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Ace cursed the day he met Spanners. Or that was what he would tell him with a playful smirk if he was there when Ace climbed out of the centrifuge, where just a few seconds ago he had to swallow back the scarce contents of his stomach.
High-g training hadn’t made Ace sick for years now, but then again this was the first time his schedule coincided with Spanners insisting on a night out the day before. That by itself wouldn’t be unmanageable if it didn’t include a staggering amount of both alcohol and spicy food. Arnold ‘Ace’ Rimmer cultivated a bulletproof reputation of being able to hold his liquor and kept it a closely guarded secret that a rank and file mechanic could outdrink him. Not that he usually thought of Spanners that way. He was Ace’s beloved engineer that he pushed into a crucial role on every one of his test assignments since their first one.
“How’s the new getup, Commander?” A group of brainiacs surrounded him as soon as he walked out of the test chamber.
“A little tight around the lower regions,” Ace quipped in a velvety voice, hiding the wobble in his walk by leaning his hand on the doorframe.
A female scientist closest to him uttered a charmed chuckle. He winked at her.
“Apt.” Another scientist ignored the double entendre. “Though it should be tight everywhere when it comes to it.” They were working on a new g-suit that should help Ace battle the effects of an especially fast crate they were developing. The ship would have a g-force modification field on board, but the technology still only altered—not negated—the havoc that the acceleration would wreak on the pilot’s body. “We’re not entirely sure what this ship will feel like yet, so while unusual, a full body coverage should cover all the bases during early tests.”
“You’re the experts. I was pulling more Gs in there than Fittipaldi on a date.” Ace stuck his thumb towards the centrifuge. “So you must be doing something right.”
“It’s fully automatic and works with its own air supply—completely independent. It triggers by monitoring blood pressure in all parts of the body instead of detecting g-forces in the ship.”
Ace inspected part of the garment on his arm. Little pockets of air were sewn into the lining and had earlier filled up with air to compress parts of Ace’s body suffering from the pooling of blood caused by the g-forces in the centrifuge. He felt the most pressure on his legs, but his arms had been compressed too. The coverage was surprisingly accurate and thorough. “It’s very responsive, I’ll give you that.”
“By our calculations, it should raise your tolerance by at least five Gs.”
Ace raised his eyebrows. It was more than any suit he had heard of.
The telling expression seemed to have delighted one of the scientists. “What wouldn’t pilots of the old times give for a suit like that?”
“What wouldn’t I give for the man in it…” The woman next to Ace muttered.
A man on the other side of the circle cleared his throat. “You can keep it for now, Commander. Since we don’t know how much time you will be spending in it, we aim for comfort as well to minimize distractions. Please wear it and let us know how it feels.”
Ace nodded. “You think of everything. Thank you kindly, lads. I’ll keep in touch.” He pushed himself off the door frame but not before squeezing the female scientist’s shoulder. It’ll leave her with something to think about.
Delegating all his willpower to appearing his usual perfect self, Ace made his way to the nearest restrooms. He bent to check if there weren’t any feet in the stalls, then barged into one. He made a mental note to thank the cleaning lady for her hard work while he emptied his stomach into an invitingly spotless toilet bowl.
If you can handle the vindaloo challenge they have on the menu here, I’ll pay for your drinks all night. Spanners’s words from the previous evening echoed in Ace’s head. It was not the free drinks he craved then but rather Spanners’s admiring look. Even as Ace hurled into the bowl a second time, he didn’t regret it. No matter what hoops Spanners had him jump through, it was always worth it for that look.
Now, the mirror presented Ace with a rather miserable look on his face. He hoped it was the result of the toilet hugging and not something present earlier. It would have been a mistake to be seen like that. He had to pull himself together. A little hangover in a centrifuge never killed anybody, did it?
Cold water poured a bit of life back into his facial muscles. He smiled. No, not like that, he had to put his eyes into it, that was the genuine article people expected. Thin crow’s feet formed by his eyes. His look widened. He hadn’t seen them before. His fingers traced their lines.
You haven’t changed one bit since we’ve met, Spanners had told him over lunch the other day. Shame. I think you’d age beautifully.
Ace’s smile mellowed. He looked away and leaned on the sink with a heavy sigh.
The ground shook.
Gently first, like a faraway earthquake. Then Ace lost his footing. Lights went out. A few seconds later, dim red lights blinked by the floor where Ace was now lying. Sirens wailed. Between periods of their ear-piercing shrieks, a pre-recorded message played, telling all staff to adhere to an evacuation procedure. Even though this lone base did evacuation drills on a biweekly basis, they usually didn’t include tremors and power outages.
