Long Haul Ch. 04

"Twenty point three degrees, thirty eight percent."

"Oh shut up," Bonnie growled, and then they were moving faster.

Out in the main concourse, most of the normal foot traffic had thinned. Where before there was a throng was now a scattered few. It seemed like most everyone in the area had run away at the initial gunfire, and in the quiet afterwards a brave few were venturing out again.

The next few minutes were a heart-pounding blur for Wren, who had never been in a real gunfight before. People were running everywhere. She shot three people, at least two of whom were maybe trying to stop her, but it was almost as much blind luck as any amount of skill. Wren had always secretly thought that all her time spent playing DBX would prepare her for the day she got into actual combat, but she was wrong. Her heart was beating so hard that it was difficult to make out anything else. She heard a lot of things, but it all blended together into a hellish soundscape. It was easy to see that the difference between DBX and a real life shootout was that one of them had consequences, but telling herself that did nothing to calm her down in the slightest.

Bonnie shot a lot of people. Wren quickly lost count, but the cutting tool-sound that the CAR made was the only thing that really cut through the haze. Every time Bonnie opened fire, it made her nerves light up.

Somehow they made it across the transit ring, but even shell shocked like she knew she was, Wren knew there were more of them at the edges of her peripheral vision. They hadn't been prepared to stop anything going out the door she'd picked, but it hadn't taken long to get security around to try to stop them. Or had it?

The Daedalus was parked at the end of a wing of docks that were helpfully crowded with structural beams and amenities for visitors that provided cover for them to hobble through. Bonnie's uncanny aim seemed to have given the pursuing forces some pause, because they mostly just kept their distance and took potshots. For her part, Wren did basically the same thing, squeezing off a few rounds every time she was turned enough to be able to aim in the right general direction.

Even through all that, Wren was pretty sure that station security weren't in a hurry for some other reason, so she did her best to get her brain back on track. Her, Bonnie, and Mr. Robot were making terrible time. They should have been run down easily. They should have been caught. She put her gun away, put her head down, and thought. They were letting them get away, because...

"We're not getting away," Wren mumbled, as they stumbled through the portal that led directly to the Daedalus' airlock, and her heart rate skyrocketed. "They're not afraid that we'll escape, or-or-or they know we can't. Oh fuck. What did I miss? What did I miss?"

"Stop it," Bonnie said, hissed. "You can't do that. Stay focused!"

"The maglock? The PA? Do they think they can..."

Wren turned in horror and looked at the door behind them. The airlock door for the port. "We can't secure those doors. If they open them, the Daedalus won't disengage. I couldn't override that if I tried. None of the engines will engage. Then they just need to wait us out. Fuck, how did I not think of that?!"

"Fine," Bonnie grunted, "It's a setback, but we'll just—"

As they were slinking sideways through the Daedalus' airlock, the bot suddenly pushed Wren down and threw Bonnie on top of her. One of its legs was malfunctioning, but its arms were apparently working just fine. It said, as it staggered away from them, "Twenty one point two degrees. Thirty five percent. Less than three."

Wren started to get up but the bot shut the airlock from the outside. She darted for the airlock controls, but Bonnie stopped her, grabbing her and pulling her away.

"No!" Wren screamed, as she kicked at the air. "We can get him back! I can fix this!"

She could just make out, through the viewport in the airlock door, the bot hurling itself back down the hallway, and then there was a terrible sound: a deafening burst of sixty hertz hum echoing around in a metal tube. It rocked the Daedalus, and both her and Bonnie ended up on the ground. Once again, Wren got to her feet faster.

It was hard to be sure, but it looked like it had detonated its power core against the airlock door on the other side of the hall, putting a terrific warp to it. It wasn't going to be opening any time soon.

"Nooo!" Wren screamed, again, impotently. "Fuck! No!

Bonnie picked her up, bodily, and hurtled through the ship, with Wren trying to claw her way free the whole time. She shoved, pushed, and cajoled Wren up the ladder, with Wren looking back over her shoulder the whole time, and she had to chase Wren down when Wren tried to dart along the catwalk back toward the airlock.

