Arcturus
“How are we already behind schedule?” Argo growled. “It’s only been a week!” Arcturus didn’t bother to answer; they both knew what the problem was.
He tapped his claws on the railing below the front viewport, staring out at the processing platform. Or the pieces of it, anyway. They had reached a stable orbit in the asteroid belt on schedule. The assembly crew and the engineers had unloaded all of the pieces from the Old Bug’s cavernous underbelly, again, on schedule. Blast it, they had even been ahead on their timeline, for a few glorious hours, before they started fitting everything together.
By this point, the vast skeleton of the processing platform should have already taken shape. In its final form, it would be seven wide rings, bound parallel to each other by heavy horizontal struts, each big enough to fly The Old Bug through. The finished product gave the impression of a tunnel, but actually passing through it would be lethal. The stubby protrusions of powerful gravity emitters lined the inner surface of each ring. Feed asteroids in one side, and sharp fingers of gravity would catch them, pulverize them to a fine powder, and strip the material away to waiting collection units. The rings contained complex equipment for smelting that powder down, extracting and separating out the metals the Efreet wanted.
They weren’t anywhere close to that, though. It went like this every time, practice as they might in the simulations. The moment they began the actual construction, problems started to pop up. Pieces that didn’t fit together right forced the crews to bring them into the manufactory and grind them down or weld them together. They couldn’t repair dead electronics at all; those required the engineers to go pull spare parts from the cargo bay, and the Efreet charged them for every spare.
So rather than the neat frames of seven clean rings, Argo and Arcturus looked out over a scene of chaos. Pieces of the rings and struts floated in space, draped in the Old Bug’s shadow. Tugs, little more than metal canisters with too-large engines strapped on as an afterthought, puttered among them. As he watched, two of them worked in tandem to haul a strut into place between two half-finished rings. You could pilot those without a suit, but Arcturus never let his people do that. Pushing and pulling the chunks of the mining equipment into place provided too many opportunities for accidents, and the suits saved lives every project.
The tugs weren’t the only things moving in the dark. From where he watched, he could see a dozen crew members in their bulky suits, clambering over the framework of the rings, handling the finer details of the assembly. Two of them labored close enough that he could almost make out what they were doing, working their way along an open electronics panel and riveting it shut.
He focused on the pair and felt the familiar click in the back of his head as he joined their Link. Their voices came to him clearly, as though they were standing right next to him.
“…have that flange bolted down yet?” Roddel asked. He stood over the other figure, leaning down to watch his companion fiddle with a part that Arcturus couldn’t quite make out.
Arcturus saw the second engineer slip, catching himself on the edge of the panel. “Miserable rot-shelled thing has warped itself.” Hark cursed, shaking a bruised hand as he straightened. “Give me the drill, I’m going to have to pull it.”
Making his thoughts stern, Arcturus broke into the conversation. “Hark, watch that language.” The junior engineer jerked upright in a most satisfying way, fumbling the drill that Roddel had just handed him. He bounced it twice from hand to hand with half muffled oaths, almost letting it drift away from him into the black. Arcturus smirked, watching him. He’d brought Hark aboard three projects ago, and every effort he’d made at instilling a little class in him had gone to waste. Reprimands slid right off his shell, or bounced off his thick skull, so it was good that he could still make the young Torellan jump.
“Give me a status report,” he thought at them, moderating his voice to something still firm, but less harsh. “How long until the wiring is done on that first ring?”
There was a low muttering from Hark in response. No clear words, just a low stream of petulance and irritation. Roddel’s thoughts came through tinged with amusement. “It’s going to be late I’m afraid, Captain. Another day at least.”
Arcturus stilled his claws on the bulkhead. “Any chance of speeding that up? And Hark,” he snapped, “Get a lock on your thoughts; I can barely hear myself think.” The discontented grumbling had grown loud enough to be a nuisance. Hark fell quiet at the rebuke. The faintest hint of embarrassment leaked through the Link from him.
Roddel shrugged in response, raising both arms to make the gesture clear in the distance. “Maybe? Reel is checking to see if she can get the faulty connections on this section going, or if we’ll have to pull a spare.”
Arcturus frowned, scanning the ring for Reel through the viewscreen. “Where is she, anyway?” She hadn’t been in the Link when he opened it.
