Authors: Allen Charles
CHAPTER 52
Inside the fragment.
Zardooz had sedated Arjmand and cleaned up his vomit mess. The tumbling sensation was wreaking havoc with Zardooz’s gut and had made Arjmand completely sea sick in three dimensions. The nano-healing technology stolen from the former “West” was working as Arjmand’s external injuries visibly cleared. The broken ankle was secure and appeared to be staying set, in spite of the shifting forces of the spin.
Zardooz made his way back to the control room. He was getting the hang of moving and knowing when he could safely move. There was a pattern to the tumbling that he was gradually recognizing and could adapt to.
He strapped in with the dimage before him. The RABI was ready to go. He traced some circuits that were shut down and sent a repair bot along the service conduit to reset the last outer door that had been damaged in the blast. He overrode the “no atmosphere” security warning and activated the dead section of the corridor, the lights and cameras all coming on. The corridor looked fine other than the atmospheric breach. The RABI would start from there.
He took the RABI dimage and placed it in the corridor in a position to allow the shortened journey to the surface node. The RABI could not repair the node cameras, but he would send a repair bot with a replacement module after the boring job.
The RABI moved in the dimage as it was transported to the closest point to the corridor. The security overrides would not allow it to bore from within the complex under any circumstances, but the corridor segments after the first two were exempted from this exclusion. The only issue was to prevent atmospheric loss as the RABI bored into the corridor section.
The RABI sent a signal that it was in position to bore to the corridor but could not proceed due to atmospheric breach. Zardooz set the emergency door locks on the room that the RABI waited in and isolated it. It was risky, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Those locks had to hold. As a second thought, he activated the lock on the access corridor to the room as well. Then he overrode the RABI security. As the RABI was still in the complex no go region, he had to fool it into believing it was outside the area. There was only one way to do that and it was surely risky. He isolated all power circuits in the complex and left only the control room active. Arjmand would have to take his chances for the few minutes needed and was so pumped full of narcotics it didn’t matter.
Zardooz flicked off all power except the control room and activated the RABI. The security warning was gone and only an atmospheric loss warning, the air in the room itself, showed and was easily cancelled. The RABI activated its boring head and went at the wall, chomping its way through the panelling until it hit the bed-rock. Then the real work began.
There was a small run of about twenty feet from the room to the corridor that would take ten minutes or so at two feet per minute. A cloud of powdered rock came blasting back into the room and swirled madly in the coriolis forces of the tumbling fragment. Ultimately the dust would cling to the walls as the flung layers built up and were held by static charge and a blast of fire retardant would set the deadly dust into a mud that could not foul the atmospheric scrubbers. Zardooz sat back and watched the RABI’s path, ready to step in if the inertial guidance could not cope with the tumbling.
The RABI soon broke through to the corridor followed by a rush of mud and fire retardant blown out by the air pressure from the room. The once black RABI carapace was now dirty white with rock mud and Zardooz was able to watch it in real time as he guided it up the corridor to the starting point for the big bore to the surface node. He double checked the intended path and set the RABI on its way, once again rock dust spewing out behind into the corridor, soon obscuring vision and coating everything with dust. The dust was going to be one of his major problems.
While the RABI chewed and burrowed, Zardooz readied a repair bot with the new module for the surface node. He was going to lose some more atmosphere as he let the repair bot into the connecting corridor to the tunnel room, but only what was in the corridor itself. He could spare that.
He opened the tunnel room door and saw the residual mud and dust fly into the tunnel as the air whooshed out from the corridor to room to tunnel. At least the repair bot would have a fairly clean path ahead. The bot trundled into the room and Zardooz shut the door behind it. He did not replenish the air in the corridor as there was no need for it. He could see the dimage of the bot and guided it to the tunnel. Its rudimentary artificial intelligence told it there was a solid wall ahead so it came to a stop even though nothing barred its way. Unlike the RABI, this one was easier to fool as Zardooz took the structural plans and added a door and the tunnel and saved the changes. The computer system updated the plans throughout the complex and the bot took off into the tunnel without further ado.
Zardooz thought back to his decadent days as a student when western television still came to the internet, to the Road Runner Coyote cartoons where the Road Runner would paint a black tunnel entrance on a cliff face and run right through it, then the coyote would run at the same tunnel and bounce off. He was certain he had just done a Road Runner trick and snickered to himself at the idea.
