16.
Ridge walked out of the Hotel Largo and into the rain. The streets glistened with water and neon. Ridge's thoughts were saturated with water, which was the universal medium on Nebula Express as it had been on Earth.
The brain in Ridge that thought these things was mostly water, as was the man who walked down the street carrying that brain. Water coursed through the ship the way blood ran through the human body, and blood after all was nothing more than oxygen-red water with nutrients and biochemical nanomachines. Likewise, water poured from falls high up in the oxygen-rusty hull of the ship. Water ran through the tubes and pipettes keeping Venable alive, which in turn provided some feeble remaining guidance to the ship's systems. The mudmen inhabited a world of slag and rust soaked and heavy with water. The incubators in WorkPod01 (or WorkPodNN or whatever the iteration of the moment called itself) filled with water, which nurtured a fetus in its wet embrace, and as the temp-fetus grew, it absorbed its amniotic fluid and emerged dry and whole as a human being meant to live no more than one very long day. That human being carried in it all the water and nutrients it would need on its brief mission to add yet one more work-shift to the million work-shifts that would be needed to restore this ark that carried the entire human race in search of a new planetary water-world.
Ridge entered the police station and started rummaging in cabinets and drawers. Lights flicked on as he entered one room after another, and flickered out as he left. He heard the inrush of breathable air before him, and its outrush behind him as the ship sucked the air back into its main atmosphere.
Ridge found what he needed. In a locker he found a collection of matte black weapons and olive-drab military style nylon-weave web gear: belts, bandoliers, pouches, holsters. The equipment still smelled of the factory, preserved in generous amounts of petroleum-based Cosmolene-type preservative grease. He crisscrossed bandoliers of ammunition over his shoulders. He hung a heavy handgun in a holster under each arm. He picked up an assault needler that could fire a thousand tiny rounds of sparking wire that would enter a mudman body and twirl about with deadly randomness before losing momentum. He also slung a grenade launcher over his shoulder, and around his neck hung a fat bandolier with eight rocket-propelled miniature grenades the size and shape of typical dinner-table pepper shakers.
On his way back to the hotel, he had his hands in his pockets. His fingers encountered the small paper packet, and he threw it impulsively into the street. He glanced back and saw it soaking up water and ruining the pills inside that offered a Venable-style solution. Ridge marched all the more stubbornly, rejecting any solution that negated who he and she were...not he and she as generic experiments that could be rebirthed at will without regard for their humanity, but unique, one-time and never-again human beings like any others who had lived from generation to generation during the Holocene Era of Old Earth-the time between the Ice Ages and the departure of mankind to the stars.
As he entered the quiet, lovely atmosphere of the hotel, he held the assault rifle cautiously before him. He stared around corners and looked left and right down hallways before proceeding to the next room or the next level. He took the stairs rather than let himself be trapped in the elevator. If ever Venable needed to do away with him, it was now.
He walked through the steaming swim-room and noted that Lantz's body was no longer in the bottom of the pool. The cleaners must have seen to that during Largo's sleep cycle, when even he and Brenna had dozed. After all, in the final hours of a temp's day, the nutrients started wearing down and temps began to yawn and thinking about lying down to sleep. Temps began to dream about dreaming.
He found Brenna on the bed where he'd left her. She had turned onto her other side. A large stain of yellowish plasma water, inset with a thin puddle of blood, stained the sheet and the pillow on the side where she had been facing when he left. Now she faced the other way. He leaned lovingly over her and used the side of his sleeve to wipe flecks of blood from her lips and chin. "Brenna!"
She moaned in her sleep. Her eyes fluttered partially open. "So tired."
"I know, Brenna. We're going to take a little trip. Come along." He tried to help her up, but she flopped listlessly. He slung the needler over his shoulder so it dangled down his back. He picked her up and carried her on his arms. Her head cradled against his chest, and he kissed her rich umber hair. Her legs dangled to his left, and one arm hung straight down. He was too heavily burdened with the guns and ammo and Brenna to be able to shift her arm up onto her sleeping form.
