Backflow Boxed Set Read online

  I thought I heard a frown in his voice when he finally spoke: “Lots of deposits on the inside of the window. Babs is probably right; the wand didn’t do a good job this last time. I’ll program it for another pass.”

  “It’s not the wand,” Steve insisted.

  Gary’s helmeted head turned toward Steve. “Steve, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not seeing anything now. Let’s go check what the chamber camera recorded, all right?”

  *

  By the time the four of us made it over to the camera control area, we had attracted a small crowd of the other engineering staff. Karen, one of the engineering assistants, had just been working at her personal station, looking over the reactor sensor information from today, but now she began working on the main computer console that controlled engineering’s many cameras and sensors.

  But no matter her efforts today so far, she couldn’t find any data-based physical evidence of a plasma in the rod shaft from earlier, from when Steve first saw something.

  I watched Karen’s long fingers type at the black computer keyboard as she called up all of the recent recordings from the camera in the primary reactor chamber. Now I watched that camera-data; I watched it slide over the large viewscreen beside the keyboard—I watched the still and moving images of the dusty, big, semi-dark chamber…but I didn’t see anything moving inside. Neither did the others, including Steve.

  He finally looked at us, through a very red face. “I know what I saw.”

  “Well, it’s true the camera can’t reach every part of the chamber, including not all of the window area,” Babs said now, her round face frowning gently.

  “That’s right,” Steve said fast, and his head jerked a nod at her.

  “Babs, why are you frowning?” I asked now. “Did you see something that made you change your mind?”

  There was a pause. I thought Babs wasn’t going to respond, but then she said slowly, “I don’t think Steve imagined anything. I think he saw something. But we need to come up with a better explanation.” Her right gloved hand slid in a circle over the screen, around one particular image. “You see that there in the corner where it’s brighter? Doesn’t that particulate pattern on the lining nodules look too round and too large? And there’s another right here. I’ve never seen reactor residue patterns in such regular shapes—have you?” Her head turned to Gary.

  “No,” he replied to her then on a frown, “I haven’t seen that before.”

  *

  I listened closely as mostly Babs and Gary continued discussing the reactor situation—discussing it and finally coming to no conclusions. There were just too many unknowns, and that meant further analyses were necessary, especially because, as Gary finally said, “It could be a structural weakness inside is leading to a repeated, more regular pattern as the particles bounce during the reaction, and we can’t take that chance. We’ll open the core and send in the Bot.”

  The Bot was a three-foot-tall, thumb-shaped machine that could work under various core conditions without getting damaged. The Bot had very precise “fingers” of various sizes that could project out from its casing on all sides; the machine could spin, or extend its height up or contract it down, or it could hover in the air; the Bot could basically reach any area inside the core.

  The engineering crew often used the Bot when the core was too hot for anyone else to safely work inside. But now the Bot would be used for a not-too-hot but unknown core condition.

  I stood watching Gary as he programmed the controls on the machine’s white front; then he finally moved the Bot into the main reactor shaft and raised the exterior shaft shield. Standing outside there now, I watched the Bot slide farther into the shaft, then through the core’s open door.

  I followed Gary back to the computer console, where the others still were, and where Karen now had the Bot’s viewpoint blown up onto the viewscreen. The moving images from the Bot were quite shaky at first; the robot was adjusting itself inside the core, based on the instructions Gary told Karen to feed through the computer keyboard.

  More lights were on inside the core now, but they weren’t bright, and they didn’t illuminate every spot. The large, red-and-white, room-like area was still mostly shadowy-dark, including the odd, “pimpled skin” of the lining; the pimple-nodules projected to different distances from the lining, so the protuberances could more thoroughly capture residual ambin and quasi-neutrons and other things at different stages of the reaction process. The sandy-looking pimples had been spaced apart from each other in a uniform way—but now there were strange circles around some of the pimples, almost as if someone had been playing a ring-toss game there and had left burn marks behind.