The RABI was now some twenty feet into the fragment mass with around two hundred feet to go. About an hour and a half of boring. Zardooz decided to catch a nap and set perimeter alarms for the RABI and a wake up for himself. He had not heard a sound from Arjmand, so he laid back his chair, stretched out and instantly dozed off.
A violent jolt spoiled his peaceful nap which he saw had been for fifteen minutes. He looked at the heads up panel and saw no warnings. What in the blazes had bounced the fragment? Had it collided with another piece of Earth?
Something was very different however. What was it? Of course! He suddenly realized that he was not suffering vertigo and that down was almost down. There was still some slight tumble but the worst effect was gone.
Well, down was not really down. The wall was down. The floor was the wall, but who cared? He reasoned that another fragment must have clipped this one and stopped the tumbling. He looked at the RABI progress and saw a glitch in the path from when the jolt had occurred. It had taken a few seconds for the RABI to reprogram from its inertial guidance and it had gone into a loop of sorts for four feet then corrected.
Problem was that the RABI couldn’t go around a corner in solid rock and that was just what it was trying to do. It did have limited reverse capability so Zardooz reset the program to back out. It slowly withdrew back into the tunnel and stopped, ready to line up again. Zardooz gave it a start command on the original track and off it went, leaving a large, side cavity along the tunnel where it had digressed from the set path.
He sat back once again, his mind churning over the possibilities that had caused the jolt, but relaxed in the return to normality, the nausea from the constant tumbling virtually gone. He was even more determined to get the node working to see what was going on out there.
The RABI bored on.
Back aboard the transport Felicity and Shaw had joined the council group to watch the charges being detonated. Fuller had decided that there was enough rock rubble mass in front of the charge for a definitive recoil effect. The blast was quite spectacular viewed through a remote camera as a silent, pyrotechnic display. The loose rock mass simply vanished in a cloud of dust that dispersed in the conical shape of the directed blast forces.
However the immediate, and welcome result was the change from tumbling to centripetal “gravity” in one direction. There was still some minute wobble to the rotation, but it was not significant, more like sitting in a rowing boat on a day of very slight swell, a pleasant almost rocking effect.
The group all looked up and around as the interminable vertigo and moving pressures on their body harness simply vanished. Fuller cautiously unstrapped and stood up in the light, rotational gravity effect, and took some small steps. “Oh, this feels good to be walking normally again! Come on guys, get up and walk a bit.”
They all unbuckled and stood. Felicity swayed a little unsteadily at first, still recovering from her ordeal at the end of the tether, and they milled around, smiling, hugging and remarking on how good it all felt. Shaw was next to Felicity like a magnet and held her when she swayed. She looked at him and gave the sweetest smile he had ever experienced. Forgetting the others about him, he whispered in her ear, “I love you!” She relaxed in his arms and just purred , “Mmmm.”
“May I have the next dance?” Fuller again spoiled their reverie.
Shaw turned to look at Fuller with a huge face splitting grin he just could not suppress. “Get in line Buster!”
“Seriously, Gerald, Felicity. I think we need to have a quiet chat somewhere.”
“I know what you are....” blustered Shaw.
“Not here Gerald.” calmly interrupted Fuller. “Later, in the flight cabin. Just the three of us.”
CHAPTER 53
Behind the Moon
“Here they come!” Screamed Sheila in tense excitement. The X6 was a rapidly growing point of light as it approached at two hundred kph relative velocity. Slow by space standards but fast enough to become a statistic if you happened to stand in front of it.
Shelia could make out detail now and saw that the entrance hatch was open. The orientation looked about right according to Bob Evans’ instructions. She could just see the two men hanging in the doorway as the vessel rushed in.
It was exactly opposite her position now at the ejection point and she saw the pair launch themselves from the opening. They were travelling away from the ship but still away from Sheila’s location, although at much reduced velocity. She watched in fascination as the slow motion drama played out. Her heart was in her mouth as Martin and Corcoran drifted away. Were they going to hit the target nets?