Hark pointed to a lower, completed section of ring. “She should be right around the bend there.”
Arcturus thought hard again, reaching for the young engineer. “Reel, report in.”
The Link took with a click, and Arcturus sucked in a sharp breath, drawing Argo’s eyes. Pain poured down the Link from Reel, mixed with panic.
“She’s hurt.” He said aloud for Argo’s benefit. “Find her, quickly, something’s wrong.” Find my daughter, he thought, fighting down the fear rising in his throat.
Roddel and Hark came to their feet in an instant, abandoning the open panel on the ring. Roddel ran, as fast as he could in his magnetic boots, around the side of the ring to search for her. It left him standing at a right angle to Hark, who stood uneasily tapping the long spanner he’d fumbled earlier against the metal of the ring.
“She’s not there.” Roddel reported back, staring around the curve of the ring. “The panel is open, but she’s not there!”
“Rotten eggs!” Hark snarled, slamming the spanner against the ring. “Where is she, then?”
The curse fanned Arcturus’ already frayed temper. “Hark, shut up and search!” He snapped. Gripping the bulkhead railing, he scanned the space surrounding the ring, finding nothing but stars. With an effort, he made himself let go of the railing and step backwards to take a wider view, beyond just the first ring on which the other two engineers stood. Argo stayed where he was, peering out into the black with his nose practically pressed against the viewport. If she were close, the other two would have most likely spotted her…Arcturus caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye.
A third suited body drifted out from behind one of the incomplete rings. What had she been doing back there? The bulky suit bucked and flailed as its occupant spasmed within, her limbs convulsing. An air hose from the atmosphere pack on her back spewed gas, whipping around where it had torn loose. The force of the life giving air's escape spun her wildly, but it was the spasms that dropped Arcturus' heart into his feet. Stricken, he thought to himself. His heart thumping in his ears, Arcturus forced a levelness into his thoughts that he did not feel. “She’s Stricken.” He said, aloud and over the link. Argo’s head whipped towards him, his eyes wide and his jaw clenched. “I can see her drifting out from behind section seven of ring four. The other side, blast it! Get her in here now, she’s losing air.” Already her wild flailing was starting to fade to a feeble twitching, but the spasmodic jerking of a Strickening seizure was unmistakable even so.
Wrenching himself away from the viewport, he bellowed down into the bridge. “Mayday situation!” Heads whipped up to look at him, claws stilling on consoles. “We have a Stricken crewmember in the black. Medical team, report to the forward personnel airlock now! All tugs to halt and hold where they are, and telemetry, get a detailed map of where everyone is positioned out there.” Reel wasn’t where she was supposed to be, and it would be all too easy for her to be crushed by a tug or thrown deeper into the black by an errant piece of the rings. The crew beneath him burst into frantic motion, and he turned back to the viewport in time to see Roddel take a flying leap across the gap between the rings. It was a risky move without a mobility pack; if he missed, he’d go drifting off into the black and they’d have to send a tug to retrieve him. He hit the floating section of ring number four boots first, and hard. For a moment, it looked like he’d rebound off, one foot coming free and his arms windmilling, but the magnets in his other boot took hold and held him fast.
With a desperate swipe, he snagged the trailing air hose and hauled Reel to him. Hark followed with more caution, and the two of them secured the twitching figure with lines from their belts, looping them around her torso. The cords stretched and tugged behind them as they started back for the ship with desperate haste, hauling his daughter along. Hark swore quietly with every lurching step as the lines jerked Reel along, and Arcturus didn’t even bother to reprove him. Instead, he turned and dashed for the airlock. “Argo, you have the deck.” He called back over his shoulder.
The medical team arrived ahead of him, but only by moments. They were still unpacking their equipment when he stumbled to a panting stop in a clatter of claws, his knees aching. The airlock sat closed, featureless steel doors locked tight. “Where are you three?” He snapped at the engineers. The medical team glanced up at him in alarm, and he realized he’d spoken aloud without meaning to.
Across the Link, Hark’s curses had taken on a winded, panting quality. “We are entering the air lock.” Roddel answered, puffing. A faint click and a hiss echoed through the steel doors. “Outer doors are closed; we’re airing up now.”