Ace scrambled to his feet. As soon as he barged into the hallway, another quake threw him to the ground. A series of resonant blasts vibrated through his palms. Whatever was wrong, it happened deep in the facility.
The early stages of this new project were relocated onto one of Jupiter’s smaller outer moons. Some of the planned experiments were too volatile for otherwise inhabited moons like those in the Galilean group. Most of the base’s infrastructure had been constructed underground, all close together since drilling into a larger moon would take more time and resources that Space Corps wasn’t willing to spare. They tried to make up for it with strict security measures, regular safety drills, and evacuation shuttles on constant standby. However, it was only a matter of time until the personnel would get to try it all out for real.
The ground still wobbled, but Ace managed to find balance. Sacrificing some certainty for speed, he headed toward where arrows on the floor pointed as per the evacuation route. Members of frightened staff joined him on the way. Ace spared each a greeting and a few consoling words while he glanced at their faces in search of the one that mattered most. By the time he reached the hangar, he hadn’t seen Spanners.
Shuttles lined the open hangar. Waves of personnel flocked to their cargo holds like a landing operation on rewind. Ace’s pace staggered. He was so engrossed in scanning the crowd for a short round-cheeked man that it took him too long to see that the view outside the hangar’s opening was moving a bit too fast. Beyond the forcefield that kept the landing bay pressurized, stars moved at an unnatural rate and angle. Stranger than that, they weren’t alone. A gargantuan angular piece of grey rock eclipsed the light reflecting off neighboring moonlets, throwing shade over the scene like a passing freight train. Then another. And then another. Between them floated smaller pieces the size of the shuttles and crashed into anything and everything in their path, birthing more irregularly moving fragments.
Today, the engineers from propulsion development deep underground were supposed to be testing a new hyper combustible fuel, an enhanced version of an already volatile substance whose energy properties neared the limits of currently known science. It was a new hope for breaking stale boundaries. The untamed nature of this centerpiece of the project gave it its name—Wildfire.
Ace knew that because he had been told. By Spanners. The only thing Ace could rely on for Spanners’s safety was that he knew just because he had more than enough friends with similarly big mouths. Spanners was a ship engineer, usually stationed in hangars on the upper levels, which meant he should have been among the first on the shuttles.
Ace ran to one. The people who got on had bracelets, much like Ace himself, which beeped whenever one of them crossed the ship’s threshold. A real-time database kept track of workers that might still be in need of rescuing somewhere in the depths of the base.
“Can you show me the database, old sport?” Ace asked a first responder who was waving people into the ship.
“What?” The man clad in pockets and first-aid equipment yelled over the sirens.
“Has David Lister got on board?” Ace raised his voice.
“Who the hell knows? A lot of people won’t be getting on board. The lower levels don’t exist anymore.”
A quake shook the ground to prove the rescuer’s point, accompanied by a creaking screech that outdid even the blaring alarm.
“What soothing optimism coming from our ride out of here.” Ace’s calm slipped.
While ever present noise drowned out the click of the rescuer’s tongue, Ace could make out the grimace well enough. The man reached for a slab of glass and protective rubber hanging from a clamp on his hip and handed it to Ace. “Do whatever you want, just make sure to get on after.”
Ace muttered a thanks. He navigated to the database on the chunky device easily enough. Spanners hadn’t got on yet. And Ace himself sure wasn’t about to before that changed.
He spotted an out of place movement in his peripheral vision. A lanky woman in a mechanic’s uniform tripped on the edge of a neighboring river of people. Ace ran to her and dragged her aside just in time before a burly man stepped on her back. Ace pulled her up like she weighed less than a packet of apple crisps.
“Go!” He slapped her back and pushed her towards the shuttle before she could process what had happened.
The mechanic got on just before the shuttle’s ramp lifted. A rescuer waved people behind her to a nearby shuttle with free capacity. The ship’s vertical engines blew hot air into bystanders’ faces who looked away as they ran past. Ace didn’t see the shuttle off and instead scanned the crowd for anyone else in need of help. Might as well make himself useful while he waited.
A few minutes later, the crowd thinned. Ace kept checking the pad he had got from the rescuer. Aside from Spanners and some others, he noticed that none of the engineers from the propulsion laboratory got on.
“Hey, you!”
Ace ignored the voice and kept his gaze on the few stragglers now remaining.
“Pilot!”
Right. Ace turned. He wasn’t used to not being called by his name. This project hadn’t been going on for long enough for him to get to know everybody yet.
“You coming?” It was the rescuer whose pad he held.