Her youniform alarm trilled and she launched off with the other three, all releasing mono filament tether lines. The danger of collision had passed and it was time to go catch their mates. As the four flew towards the nets, she saw one of the tiny figures tumble into the edge of the net and roll towards the center. The other missed entirely and flew on into space. She called “Contingency!” and drifted to her nearest companion. He released his reaction mass pack to her then braked his motion and started reeling himself back to the transport on the cable.
Sheila strapped the extra pack on her chest, oriented towards the dwindling speck and put the pedal to the metal. She concentrated on the speck of light that was her target and a warm, live human being in trouble. Gradually she drew up on the speck and could soon discern limbs and details.
With a shocking squawk her youniform alarm warned that the end of the mono filament was seconds away. In a snap decision she hit the release to the line and left the spool adrift with its small light beacon flashing. Relieved of even this slight resistance her acceleration picked up and she soon reached the inert figure.
“Hey there big boy! Who have I got here?” The short range youniform communication jolted the figure into action and it raised its head to reveal Martin’s weary face. He cracked a smile for her and raised a hand in welcome. She drifted up to him and matched velocity, attaching her harness to him. She used her orientation jets to turn around so she faced back to the shuttle and re-activated her jets to decelerate them and start them back. But she hadn’t been watching her reaction mass level and the youniform screamed another warning at her.
She checked all levels and computations for return to the shuttle. The extra reaction mass pack would just make it for one person, but not for the two of them. She would have to hope that her team would see her predicament and come out and meet her with another pack. She was out of youniform comms range to tell them.
Sheila released her expended pack and Martin’s to reduce mass. There was nothing else expendable. She activated the jets to gain optimum effect. The deceleration phase would use around eighty percent of the mass, leaving only twenty percent to drive them back, but that was too slow to avoid Martin running out of recyclable air, even with his youniform working at full capacity. She would cross that bridge when she got to it.
They were going to drift for some hours based on the reaction mass calculations. Sheila brought up a schematic that showed she could reach the drifting tether line spool with a quarter of one percent mass left. “Hell, that’s enough margin for error!” She thought to herself. Meanwhile she was cuddled up with Martin in the weightless version of the missionary position. This was getting interesting.
“Martin? Are you with me?”
“Y-yes.” He replied weakly.
“Are you hurt?”
“No, not at all. Just exhausted. Haven’t slept in like sixty hours. Can’t stay awake, so tired.”
“We have a few hours of travelling to do before we are back at the shuttle. Can you hang in there?”
“Don’t know. My youniform says my air supply is reaching critical contamination. Think that’s why I am so sleepy too... Hey, thanks for rescuing me. You’re taking a big risk for a cook’s assistant.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Seen you on the City. Asked around.”
“So how about cook’s assistant Ph.D?”
“Yeah, that too. But you’re much cuter as a cook’s assistant. Not so scary.”
Sheila laughed. “So what are we going to do to keep you breathing?”
“Well, whatever you think of, do it soon?”
“Yah. Here we go. Behave yourself!”
Sheila initiated a youniform suit meld to share her atmosphere with Martin. It would get them back to the shuttle with molecules to spare, but she was getting used to cutting it fine.
The suits reflowed around the pair, taking the thin barrier between their skins away and providing fully oxygenated air for Martin’s oxygen starved body. He gradually became warmer and more coherent while Sheila enjoyed the feeling of his hairy chest stimulating her nipples of her neatly endowed breasts. She felt his hands slide down to her buttocks but didn’t stop him, his unavoidable erection probing directly at her now stimulated vulva that was flowing with anticipatory juices.
Martin’s eyes popped fully open and he tried to pull away from her, gasping, “I’m sorry! Can’t help it! I.. I...”
“Martin, don’t worry. I’m a big girl now. Let this happen. I want it. We have time.”
Sheila felt him relax and then an urgent pressure as he slid inside her. They started gently pumping away together...
“Ahh!”
“Ooh!”
The screams meshed into a general uproar across the network as the few remaining glands in the immortal brains reacted to Martin and Sheila’s explosive orgasms, probably the most viewed and voyeured copulation in the history of the universe.
