Tumbler Page 15

  Chapter 20

  The two of them landed at the docking bay and cycled in, not bothering to tether the runabouts or take off their suits. The crowd was more hectic as people swarmed to get to their homes, protect loved ones, get to safety. People were screaming and wailing, shouting orders at each other, as small fights broke out. Libby watched as one person fell in the middle of the pandemonium, and was nearly trampled. She bounced over to the fallen pedestrian, using her extra mass from the environment suit to get people out of the way. She picked up the fat man who'd fallen, dazed and bloody, and fought her way out of the wash of people. She stood between the large man and the onrushing crowd, acting as a buffer while pulling him slowly out of the stream of traffic. Libby dropped the man off at a station where a city worker was unloading huge crates of personal respiration kits, bottles of compressed air attached to face masks. The city worker gave supplies away frantically as people grabbed for the air. One security officer stood next to him, not caring about how many people took, but making sure there was no one overrunning the stand.

  Libby looked down at the large man and asked, "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

  He smiled up at her, blood running down his forehead, "Thank you, miss. You are too kind. I'm quite certain that mob would have been the end of me, had you not shown up." A strange look passed over his face, as they recognized each other. He let out a small shriek like a frightened child.

  Libby barked out a short laugh, as the man recoiled, "Sam! Sam with the company! You're the bastard who took all my money!"

  He brought up his hands in defense, "I'm sorry, it wasn't personal. I didn't know who you were. I was just trying to -"

  “A poor, innocent kid, just off the flight from Earth, and you took every penny I had. You left me to die here, do you realize that? You left me to die.”

  He opened and closed his mouth like a fish drowning on air. When he finally found the words she waved him off, "Forget it. You're just - just forget it. I've got bigger problems." Libby started to walk away, then turned back and said, "Just remember, I saved your life. And that's after you took my life savings. So what does that make me? And what does that make you?" He opened his mouth to respond, but she was already gone.

  Libby got back into the fray, pushing through the running, screaming throng. She climbed onto some shoulders, dove in between lines, and zig-zagged her way to the Hail Mary, where everyone seemed to be gathering. Inside, the place was packed, with people using the tables as makeshift beds for the wounded. Libby saw Bronson standing at one of the tables. She bounced over to his side, and put one suited hand on his shoulder.

  Bronson was breathing hard, and sweat glazed his forehead. His arms were stained with blood up to the elbows. He was staring down at a man, lying on the table. Bandages covered the man's midsection and Libby could see a long, thick wire jutting from a bandage on his chest. Bronson was holding his hand, looking down at the unconscious man's face. When he felt Libby's hand on her shoulder, he said, “I know this one. Paul Fischer. He's eaten at my table, and played with my boy.” Libby didn't know what to say. She wanted to go help the others, but it seemed wrong to just walk away. After a moment, Bronson shook his head, “We've got doctors, but not nearly enough. This is just too big.” Libby put one hand on the man's leg, and found herself thinking about how many others there were. How many others would need help.

  Bronson took a deep breath, “He stayed at his post, when the trainees ran.” He turned to Libby, “Go. Go find the others. You're good at finding people. Find the others so this doesn't happen to anyone else.” Libby nodded once and bounced away.

  At the bar, there were people gathered in a large group, all centered on a holo-map of the area. Libby bounced over to them.

  She spotted Miriam in the middle of it, as people were pointing at rocks and shouting questions. Miriam was ignoring them all, frantically writing things down on the waitressing pad she had never used for food orders. Libby put a hand on her shoulder and asked, "How can I help with the hole?"

  Miriam looked up and blinked at her, "The - oh. The hole in the dome. There's people working on that now. We've lost a lot of air, and we've had some casualties, but the city's working on patching that up." She looked back up at the map, jewelry clinking softly as she regarded it, "If you want to help, you'd be more useful finding people, getting them to safety."

  Libby nodded, "Okay. Who am I finding? What do I do with them?"