On the wall directly next to the door, a pressure dial began to inch from red to green with all the speed of a planet in orbit. Too slow. Arcturus pulled open the access panel beneath the dial; inside sat an emergency release bar, flagged with dire warnings in red letters. He gripped it grimly, the scales of his knuckles white, eyes fixed on the dial. As soon as it hit the halfway mark, he yanked the release, hard.
The doors to the airlock gave way in a blast of air that almost drowned out the whoop of the pressure drop alarm, popping his ears and triggering surprised yells from the medical team. Hark and Roddel staggered through the airlock doors, half-dragging and half-carrying Reel behind them as they crossed into full gravity again. They settled her limp form on the deck plating, rolling her onto her shell as the inner airlock doors closed behind them, and the medical team rushed in, blocking Arcturus’ view of the bulbous suit that held his daughter.
He almost pushed one of the medics aside before checking himself with an effort. What would he even do? He hadn’t done any medical simulations. Air still hissed from the atmosphere hose. The suit’s fail-safes should have closed valves at the suit and the pack, preserving her oxygen, though they obviously hadn’t. One of the medics solved the problem by pulling the power pack out.
“Make space for me there, if you please.” Vorona, the chief medical officer, slid through her team members. Her perfectly pressed coveralls were slashed with white, and she held a first responders kit under one arm. Stately even in an emergency, she knelt smoothly by Reel’s head, setting her bag aside and taking hold of Reel’s helmet. She twisted at it, and it came loose with a whisper of air, suggesting that at least the suit side valve had closed properly, saving its occupant from direct exposure to the hard vacuum of the black.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Even so, Reel looked awful. Her head drooped backwards as it came free of the helmet, mouth open. Her scales had an unhealthy gray pallor, and she gasped feebly, sucking at the ship’s fresh air. She stared at the ceiling, her eyes unfocused slits.
“Oxygen.” Vorona said briskly, holding out a hand. One of her team members slapped the mask into her hand, and she pressed it hard against Reel’s mouth and nose. The young engineer’s breath fogged the plastic as she gasped, and then began to breathe deep. “There you go, dear. Just breathe. It’s alright.”
How is she so calm? Arcturus marveled. You would never know, watching Vorona work, that she was treating her own daughter. She certainly showed none of the panic, or the helplessness that Arcturus felt. He forced his fists to unclench as a tinge of good green color returned to Reel’s cheeks, not even noticing the divots where his claws had pressed into the scales of his palm hard enough to bruise. Reel blinked, her gaze focusing, and she lifted one hand to tug feebly at the mask.
“No, stay put.” Vorona said, pushing the hand back down with gentle firmness.
“I’m alright.” Reel rasped through the mask. “I’m alright, my regulator went out but I’m fine now, really-”
Arcturus cut her off, his voice low and dangerous. “You were Stricken.”
Silence fell, broken only by the hiss of air from the breathing mask and the awkward shuffling of nervous feet as the nearby crew members looked away. Reel flinched under his glare.
“N-no.” She managed. “I just couldn’t breathe all of a sudden, like there wasn’t enough air, and then everything went dark.” She tried to shake her head, but Vorona had an arm in the way, fingers pressed to the side of Reel’s neck as she felt for the beat of her heart. Whatever she felt there must have satisfied her, because she nodded to herself and settled back on her tail. Everyone else had averted their gaze, but she looked right at Arcturus, catching his eye and giving him a flat, warning look.
He pressed on, ignoring her. “We saw the seizure.” The tell-tale sign of a full-blown Strickening, impossible to mistake. That prompted more embarrassed fidgeting from the surrounding crew members, and the scales around the sides of Reel’s face flushed. Arcturus couldn’t tell if it was from anger or shame. She held his eyes for a moment longer before dropping her gaze.
“Sorry.” She mumbled. She didn’t admit that was what had happened, but she didn’t look up again either as Vorona and her crew lifted her onto a stretcher.
…
Arcturus followed Vorona’s team into the medical bay as they bore Reel along in her stretcher, but Vorona turned and blocked his path at the door to the sick room. When he tried to step past her, she rasped her arm along the door, scales scraping over the frame in a warning to keep away. The scales along his own neck flared up in response, but he managed to keep his voice level.
“I need to talk to her, Vorona.”
“Talk? Or yell?” She stared up at him, defiant. “You’re too hard on her.”
He spread his hands, palms up. “What would you have me do? Give her special treatment, just because she’s our daughter?”