  There were central mechanisms and workings inside this first core room, and then workings positioned in various spots around the central workings; farther back, the main core chamber narrowed, and even farther behind that, there was another narrower space that led to another chamber.

  The second and third reactor chambers didn’t—couldn’t—have cameras inside; it was also too dark inside there for any of us in engineering to clearly see those spaces from the main chamber’s camera, and Karen was suddenly having trouble with the controls for illuminating those other areas.

  “Just send the Bot near there,” Gary said to her now. “We’ll turn it and get some more video and stills of the main chamber from that direction; then we’ll move the Bot into the next chamber.”

  Karen did as Gary instructed, and I watched the bouncing view get bouncier with the Bot’s motions, and then I watched the view get darker: one of the lights near the Bot had suddenly failed.

  Karen’s long fingers moved over her keyboard faster, and she must have turned on a light on the Bot because the view brightened, but it was only a narrow cone of brightening toward that darker end—

  —A shocking flash of white shot across the screen, as if the Bot had turned or the core had.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked fast.

  “I don’t know,” Babs replied, and she began moving closer to Karen now.

  In fact, we all moved closer to her and the screen. And now I couldn’t take my eyes from it; I didn’t often come down here and take a look inside the core, but even I could tell that the white and now black filling most of the screen just wasn’t a normal occurrence—

  Karen began turning the Bot in another direction, apparently in an attempt to get something other than the blurs of black and white—then suddenly the blurs turned into a shocking sharp blue and the Bot’s camera lurched—or the Bot itself lurched—or was thrown. The image on the screen spun, and more flashing blue filled the screen.

  The Bot’s camera seemed to be sideways now, but it was still working, and in that working view, something was moving, something large and seemingly angry. It jerked forward and engulfed the Bot, till the computer screen went completely black.

  Nervous heat shot into my face. “Oh shit!”

  “I told you!” Steve shouted.

  “All right. Something’s in there,” Gary said in a flat voice.

  “No kidding!” Steve scoffed.

  “What the hell is going on—what the fuck could be in there?” I demanded. I hadn’t really expected to get an answer, but, good-old Gary did his best to give me one.

  “It must have been the plasma—the backflow. Genteran’s never been studied enough because it’s huge and so much of the crust is so impenetrable. Who knows what the hell’s here underground?”

  “Well, whatever the hell’s here underground is now in HERE,” I said.

  “Gary,” Karen said fast now, her blue eyes on her screen, “the sensors are picking up nodule damage—some type of corrosion’s eating away at one corner of the lining.”

  Gary’s head spun to me, and his brown eyes were flashing, as if his mind was working at a feverish pace to come up with a solution, which his mind did come up with, though it wasn’t a solution I wanted.

  “There’s no choice,” Gary said to me. “We need to ev
acuate the ship now.”

  My suddenly furious eyes widened at him. “I can’t leave my ship—my whole life is in this!”

  “I’m sorry, Lydia, but we don’t know what this is—look what it did to the Bot?” Gary’s head swung toward Karen and the viewscreen, but no matter what she tried, she couldn’t get the Bot’s camera to come back on—and now the chamber camera was also just showing black.

  Gary’s head shot in Steve’s direction now. “Get on the reactor console and turn on the emergency shield around the core and the outer shield around the shafts.”

  My heart was pounding hard as I watched Steve rush to another panel table. Then I said, “You’re not serious, are you, Gary—that we’ve got to evacuate?”

  “Yeah, I’m serious!”

  “Gary, I need to talk to you alone.”

  “But, Lydia—”

  “No buts, Gary!” I said in a hard voice, before turning around and marching across the room toward where his office was.

  Gary followed behind me, and neither one of us said anything, till we reached near his black door.

  I didn’t walk inside; I just turned around to him fast. “What the hell are you doing, Gary? Why are you being so rash?”