“He’s not here.”
“Whoever you’re looking for, he’s probably dead.”
“No.”
“He would have been here already.”
Ace handed the pad back to the rescuer. “Sorry to complicate this for you, pal.”
“Wait! We can’t wait for you!”
Ace was already jogging towards the door back into the facility. “Smoke me a kipper!” He waved his hand, not looking back.
Emptiness turned the red lit halls uneasy and saddled Ace with a heavy sense of unbelonging. As far as he knew, it was supposed to be a regular day for Spanners, so he would be somewhere on the upper levels near the prototype’s hangar. He checked there first. The ship sat there, but Ace only noticed the lack of people. Then he started making his way through adjacent halls and warehouses.
“Spanners!” he called, but his only answer was another blast from below. It silenced the sirens. Ace noticed the structural damage hit this part of the base harder than the one he came from. Ceiling panels lay on the floor while wires hung from where they used to be. Walls bent both inwards and outwards.
An empty mess hall. A deserted office. Ace pressed on until he realized he heard a banging that didn’t fall in with the rhythm of his boots hitting the floor. He followed the sound to a storage room whose door was jammed by a thin beam that had fallen from the ceiling. Somebody was kicking into the door from the inside, managing to put a good crack in it already but not big enough.
“Wait!” Ace called and the kicking stopped. He cleared the beam too easily, as its biggest strength was unlucky positioning. The mangled door didn’t move without him using both hands. He pried it open in an irregular arc that left deep scratches on the ground.
“Ace!” Spanners ran to him, and Ace half expected him to plunge in his arms. He had played that scene in his head too many times not to expect it. Rookie mistake, Ace reprimanded himself when Spanners stopped short of him. Still, his joyous look was enough to pin Ace to the spot.
“Come on, we’re getting outta here,” Spanners looked around frantically, and Ace snapped back to reality.
“This way.” Ace started running after making sure Spanners followed.
It only took a minute to get back to the main hangar. Ace rounded the last corner and tore through the entrance. He stopped to a halt. Spanners bumped into his back.
“What—” Spanners’s question was cut short when he saw the same thing Ace did: nothing. The last of the shuttles had just taken off from the bay.
They watched their one chance at survival shrink as it put distance between itself and the crumbling base. Beyond it, other shuttles were still visible. They weaved through floating debris and rock when two of those unpredictable chunks crashed into each other. A building-sized boulder split into two, and one of its halves plunged towards the leftmost shuttle with speed uncharacteristic for anything that large. It hit the crowded escape ship which crumpled and popped in a fire-less explosion like a smashed glass. It was hard to tell, at this distance, which of the thousand shards were parts of the ship, and which were the people inside it.
Ace wasn’t scared until he looked at Spanners. Fear wasn’t something Ace was supposed to feel, but Spanners had it in spades. He had a lot to be afraid for and with one sentence interjected all of his dread into Ace.
“It’s over.”
Sudden impact lifted both of them off the ground and threw them towards a faraway wall. The split second of shock in Spanners’s look was all Ace needed to act. In flight, he just barely reached Spanners’s arm and flung him towards himself, hugging as much of him to his chest as he could. Ace’s back hit the ground, and his stomach cushioned Spanners’s fall. He held onto him until a metal crate stopped their slide across the cold floor. They ended up a good fifty meters away from where they stood before.
“Wildfire,” Ace croaked.
Spanners stirred in his stiff arms. “What?”
Ace rolled off him. “The prototype ship. It’s still there.”
Spanners shook his head. “It doesn’t fly.”
“Doesn’t or hasn’t?”
Spanners scoffed with a disbelieving smirk.
“There was a test flight scheduled for next week. I would know.” Pushing himself off the ground, Ace managed a sitting position. “And I also know you’re not one for last minute finishes, old friend. Not when it comes to my ships.”
Spanners gulped. He nodded.
Ace forced himself to stand. “Come on.” He took Spanners’s hand who squeezed his just as hard. “We’re getting out of here.”
He headed back into the corridor with Spanners in tow. The prototype was still in its hangar, even if lighter boxes and various equipment lay scattered on the floor as a result of the earlier impact. Wildfire resembled a wreckage more than a high-end ship—a crude grey bodywork with exposed engines. Spanners was already halfway there, so Ace picked up the slack. By the time he ran over, Spanners had put up a boarding ladder. Ace climbed up and looked into the cockpit.
“It’s a single-seater,” Ace said.
“‘Course it is.” Spanners scanned the messy hangar. “We were experimenting with seats though. Y’know, since it’ll be so fast, you wouldn’t appreciate being pushed into something that felt like your grandma’s patio chair.”
