Target 10 S3.2 Inertial Motion
He fired again, again until she stopped, teetered and fell backward just a meter away.
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RJ listened to alternating thuds and metal tearing beyond the door in front of him. "Anytime, Aida!"
"We will reach an orbit meeting your requirements in thirty seconds."
He took a big breath in, widened his stance and held up the e-blaster. "That's close enough. Unlock this door."
With a swoosh, the metal panel disappeared into the wall.
Marisil swiveled on her base, rushing toward him.
He fired.
She slowed, but kept coming, arms outstretched to grab him.
He fired again, again until she stopped, teetered and fell backward just a meter away.
Reaching in his pocket, he pulled out four of the G-discs. He slapped one on either side of the rolling sphere, pressing hard to activate them. The sphere lifted off the floor by half a meter. He made his way round to the head, placing another disc on the side of the primary cube, keeping as much distance from the arms as he could.
There was a whine and scratching from inside it. He jumped back, ready to shoot again.
It's display face remained dark, but the sounds continued. He inched closer, peering again into the hole. Two golden eyes spotted him, the pupils narrowing to a thin vertical slit. A mouth lined with wide, pointy teeth opened and hissed as the triangular ears pulled back. What the hell?
Inside was a four-legged animal, fully intact with all its parts. The walls, last seen covered with fur, blood, and flesh were shiny and bare. A cold spread, like tendrils from a frozen core, as he realized what he was looking at. After he'd blown it apart, it had reformed. Somehow.
Tubes still penetrated it, holding it in place except for the front legs, which clawed at the metal as if trying to break free. Or to get at him.
Its display flashed red.
He stepped back, changed the E-blaster setting, and fired inside.
This time, he looked in just long enough to see the animal had been blown apart. Again. He put the last of the G-discs on the side and Marisil floated above the floor, arms hanging down limp.
Grasping the thick block that served as her head, he pushed it out of the junction into the main corridor. "There isn't much time, but can you do a full scan of Marisil, get some info on whatever the hell is inside it? You should have seen a bio signature." He turned right, then left.
"I have a complete scan."
As he rounded the corner near the med room, he sped up, still careful not to slip on the furballs lining the floor. When they reached the pile Marisil's arms dragged through it, but he had enough speed it didn't slow him down.
A few steps later, he came to a halt and pushed Marisil into the square entrance to the ramp on his right. Making sure it was as close to the exterior door as he could get her, he picked off the G-discs and it crashed to the floor.
The display flashed red.
Its arm stiffened.
He turned to run too late, Marisil latching onto his ankle. His right elbow hit the floor first, then the blaster smacked the floor and slid away from him into the corridor. He screamed, a crushing grip breaking his right ankle.
Kicking with his other leg, he tried to break free, but Marisil pulled him closer. He flailed, reaching for the E-blaster a meter beyond his reach.
"I'm going to assist you, RJ. Prepare for an inertial shift towards your weapon."
Aida's words processed through his pain. He stopped his flailing, but still keeping both hands out in front of him, his eyes focused on the gun. With a jerk, he slid forward as the shuttle banked left. A jolt of pain ran up his leg as Marisil slid with him.
His fingers brushed the E-blaster, moving it close enough he could grab it. He twisted around, firing repeatedly at Marisil. The blast stopped her forward motion and her display dimmed, but her fingers remained clamped on. When he stopped firing, they both resumed their slide towards the corridor and out of the airlock.
"Aida!"
"Reversing inertial motion."
RJ swung his left leg over his right and sat up, the pain forgotten in his panic to shoot the inside of Marisil. But his shots hit crushed the front metal of the chassis, almost entirely closing the open corner on the opposite side of its body. He pulled himself closer as they slid into the airlock and shoved the tip of the E-blaster into the hole. The blast reverberated through Marisil, down its arm and into his ankle before its fingers went limp.
He scampered back as the ship leveled out. His back pressed up against the corridor wall, he stared at Marisil's still body, holding his breath.
"Activating airlock," Aida said.
The inner door snapped closed. A small display to the right flashed "DECOMPRESSING" in bold red letters before switching to a bright green "SECURE."
RJ exhaled. "Is it gone?"
"I am tracking an object expelled from the airlock. There's every reason to believe the entity is gone."
He swallowed. Only one way to be sure. "Open the inner door." Its sound made him flinch, but the airlock was empty. He closed his eyes and breathed out. Can't rest. Need to save Reby. "Take us back to the star."
"My scans indicate you are in significant distress. You should receive medical attention before any other activity."