He carried her down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the street. The load was heavy, and he walked to one of the small cars by the curb. He slung Brenna over one shoulder and tried to pull the door open. It appeared to be locked. He kicked at the passenger side window, but it wouldn't break. Keeping Brenna over his shoulder, he recovered the assault gun from his back in a twirling motion that brought its barrel up, he stepped back and aimed from an angle to deflect the resulting energy. He fired several bursts. The window exploded in myriad tiny glass crumbles that fanned over the sidewalk in one direction and blew into the car in the other, which couldn't be helped. The glass was designed to shatter without being sharp. He opened the door and gently placed Brenna on the bed of torn upholstery and harmlessly piled glass crumbles. Then he got into the passenger side. There was no key, so he hotwired the electric connections underneath. It was just like driving any car on Old Earth, and he had memories of how to do that. He did a U-turn and drove down the street in a spray of rain. A large fishtail of water cut the moist air behind him as he raced along.
At the train station, he drove directly onto the sidewalk and braked with squealing tires directly before the steps. Wielding his gun and watching on all sides for cleaners, he walked around to the passenger side. He saw no evidence of mudmen or any other life form, but he wanted to take no chances. Carefully, gently, he lifted Brenna from the car. She moaned softly and put her arms around his shoulders. "It's going to be okay," he said, "we are halfway there." In response, she lost consciousness again. Her loose arm dangled once again, while the other was crushed against his stomach. He carried her through the echoing main hall and around to the elevator lobby in back, where he had arrived from WorkPod01.
He gently lowered Brenna onto the floor of the still-open pod in which he had arrived. He unloaded his heavy arsenal onto the floor around her. Keeping one handgun in his hand in case of ambush, he carefully backed into the pod. The rudimentary controls were simple, but he used voice commands. "Close," he said, and the door slid quietly shut.
"WorkPOd01," he said while trying to make her comfortable. He sat down on the rolled-up bandoliers and cradled her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. "Return," he said because the first command had not worked. He shouted: "Venable! I am the only hope for this ship!"
At that, the pod swept into motion, and for a second Ridge thought the Captain meant to dash him to his death. The Captain said nothing. The pod flew through hidden pneumatic shafts in the walls of the bow section and in the hull itself, and then wrenched to an over-torqued stop that pressed Ridge against the wall. He felt his body compress in multiple G-forces and held on to the bench behind him with both hands. Brenna's unconscious weight pressed against him and threatened to suffocate him, but the pod stopped and the deceleration G-forces ended as abruptly as they'd begun.
The door opened without a word from either Ridge or Venable, and Ridge stepped out into WorkPod01. Another team must have just left, because the incubators were newly horizontal and just half-way full of water. Ridge blocked the transit-pod door with his body and with the assault rifle as he lifted Brenna out. With Brenna slung over his shoulder, he pulled his weapons and ammo out. The door slid shut, sealing the transit pod.
Ridge carried Brenna to the incubator whose lid-markings bore the same designation as her jumpsuit collar. He was sure she had been born in this incubator. Ridge pulled at the lid but it wouldn't open. "Venable," he said in a warning voice.
No answer. He laid Brenna on the floor, picked up his assault rifle, and tapped repeatedly, sharply, against the side of the lid. Sweat poured down his face, and his stomach was in knots. "Venable, help me!" He bit his lip with concentration as he tapped again and again. Finally the seal popped with a sigh of wet air, and the lid unlocked. He raised it up. Stripping Brenna naked, he placed her gently in the still rushing, foaming fluid. He gave her one last hug, one last kiss, and she barely seemed to know who he was. He slammed the lid down and saw the seal reform. He looked for a second or two at her sleeping features as she sank into the engulfing waters. More water rushed in over her face, and bubbles floated across her features. She opened her eyes and mouth once-just for a second-in a horrified moment of realization that she was drowning-before she relaxed and sank down into the oxygen-rich liquid. Ridge gasped at his own recklessness. This immersion would either kill her, or save her life. There had been no alternative.
Angrily, he stormed to the wall where he knew the opening into the CP was. "Venable!" He banged on the wall. "Let me in!"