  “Lydia,” Gary said in a calm voice now, a calm I suddenly found really annoying, “you saw it too: there’s something in the reactor, and we’ve got to get it out. We don’t even know what it is, or what it’ll do next—it’s clearly taken over the core. Will it take over the ship next? Think, Lydia.”

  I ground my teeth together. “I am thinking. If we weren’t good friends, I’d throw you right off the ship for speaking to me so condescending like this.”

  He sighed hard and short, as if he were talking to a frustrating pain in the ass, which didn’t exactly please me or make the situation better.

  “Look,” he said now, “we’re arguing here and the dangerous situation still stands. I’ve got to inform the others—”

  “And make a ship-wide announcement. Me too.”

  “So why are we arguing?”

  Sighing suddenly, I pressed a hand to my helmet and was about to speak again when Steve rushed over to say, “I’ve put the reactor shields on maximum. What next?”

  “We’re trying to figure that out,” Gary said, and he looked at me when he said it.

  *

  The three of us remained there by Gary’s office, discussing (a.k.a. debating) what to do next. My head was pounding, my mouth was dry—mostly because it kept falling open and staying open. Leave my ship? What a fiasco! All my money was tied to this business; now I had some fucking thing setting up housekeeping in the core of my business!

  I felt the weight of the crazy situation suffocating me, and my helmet wasn’t helping matters. But, I was afraid to remove it at this point….

  Gary was saying something now. But I quickly cut him off: “Look, let’s assume the thing wants something in the core contents. How long before there’s nothing left of what the thing wants and it decides it wants to come out?” Nobody replied to my statement. And then I sighed hard, in resignation. “You’re right, Gary—we’ve got to move fast—make quick decisions and execute them quickly. But how do we do that—what do we do first from an engineering standpoint to secure the core better, even if we leave the ship?”

  “Well,” Gary said, “so far the thing seems to prefer the reactor—at least we’ve seen nothing out of the ordinary anywhere else. We’ve had the joints to the nozzles retracted and closed for hours now, so I’m assuming the thing’s been in and around the core area for hours, and it’s right inside the core now. So, as far as I’m concerned, if the core’s what it wants and what’s keeping it here, it can have it. We can drop the core.”

  The room seemed to spin around my head. “Drop the core?!?” I said in a loud voice, noticing several of the engineering-staff’s heads sharply turn my way: my suit was still on speaker from before, so my statement had just been broastcasted to the room. Now I added, in just as loud a voice, “A new reactor costs more than I’ve made this past fucking month, and that’s including this job on Genteran!”

  Gary spread a red-gloved hand toward me. “What do you expect, Lydia? The core’s already been damaged by its new tenant. And isn’t losing the core better than losing the whole ship? If it gets out, who knows what else in here it might take a liking to?”

  “But how do we get the core out?” Steve asked now. “We don’t have a retrieval unit here.”

  Gary looked at him. “We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: we’ll have to cut it out manually. Use the laser saw to cut through the hull; then open the inner-hull doors to the reactor’s structural shaft; then drop the supports, locks and shields, and let the core go. But there’s the locking on the nozzles against the reactor, and there’s the failsafe: someone will have to remain in engineering to release all the locks.”

  “Who?” I said.

  Gary didn’t respond. Neither did anyone else in the room, for that matter.

  “Well? What the hell do we do, people?” I asked finally, my voice very impatient now.

  Gary spoke again. “Either way, staying here, cutting down there—there are risks, after what the thing did to the Bot. It’ll take at least six of us, but it’s my responsibility to physically remove the core—I have the most experience too. But, I’ll stay in engineering and direct everything from there if no one else will volunteer to stay and unlock the internals.”

  There was a silence, too long a silence. I thought no one would speak, and when I was about to open my mouth and take the decision out of their hands, Steve finally spoke: “Look, I’ll work things on the internal engineering end, but I’m not gonna lie and say I wanna do it. I’m just the next in line in the experience department. But, wow, this sure sucks.”