"No," he said, shifting his position onto his hands and knees. He trembled. His muscles gave out, his cheek smacked the floor.
***
"Welcome back, Captain. How are you feeling?"
Jemy heard words. He knew what they meant. They just didn't make sense.
He tried to sit up, noticing the autodoc dome just before his head hit it. Dropping back, he thought back to the last thing he remembered. Scans of the second site. I was in the cockpit looking at the scans.
"Based on your reaction, Captain, I assume you are confused."
Aida. That's Aida's voice.
"I have a status update that might help. Would you like to hear it?"
Again, the words were clear, but their meaning was like a hulking shadow in a dense fog. He relaxed and took a few breaths as he ran through his memory again, the pieces finally falling together.
"Aida."
"Yes, Captain?"
"Open the dome." His body was restless, like he needed to stretch, though almost too tired to move at the same time.
The autodoc released him and he swung his legs over the side, rubbing his temples with his hands. A tinge of sulfur and ozone whirled around him. He spotted the off-white floor splattered with blood. Then a heap of bloody clothes. RJ's clothes.
He jumped off. "Aida! What happened? Where's RJ?"
"That is all in the status update, Captain. Shall I begin?"
"Yes!" He listened, distressed, to her summary of RJ's encounter with small but aggressive life-forms. The fact he couldn't help because he'd passed out from the milip, turned his stomach. Why didn't I listen?
"Where is he?" He stepped around RJ's pants to the door. It didn't open.
"Aida, let me out."
"I'm sorry, Captain. RJ instructed me not to let you out of this room without making sure you knew everything."
"Open this door!"
There was a silent pause, long enough for a scream to start working its way up inside him.
"Yes, Captain. But you should know RJ is injured and unconscious near the airlock." The door slid open.
Jemy burst through, pausing only a second at the mash of fur and blood piled outside the door, the sulfuric odor making him choke.
"The threat RJ intended to protect you from is gone. However, because of the damage from the encounter I have returned the shuttle to the Demption."
Her words washed over him like a gust of wind before a summer storm, charged and dangerous. "Threat?"
"Yes, Marisil attempted to kill him."
Even before she finished speaking, he saw RJ, splayed out in front of the airlock door. Ice-cold knives of guilt and anger stabbed him in center of his chest knowing Marisil was responsible. "RJ!" Kneeling, he rolled him over, grabbed and shook his shoulders. "Wake up!"
"Please, Captain. Consultation with the medical systems suggests he fainted from pain and exhaustion. He should be stabilized and pain-blocked before attempting to move or revive him."
His thoughts jumbled together until they massed into a blob that shifted and grew until it took the shape of his sister's face. "Reby! Where's Reby?"
"She is still in Havenstar and three hours twenty-two minutes past our scheduled connection time."
He sat back on his heels, RJ's pale face becoming a blur as tears streamed down his cheeks. All my fault. All my fault. He rubbed his face, pushing the tears aside, but more followed. A darkness settled over him, an urge to curl up and cry.
"Captain?"
He closed his eyes.
"Captain? Do you plan to provide assistance to RJ?"
"It's my fault. I, I didn't believe him when he said Clay was a threat." He dropped his head, hitching.
"I believe you are suffering the aftereffects of the substance you ingested."
He shook his head. "I don't know what to do." But I should.
"I've consulted the medical systems and they recommend returning RJ to the primary autodoc on the Demption. It's likely his ankle is beyond the shuttle's older autodoc's ability to repair."
For the first time, Jemy looked at RJ's leg. He gagged. Beneath the ripped pants, were shades of deep red where his skin was torn in strips. Bits of fabric stuck to the wet wounds, and embedded in parts that had begun to congeal. His calf had ballooned to twice the normal size above the top of the low boot. His foot rested at an awkward angle, like it wasn't even connected to his leg.
Jemy closed his eyes again. He wanted to help. A fire burned in his chest, the heat pushing him to fix what he'd done wrong. His mind, though, moved too slow.
"What do I do?" he whispered.
"I believe the best approach would be to retrieve a fixer and a straccer from the med room. Use the fixer to stabilize him then transport him to the autodoc in your lab."
He nodded, swallowing hard. "Ok. I can do that."
Though he hurried down the corridor, everything moved slow around him, like he was pulling his feet out of the sinking sand of Roree beach. When he finally reached the med room, he found the fixer on the chair. Dried blood flaked off the handle when he picked it up. What have I done? He held it up, staring at it. How could I have been so wrong?
"Captain?"
Aida's voice pulled him out of a dark hole, one filled with RJ's blood covered face begging him to understand Clay was a threat. He put the fixer down and started going through the panels, trying to find a straccer. "Yes?"