“Your words, not mine.” Vorona shook her head. “Stars, treating her like everyone else would probably come as a relief. If that were Hark or Roddel, you wouldn’t be mad. You’d be relieved.” The crests of her eyes drew together sharply as she stared up at him, obliterating their usual smooth curve. “You’re too hard on her.”
Arcturus growled in frustration. “I can’t treat her like I would everyone else. The expectations for her are higher, they have to be.”
“You were the one who decided that.” She snorted. “Wait out here until I’m done looking her over.” She palmed the door shut in his face, a scale’s breadth from his nose.
He ground his teeth, swinging his fists by his sides, but she was well within her rights. The ship was his, but the medical bay was her domain, and all tread lightly within. He could leave, but he wouldn’t until he saw Reel. Instead, he paced the receiving bay, nostrils flaring. The room stank of the astringents that Vorona’s team scrubbed over every surface, and it was all bright white tile and ceramic, reflecting the glaring bright overhead lights. Vorona claimed it helped with preventing sickness, though he couldn’t imagine how.
He scraped the claws of his toes back and forth across the room for what seemed an age until the door slid back open, Vorona standing to one side to admit him. Beyond her, Reel was sitting upright in a bed, leaning back on her shell, her head bowed with exhaustion and pain. She had blankets piled around her, and a monitor next to the bed beeped every few seconds, numbers flickering across the screen. She looked away when she saw him, hunching down in the plain white gown that covered her.
Arcturus hurried to her, his frustration forgotten for the moment. “How are you feeling?” He asked, covering the distance between them in a few quick strides. She looked up at him, then back down to the white blanket folded across her, her scales drooping. He came to a stop next to the bed and started to reach out to her, but stopped short. He dropped his hands, unsure what to do with them. He wanted to hug her, to hold her close and tell her that everything was going to be okay, to pull Vorona into that hug too…but he couldn’t. He kept his hands by his sides; he needed to be the Captain right now, not the father.
“I’m fine.” She answered, her voice flat. “Just tired. It was a bad one.”
He nodded, sighing. “They get worse every time. This is what…your fourth?”
“Fifth.” She admitted. “There was one a few months back we didn’t tell you about.”
Arcturus winced, and then shot Vorona an accusing look that she ignored. He’d only had two in his whole long life, and didn’t care to think about either of them. He reached a hand towards her head. “May I?” She gave him the barest nod. With gentle fingers, he cupped her chin and turned her head.
On the back of her skull, a series of small lights embedded in a small plate of metal winked out at him. He sighed; they all glowed green. She’d be alright. His own implant itched at the sight of it, the way it always did. He made himself study the device anyway, though there was nothing he could do beyond look at the lights. There was no sim training for working with implants; you had to go back to Efreet if you broke one, assuming you lived long enough to make it. He pulled his hand away. “What happened?”
“I was rechecking the connectors for the gravity plate wiring in that section.” She said, her voice dull. “I went through all of the troubleshooting checklists, and we were going to have to pull it and replace it since we kept getting a negative power reading. I knew we were already behind, so I thought maybe I could compare one that was working to the broken one and figure out how they worked…” She winced and put a hand up to her implant again, and Arcturus felt the warning buzz start up in his own in the same instant.
“You could have been killed.” He pushed the image of Reel puzzling over the inner workings of the gravity plates away, and the buzzing quieted. “Next time just replace it.”
“But it’s so slow!” She protested. “And we’ve already used so many spare parts, and they’re so expensive! There’s got to be a better way.”
“You must have pushed through two warnings, or even three?” Arcturus shook his head. “You know the rules, Reel. Follow the steps, don’t try to work outside the directions. We’re not capable of it.” The words left a foul taste on his tongue, but he knew better than to think his resentment too loudly. No matter what his secret half-formed thoughts might be, the Efreet had made that point painfully clear.
The silence stretched between them until he broke it with a sigh. “You can’t keep indulging your curiosity like this.”
Reel’s eyes flashed over the smooth scales of her cheeks. “Isn’t that the whole point?” She demanded. “To reach a point where we can? How much longer will it be like this?” He flinched, her desperation wrenching at his heart.
