SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

‘Of course, I can do it.’ Vazoya’s normal arrogance seemed forced now.

‘The power’s out in that ’scraper so it should be empty, but we might get company when folks see the shuttle docking. Most likely the elevators will be down so they won’t reach us too quickly.

‘There’s one exhibit in particular that Mr Glass wants. It’s called the Seagull , and it’s the centrepiece of Zhu’s collection. I don’t know what it is, but Mr Glass said we’ll know it when we see it. It’s vacuum-safe, so we can just open the hangar doors and push it out, then the Names can pick it up. We get in and out as quick as we can. I don’t want any encounters with the inhabitants.’ He didn’t want the crew to see them: it would make them real, make it harder to leave them to die. He didn’t want to see them himself, for the same reason.

‘Understood,’ said Keldra from the back of the room. Olzan shot her a look. No one had asked her.

The city spun above Olzan’s head, the shadows of the starscrapers processing like raking fingers across the grey surface. He could feel the gravity change as Vazoya teased the shuttle into a powered orbit that matched the city’s spin. There was a shift in perception, and then he was sitting in a steady one gravity, with the city stationary above him, both of them in the middle of a rotating sphere of stars. Vazoya was gently manoeuvring the shuttle up , towards the hanging mass of Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper.

Olzan was crammed next to Keldra in the shuttle’s tiny cargo section, both of them dressed in stuffy vacuum suits. If she had such an interest in Planetary Age artefacts, Olzan had decided, then they might as well put that to use. Brenn and Tarraso were still on board the Thousand Names, keeping it in a wide orbit of the city, ready to pick up the artefact and then make a rapid escape once the shuttle was back on board.

Vazoya moved the shuttle up to the side of the starscraper. Olzan could see the blue-white reflections of their thruster flames in the windows. One wide gap between the windows resolved into the door to the hangar housing Anastasia Zhu’s collection.

Vazoya stabilized the shuttle next to the small personnel airlock at the edge of the hangar door. A magnetic grapnel line shot across the gap and latched onto the starscraper’s metal wall, and then the shuttle’s hatch swung open. The external airlock wasn’t built to take this type of shuttle, and hovering too close to the wall would be dangerous. They would have to cross the gap in vacuum suits.

Keldra’s face was pale behind her visor. She hadn’t said much on the shuttle flight, despite her constant talk of the Earth artefact while they were still on the Names . It was vertigo, Olzan realized with amusement. With the rotational pseudogravity in place, they were suspended over an infinite drop filled with shooting stars. Keldra had been a habitat engineer, working in her city’s spine, well away from the outer skin. For someone not used to these manoeuvres the experience could be terrifying.

Olzan wasn’t in much of a mood to spare Keldra’s feelings. ‘All right, Engineer, get that door open. Your precious artefact’s in there.’ Keldra hesitated. For a moment Olzan thought she wasn’t going to move. ‘Go on. We’ll retrieve you if you fall.’

‘Might not be worth the fuel,’ came Vazoya’s voice from the cockpit.

Keldra scowled, stood up, and clipped her suit to the wobbling grapnel line. She swung out into the gap and climbed hand-over-hand to the personnel airlock, moving confidently now that she had started. She reached the ledge beneath the airlock door and began fumbling with the door control.

‘It’s not going to open,’ she said after a minute.

‘What’s the matter with it?’ Olzan asked.

‘The lock’s physically jammed. We might be able to open it from the inside.’

‘We can blast it,’ Vazoya said. ‘Get the charges. The decompression might even push the thing out for us; problem solved.’

‘No!’ Keldra snapped. ‘It could be damaged.’

‘Then we can give Mr Glass the damn pieces and tell him that’s how we found it. Olzan, let’s get the hell out of here.’

‘Mr Glass won’t be pleased,’ Olzan said. The approach of the Worldbreaker was a nagging presence in the back of his mind, but every time he thought about cutting corners or doing a less than perfect job, he thought back to Emily’s last message. Do a good job here and he could marry her, get sterility reversal treatment, live like a true-born…‘Vaz, find another airlock. We’ll work our way round the inside. Keldra, get back here.’

They found another airlock a few levels up. Once again Vazoya brought them alongside and fired the grapnel, and this time Keldra climbed across without hesitation. Olzan watched her tinker with the lock for a moment and then the outer door hinged open.

‘Vaz, hold the shuttle here,’ Olzan said as he clipped himself to the line. ‘We might need to come back out this way. I’ll let you know when we reach the hangar.’

‘Take your time. If you’re not back, it’s my ship.’

‘We’ll be back.’

‘I’m serious, Olzan. I’m not waiting for the Worldbreaker to—’

‘Neither am I. We’ll be back.’

Olzan strapped the explosive charges to his suit’s backpack and then pulled himself along the grapnel line, carefully avoiding looking down. Keldra had already dealt with what little was left of the security system, and she cycled them through using the airlock’s emergency power.

The interior of the starscraper was dark, lit only by sporadic emergency lighting and the bobbing circles cast by their helmet lamps. A sound of dripping water echoed to them from somewhere deeper in the maze of metal corridors. Olzan called up a floor plan from his implant and laid it over his vision. The elevators wouldn’t be working, but there should be stairs in the central atrium. With the city’s datanet offline the implant couldn’t plot a route for him, but it wasn’t hard to see which way to go.

The atrium was a towering void that ran the entire height of the starscraper. There were arcs of piping hanging in the space, suspended by invisible cables. It took Olzan a moment to realize he’d seen something similar in the Glass family starscraper back in Santesteban, but that one had been filled with water. It was a water-sculpture: if the pumps had still been powered, a thin stream of water would have poured down the atrium, twisting towards one wall due to the Coriolis effect, and redirected by the arcs of piping into graceful curves and helices. He looked down over the railing and could see his helmet lamp’s beam reflecting off a murky surface. It looked as though the water had kept flowing for a while after the pumps had failed.

There was what looked like a stairwell on the far side of the atrium. Olzan led Keldra around the walkway towards it. Halfway to the staircase, Keldra suddenly stopped. ‘We’ve got company,’ she hissed.

Olzan followed her finger. High above the spouts of the empty water-sculpture was another cluster of bobbing lights.

Olzan did a frantic mental calculation. They could go back, but that would mean going back to Mr Glass empty-handed. ‘It’ll take them a while to go down those stairs. They don’t know where we’re going. We can lose them.’

Keldra didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t say anything.

‘Keep your head down,’ he said. It was still possible the others hadn’t spotted them. He dimmed his helmet lamp, angled it at the floor, and jogged for the stairs.

He counted the loops of the spiral staircase until they were on the correct level, then found the radial corridor that would lead to the hangar. He risked a glance upwards. The others were still above them, their lamp-beams bobbing around agitatedly. Olzan couldn’t tell what they were doing.