"Do you want to talk about how you're feeling?"
He stopped his search. "What?"
"Do you want to talk about how you're feeling? Standard medical treatment for withdrawal depression is to talk about what is bothering you."
"I'm fine." He pulled out another panel and another until he found what he needed.
Aida remained quiet.
Returning to RJ, he bent over and held the fixer out over the swollen ankle, trying not to look at it directly. It made a quick beep, beep and the tiny light flashed green. His shoulders dropped. Normally it took time for the fixer to work, now all it could do it block RJ's pain receptors. He stood up straight, hoping to shake off the sense a heavy darkness clung to his back.
He put the fixer down and pulled the two long, white bars of the straccer apart. One he placed just above RJ's head and the other at his feet. A thin, translucent film extended from the first one, flowing between RJ and the floor. It continued until it reconnected with the second piece. A beep sounded and the film slowly grew taut, lifting a few centimeters off the ground.
RJ's right foot hung off the edge. Jemy lifted it on and RJ groaned. Next he pressed a button on the top straccer bar and RJ lifted to waist high. As he pushed him down the ramp into the Demption, he choked on his tears. One thought circled in his mind. Clay won't hurt Reby. Clay won't hurt Reby.
***
The ceiling in the lab lacked any interesting features. Jemy stared at it anyway, his thoughts presenting him with enough visuals that he appreciated the blank white canvas above him.
Though he often spent time like this in his lab, reclining in his desk chair and letting his thoughts ruminate on his findings, this was different. He faced the autodoc in the corner, waiting for an update. RJ's ankle had been crushed and required reconstruction, but otherwise he was physically fine, though exhausted. Just as Aida had said.
And Reby hadn't contacted them. Just as Aida had said.
What else she had said had given him some hope. She had observed Clay in the room with Reby when he and RJ were at site two. Through the connection, she saw them interacting, and Clay was not threatening. After an hour of reliving their weeks on the star, he'd concluded that Clay's attachment to her meant he wouldn't hurt her. That he probably wanted her to himself, and at worst would keep her prisoner, locked in a room or something. He wouldn't let himself think beyond that.
Except to make plans to rescue her.
Aida already had the flight plan for returning them to the star, and he'd explained how it would take over controls once they passed below the shield. He didn't even need to be in the cockpit based on their first landing. He and RJ would wait at the ramp, armed and ready to find Reby and get back to the ship.
The only hitch was that they needed the star to help them, transport them to where she was. If Clay had more control over the systems than he let on, Jemy didn't know how they'd find her.
Maybe she'll find us.
He snorted at the thought of her waiting in the docking bay when they arrived, tapping her foot and asking what took them so long. Then hearing her story of how she took Clay down, just like those guys on Kioni. He knew she was capable of it.
She hadn't talked much about her time on Igni Prime, but he knew enough to put some pieces together. Bad things had happened. Things he didn't want to think about, and she didn't want to say. Ghosting her employer, Gaine, and leaving to join the Demption had been scary—for him. She knew exactly what she was doing and assured him that the huge deposit they made into Gaine's account after their first trek settled things. But she'd changed, grown stronger, from the little sister he'd known before she went to university.
She knows how to take care of herself. He believed it, though it didn't make the tightness in his throat or the knots in his stomach go away. Tears dripped down his face, and he wiped his eyes.
"Captain. There are approximately thirty minutes left on RJ's reconstruction sequence. Would you like to spend that time talking about how you feel? Medical literature indicates this is a critical path toward a subject's recovery."
He leaned forward and rubbed his temples again. "I'm not an addict, Aida. The milip messed me up and I still feel... emotional. But I think discovering my best friend nearly died, and we left my sister with a murderer justifies a little emotion." The words left him with a bitter taste in his mouth. "Don't ask me again."
"Of course, Captain. I will alert you when I begin our descent."
He pushed himself out of the chair and walked to one of the larger tables just beyond his desk. Laid out on top were the essentials he thought they'd need to rescue Reby. First, there were two pulse rifles, more powerful than an E-blaster, just in case Clay had more Marisils roaming around.
Next there were hand-held bio-signal detectors—which he realized probably wouldn't work, but added just in case. Then there was change of clothes for RJ. And finally, everything he'd found in RJ's pant pockets on the shuttle. He knew how important the tools were to RJ. And how many times they'd saved them in a jam.
He kept moving around the lab, straightening things that were already straightened. Anything to keep his mind from going back to the dark place and losing his focus. Though it had started to fade he couldn't be sure it wouldn't pull him back in if he stopped being busy again.
