Chapter 12
Most of the crew and several passengers who had been recruited to help with the final manufacturing and installation of the Juraszczyk ghostform were already in the supply bay when Suvan arrived.
His pulse thudded hard when they all looked at him.
It was bad enough when the captain and some of the others had invaded the engine module during the anomaly containment. But to be exposed in the bright lumes of the bay was nearly intolerable.
And Mariah was not there.
His morning message to her had been insufficient. He hadn’t found the words he needed, and then the fabricator had thrown an error code at the end of the curing cycle, right when Lub stress-vomited the flux spanner that’d been missing for days…
He still should’ve said good morning.
Squinting, he started his final walk-around.
No one would guess the mask Mariah had sketched was inspired by a goblhob.
Lub’s lure was now a grappling hook of the sort raider ships wielded against their prey, and all those menacing underbite fangs were an array of oversized cannons.
Once the ghostform was locked in and the interference field engaged, the illusion would be woven through precise reflectors to spectrally scramble the backscatter and thermal returns of any hostile scrutiny.
Cloaked in Mariah’s design, the Love Boat I no longer looked like a cruise ship; it looked like trouble, too perilous to pursue.
That—with some luck and expedient acceleration—would give them the opportunity to run away.
As he finished his review, the captain stepped up beside him. “Everything looking good, Chief?” Nehivar lowered his voice. “Are you sure you’re up for a spacewalk?”
“Ready.” Once again, he knew his response was too curt, missing the words he needed to say to the Kufzasin who’d been his captain for so many lightyears before this cruise.
But as he avoided Nehivar’s probing look, Suvan locked eyes with Mariah quietly entering the storage bay.
His pulse changed again, even faster. And this was why he didn’t like all the distractions. Unless there was a problem, he and his engines performed at a predictable, steady rate. Interacting with others muddled him.
Tightening his jaw, he strode over to her.
She was standing next to the EVA suit, her brown eyes wide with alarm. “You’re leaving the ship?”
With a quick, accusing glance at Ikaryo who must have explained to her already, Suvan took her arm and turned her aside.
“We don’t have external manipulators with the motor control to complete the install.
Captain Nehivar and I discussed it, and I have the proper skills and experience to do the final fittings. ”
Judging by her scowl, she was entirely willing to toss the captain out to do the work, maybe without a suit. “But you don’t even like leaving the lower deck.”
Having her question him too, as Nehivar had, rankled. He knew she was only sharing her concern—sharing his fear with him—but he could shake the old, withering feeling that he was on the outside, alone. “And yet here I am.”
“Suvan…”
Since he was already encased in the EVA suit liner, which compressed his quill-scales uncomfortably, she was able to grasp his arm without risk. And despite his disquiet—only worsened by the validity of their apprehension—he couldn’t help but lean into her touch. “There’s no one else.”
He couldn’t quite finish the thought.
Her dark gaze searched his for another long moment before she straightened with a brisk nod. “How can I help?”
“You already have.” He reconsidered. “Although we need a name for our future product sales.”
She blinked at him, bemused. “Our what?”
“You sell your knitting, yes? The ghostform is the same. What do you think of ghostform adaptive silhouette matrix?”
“Ghost… I can’t even remember all that.”
“We can call it a GASM.” He stared at her. “An optical resonance GASM.”
“ORGAS…uh, Suvan!” She shook her head. “Be for real.”
“I am. We’ll be rich.”
“We?” Her lips trembled, and he thought it was a smile, tentative and not a little surprised.
She stepped back while the captain and Griiek clamped the EVA suit around him, but Suvan kept his gaze locked on her. At least no one could track his compulsive focus as the helmet settled over his head.
He watched as she pointed out to Ikaryo and the assisting passengers how to maneuver the folded segments of the fabrication into the outer hatch for in-order assembly. With an acknowledging nod, the augmented bartender handed her a comm button that she pressed behind her ear.
As Griiek fastened a heavy toolbelt around his hips, Mariah returned to hover beyond the little Monbrakkan, her lower lip caught between her teeth.
Struggling to ignore the strangling constriction of the suit, he toggled the comm inside to a private channel. “Mariah?”
“Where’s your tether?”
He hefted the cord that the captain had fastened at the outer hatch door.
“Come right back,” she murmured.