There was space in the back. “You get it in there, I’ll take care of the fuel.”
As if on cue, Spanners spotted one of the rejected designs and sprinted off. Ace jumped down and ran to a small trailer cistern. He knew what to do. He had watched Spanners do it a thousand times and saved it to memory for, among other things, a crucial time like this. Ace grabbed the hose, but it stretched to its maximum a good few meters before the ship. Just as he ran back to the cistern, the ground shook again. Dimmer lights powered by the backup generator flickered. Ace took a deep breath, put both his hands on the back of the cistern and pushed. His soles slipped on the ground. Just over the top edge, he saw Spanners mounting the seat to the back of the cockpit. Ace found better footing. With his eyes fixed on Spanners, he steeled his legs and engaged his upper body. The cistern moved. One step, two, three… Enough.
Ace estimated the position of the fuel tank by experience and found its intake fast. His arms were still shaking from the strain. Hook up. Fasten. Open flow to the max.
“Done!” Spanners called and jumped to the ground.
Ace put his hand on the ladder but froze. He turned to Spanners. The decision didn’t need more than a second to make.
“You’re wearing this.” Ace unzipped his flight suit and stripped into his shirt and boxers.
“What? I can’t take it.” Spanners sounded panicked. “If you faint, we’re both dead.”
“And if I lose you because I went over your limits for too long, my life wouldn’t be worth a damn. This will help you.”
“Ace—”
“I’m not asking.” He threw the suit at him.
Spanners crumbled under his hard stare and undressed hastily like a lucky teenager after prom night. The tailored flight suit didn’t fit him, but if they were both a little lucky, it would work. Ace made use of Spanners’s smaller boilersuit. Its trouser legs didn’t reach the edges of Ace’s boots, and he had to tie it at the waist, but it would do better than bare underwear. He picked two helmets off the ground and handed one to Spanners.
“Ground check.” Ace climbed to the cockpit.
A familiar order snapped the jittery Spanners back into work mode. “I already did a once-over. We’re missing a lot of stuff, but it’ll fly.” He grunted when he disengaged the fuel hose.
Ace motioned for Spanners to get on board before he fell in the seat. He inspected the controls. The hundreds of switches missed their succinct one-word descriptions. Spanners must have noticed Ace’s focused look as he climbed into the cockpit behind him.
“It’s preliminary. I meant to run the layout by you.”
Spanners was already well acquainted with Ace’s preferences. Every switch, button and gauge was exactly in the right place as per the configuration of the ships Ace had flown the most before they met. Ace didn’t need but to follow his muscle memory. He flipped a few switches—battery and auxiliary power unit. The ship woke up.
“Hardly a need, you handsome devil.” Ace smirked. “Like coming home.”
Spanners’s chuckle was interrupted by a strong tremor. It reverberated through the ship, drawing unnatural sounds out of the undercarriage. They were still running out of time.
“Strap in. Helmets on.” Ace followed his own commands and closed the canopy. It came down and clicked forward, sealing the cockpit with a soft hiss.
The overhead lights flickered again but didn’t come back on this time.
Engine start sequence. Ace flipped a switch and pushed one side of the split thrust lever on his left by a small margin. A high pitched hum intensified.
Another tremor, this time shaking them in their seats. The view outside the hangar changed trajectory.
Ace flipped the earlier switch into a different position and moved the other lever until it met the first one. The rumble of the engines on idle now came evenly from both sides. Displays on. The flight control system screen showed some errors, but Ace overrode them. The g-force modification field appeared as disconnected. Luckily, this early version of the ship was just a proof of concept for a wholly new engine design and would hit about as hard as a regular Space Corps fighter. At least it was burning regular fuel now, otherwise they would be toasting to the project’s first takeoff in heaven.
Outside, a rock flew through a remnant of the base which rained small debris into the hangar.
He had to hurry. Navigation systems and radio could wait, but they needed life support. The switch for the environmental control system didn’t respond. Another try. Nothing. He thumbed the underside of his helmet to switch the intercom on.
“Spanners?”
When he didn’t respond immediately, Ace turned his head and tapped his ear. He heard a click.
“Receiving.”
Ace continued with checks in the meantime. If something was wrong, he couldn’t change it, but he could accommodate for it instead of finding out too late. He grabbed the flight stick with his right hand and looked over his shoulder at the wing.
“Engines are purring, but ECS is not responding,” Ace noted. Wiggling the flight stick in all directions and pressing on pedals, he checked the ship’s maneuvering jets—small thrusters in places that let them emulate what flaps, ailerons and a rudder would do for a terrestrial fighter jet.