A series of loud bangs and muffled screams came from the autodoc.
He rushed over and saw RJ's palms pressed up against the autodoc's dome.
Jemy smashed the button to open the autodoc dome. It didn't budge. RJ's bashing became more frantic.
"Open the autodoc Aida!" Jemy kept pressing the release button.
"There are still eighteen minutes remaining—"
"Open it!"
The dome split lengthwise and slipped back into the base of the autodoc.
RJ sat straight up. "Jemy!" He pulled Jemy in for an awkward hug, then abruptly pushed him away. "We've got to go back. Reby—"
"I know. Aida told me everything. But you need to be fixed first—"
"I'm good. Let's go." RJ tried to swing his legs over, but his legs wouldn't move. "What the hell?"
"As I was trying to tell the Captain, the healing process on your right ankle isn't complete. Both legs were nerve locked to prevent any accidental damage during treatment."
Jemy looked at RJ's ankle, which seemed perfectly normal, then noticed a slight shimmer covering both his legs.
"It feels fine, Aida. Let me off this thing." RJ pounded his fist into the foam bed.
"That's not possible until the process is complete. Even if the autodoc reversed the nerve lock, you wouldn't have any sensation in your right leg from the knee down. The local anesthetic has approximately sixteen minutes of effectiveness remaining."
RJ's eye grew wide and opened his mouth.
Jemy put his hand on RJ's arm. "So what you're saying is that the repairs are complete but that his lower right leg will remain numb for another sixteen minutes?"
"Yes, effectively. Those additional minutes provide time for the repairs to stabilize."
"Fuck that! Let me off!"
"Hold on, RJ. Are there any issues if he walks around on it?"
"There is a high probability of additional injury from falls and a medium probability that the existing injury may cause weakness in the area if not rested for the full treatment."
"Aida, release RJ. He can handle some numbness. It'll take that long for us to land, anyway."
"Yes, Captain."
The slight shimmer over RJ's legs disappeared. When his feet hit the floor, he tumbled onto Jemy, dragging them both to the ground.
"Sorry," RJ said, pushing back up on his knees and helping Jemy sit up. "I can't feel a damn thing on that leg."
"As I suggested, RJ, there is a high probability of additional injury when trying to attempt walking with no sensory feedback in one of your limbs."
Jemy made a mental note to talk to Reby about whatever sarcasm routine she'd put into Aida's programming. "We got it Aida. Thank you. Just let us know when we begin our descent."
"Yes. Of course, Captain."
"Lean on me," Jemy said and helped RJ to the chair. He pulled up a stool as RJ stomped his foot on the ground.
"I thought I'd feel something. Like sleepy tingles kind of numb, you know?"
"Me too. But you should be good to go by the time we land." Jemy looked to the side, towards the table laid out with weapons and supplies. His throat tightened, and he his body tensed. "I-I'm sorry I didn't listen to you." He brought his gaze back to RJ.
RJ stared at him, a slew of emotions crossing his face in waves as he shifted in the chair. "Let's just get Reby back." His voice broke and he coughed. "We can argue about how right I was when we're all safely back on the Demption." He glanced around. "Speaking of, why are we here?"
"Aida thought the shuttle's autodoc wouldn't be able to fix your ankle. Plus, the airlock suffered some damage." He couldn't bring himself to mention details. He'd watched the video of what happened and that had been enough.
"That thing is gone, though, right?"
"Gone. On a trajectory to the sun."
"Burning up in a fiery ball of fusion is too fucking good for it."
"I agree." Jemy swallowed again, a fear, a pain, a chill settling into his chest. The last time he felt it was when he'd lost his parents. I will not lose Reby. "I've got a plan to get Reby back." He gestured toward the table loaded with supplies.
"Yeah." RJ leaned forward to get a better look. "We go in guns a blazing and kill that—"
"Hold on. We don't know what he's done with Reby. If he won't tell us where she is, we might not find her. He holds the upper hand in knowing the landscape."
"But the teleporter should get us close." RJ's voice hardened, as if it were raising an axe and was ready to drop it.
"That's assuming he doesn't have more control than he let on. Looking back..." he ran his hands through his hair, "I just don't know how much of what he said was true. It all seemed plausible, but was it true? And if he can control the docking systems or the teleporter, then having all the weapons in the world won't help us find her."
RJ sat back and stomped his foot again and frowned. "Then what is your plan?"
Jemy looked between the rifles, supplies and RJ, pushing down the hard ball inside him that had only grown during their conversation. "Hope he thinks we're dead, so we catch him by surprise."