He decided not to tell her that he hadn’t been in an EVA suit since he and Nehivar had all but destroyed their last ship fighting off pirates.
As the inner bulkhead came down, sealing him in the outer bay alone with the prepped fabrication, he kept his attention on the mechanical arms as they maneuvered into place, controlled deftly by Griiek.
The supply bay had several manipulators suitable for loading provisions and materials containers, and they could do all the awkward lifting and positioning.
But he would have to link the precision laser relays by hand to power it all.
The hatch opened.
His heart seemed to stop.
Though the caves where his people had evolved might’ve been utterly black, that had been many millennia ago; they had lights now, calibrated for Szauralithyn vision.
But space…
The void did not care about his literal vision or Mariah’s creative ones. Even though the outer bay had vented before the hatch opened, he felt the lingering pull of the vacuum trying to suck him out. Or maybe that was his imagination.
What a terrible time to discover his imagination.
“Chief?”
Griiek’s croak in his comm broke through his stasis. “I’m clearing the lock. Begin unloading.”
He had to be out of the way and ready to attach the relays as the fabrication locked into place.
“Chief.” Mariah’s voice was composed in the main comm. “Ikaryo and I are looking over the pattern again with Anoushka, who has a civil engineering background. We think there might be more structural support if you install the cannon mount section aft of the…um, nav scope?”
They were changing the plan when he was about to step off into space?
“Acknowledged,” he said through gritted teeth.
The nav scope was not readily accessible from the supply bay. He’d have to do that section last, but the fake guns were crucial to their disguise.
He got to work.
With Griiek’s four hands at the articulated manipulators, the fabricated pieces of the ghostform mask maneuvered into place one after another.
Suvan kept his attention on linking the sections efficiently, spot welding in place, and testing each relay as he went.
With the ship gone sensor-dark, only his helmet and glove lights created a pool of glare on the bulkhead. Beyond that light was…
Nothing.
“Last one,” the deck tech announced over the sound of a ragged cheer.
Suvan didn’t respond.
The counterfeit cannons were clutched in the bay’s longest manipulator arm, stretching partway to the nav scope.
But not far enough.
“Retrieving final component.” His voice sounded warped in his comm. “Griiek, release the grip.”
As the grappler end opened with barest momentum, the guns drifted free. Suvan wrestled the awkward bulk, arming himself like he was the universe’s most ruthless raider.
Except false.
Because now he had to face the emptiness.
The gap to the nav scope seemed a million lightyears away, and his tether suddenly felt as insubstantial as Mariah’s frailest yarn.
All his quill-scales strained in a stress response, and he imagined—again curses to his imagination—the spikes ripping through his suit.
Which wasn’t possible, but that apparently didn’t matter to imagination.
The EVA suit’s readouts flickered across his visor display, exposing his ratcheting panic, dimming as he held his breath to force the betraying numbers down—
“Chief?”
He couldn’t tell anyone. Not even Mariah, though they’d shared so much in the prismatic darkness of her stateroom.
Who would trust a chief engineer—the one who lived and breathed in the depths of the ship, whose absolute control of the engines kept them alive in the lethal emptiness of space—who was afraid of that void?
“Suvan?” Mariah’s voice was soft in his private channel. “What’s happening?”
Chunks of dead rock and ice swirled past, all of it capable of puncturing his suit, as indifferent to him as he’d been to anything that wasn’t his engines and Lub.
Even if Delphine’s trajectory calculations were perfect, the mere presence of the Love Boat I—its localized magnetic effects, even its comparatively insignificant gravity—would begin to have an effect.
First on the dust, closing in around him, then the pebbles, then—
“So I’ve been thinking about our orgasm,” Mariah continued. “I mean the ghostform ASM, not the other kind, obviously.”
He’d been with Mariah long enough to recognize her gentle humor. To feel it through the separation.
“What if we added some pyrotechnics?” Her musing tone took the edge off his pulse. “I think we could get very rich together with a few explosions.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding, a harsh sound that fogged his visor despite the suit’s regulator. “Will it look like plasma fire?”
He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded like he was joking.
“Brighter than that,” she murmured. “So bright you might have to close your eyes.”
He did, for a moment.
When he opened them, everything was the same: dark, cold, deadly. His target was no closer. Every painful thud of his heart seemed to reverberate through his trapped quill-scales.