Backflow Boxed Set Read online

  Chen laughed hard at my finger. But his smile quickly faded. “I guess I should get my stuff—” he began to say.

  But Gary suddenly strode in. “Sorry for interrupting. Just wanted to let you know we’ll be ready to get started in about twenty minutes. Lydia, once everyone other than the seven of us in engineering is out, have the station detach the sleeve…or else the thing could possibly come across to there.”

  I pulled a face at him. “It’s living inside a reactor, but GS’s walls will be a deterrent?”

  “Well, still, there’s no need to give it a direct conduit to the station’s interior…. Are you ready to go?” Gary’s helmet had been hanging off the back of his head, and now his hands quickly adjusted his helmet as his head turned toward Chen.

  “I was just going to my room to get my bag?” Chen said, leaving a questioning sound at the end, for Gary first, then for me. Chen’s eyes were right on me now.

  But before I could respond, Gary said to him, “Yeah, you better go.”

  “I’ll meet you down in the cargo bay, Lydia?” Chen questioned again.

  But I only shook my head at him. “No. I’m not going anywhere.”

  I didn’t look at Gary now, but I could have sworn I felt tenseness coming from him. “Lydia,” he said in a sharp voice, “I told you—you’ve got to leave.”

  Chen’s gaze bounced between the two of us, as if he was waiting for both of us.

  “Just go,” I told him.

  I watched his eyes fall onto his chair one last time, before he rushed out the doorway.

  I turned to Gary. “Once again, what the hell do you think you’re doing—giving me orders, and in front of the other crew!”

  “Lydia, how many ways must I say it: you need to leave. I’m the one who’s got to remove the core, and I just don’t like that you’ll be on here—it will distract me too! What do you want me to say? I know I keep overstepping my bounds, but we’ve got an emergency here, and I suddenly don’t care about being formal. I’m worried about you.”

  I ran a hand over my long hair. “And you think I don’t feel the same?” I said now, my breaths coming harder. My eyes swerved to his and found his flashing with something—annoyance and some type of assertiveness, an assertiveness I didn’t particularly care for. “Save it for the thing down below,” I finally said, jerking a thumb at the floor. I wondered if Gary knew what I meant….

  And then he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re being overly protective and too assertive, behaving like a stereotypical kind of guy when you’re not that kind of guy. Interrupting me when we’re talking, then trying to push me where to go. I can take care of myself.”

  Gary’s face was flashing several shades of red, almost as dark as the suit on his body. “I know that,” he said now. “But I can’t help caring about you—is that a crime?”

  “No, it’s not a crime. It’s just this shit going on is the last thing I had planned for today—or any day! I appreciate your trying to help and your prompts too, but I’m not sure leaving my ship is the best thing to do. I can be another set of eyes on here—”

  “You can be another set there, at the station in front of their viewscreens. I had Karen send a message to them the moment you left engineering. They’re expecting everyone, including you.”

  “You bastard,” I said, but it came out pretty flat. I was tired of arguing over the issue: this was an emergency, and there was no way I could argue that away.

  Gary was right this time: the bulk of my crew would be inside the station; there was no need for me to be on the ship—and if the worst happened, it was senseless for me to be another casualty here….

  At that horrible thought, my eyes rushed to Gary’s, and I realized then that his had softened—not with tiredness though, with something else.

  “This really isn’t the right time or place for this, but, what the hell—how’s this for a stereotypical kind of guy?” Gary said fast now in a shaky voice, and then his face quickly came closer to mine, to kiss me right on the mouth.

  *

  An instant later, he pulled back. His face was all flushed, and mine felt just as flushed. But before I could speak through my stunned open mouth, he spun around and rushed out the bridge doorway.

  I stared after him, feeling mostly fear, and then a little anger. What a time he chose to kiss me—why didn’t he do it sooner, under better circumstances! Had he lost his mind, or were we all losing our minds? I couldn’t believe what was going on—some monster in the core. I’d never even considered that a possibility.

  My breaths were coming too hard, and that wasn’t only because of Gary. I had to pull myself together and think. I remembered my emergency case in my office; I kept my most important possessions and business info in that case. I would go grab it, then go to the station.

  However, I suddenly couldn’t move. I was afraid, afraid of the thing in the core, and afraid for Gary the most—I couldn’t help it, I realized now. I knew him the longest out of anyone on the ship, and he had just kissed me. Now what?

  *

  Later, I was finally in Genteran Station, in one of the lower-level rooms, facing the long axis of my ship. It was still light out, but the outside of the station was also artificially illuminated now, because of the emergency situation and because a mild mist-storm had just moved into the area.

  My eyes roamed over the Demeter’s dark hull, down over a silvery seam, then to under the curve of the belly. The exterior sections of the four belly nozzles had been retracted after landing here, and someone had just turned on all of the hull’s underside lights; I could see the general area beneath the glow of all the lights, but I couldn’t see many details because they were too far away.

  Before I had walked through the sleeve to the station, I had donned my protective suit’s helmet and gloves, but now I removed those coverings and laid them and my emergency case onto a table.