  “Steve,” I said, “none of us wants to be stuck on the ship. I’ll be here too, watching everything from on the bridge—”

  “Lydia,” Gary interrupted me, his words coming faster now, “I think it’s best if you leave the ship with the others and you all go over to the station. You can watch us work from on the cameras there.”

  My back stiffened, and I flashed Gary a look I didn’t often flash him: a pissed-off look. “I’m the captain. And I’m not leaving my fucking ship.” I was breathing too hard, facing Gary still. Inside, in my mind, I forced myself to calm down. It took me a moment to speak again, but I finally said to Gary, “Are you sure this is the best way to proceed—that we should do this with the core? What about giving the thing access to the nozzles instead—maybe it would slip back outside then.”

  “Or maybe it would somehow break through a nozzle and slip into another part of the ship,” Gary pointed out. “I figure that if we let the core out, the thing will have a direct opening back to the planet’s surface. It’s a path of least resistance and it knows the place. Who knows—maybe it inadvertently got sucked into here and it misses the planet or would like it better.

  “Lydia, you know I’m not sure of anything. That word’s not in the language of science. But I just think we’ve got no goddamn choice now.”

  *

  “No goddamn choice” wasn’t something I ever wanted to hear with respect to my ship. But as I moved toward the bridge to make a ship-wide announcement, I realized that Gary’s “no goddamn choice” was correct.

  Still, it was very hard for me to accept, so I was determined to find a way to remain on my ship—to find some necessity for my being here. There were no technical necessities I knew of, but I kept trying to come up with some important reasons inside my head, even while, over the ship’s speaker-system now, I was telling my crew to remove anything of personal value and high-tail it to the station.

  When I was done with my announcement, Gary’s voice came over the same speaker; he gave everyone more specific information, which I listened to with a reddening, frustrated face; my plan to remain on the ship now seemed increasingly ridiculous to even my own mind….

  A moment after Gary finish
ed talking, Chen rushed onto the bridge. “Lydia, is all this true?”

  “Yes!” I said.

  Chen frowned. “I wanted to confirm with you directly.” He glanced around the bridge, his dark eyes finally falling on his red pilot’s chair. I saw his chest beneath his dark shirt rise and fall in frustration at first, then finally fall in resignation.

  Like quite a few of my crew, Chen didn’t have any close family members planet-side anywhere. He preferred being in space, and he had been a flight fixture on the Demeter since shortly after I’d bought it. This ship was like his family, and I considered him a close friend, as I considered all my long-term crew members. I knew how Chen felt now; I could see it in his hunched shoulders, in the flatness of his mouth.

  Finally, he lifted his head and looked at me again. “But, Lydia, what about the storms? Will they interfere with the core removal, and will the Demeter get fined for dropping the core? It’ll probably open then.”

  “We’ve got no choice,” I said on a sigh, my words sounding like Gary’s. I had detached my helmet to make my announcement before, and now I removed my gloves and laid them beside my helmet on one of the bridge tables; then I turned back to Chen. “I’m certainly not in the business of sacrificing my life or the lives of any of my crew. We can’t drop the core in space without critically damaging the Demeter’s exterior, and Gary said the nearest station who could remove it is days away. We’re going to last days with some fucking thing in the reactor—and when we might need to use it? No matter if it can live in there, for all we know, using the reactor would make it grow bigger—the fucking reactor might have created it!

  “We just don’t know what’s happened—if it was on the planet and found its way in, or if it’s been made in the reactor and maybe needs it to live—or needs ambin or hydroambin or both—I have no idea. I only know this ship isn’t big enough to house us and it. I’m sorry to just dump it on this planet, but here is where it seems to be from. And if we don’t dump the core and we sit here for forever, at some point the thing will probably come out onto Genteran anyway. This will be my response to any goddamn Genteran objections,” I finished, lifting a stiff middle finger.