“You’ll never make it there if you end up dead in the black!” It came out harsh, and harder than he meant it. It wasn’t fair, either. She knew as well as he did that neither of them would live long enough to see that day. “It...it doesn’t matter how long it will take,” he stuttered, trying to move past the momentary lapse. “All that matters is that we keep pressing on; that’s our duty.”
“But why!” She cried out, tears of frustration brimming in the corners of her eyes. “Why do we even need these blasted things in our skulls?” She dashed them away with the back of her hand before they could fall. “I was fine without it!”
“As a child, when you didn’t have to do complex work, maybe. But how would you ever fly a ship, or engineer an assembly platform without it?” His tongue twisted, knotting up at the words, but he pressed on. “Without the implants, we’d never manage it.” In answer, she drew her head all the way back into her shell, hiding her eyes with an arm.
That would never do. He rapped on her shell with his knuckles, making a solid clunk. “Stop that. Have some self-control!” He snapped. She didn’t budge, and Vorona came bustling up to chivy him towards the exit.
“Enough! You can talk to her more after she’s rested. Back to the bridge with you!”
He glared down at her, his neck extended, but she met his gaze without flinching. “She needs to learn, Vorona.”
She narrowed her eyes at that, jabbing him in the chest with a blunt claw. “She’s had that implant for only a few years, and she hasn’t had the same training on Efree that we had.” She prodded him again in the chest, harder this time, forcing him backwards out the door.
Hard to send a Shipborn daughter, an illegal daughter you weren’t supposed to have, for training. “It doesn’t matter.” He insisted, stumbling over his own tail as she drove him back. “She has to do better!”
“Great! She can start when she’s recovered.” Without another word she palmed the door shut again. It slid home, leaving him sputtering at blank steel and ceramic.
He stared at the door for a long moment, the scales all along his neck spiked up. As Captain, he could override the door locks…but no, he’d pay dearly for that later, and duty called him back to the bridge in any case. Resisting the urge to give the door a good thump, he spun and stalked off, his thoughts black. Did they think he didn’t understand, that he didn’t chafe under it the same way they did?
Blasted woman, blasted girl! Then, a treasonous intrusion. Blasted Efreet! It sent a spike of pain lancing through him, from his head clear to his neck, forcing a sharp breath. He banished the thought, gritting his teeth against the pain.
Blasted implant!
…
Reel watched, peeking out from under her shell, as Vorona leaned back against the door, pressing her shell against it if to bar Arcturus physically. For a long moment her mother stood that way, listening. As the Captain stomped away, she let her head fall back against the cool metal, closing her eyes.
“Why does he have to be so hard?” Reel mumbled, easing her head back out of her shell. She hadn’t meant for Vorona to hear it, but her quiet murmur echoed in the stillness of the med bay.
Her mother’s head came back up, her eyes snapping open again. Vorona bustled back over towards the bed where Reel lay, briskly wiping her palms on her coveralls as she came on. “I don’t think he means to be hard.” She sighed, tugging the sheets covering Reel higher across her chest. “He’s afraid of being seen to play favorites.”
“It feels like he’s ashamed of me.” Reel’s mouth twisted on the words. “Because I’m Shipborn.”
Vorona caught at her arm, squeezing until Reel looked up to meet her eyes. “Never that.” She said. “He wants you to excel, so he pushes you the same way I do. And he worries about you. It’s hard to manage an implant without being trained on Efree.”
“Then he should have just sent me for training.” Reel said bitterly. “Then he wouldn’t have to worry so much, and he could treat me like his daughter again, instead of constantly snapping at me.”
Vorona reached out and ran a hand over the scales on the top of Reel’s head, as if to smooth them down. “He could have done that…but he couldn’t bear to send you away.”
“Could have fooled me!” Reel burst out. “I try so hard to do what he wants, to help, but all he ever does is yell at me.” She thumped at the bed in frustration, dislodging the carefully tucked blankets around her.
Vorona smoothed them back into place absent-mindedly. “That comes from the worry.”
Reel started to shake her head in vehement denial, then stopped short, flinching at the fresh spikes of pain it brought on. Vorona saw, and pushed her firmly back into the bed. “Trust me. Your father struggles to show it, but he loves you. There’s nothing he wouldn’t give, no sacrifice he wouldn’t make, no risk he wouldn’t run if he thought it would save you an ounce of pain.” Reel squinted doubtfully up at her mother, but Vorona just cupped her cheek, smiling. “Count on it.”