Silence.
Ridge picked up the grenade launcher. "Venable, I'm going to count to three. One way or another, I'm coming in there. I don't really care what happens to you, which is fine because you do not care what happens to me or her."
"You must not do this," came the feeble voice.
"There is no choice and no time." He stepped back as far as he could and released a round. The gun barked in his hand. The air between gun and wall flared in white light. The door blew out in a mass of twisted metal and plastics. All around the opening, tortured and damaged controls sparked. Of the door itself, little more remained than some fine black mesh that hung down as acrid smoke drifted away from the impact and was sucked up by air-conditioning vents.
"Please stop," Venable said.
Ridge climbed into the cramped little CP. As he did so, he laid the launcher down on the doorframe to make sure the ship could not somehow close him in.
"Ridge!" the face of Venable cried out from its tray of fluids. "Please, let's figure this out."
"Right," Ridge said. "Let's do it my way, shall we? We've been doing it your way." He reached behind the tray and yanked on the tubing there. Water splashed all around. Quickly, Ridge used his fingers to sort through the surprisingly flimsy plastic hoses bundled in padded harness-clips. The face in the tray drifted from side to side on wildly patterned ripples with an anguished impression. Ridge figured out which of the nutrient water hoses went to which incubator. Rummaging in drawers of spare parts that looked like the plastics kits at some neighborhood department store, particularly in the garden department, the section he remembered in which one found all the parts for a lawn sprinkler system. In hasty, bitter triumph, he held up a Y-joint with one hand and a can of purplish join-sealer with the other. He had to lean down with his teeth and rip the plastic of the hose going to Brenna's incubator. When that didn't work, he sawed frantically with a little file. The tray with Venable's face and organs in it shifted ever closer to the edge and looked ready to fall off. Venable's mouth moved in panicked gasps for oxygen or attempts to tell Ridge something, and his eyes were large, and finally his eyes started looking glazed and the mouth stopped moving. Ridge saw the edge of a wooden knife handle protruding from the bric-a-brac on the counter under the tray. In a single motion of his arm, he swept the tray away. The tray sailed through the air, twirling, losing its fluids. The tray bounced off wireframe shelving, twirled some more, and hit the wall. The tray bounced off. There was a large shiny wet spot on the wall, and a mass of grayish tissue and purple matter like kidneys dripping down the walls. Rolled up in a mass where it had slid down to come to rest in a dusty, dirty box full of screws and bits of wire and half-empty tubes of this and that was Venable's face, with one blank eyeball staring away at the wall.
Ridge used the newly found knife to sever hoses and hook up new connections. It was a desperate gamble, more likely to fail than succeed, but it was the only hope. Ridge could only pray now that the ship still had enough fuzzy logic or meme programming or fuzzy logic problem solving abilities to make the necessary adjustments after reading the new situation.
Multiple hoses, albeit smaller ones, had fed into Venable's tray and into canisters under the table where his nutrients had been mixed. Ridge disconnected that system and yoked the canisters into the system feeding Brenna's and one other receptacle. When it was all done, when the joints were sealed and the system was bubbling happily and there was nothing else he could think to do, Ridge wiped his hands on a rag and muttered to the ship in general and to Brenna in particular: "Now we'll see if we wake up at all, and if we remember who we were, or if we go to sleep and never wake up and eventually this whole rusting hulk goes sailing, baseball-heads and all, into some blazing sun somewhere that will never even notice that the entire human race just did its final fire dance."
So saying, Ridge went back outside to check briefly on Brenna. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully-or was she dead?-in her incubator awaiting the time a hundred or a thousand years from now when the ship went into orbit around a New Earth, and Largo woke up to a new dawn. Ridge went to his own incubator. Struggling for a few minutes, he managed to raise the lid. He took off his clothing and climbed inside. Water splashed around his naked body parts as he turned over onto his back. He lowered the lid down on himself and went to sleep amid the sweet soft white light and churning air bubbles that saturated the faintly pink broth in which he was about to steep himself.
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