“We were supposed to be putting it in tomorrow.”
The thrusters puffed dirty air. All good. “So no air supply?”
“No.”
Ace looked over his other shoulder. All good too. “Temperature control?”
“None.”
Ace looked forward. Proximity warning system check beeped loudly. “Cabin pressure?”
“What we have is what we get,” Spanners trailed off. “It was all supposed to be where I’m sitting, y’know?”
Ace flicked the fuel indicator with his finger. “We’ll make do.” No margin for error.
The base’s metal construction moaned. Ace’s stomach lurched. The tightened harness stopped him from floating up.
“Ace?” Spanners’s nervous voice cracked in the comms.
The base’s artificial gravity generator finally gave out. Ace wiggled the flight stick to level the ship with the tilting ground.
A trio of rocks mangled the edge of the hangar, and soft light around the opening blinked out. All haphazardly floating boxes and equipment launched outside. Final bits of escaping air carried their last sounds to the cockpit. Ace thumbed a button on the thrust lever and pulled it back to force the ship to stay in while pulling the landing gear up at the same time. His eyes scanned the obstructions outside their doorstep that swirled like a shoal of fish. Not yet. Not yet…
“I’m sorry, old love.”
…Now!
“For wha—” A surprised grunt cut Spanners’s question short when the ship’s full throttle pushed him into his seat.
Wildfire shot out of the doomed hangar like a feisty dragster. Too bad the opening wouldn’t serve them for long.
“Do you remember the anti-g straining maneuvers I taught you?” Ace asked as he rolled on their right wing and took a gentle turn to dodge a large rock. When he looked up and behind them, he saw their exit point spinning on unnatural axes. It looked like it was carved into a rock with long straight planes. The explosion in the propulsion lab cracked the whole moonlet into pieces. The longer they had taken with their escape, the more chaos did the haphazardly moving fragments have time to make. They were in a maze whose walls didn’t only change by the second, they also sought to flatten them like a movie-style booby trap.
“You always bring them up seven beers in. I don’t remember smeg all.” Spanners sounded a bit choked.
The only reason for teaching them to Spanners was to use them in a life threatening situation, and Ace usually delegated those thoughts to parts of his mind only unlocked by alcohol.
“Is it going to be that rough?” Spanners asked when forces in the ship leveled.
“It’s always rough.” Even if the current version of the ship didn’t have the output to flatten them in their seats, the flight would be a difficult one if they didn’t want to end up like one of the shuttles. “Just try to flex parts of the body the suit puts pressure on and take quick breaths.”
“I recall that bit.”
Ace rolled to spare his wing from a flying door. As comforting as it was to know Spanners remembered the theory, he hardly had the muscle memory to pull it off.
A car-sized rock headed for them straight from their side.
“Get ready!”
Ace pulled up not to meet it. His body’s inertia fought with the ship’s changing course. He suddenly weighed five times as much. Ace flexed his calves, thighs, butt, and abdomen. The rock’s sharp apex barely missed the ship’s fuselage. They were now headed straight for a few floors of the base above them.
Proximity warning blared. “Terrain! Terrain!”
Ace rolled the ship over and pulled up again, this time harder. He had to work with his breath. Sharp exhale and inhale, hold. Again. Again. Again. In the comms, he heard Spanners behind him struggle for breath. He finally stopped the maneuver.
“You good?” Ace asked while scanning their surroundings.
“Smeg no.”
They flew into a swarm of shifting rock fragments. Ace zigzagged between the ones large enough to shatter the ship. Others bounced off the hull with metallic clangs.
“The engines!” Spanners struggled the words out like a first time rally co-driver.
“I know.” The engines were missing their covers. Any unlucky impact could spell a quick end for the ship. Ace tried to catch straggling rocks on the underside where less of the engines were visible, but he still had to prioritize not burying the nose into one of the many moving walls.
“Above!” Spanners yelled.
Ace executed an especially sharp turn to dodge a wedge of rock aimed at them like an arrow. The force that pushed Ace into his seat was extreme but mercifully short.
“Good catch, old chumbucket.” Ace tried to keep the atmosphere calm and optimistic.
His only response was a half-conscious grunt.
“Stay with me, Spanners.”
A huff. “Okay.”