"There's nothing left," she said, through gritted teeth, as she pushed Wren through the galley. "You're risking everything for nothing! Save what you can! 快走!" Run for it!

This, finally, pinged in Wren's head, and all her mindless flailing to get back to the airlock redirected into mindlessly flailing to get the Daedalus detached from the maglock system and on its way. Her fingers

moved like they knew what to do, without any conscious thought driving them. She knew her ship. She knew how to make it dance, and it would need to. She checked her watch, and they were three minutes behind schedule.

The Daedalus pried itself free by sheer force, overwhelming the maglock system and only damaging her own docking apparatus minimally, and started moving along the pre-planned exit vector. She could see that, between her and the Minimum Safe Distance Jump Point, a small array of station security craft had started to assemble, but this part of the escape she had accounted for and that wasn't where she was going.

"Don't answer that," Bonnie said, which made Wren blink. She hadn't even realized they had an incoming hail, which she, of course, answered.

That engineer, whose name Wren had already forgotten again, appeared on her display, with a big knot in his forehead and one eye starting to swell shut. "You're not getting away," he hissed. "Just thought you deserved to know, before the end, that it was me that brought you down."

"Mmmhmmm," Wren said, as she tried to stay focused.

"I minimized your design so much that I realized... I could put it in a drone! You thought you were so special, but I replaced you with a tiny, stupid machine that can't think for itself. Welcome to obsolescence, you smug bitch."

"You must be so proud of yourself," she replied.

"You don't get it, do you?" he laughed. "Those drones? They're tailing you even now. You won't get away. No matter where you go, they'll be so close behind you that they'll be able to follow you through t-space. And then it's over."

That wrinkled Wren's brow. She brought up her scanner, and her eyes widened when she saw a pack of very small pursuers gaining on her, as opposed to the rest of the security craft that had been originally heading for the Minimum Safe Distance Jump Point and was now on an intercept course with her new heading. Tracking through t-space was fantasy, but following someone was theoretically possible if one stayed close enough and had, like, absurdly precise reactions... like a drone.

"Your drones can shift into t-space?" she said, narrowing her eyes.

"Miniaturization," he said, smugly. "Something you never put a lot of stock in, I see, and now it's going to be the death of you. For real, this time. I don't know where you think you're going, but..." The engineer's face contorted as he looked at something just to the side of the vid call. "There's a what?"

Wren was pretty sure she knew what what was.

A month beforehand, the Daedalus and ninety nine volunteers Jackson had scrounged up launched a volley of asteroids on a near trajectory past Port Houston. Then, two weeks later, they'd slipped in behind the last of the trail and done the same thing again. All the ships had taken slightly different positions, like a wide net, flying at slightly different speeds and angling their payloads in slightly different directions, all extremely carefully calculated, creating what she referred to as a temporary asteroid corridor.

It occurred to Wren, as the incoming asteroids started appearing on her scanner, that for that engineer to know that his scanner was smaller than hers, or that she had gone for parallel processing where he had streamlined and miniaturized, probably meant that someone had taken pictures of her scanner. Someone had gotten inside the Daedalus, her home, her sanctum, and spied on her work.

She had, perhaps, never been more incensed in her life. She suspected that Owens, her foodstuffs guy, was the most likely suspect, but that hardly mattered. She pushed the throttle wide open, throwing Bonnie back two steps and driving her back into her pilot's chair, as the Daedalus rocketed toward near-certain death, and it was with a manic grin that she said, "Catch me if you can."

The engineer grimaced and cut the call.

"You need to get into a suit, Wren!" Bonnie shouted, just barely audible above the roaring engines.

The first row of the asteroids made her stomach sink with the speed of their approach. They went from three hundred kilometers, to twenty kilometers, to behind her almost as fast as she could blink, and the Daedalus' autopilot system started pivoting through the field like a fleet-footed fairy. The asteroids they'd fired hadn't had much time to bounce around off of each other and turn into a really crazy debris field, but there were more than enough cracked and broken hunks of rock that even Wren, a seasoned asteroid field pilot, was white-knuckling it in her chair.

