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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 7.

Chapter Four

Ready?" Ridge said. He was the first out, followed by Tomson. Ridge and Tomson stepped gingerly about on the clanging, vibrating, gridded steel platform outside. They kept their guns aimed straight ahead and looked carefully about. Ridge examined the spattering of bloody hand prints on the portal.

Tomson said grimly: "We were not dreaming, Ridge."

"No, we weren't. I wish we were." Ridge's gaze followed the trail of fresh blood away from the portal, over the railing, down into the blackness below.

Tomson stepped up to the steel railing and touched the thick blood there with one fingertip. "No doubt about it. That is blood. What do you suppose that was all about?"

"I cannot imagine," Ridge said.

Brenna stepped up behind Ridge, briefly putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Her touch went through him like the warmth of a heat lamp. "Probably some poor soul lost his mind," she said. "The ship's constabulary had to take him away, and the Captain will give us a talk about it later."

"Yes yes yes," came a murmur of assent. The group were digesting and denying, processing and getting on with things, as humans wanted to do. Ridge felt the urge to put it behind him also. He said: "Let's lock down the workpod completely." It was SOP anyway, some esoteric Corporate regulation probably having to do with insurance rules.

"Let's get our jobs done and get the hell back here where it's safe and sane," Lantz said as she buckled up her web gear. "Yes yes yes," came the chorus, and the others secured their gear. Each of the eight technicians wore a light-weight rig similar to hers, olive drab in color, held together with adjustable straps and consisting of cylinders and pouches sitting snugly against the chest and back.

Under Tomson's direction, Yu and Mahaffey used hand-held wireless devices to make the twin doors slide shut. They locked the portal tightly, and Ridge could see nobody smaller than a crazed hippo could force his way through there. At least their home was safe, although now they had no way back in. The only way to re-enter WorkPod01 would be when they returned and telephoned Captain Venable to have him transmit the entry codes.

"We're ready to rock and roll," Tomson said. "Are we going to open the workstation down under?" He meant the lower floor of WorkPod01, which contained practically an entire factory, tool making facility, whatever one could think of. Normally, it was an island brightly lit from inside, with its doors open and a ramp laid down to truck in heavy parts, motors, assemblies, special tools, even portable generators and hoses.

"No, let's hold off," Ridge said. "Let's go out on Ring 61 and assess what we have going on. Then I'll decide whether we come back here for tools, or bring the shop out there with us." Implicit in his thinking was the fact that it took a lot of work, a lot of energy, and a lot of time to move a fifty ton room made of solid steel and containing all that equipment. He'd need a special auth from Venable plus possibly assistance from one or two other workpods. It was tricky running the shop out there, separating it from under WorkPod01 and then trucking it out like a gondola at a ski lift. It wasn't something to do unless one had to.

With that decided, for the first time Ridge was able to focus on the platform and the guts of the huge ship beyond. The steel grid platform, big enough to park a truck on and surrounded by safety railings, seemed jammed among the massive girders making up the ship's inward skeleton. The men and women in their suits and helmets, with miners' lamps atop their visors, stood in puddles of light, while all around them loomed darkness. The sun itself was too far away now to shed anywhere near the bright heat it did on Earth or the Moon. The ship's nuclear reactors were on minimum output, and the ion drives did not ordinarily power internal systems.

Ridge counted heads. "Everyone ready?"

Single-file, looking like old-fashioned miners going down into the bowels of the Earth, the eight technicians with Ridge in the lead started on their journey. Their voices echoed hollowly in the nocturnal void that stretched in all directions, offset only by the faint glow of daylight from that distant little star, that pinprick known as the sun. Huge girders, much lighter than their massive shapes suggested, curved through the darkness. Their crisscross members merged and blended with other gloomy shapes, like large round containers and tanks, work platforms, ring shafts, and other features. That was just the inner cylinder, with zero G at its central axis. The precious cargo was stashed in blisters, pods, and hangars in the inner skin of the ship. Deserted stretches of walkways represented the loading and unloading bays for when she was to dock in orbit of Triton.

As they carefully made their way along catwalks high in the air, Ridge tried to call Venable again, this time on his collar com. No reply. Ridge tried calling the other numbers he knew, including the Provost Marshal, the Chief Engineering Officer, and more, but the communications grid appeared to be dead. Ridge kept getting a prickling feeling up and down his spine that they were being watched.

The others were voicing questions of their own. Mahaffey was never one to be put off. "Hey, this place looks like it took a direct hit from an atomic bomb."

Yu said: "Come on, it's not quite that bad."

"It sure is dark and spooky," Lantz said. Her normally pale, freckled features looked ashen.

Ridge walked ahead, with Tomson bringing up the rear. Ridge told them: "Keep your eyes on the path ahead and your hands on the railings at all times." He took a deep breath. "If you feel the need for oxygen, pull out your mouthpiece. Tomson tested all the bottles and gear, so we should be in good shape."

Tomson, in the rear, said dryly: "If you trust that I'm not ready to be yanked off the window by any guys in white coats."

"Those weren't guys in white coats," Jerez said. When she was nervous, her Universal Anglo slipped deeper into a classic Castilian Spanish complete with lisped letter 's.' Yu thought it was cute and told her so, for which he got a tongue-lashing in Tagalog. Several persons laughed.

"Eyes on the path," Ridge reminded them. He was troubled, though. Nothing was as he remembered it. He did not remember the vastness and cavernous nature of the ship's interior, at least not around Ring 61, which he had always assumed to be a Ring of many small compartments. Looking around in the dim light, he began to think that the devastation here was much worse than anything he had seen in other decks they'd worked. He tried to picture the other decks, but couldn't put a number to any one. It scared him a bit that his memory was so vague in places. He wondered if he were going insane. At first it was just a nagging thought. He kept seeing Brenna's alluring look over her shoulder as she pranced away in her turban and robe a while ago. Did she do that on purpose? Was it just how she was? How could a seductress have slipped through the fine toothed comb of Corporate industrial psychologists? Or was it all in his imagination, and was he having problems with Dorothy without knowing it? Then he got a real scare. He couldn't remember the names of his children. This made him tremble with fear. He had chills going up and down his arms and back.

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