Charting a course out of the chaos proved difficult while prioritizing survival. Ace found that their little stunt steered them back towards the moonlet. Rocks rained less frequently near the eye of the storm where the biggest chunks rubbed shoulders, so Ace headed there. While looking for the least dangerous route, he failed to notice that two big parts of the moonlet that he planned to fly between headed for mutual collision. Ace suddenly found their way forward to be closing too quickly. The ship was not fast enough to thread the needle, not in this version. Ace rolled and started pulling away. The colliding rocks were too big. Their speed too high. The evasive maneuver too sharp and long.
Ace flexed the muscles on his lower body to keep as much of his blood from pooling in his legs. Quick sharp breaths. By how much the skin on his face stretched down, he recognized they were pulling more sustained Gs than before. There was no strength to assign to making pained grunts. Only quick sharp breaths. Hold. In and out. Hold.
Ace stopped pulling on the flight stick.
“How’re you doing back there, champ?” he asked as soon as weightlessness let him use his vocal cords again.
The intercom stayed quiet.
“Spanners?” Ace rolled out of the way of a shuttle’s debris.
Nothing.
“Dave!” Ace looked over his shoulder. From the corner of his eyes, he could only make out Spanners’s slumped body.
“Pull up! Pull up!”
Ace snapped his head back to the front. A downwards slope filled his vision. No time to roll. Ace’s instinct tipped the ship down. The canopy all but licked the rock above them while g-force pushed Ace up. Blood rushed to the top of his body. His head throbbed. His lower eyelids were being pulled up, pushing a red edge into his vision. His organs squished his stomach, from where bile spurted into his mouth and sinuses. The ceiling whizzing past closed in. The last of it scraped the canopy.
Ace stopped the descent immediately. Blood trickled from his nose and left a sweet taste on his lips. A thin crack grew under the scratches on the canopy. Ace ran his bare hand over the glass. Luckily, the crack didn’t reach the innermost layer. He could only tell by the way his skin didn’t catch on the lines. He couldn’t feel his fingers. It was freezing in the cockpit, he didn’t realize until now. His grip on the flight controls was sticky, but not cold enough to freeze his skin to the metal. Likely the heat of the engines warming the ship was still keeping them alive.
“Fuck,” Ace spat in a way he didn’t even know he was capable of, the unfamiliar curse barely audible over his still throbbing ears. He dodged a couple of rocks with a well charted path. Waves of debris rolled over each other in front of him like ominous flocks of vultures. He adjusted his course to orbit the city-sized slabs in the eye of the catastrophe. It was best to keep momentum, as he wouldn’t want to be caught dead in a surprise way of some rock with a speed higher than he could accelerate. In time, the debris’ volatile movements would settle into a disc, but Ace and Spanners would have suffocated by then.
“Ace,” Spanners slurred.
A wave of relief washed over Ace. “Sorry for that last stunt, partner.”
“What?” He must have just woken up.
“Just sit tight.”
There had to be a way out. When Ace didn’t have to adjust to the movements of the fractured moonlet, he looked around. At the top of the spherical trap—relative to Ace’s current position and orientation—debris thinned in a conical shape. A storm swirled around it and bombarded the moonlet’s remains, but the oasis should be accessible from the center of the cracked moonlet.
Ace hadn’t flown through a celestial body yet, but there was a first time for everything.
It was dark. Near unending walls shielded the inside of the moonlet from surrounding light, restricting Ace’s view to strips of lit debris seen through the cracked moonlet. Ace flicked a switch. Headlights came on, and Ace could feel a bit less like he was playing Russian roulette with Spanners’s life now.
“I’ll get you out of here, darling,” he muttered to himself more than to Spanners, who hummed nervously.
Vision turned out to be crucial. Every now and then, Ace had to dodge a protruding console or other parts of the construction of the underground base that littered the walls of the moonlet like needles in a pincushion. Dodging a few stray rocks and debris, Ace navigated through an intersection without slowing down. He realized his naivety during the next flythrough. One wall moved up while the other moved down, resembling waterfalls surging in opposite directions. If parts of the moonlet moved like this, they would be crashing into each other as well. Wasn’t that what they felt back when they were fleeing the base? Ace blasted through another intersection and hoped to scrape some residue off the bottom of the barrel that held his luck.
He saw stars—a clean stripe of space at the end of the chasm he was speeding through. The road ahead was long but clear, so he put pressure on the thrust lever. Instead of the stripe widening as he got closer, it slowly thinned. More stars at its edges disappeared in a black v-shape that was sliding upwards. The two parts of the moonlet crashed into each other somewhere ahead and below Ace, and they were about to complete the sandwich.