"Wren!" Bonnie cried, grabbing her shoulder. "A suit!" She'd already gotten into hers.

Wren turned to argue with her, that no amount of exosuit was going to save them from a head-on collision with an asteroid, but stopped when she saw the look on Bonnie's face. This was all Bonnie could do, and she knew it. The extent of her ability to save Wren was to shove an armored vacsuit in Wren's face and badger her until Wren put it on. Her stubbornness in the face of futility was so incredible, and so incredibly charming, that Wren couldn't help but give in.

Which was difficult, given the ridiculous amount of thrust and shifting inertia the Daedalus was inflicting on them as it rolled and spun and weaved and banked, but Wren did it.

The field of dots behind them, giving chase, winked out one by one until there were only three dots still following her. She theorized that even if they had been designed to give chase through a field like this, they probably weren't prepared to maneuver around each other, and made a mental note to amend some of her future designs for that kind of contingency. Her drones certainly had some awareness of each other, but they didn't take their actions as a collective into account on this scale.

Ultimately, though, it didn't matter what was taking out the other drones. They weren't evil drones, as they had no capacity for choice. They weren't corporate drones, as they had no control over which side of the conflict they were on. Wren had a whole internal conversation about what to call them, as they raced through the rocks, and ultimately what mattered was that they weren't hers. They were other.

Another hail from Port Houston. This time, Bonnie reached over and denied it. Wren had probably been about to do the same, but she appreciated Bonnie saving her from herself. Nothing good would have come from bantering with that engineer except dividing her attention, which she needed all of and he, from the relative safety of the center of Port Houston, could spare much.

Two dots following them.

Her scanner told her that some craft were stalking her in parallel, running along the outside of the temporary asteroid corridor and keeping pace with her, but that was fine. Calculating the trajectory of a ship shifting into t-space was a tricky, highly specific thing, and couldn't be reliably done with so many celestial bodies whizzing around. She was taking the Daedalus on a diagonal path through the corridor, so that when she emerged on the far side, near the far end, (hopefully) nothing would be close enough to spot her exact exit vector.

One dot following them. One measly pursuer. Wren smiled.

The last twenty asteroids to be fired had been done from further back behind the tailing end of the column, and fired with greater speed so that they definitely impacted with something else. The others, earlier, were only likely to impact with each other, but the back end was going to be a nightmarish flurry of rocks, each as large as the Daedalus itself. As she swerved around one of the last of the really big ones, she cut their speed by a third, to allow for maximum maneuverability, and the really crazy maneuvering started.

The last dot did not last long in the squall.

As soon as it disappeared from her scanner, Wren steered the Daedalus through some navigation choices that took it away from Port Houston and out the far side of the temporary asteroid corridor, and from there, it was only seconds until they shifted into t-space.

***

Wren had always thought of herself as the kind of person who dealt with life-threatening stress with vigor and energy, and her first few brushes with it had each elicited the kind of bursting 'I'm alive!' reaction that quickly led to sex. Survival is such a fragile thing that, at times, it's easy to see it in completely black and white terms; that there are only 'I made it' and 'I didn't'. It often takes having to go through it to see the subtle perspective shift required between 'I made it' and 'We made it', and then how easy it can be to go from 'We made it' to 'we didn't all make it'.

Wren spent the next day in her bunk, most of it wrapped in Bonnie's arms. Bonnie was able to get up and move around a bit more than she could, and made them food. She had always compartmentalized better than Wren did, and Wren appreciated that aspect of her personality a bit more than she had previously. She was so strong. Wren, though, was nearly catatonic. She couldn't get out of her head. She couldn't stop obsessing over the things that went wrong. The things she could have done differently.

It was an absolute mindtrap, made worse by the fact that Wren could imagine hundreds upon hundreds of things she could have done differently. Alternate paths branching off of alternate paths. There was no end to it. Eventually, Bonnie made her get up, to shower and eat and stretch, which she did, but as soon as she was by herself she went down to her workspace and threw herself at an even less helpful problem.