  Miriam pointed the pencil at the map, showing Ceres in the center, with all the known claims listed in the space around it, "This map is the best one we've got, but it's almost completely wrong now. Whole planetoids have shifted out of place, and all the smaller rocks have been thrown into other areas. We don't know where they are now. We've got people on the radios, tracking down the current locations of rocks, but nobody's doing any serious cartography yet. We need you to find the people who haven't reported in. Find them, help them if necessary, bring them back here."

  "Cool. Gimmie some names." Libby looked around, "Where's Woody, I would have expected him to be here."

  Miriam looked at her darkly, "Woody's one of the names. First, though, you should see to the Davis'. Nobody's heard from them since the comet."

  Libbys eyes widened as she tried not to think about that. Her friends were all out there. No message from them. "I – okay."

  Miriam continued, "Mike may have been out on his rounds, with the air, water, and waste. But he may have been at home. Nobody knows."

  Libby nodded dumbly. She opened and closed her mouth a few times as she looked blankly around. Then she snapped back and said, "Okay, where would they be?"

  Miriam shook her head, "We don't know. You know where their rock was, and you know what direction the comet was pulling everything. That's as much as we've got. Other rocks may have collided with theirs, sending it in another direction. We just don't know. We're sending people out there to find them, but we don't have a system for tracking the rocks yet. Just do your best, hon."

  Libby nodded, and ran out. As she got to the runabout, she switched to the emergency station, which was calling out, "Remember, rescuers. Check in every ten to fifteen minutes with your position. If we lose you, we want to know where you were." The voice was even, but strained, as though the announcer was trying hard to remain calm.

  Libby wove through the debris of homes, asteroids, machinery, and lives. She looked over her shoulder occasionally to get a bearing by her angle from the city. Lights flickered on and off throughout the space, as power systems failed, and emergency backups on hundreds of homesteads fought to cope. She looked back and forth from the city to her presumed direction, trying to avoid larger rocks, or wave aside smaller ones. A quiet smacking noise inside her helmet made Libby shout with surprise, and she saw something sticking to her visor. As she focused on it, she could see that it was a pale shrimp, head and tail removed, little red veins pressing against her helmet. She blinked at it for a moment, nonplussed, then her mind caught up and she realized that someone's dinner had probably escaped. A refrigerator had probably dumped its contents into deep space. She wiped off the visor from the outside with her hand, and forged on, a little wet smear where the shrimp had been.

  She looked in horror as an erratic cloud of milky water floated past her, with wriggling bits coming in and out of view. As she passed by it, she saw the wriggling bits were groups of some kind of worm or eel, which must have escaped from a hydroponic farm. It was a surreal ever-shifting, desperate clutching swarm of blue, green and gray. She turned her head one way, then the other, almost hypnotized by the view of it. She turned back to face the direction of the Davis farm, just as a small, fast-moving set of surgical tools pelted down on her. A set of clamps rang off of visor, splitting a spiderweb in her view, even as a chest splitter pry bar slammed into her stomach, knocking her breath out. It was a brilliant flash of sharp pain, radiating from her stomach. She doubled over on the runabout, fighting off the clutching pain from the collision, and trying to kee
p from throwing up in her helmet. She struggled to keep the runabout headed in the right direction as her body dry heaved. Libby waved an arm up, fending off scalpels and scissors from her head. She gripped the controls of the runabout, blinking back tears of pain as she prayed the suit hadn't been punctured by the shrapnel. Her breath came in ragged gasps as she zipped through the debris, looking in all directions with a paranoid fear.

  Looking back at Blessed, she could tell that she was in the right general area for the Davis farm. However, as she had feared, there was no sign of their claim or the rock they lived on. With the wreckage flying drunkenly past her, she could barely even make out what direction the Davis claim would have gone in. She checked Blessed again, and tried to see all the wreckage around her with her peripheral vision. She carefully focused on nothing, resting her eyes on the space between objects. She relaxed her eyes, and tried to see it as an ocean wave, rather then a thousand individual objects. Slowly, she began to see the direction of the movement. All of the wreckage, splintered and spinning though it was, moved in one general direction. The way of the comet. It was like licking your thumb and then holding it up to find the wind, she could tell the way the wreckage was moving, and she headed that way.

