Nemesis Games

The lockers by the airlock hung open and empty. The three EVA suits that remained didn’t have batteries or air bottles. The emergency rations were gone. She expected the toolboxes to be gone from the machine shop, but they’d taken out the racks that held them too, the drawers from the cabinets, the LEDs from the wall lights. The crash couches were all slit open, gel and padding pooled on the deck beside them. The drug delivery system and reservoirs were gone. The only water was in the drives; ejection mass to be spit out the back of the ship. The only food was the residue in the recyclers that hadn’t been processed back into anything edible. The stink of welding rigs and burning still hung in the air, so the air recycler was probably running unfiltered.

Naomi lay on the deck, her head resting on her hands, and her eyes closed. The ship had been constructed for one use and as an insurance write-off. Its working life had begun with it being disposable, and it had been looted from there. Even the physical panels and monitors had been salvaged and carried away. As presents to Filip went, it was actually pretty crappy. The deck shook under her, the vibration of thrust setting up resonances that no system even tried to damp down. Between the high g and the vacuum damage leaking fluid into her lungs, breathing took more effort than it should have.

The ship wasn’t a ship. She needed to stop thinking of it that way. It was a bomb. It was what she’d done to the Augustín Gamarra years ago and had carried with her ever since like a weight around her throat. Jim had known the kind of person that landed on water haulers like the Canterbury. He’d said that everyone there had reasons for being there. There were reasons the ship she’d tried to give to her son was stripped empty and triggered to kill. Not just her but anyone who came close to her. There were reasons. If she could defuse it, undo the threat, then she could follow it back, though. Take it to Ceres, where it had all started. There should be a way through the machine shop. All machine shops were supposed to be connected at the back.

She reached out her hands, only they weren’t her hands. She was dreaming. She forced her eyes open and rolled to her back with an exhausted sob.

Okay. If she stopped moving now, she was going to sleep. That was good to know. She sat up, rested her head against the wall. Sleep later. Sleep when you’re dead. Or even better, sleep when you’re safe. She grinned to herself. Safe. That sounded like a good plan. She should try that for a change. She balled her hands into tight fists. The joints all screamed in pain, but when she opened them, her fingers moved better. That was probably a metaphor for something.

She had to set priorities. She didn’t have a lot of resources. If she just grabbed at the first idea that came to her, it would be easy to exhaust herself without getting the critical work done. She needed to get food and water and make sure the air supply was reliable. She needed to warn anyone coming to save her not to approach. She needed to disarm the trap. Maybe dump core, maybe replace the drivers with a copy that didn’t carry her poisoned code.

And she needed to do it before the ship blew up. At two g. Without tools or access to the controls. Or… was that right? Access to the controls was going to be hard, but she should be able to improvise some tools. The EVA suits weren’t powered and didn’t have bottles, but they had seals and reinforcement. She could take the cloth apart, and salvage some lengths of wire. Maybe something solid enough to cut with. And could she use the helmet clamps as a kind of vise grip or clamp? She wasn’t sure.

Even if she could, what would that gain her?

“More than you’ve got now,” she said aloud. Her voice reverberated in the empty space.

All right. Step one, make tools. Step two, drop core. Or warn anyone coming in. She stood up and forced herself back to the airlock lockers.

Five hours later, she was on the ship’s perfunctory little engineering deck, sealing the hatch manually. Two of the EVA suits had given up what little they had to offer to make a tiny, sketchy tool kit. Doing anything with the controls had failed. So she could be a rat in a box, or she could take out the middleman. After all, the controls all connected to machinery, and the machinery – some of it – was where she could put her hands on it.