  Cambridge stood beside me; he was setting up a camera view on a very large computer screen, so we could zoom-in at my ship while my crew was working on it.

  I pressed the communicator-button on my suit. “Gary, are you linked up—can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” Gary said, his voice coming out of my suit’s speaker.

  “Where are you? Have you seen anything more on the sensors and cameras for the reactor area?”

  “I’m in the shuttle bay, getting the portable platform. Babs noticed something on the internal sensors before; she’s on her way to you from another part of the station.”

  I lowered my voice now, feeling my heart suddenly strangely vibrating. “Gary, I’m worried about you.”

  “I know,” he said.

  A pause, during which I chewed my lower lip.

  Then I said, “I just hope this is the correct decision.”

  “Believe me,” Gary said, “so do I.”

  *

  I remained in that same station room, my mind rapidly going over my finances and already feeling drained of all the money that would soon be flowing from my wallet.

  Cambridge finally finished his work on the viewscreen, and now my eyes kept going to that large projection, expecting to see my crew show up. But my crew seemed to be taking too long a time.

  “What’s going on—Steve?” I said, over my suit’s communicator.

  “Yeah, I’m here. Alone.”

  “I’m sorry, Steve,” I said. “Anything going on inside the core?”

  “Not that I can see. The sensors inside are reading normal at the moment; the camera there and the Bot camera are still dark. And I’m not seeing anything on any of the shaft cameras and sensors—GOOD.”

  I sighed. “Well, keep the line open…and remove a few pulse guns from the locker—”

  “Already done,” Steve said.

  “You know,” Cambridge said from beside me, “you’re going to be fined for the ambin and radiation leakage.”

  I pulled a face at him. “Not my biggest concern right now. And
it’s especially ridiculous here when you mine hydroambin.”

  “Yeah, under controlled conditions.”

  “I doubt it,” I snapped, knowing the reputation the planet’s workforce had for being lackadaisical.

  Cambridge’s black eyebrows rose at me now. “You’re acting like you think we caused this.”

  I turned to him fast. “Well, didn’t you—and this planet?”

  There was a pause. Then Cambridge’s heavy, dark eyes slid away to out the window, and he frowned. “There are stories about things that live here—weird things people have seen occasionally but couldn’t explain. So we explained it away with the Hash. But the thing you described before does sound like what people call, Genteran’s Ghost.”

  “What we saw in the core was no ghost,” I said now.

  Cambridge shrugged, the blue fabric covering his shoulders shifting. “It’s a metaphor.”

  “I don’t deal in metaphors. I deal in realities. In science.”

  “So what do you think the thing is then?” he asked, his head turning to encompass Babs too. She had just walked in and she was looking down at her blue, hand-held computer-device. Derry was right behind her, her skinny bare arms clutching a red bulging bag in front of her white shirt.

  “I haven’t gotten and still can’t get enough info from the sensors,” Babs said now on a frown, still staring at her device. “But I think I’ve detected some ambin and hydroambin clumping—asymmetrical solid lumps moving around the main chamber. Since the reactor’s inactive, I’m assuming the ambin bound in the lining is being eaten by or combining with whatever the thing is….”

  “And what will that mean?” I asked her.

  But she just frowned and shook her head, her eyes still on her console.

  I turned to look at Derry; her nose was too red and her skin was too pale beneath her short, curly crop of red hair.

  “Derry,” I said, “why don’t you rest in that big chair?” I jerked a hand to the right, where there was a soft-looking, blue armchair against one of the white walls.

  “Thanks, Captain,” Derry said, and then she promptly sneezed into a white handkerchief, before collapsing back onto the blue chair.

  I glanced at the doorway to the room, but I couldn’t see much farther into the hall outside because of a curve in the wall out there. “So where is everyone else?”

  “They went to the station’s restaurant,” Babs said now. “I took one look at it and didn’t feel hungry anymore.”

  I heard a low rumble of laughter from Cambridge.

  My eyes gazed out the window again, finally latching onto the dashes of red moving below my ship—six dashes, six of my suited-up crew. One of them waved big in our direction—Gary probably. I could have asked if it was him waving, but I suddenly felt shy about doing that, especially with my other crewmembers nearby, especially with Babs nearby.

  Gary’s voice came into the room now as he gave instructions to Karen: “…Try to keep the camera on the opening as much as possible. Who knows if this’ll be important information to have for the future?”

  Because the hull was too high to reach from the ground directly, behind Gary, someone was now using a handheld control to shift a big gray platform to beneath where the core was inside the ship.

  Gary and Sam, who was another of my engineering crew and the oldest person on my ship, and then Karen with her camera—all three of them finally went up onto the platform.

  “Lydia,” Gary said, “can you hook up with Karen’s signal? That way you can watch everything from close up, as it’s happening.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to see everything, especially if it turned ugly. But, I asked Cambridge to take care of the hook-up anyway.

  By the time he’d done that, Gary and Sam were at work using the laser saw on the hull’s outer layer.

  The outer hull was held together by both structural seams and locks, and also magnetic locks. Steve actually could have unlocked just about everything from his end, but….