  There was a brilliant, bright gold explosion in the distance, far off to her left as she flew through the debris. Libby's best guess was that an oxygen tank had been punctured and ignited. The bright pain of it, like a sunburn on paper-thin skin, made her turn her head away. As she shifted, though, pain lanced up her side, radiating from the impact in her stomach. For the first time, she worried that she'd seriously hurt herself, that she just might not make it. Through her spiderwebbed visor, she could see a few large rocks, and she aimed for the closest of them.

  Flying over it, she could see quickly that it wasn't the Davis farm. From the furrows in the rock, Libby could tell there was mining going on, but it was definitely not their rock. One side of the rock was cracked and exposed, showing a vein of orange-green ore. Given that the rock was being mined in a completely different location, Libby assumed the crack was caused by a recent collision. Something had cracked it nearly in half.

  Libby saw a building near one of the dig sites, and headed for it. She looked for lights, movement, any sign that people still lived there. There were lights on, but no sign of movement, leaving the question of survivors still unknown. She could see a stream of oxygen pouring listlessly out of one corner, and as she closed in on it, she could see small impact craters in the shed itself. One wall had been partially caved in, but she couldn't tell whether it had lost it's structural integrity there or not. She put the runabout down near the building, and bounced over to the door, calling out on the local radio frequency. There were no locks on the door, so she was able to get in easily.

  Inside, Libby could see that this place originally had gravity, but had lost it in a collision. Nothing was secured, plates and spoons floated around easily, bouncing on a listless wind. There were three rooms, the first of which was the living room, which was partially filled with floating personal items. A wall-sized video screen flew across the room as she entered, floating in her general direction. She pushed it away easily, and shoved off from a wall to head for the door on the other side of the room.

  The bathroom was just as empty, but more of a mess. Without gravity to hold it down, the septic system had mixed with the fresh water to fill the room with a disgusting cloud that Libby backed out of immediately. She closed the door as quickly as she'd opened it. There were no people in there, and she had very little interest in further investigation.

  The other room was clearly a bedroom, with a small office section. Nothing flew around in this room, and Libby could hear the high-pitched squeal of air escaping into the vacuum of space. She had to pull at the door to open it, and after seeing that no one was in there, she immediately let it slam itself.

  She switched off all the lights and bounced over to the exit. With no people found, there was very little reason to stick around. She tried to think of some way to signal to other rescuers that there was no need to check this rock, but the best she could think of was to leave the lights off.

  Flying to the next closest rock, Libby could barely make out its shape, from a petroleum haze that hovered as a cloud around the rock. The rock itself was huge and oblong, with a regular shape that could only have come from extensive surface mining. This claim had obviously been pelted as well, but it seemed to take all the damage on the side where the residence stood. There was a large house, with a glassed-in patio and satellite receivers sprouting out of the roof. The patio was shattered from the impact, and one wall of the residence was completely ripped away, the roof collapsing in on it. Still, lights were on, and Libby thought she could see movement in one of the rooms, so she landed nearby, and ran for the house as soon as she hit dirt.

  The petroleum cloud adhered to her suit, and she had to use her sleeve to clear the grime. Rainbow halos shined around everything as she gave up trying to clean the spiderwebbed visor. Whatever damage this rock had encountered, it was clearly still big enough to hold gravity. The things in the house were all knocked askew, looking like the remnants of an earthquake, but they did remain on the floor. It was silent inside, with very little remaining pressure. The air had clearly leaked away to almost nothing. Reaching a decision, Libby nodded and turned off the lights, preparing to leave. Then she stopped, thinking she'd seen movement again in one corner.