Ace looked in all directions. The exit ahead was closest. He pushed the throttle to its maximum, then with a click past a safety and into the afterburner configuration. He tilted the ship up gently, but the closing on the horizon kept sliding up faster. He pulled up more, but it still wasn’t enough. More. Ace flexed his legs. Sharp breaths. The horizon escaped him. More! Dust and shards of rock rained on the ship from below. Ace pulled the flight stick as close to himself as he could. The ship almost surfed up the inclined slope that was closing in. Ace’s legs lost strength. Darkness creeped from the edge of his vision. He could see nothing else but the stars ahead. More! Leaving the thrust lever in its furthest position, he pulled the flight stick with both hands. He failed to take in any kind of breath anymore. Loud scraping drowned out the roar of the engines. Ace’s vision darkened completely. Pull up. He could feel nothing but his hands on the stick. Pull up, pull up. Keep pulling up. His hands struggled to fight the pressure. The feeling of metal in his hands slipped further and further away. As Ace made peace with death, he only wished Spanners would make it.
Warning systems tore through darkness like an army of alarm clocks. Ace took in a deep sharp breath of stale air.
“Engine fire left! Engine fire left!” The voice warning system yelled over a cacophony of alarms, each with their own pitch and two tone melody.
Ace pulled his limp arms down from where they were flung by the ship’s current rotation. He put both engines on zero thrust immediately. He filed all alarms by ear into a list—engine fire, hull damage, oxygen shortage, flight control system failure, landing gear malfunction, navigation system error. Ace looked out the canopy—ignoring the madly spinning world—to confirm left engine damage. The whole back half of it was gone. Fuel combustion components must have been wreaking havoc on the mangled insides. Ace flipped a red cover off the left engine killswitch and pressed it. He switched one of the displays to the ship status screen. It showed hull damage along the bottom. Figured. The current of rocks they had sailed through must have torn gashes on the underside and nose, turning the landing gear, vertical landing thrusters and radar to pieces. Ace almost smiled when he saw that cabin pressure stayed stable, even if the oxygen levels left a lot to be desired. He did a visual check on the flight controls. While their left engine had been torn in half, the wing thrusters worked, unlike some on the right frayed wing with a functional engine.
Ace translated all the controls malfunctions into practice in his mind and leveled the ship’s rotation in a matter of seconds. The hell they had escaped from hung far enough above them to release them of its clutches.
“Finally some good news, eh, old pal?” Ace looked over his shoulder.
Spanners’s head and arms swayed limply in the lack of gravity. A crack glinted in the visor of his helmet.
Plenty of time to worry later. They were not out of the woods yet. Ace looked at his wrist. The glorified pager had a tiny built-in display which received the assembly point’s location in real time. The ship had lost its radar, but the inertial navigation system miraculously still worked. Although Ace doubted its precision given the state of affairs, he inputted the coordinates.
The missing engine caused a bit of drift, but Ace compensated for it by constantly adjusting course to comply with directions on the heads-up display. He piloted as calmly and carefully as he breathed.
“Spanners?”
Not a single sound came from the back seat.
Ace narrowed his eyes. He finally had visual confirmation on the assembly point—a large spacecraft carrier. He turned the radio on and tuned it to a designated emergency frequency.
“This is Commander Arnold Rimmer, call sign Wildfire One. Two souls on board.” He swallowed. “Requiring immediate medical assistance. Requesting emergency landing, our landing gear is toast, as is VTOL.”
Ace waited. Just as he was about to repeat the call, a female voice crackled on the radio.
“Wildfire One, this is Evac One. The flight deck is not clear. Proceed to emergency runway.”
Ace adjusted his course to come in from the side. The low oxygen indicator was now accompanied by a carbon dioxide warning. With a loud tone, the fuel shortage joined in. Ace fought fatigue, but not for lack of adrenaline. As he made last corrections to their course, the engine puffed and gave out. Usually, ships without landing gear or vertical landing functionality would park in zero gravity and be let down gently. Not this time. “We’re out of fuel. No way to slow down. Coming in hot.”
“Affirmative. Barricade raised,” the air control attendant responded. “Good luck, Ace,” she added after a pause.
Maneuvering thrusters breathed a few fumes and let Ace make a final adjustment to the direction. With quick heaving breaths, he watched the opening to the hangar close in faster than he would have liked. He had no control over the ship anymore. He might as well have let go of the flight stick, but his subconscious didn’t let him.
