coming,” he said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“I’m hurt.” He stared at the protuberant bone, wondering if he should try to push it back inside his leg.

“You are talking strangely, Sav. Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he said, wiping the perspiration off his forehead. “No.” He hesitated. “I’m here. What do you want?”

“Sav! You contacted me!”

He tried to focus. “I’m in the dropship.” He articulated each word carefully so that she would understand. He craned his neck, watched The Viracosa draw near. “I can see you.”

“You can see me?”

“Yeah,” he said, annoyed. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she understand?

“You’ve left The Viracosa?”

“Uh huhn,” His tongue thick and unwieldy in his mouth. “I’m coming to get you.”

“How? How are you going to do it?”

“Josua shot me.” It seemed like something he should share with her. “And Ruen’s dead, too, I think. Josua wants to kill all of us,” Sav said, then thought to add, “You more than anyone.”

“Listen to me, Sav! You are coming to get me. Remember?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“How?”

Sav tried to concentrate, but everything seemed distant and uncertain. “In the dropship.” Suddenly he felt ashamed: he had no idea what he was doing, why he was here. “I don’t know,” he said, tears burning his eyes. “I don’t know anything.”

“Listen, Sav. I can blow the air lock,” Lien said. “The decompression should throw me free of the tube. My suit has a weak propulsion system, but enough so I can guide myself to your craft if you’re near. But I will not be able to catch you if you go past. You must open the hatch and wait for me. Do you think can do that?”

“No,” Sav said, wiping his eyes. “There’s no airlock on the dropship.”

“Are you wearing a suit?”

Sav looked down. “No.”

“Do you have one aboard the ship?”

Sav craned his head; clipped to the back wall of the cabin was the emergency EVA suit. “Yeah.”

“Put it on. Then give me the word and we will blow our hatches at the same time and try to get clear before Josua realizes what we’re up to.”

“Sure,” Sav said. It seemed easier to agree than to argue with this insistent woman. He undid the harness and pushed himself towards the rear wall.

The suit was split down the front. It seemed to take forever for him to work both his legs inside, even though his shin had ceased troubling him. At one point he snagged the protuberant bone on a fold in the material and had to free it with numb fingers. After a time (how long had it been?) he managed to accomplish the immensely difficult task. He put his arms into the sleeves, sealed the inner suit and pressed the outer seam closed. Swinging the helmet down over his head, he gave it a quarter turn and pressed the compression snaps down with his thumbs. The display came up, overlaying the bottom third of the visor. It showed the suit was powered up and ready. He felt proud of himself, even though he wasn’t sure why he had to put on the suit.

Something was different.

At the far right of the suit display, unfamiliar green digits popped up, a four followed by a colon and then two zeros. Like a stopwatch, the value began counting down like a stop watch. Sav frowned, puzzled over the curious addition, wondering why it looked familiar. There was some connection he knew he should make, but his brain seemed addled and useless. A stopwatch. Counting down like the watches Hebuiza and Yilda had made them, only this one didn’t have days, just minutes and seconds. Already several seconds had passed; the display read 3:55.

He remembered the plague, the Speakers. Looking up, he saw he was closing on The Viracosa. Obscuring the rest of the ship were the bulbous feeder tanks. He remembered the bomb.

The trigger, Sav thought, trying to marshal his jumbled thoughts. This suit is the trigger. It made a kind of perverted sense. Maybe Josua planned to abandon The Viracosa at the last minute so that he could admire his handiwork from space. Watch the destruction sealed inside this suit before he, too, drove the dropship into its last fiery re-entry. Suddenly Josua’s words made sense: taking the dropship had made Sav a thief, stealing Josua’s means to detonate the bomb. The clock had ticked down to three and a half minutes.

Pushing away from the wall, Sav drifted back to his seat and grabbed the drag bar fixed to the edge of the control board. “The bomb,” he said after fumbling the suit’s cable into the board. His words were slurred. Speaking had become difficult. Outside, the slender emergency tube now drifted past. “I…I think it’s going to blow in three minutes.” He cut the engines, fired braking jets. The dropship slowed.

Lien said something Sav couldn’t make out, something that sounded angry and frightened. Then she spoke in a calm, measured tone. “You must open the hatch for me now, Sav.”

“Yeah,” he said, but he wasn’t sure what question he’d just answered. He was confused again. It was hard to concentrate. He felt cold and clammy. Like all longhaulers, he’d taken the requisite first aid course, and he recognized the symptoms: I’m going into shock. Staring at his leg, he thought sadly, I should have put a tourniquet on it. But there hadn’t been time. There was never enough time for anything.

Sweat slipped from his forehead and drifted free, clung in tiny round domes to the inside of the visor. Darker, opaque liquid also hung there. Blood. He shivered. What was he supposed to do? The hatch. Hadn’t she said something about the hatch?

Sav reached forward and keyed in the commands, his clumsy fingers moving automatically, trained from long habit. An emergency alarm blared. He turned around and could see the hatch breaking, the flare of atmosphere being sucked into the void, the rush of bloody droplets being stretched into thin lines that raced towards vacuum. “D…done,”