It took her five minutes to realize, because she had to write it down rather than just process the sound of it, that 'less than three' meant '<3', and that started her crying all over again.

***

Two days later, most of which had been spent at silence, Bonnie hit her breaking point. She'd been strong, and held Wren while Wren had cried, but she couldn't be strong forever. She came down into the workspace, while Wren was fiddling with the test version of her scanner's firmware, and stood behind Wren.

This was not unusual. Wren often found Bonnie watching her while she worked, and she didn't think it was because Bonnie had any great interest in electrical engineering, or her specific design aesthetics. She was pretty sure it was because Bonnie just liked to watch her absorbed in something, and her hypothesis was backed up, however flimsily, by the enjoyment she got from watching Bonnie work. Whether the redhead (Bonnie had dyed her hair back in the intervening time) was working out, cleaning her weapons, or doing her walking badass routine on a mission, Wren found everything she did fascinating, and wanted to see every part of it. She thought that might be what made it love, and not just lust.

It only took Wren turning to look over her shoulder to see that this was different. Bonnie's expression was... conflicted.

"Hey," she said, "I... uh..."

Wren got up out of her chair, and wrapped her arms around Bonnie.

"No," Bonnie said, holding her arms out. "I need to—"

"It's okay," Wren said, squeezing even tighter.

"You're not listening," Bonnie hissed.

So, Wren listened, let go, and took a half step back.

"This is all my fault," Bonnie said, voice choked, and Wren went right back to squeezing her. "No, no!"

"Babe," Wren said, reaching up to caress the back of Bonnie's neck with one hand. "Baby, don't."

"If I hadn't... If I—"

Wren stopped hugging her, and moved directly in front of her, nose to nose, and gently cupped Bonnie's cheeks. "Before I met you, I was only half-alive."

"Fuck," was all Bonnie could manage before she broke down.

It occurred to Wren, briefly, that perhaps it wasn't that Bonnie processed stress better than she did, or that Bonnie compartmentalized better than she did, but that Bonnie simply did those things differently than she did. She didn't process this thought, in the moment, because there were more important things to see to, but it occurred to her and the seed took root in her brain.

***

"Everything," Jackson said, barely hiding his smirk, as the three of them floated through what had once been the bridge of the Persephone class ship within Singapore Station. "We got all the downloads you queued up, and then we were able to remote in through your PDU and request a couple more. Kuo made sure that there was a kill command on your hardware, so that as soon as it lost the secure connection to the Daedalus, as soon as you shifted, it self-destructed."

"I hadn't even thought about that," Wren said, blinking.

Jackson just clapped her on the shoulder as he set down his helmet. "That's why it wasn't a one person job."

Bonnie had been a little slower to remove her helmet, but even she couldn't argue with them not immediately asphyxiating.

"Do you smell that?" he said, breathing deeply through his nostrils.

"Smells like... burned steak," Wren said, wrinkling her nose.

Jackson just shook his head. "That's Singapore. This is where it starts. Right now, it's one airtight room in a hulk, with a wheezing air system. Soon?"

"If you think about it," Wren said, "space is kind of like a river. Connecting places. I know the song was talking more about bringing life, but I think the meaning behind that is... what..."

Jackson turned toward her very slowly, and it was the most surprised she'd ever seen him. "You were listening." She'd seen Bonnie level a hand cannon at him, and it didn't elicit the same reaction. "How do you even know what a river is?"

Wren rolled her eyes. "You'd be surprised at the things I've looked up while I was waiting for code to compile, or a design to render."

Jackson smiled and turned. "I won't live to see it. Not in my lifetime... but... I was here for the start."

Wren and Bonnie both looked at each other, perplexed, and it was Bonnie who said, "It's gonna take that long?"

He nodded, and pushed himself toward the forward viewport. "Decades of work ahead, and I am not young." When Wren caught up with him, hovering beside him and looking out over the still assembling framework, he said, "The younger generation? They're ready for this. I didn't think that they were. I... Sometimes it felt like I was carrying it by myself, but when you asked for volunteers? To throw your rocks? Thousands wanted in. I had to turn them away."