  She bounced over to the corner and pulled an upturned chair out of the way. Underneath was a thin woman with pale skin, and an emergency respirator strapped around her head. Libby couldn't check the woman's pulse through the suit, but she thought she could see her chest expand with breath. Libby grabbed her shoulder and shook it, noticing in a distant fashion that she was getting oil all over the woman's expensive loungewear top. A flare of pain shot up from her injured stomach, and she dropped the woman's arm. Her eyes opened briefly, and she waved an arm up at Libby, as though saying something, then she fainted again.

  Libby bounced over to the doorway, and found the woman's suit. It was one of the expensive systems that had way too many safety features, and was hard to put on. Libby dragged it over to the woman, and started unceremoniously pushing the woman into it. The unconscious woman didn't put up a fight, but couldn't help either. Pain lanced through Libby's side, and she had to move slowly to keep her stomach injury from seizing her into a fetal ball. Libby found herself swearing at the woman as she wrestled the suit around her. Why didn't she just get in the suit from the first? It still had all of its air and energy. She could last for almost half a day in that suit, if she paced herself. Why just sit in the house, using an emergency respirator? Why not get in the suit and get the hell out of here?

  But even as she thought the question, she could feel the painful answer. The woman was scared. She saw what was happening, watched the wall cave in on her, maybe heard the screaming on local channels. Libby pictured seeing the world crush in on her in a matter of moments, and knew how it would scare her. The woman wouldn't want to go outside. She would be desperate to hide and wait for this whole thing to just be over. It made Libby feel a little bad for her, so worried and frightened in the face of all this calamity.

  When she got to the helmet, Libby just stared at it, and at the respirator in the woman's mouth. They wouldn't both fit, and there was no other way to do this. She wiped her gloves off on the window drapes, trying to get the oil off so she would have traction to do what she had to.

  In one swift movement, Libby pulled the respirator out of the woman's mouth, and slammed the helmet down over her head. The woman shuddered and choked with the momentary loss of air and pressure, but when Libby switched on the suit, her coughing subsided. Very carefully, Libby tried to lift the woman into a standing position. She pulled one of the woman's arms around her shoulders. Libby had almost stood upright, holding the woman carefully with one of the woman's arms around her neck, when the injury in her side flared up again. A br
illiant shot of pain dropped her back to the ground, mouth agape with a sudden, racking, silent sob.

  Libby lay there on the ground for a long time, gasping and blinking out tears. Maybe the woman was right. They were both in suits. They could last for a while there. Maybe they could just rest for a bit, until the rescuers get there. Someone who could help. A person who wasn't crippled by some mystery pain in the gut.

  She lay there for a moment, indulging in the fantasy of big, burly rescuers, with strong arms and emergency medical systems, and a runabout that could take them all directly to the hospital. But in the back of her mind she knew the truth. She was the rescuer, the only one they would be likely to get. If Libby didn't get them out of there, no one else would.

  Libby painfully crawled back up on her knees and grabbed the woman by the back of her helmet. Slowly, carefully, Libby dragged the woman over to the door, and stopped. She looked around the door, kicking at things littering the floor. Finding what she was looking for, Libby grabbed the woman's keys and a small envelope, as she cycled the door, and pulled the woman out behind her.

  Once she was in the open again, Libby switched back over to the SOS station. She waited for a moment, as reports came in from other rescuers, then she piped up, "Tumbler here. I'm about four clicks out from Blessed, going in a general direction of,” Libby flipped to her navigation screen on the heads-up display and read off the numbers, “13 by 27 by 5. I started moving in the direction of the comet, so I'd guess I'm about four clicks off from that course. I've got a woman here who looks like she's suffering from a pressure drop, possibly loss of air. Her name is," Libby held up the envelope, now greasy with her gloveprints on it, "Alice Von Tromp. No other people in the house."

  A response came back immediately, "Tumbler, roger. This is base. How is the Von Tromp woman holding up?"

  Libby said, "Well, she came around once when I shook her, but she passed out again. I've got her in a suit, so she should be okay. No visible damage."