  “The problem is,” Gary said as he worked, raising his voice over the buzzing noise from the saw, “I don’t know how the core will fall when it doesn’t have a retrieval unit to attach to. It could damage even more of the outer hull if it catches somewhere and yanks it, and the outer hull is harder to repair…. I’m making the opening larger than I think it needs to be, to avoid making an even larger area of damage, if that makes sense…sorry for all the damage from the cutting, Lydia,” Gary finished.

  I sort of grunted at his words at first. Then I quickly added, “Just keep going—you’re doing a great job—all of you. If you need me out there, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “No,” Gary said, of course.

  “Captain—” Karen’s voice “—are you getting what I’m filming?”

  “Yes,” I said, my eyes on the split views on the viewscreen, the magnified view from the station’s camera and now the even more close-up view from Karen’s camera.

  “How long do you think this will take?” she asked, but she seemed to be talking to Gary.

  “You’ve never seen one of these done, huh?” Gary said.

  Karen must have shook her head quite hard, because the camera view was suddenly vibrating. But then the camera view just as suddenly stilled—on Gary’s face in his helmet, on Gary’s sweaty face.

  My eyes widened: I’d never seen him so sweaty. He looked as if he’d rather be anywhere but there at that moment.

  I felt a terrible tightness in my stomach: Gary had only been acting I-know-what-to-do-because-I’m-a-tough-guy confident; he was actually very worried. And now he was stuck doing this dangerous shit.

  I wanted to run out into the station and force one of the stoned bozos from GS to get into a suit and take care of the removal, but I didn’t have that authority, and they probably didn’t have the brains….

  “Lydia, are you all right?”—Babs’s voice.

  My head spun to her. I felt a bit sorry that I had removed my helmet; my face must have been revealing how upset I was on the inside. Too late to hide that now, though.

  I sighed and turned off my communicator. Cambridge had just stepped out of the room and Derry appeared to be dozing, so now I said to Babs, “I’m really worried about them, especially Gary.”

  I didn’t say anything further, but I could tell by the slow way Babs nodded that she knew what I really meant. I thought I saw a spark of humor in her brown eyes, but it seemed the situation was too tense for her to let the humor out beyond that.

  I switched my communicator back on and glanced back and forth between the viewscreen’s two images. Gary and Sam had seemingly finished more than half of the hull-cutting, and now there were almost three sides of what would apparently eventually be a rectangular shape parallel to the ship’s long axis.

  “This should go faster now,” Gary said. “I’ve been trying to get the feel of the best angle to hold the saw at. You all right, Sam?”

  “Yeah,” Sam replied in a gruff voice. “My shoulder’s feeling the strain though.”

  Technically, Sam had more years of experience on a ship than Gary. But Sam had spent many of those years in the Space Force as a lower-level engineering technician. I knew he considered his time on my ship his retirement; he’d said many times that he didn’t want the stress of responsibility, the stress of making decisions, and that was why he was normally just the part-time gopher of my engineering section. He certainly hadn’t signed on for all the physical—and dangerous—work he was doing today….

  “Gary,” I said, “have Sam switch off with Chris.”

  In Karen’s camera view, I watched Gary nod, his brown eyes right on her camera, which felt like they were right on me. “Chris, get up here,” Gary said now.

  “Thanks,” Sam said in a relieved voice. “I feel like an old man—but then I am an old man.”

  Several people laughed now, including me. And Gary went back to his sawing once Chris joined him on the platform.

  As Gary had predicted, the re
st of the outer-hull cutting went faster, and right before Steve was supposed to open the magnetic locks that were still intact in that area of the hull, Gary had everyone move away from the opening and pull the platform back, so it wouldn’t get crushed.

  He told Steve to unlock the locks, and then a moment later the outer-hull piece loudly crashed onto the Genteran earth below.

  My crew now worked on pushing and pulling that heavy hull section aside, using a small hydraulic hauler; when they were done with that, they put the gray platform back.

  Karen’s camera caught a glimpse of Gary’s face again, and this time it was very red as well as very sweaty. “Steve,” he said, “let the locks go on the first inner-hull door.”

  “Got it,” Steve replied.

  Gary was on the platform again and now he reached up to the gray inner hull; he pressed one of his palms to it and his other palm against a nearby electronic button—but before he could actually do anything further, he began slipping on the platform. “Whoa,” he said, one of his feet really sliding and making him fall down to his knees onto the platform floor.

  “Gary!” I said, jumping closer to the station window, my heart galloping wildly.

  “It’s all right—I’m all right,” he said, his voice a little unsteady and a little tired. “It’s very damp out here—with the mist-storm.”

  Cambridge had come back into the room, and one of his hands motioned to me as he walked closer. “Does he need more people? I can ask a few to suit-up. We can bring out the wet-vac and mop the platform when you need it.”

  “Actually, that would be really good,” I said.

  Gary must have heard Cambridge and I talking. “We’re all right—” Gary said fast “—we don’t need anymore help.”

  “Gary,” I said, “you can’t do this if you’re fucking falling off the platform!”