Hard on the heels of Felicity and Shaw’s performance, this total release and abandon by Martin and Sheila, both so much more experienced than the raw, virgin pair, some of the brains that still had memory of corporeal bodies, genitalia and the associated sensations, couldn’t take it any more. They went into sensory overload and Nickle’s emergency board lit up amber spotted with a few red dots. The amber ones were viewers in severe distress requiring Nickle’s intervention. The red ones, never before seen in six World Game series, were brains that had suffered aneurysm and were either dead or reduced to unintelligent mush. Not so immortal.
“Nickle! Nickle! Where are you?” Screamed out Howley losing his cool.
“Nickle? We need you!” Peepers monotone pretending calm did nothing either.
“NICKLE!!!” Shrieked Charonelle. “WHERE THE **** ARE YOU?”
“Oh look! I got blipped... NICKLE!!!”
Nickle was back in the rest room having released the vice that clamped his genitals in a state of extreme need. He muttered to himself, disgruntled at his lot and isolation. “Damned old fart brains, getting off on watching this shit. I gotta get back in the real life scene and find me a woman to do it with again. Screw being a brain or immortal. One good orgasm with your woman beats the crap out of this bullshit.”
Nickle opened the control room door and was assaulted by the control board that for centuries had been pure green, and was now liberally scattered with amber and a few points of vivid red. “Crap!”
He rushed to the board not knowing where to begin, waving his arms about and repeating “Oh shit!” to himself, over and over. He looked up at the observation screen and saw that Sheila and Martin were now just resting, holding each other and dozing in post coital bliss. Looking back to the control board the amber lights gradually started reverting to green again, the metamorphosis accelerating at a rapid rate until there were a few manageable dots left and the red ones. “Hmm. Red ones.” He said to himself holding his chin. He quickly selected the few remaining amber dots and ordered an infusion of adrenalin for all of them. They soon winked out to green.
“The red ones...shit!”
“Nickle?” It was Peepers on the private channel.
“Yah Peeps?”
“What’s going on?”
“I got red ones Peeps. Never had red ones before. What can I do Peeps?” Nickle was almost crying in despair.
“Don’t worry Nickle,” assured Peepers, “They went out in ecstasy and exchanged immortality for sublime pleasure. The bottom line is Nickle, they are gone and there is nothing any brain can do for them. I suggest you send in the disposal unit and recycle the tissues.”
“But them’s is still living brains Peepers. Ah cain’t trash them man!”
“Nickle, an egg is a living thing but you boil it and in your case, eat it. These brains that remain have the personality of an egg. The sentience is gone. I repeat, recycle them.”
“Aw that’s gross Peepers, calling them eggs.”
“Nickle! Just do it!” Peepers switched the comms back to the network. “Well people! How about that! Two of our acts have turned in unparalleled copulatory performances, set the audience afire and yet even if the basics were the same their execution showed imagination and originality. I truly thought Shaw and Hannaford had this wrapped up, but it seems this newcomer, hee hee, get that... new comer... Sheila has come out of left field and put some heavy competition back in the game.”
Charonelle interrupted, “Hold on there Peepers, you’re being a bit chauvinistic isolating the woman here. Sheila certainly played her part and performed well - I know I got quite a thrill from her climax, but Martin had something to do with it all and we have to consider them as a team.”
“True Charonelle, but I’m going by the results on Nickle’s board and all the brain overloads occurred in male brains. I noticed one or two mild reactions in female brains that recovered very quickly.”
“But..”
“Look Charonelle, that is not the point here! My job is to ensure the best possible entertainment for our audience and that is what this pair has provided. What I want to talk about is the fact that this happened twice in close succession and each time immediately following a near death experience for one or both of the performers. Howley, what do you see in this?”
“Huh? Huh? Wow! I’m still coming down from the high. Gads, if I still had a body I’d be taking Sheila home with me... OK, seriously? I think that the survival drive is so strong in this group and that they know there is nothing to go back to, well the relief of the spontaneous sex gives them the hope that their procreation will advance their group survival. Honestly, I do like humor in the acts, being a professional comedy-brain, but these guys have it all and I have no doubt we are going to enjoy many more hide the sausage acts before this game is over.”
There was an immediate uproar on the net as Howley finished. Peepers was yelling at Howley that he couldn’t say such rude things in public and Howley flashed back an image of eyes rolling up in distain. The roar settled into an intergalactic chant of “We want more! We want more!...”
“See!” was Howley’s final word.