A net woven from thick stripes stood like a wall behind the entrance to the hangar. The ship flew through the pressurization forcefield right into it. Their torn nose poked through one of the net’s large holes while the rest of the straps hugged the wings. The ship dragged the arresting gear behind it like a cheese pull. Powerful winches controlled the extension of cables holding the barricade, trying to dose the impact in safer amounts. Inertia pushed Ace against his seatbelt. The winches shrieked. After a deafening blast, the ship tilted downwards with a shake. A steel cable flew forward past the cockpit and slashed the approaching wall like a whip, shooting metal shards against the glass canopy. The now uneven barricade sent the ship down where it hit the ground and slid towards the runway’s end. The jagged metal of its underside screeched on the runway loud enough to make Ace’s ears hurt, but he couldn’t feel it anymore. The quickly approaching wall in front of them transfixed his gaze. Instinctively, Ace pushed himself back into the seat. Pressed his feet forward. Flung his arms out, palms slapping the sloped glass in front of him.
Impact. The straps of his seatbelt cut into his chest and abdomen. His head fell down then slammed back into his headrest. Ace tried to blink away the daze. Through blurred vision and a lace of cracked glass, he saw the wall closer than it should have been given the size of the ship’s nose. His body gradually took on a familiar weight, but his head still weighed too much. Breathing suffocated him while adrenaline delayed loss of consciousness and supplied it with untamable panic. He took off his helmet and let it fall in his lap. It didn’t help. Through habit, he found the switch to open the canopy. Nothing happened. He breathed fast raspy breaths. His hands patted the switches in the cockpit around him while his heart beat like a machine gun. His fingers found a lever. The canopy jettisoned with a loud hiss and landed somewhere on the ship’s back. Ace’s ears popped. He took the deepest breath of his life. His fingers struggled with his seatbelt while he took in livable air from the hangar.
Footsteps. Voices. Ace didn’t care about them. He turned around with his knees on the seat.
“Spanners?”
His slumped head gave no response.
Ace removed Spanners’s helmet and threw it aside. Trickles of blood stained his upper lip.
Brain hypoxia, stroke, suffocation, whiplash… Ace had a lot to choose from for a cause of death, but his fingers on Spanners’s neck told him not to. Pulse. His chest didn’t move much, but Ace could feel air when he put his fingers under Spanners’s bloodied nose.
“Spanners!” His voice sounded foreign to him—higher, choked, raspy. “Wake up, old love.” He cradled Spanners’s head in his hands. “Darling,” he pleaded as he rubbed his thumbs on his cheeks. “Come on.”
Spanners’s neck stiffened. His facial muscles worked, eyes opening into thin slits.
“Dave,” Ace whispered softly like he had only a few times in his life.
Beside them, people climbed the ship’s battered wings and called Ace’s rank. Spanners let out a shallow groan. His narrowed eyes found Ace’s.
“Kris?”
Ace swallowed his heartbeat. “Yes,” he blurted out before his mind caught up with the words. “She’s fine.” Family members hadn’t been allowed on the base and instead stayed on Europa where the project was scheduled to relocate once the technology was more stable. “The boys too. They’re all safe.” Ace heard his own assurance from somewhere far away.
“Commander!” A hand touched his shoulder. It was a medic with her bag already laid out on the ship’s wing beside her.
“I’m fine.”
“Let me check your—”
“Help him!” Ace turned to her. He didn’t know if it was something in his tone or on his face that made her stagger.
Another medic took Spanners’s head from Ace. “Can you hear me, sir?” he asked Spanners while he checked his vitals.
“Kris,” he muttered in a dazed response.
“Do you know where you are?” He shone a light into each of Spanners’s eyes. “Can you tell me your name?”
Spanners replied with an incomprehensible mumble.
“We’ll take care of him, Commander,” the medic next to Ace said as she took something out of her bag.
“I’m fine.” Ace swiped the back of his hand under his nose, smearing the sticky drying blood. He swung his leg over the edge of the cockpit and climbed on the wing. His knees buckled.
“Let me—”
“Lend a hand to your colleague instead, would you kindly?” Ace’s legs gave out. He fell on his knees and elbows. A splatter of blood bloomed on the metal below him sooner than his taste realized it came from his mouth.
“Commander!”
With a rough but successful landing behind them, Ace’s adrenaline collected the paycheck and ran. Left to its own devices, his body was finally allowed to shut down.
A man awoke. He blinked his sight into focus and registered his surroundings—a large room, sharp overhead lights, many occupied hospital cots. His legs, body, and hands. Recollection came back like flicking on a light switch and brought with it everything he was supposed to feel.
Ace wished the post-awakening amnesia had given him at least a minute of respite. He pushed off his elbows to sit. Nothing hurt too bad, but he struggled all the same. Judging by the zeal of his weariness and the unchanged set of clothes, he wasn’t out for long or for major reasons.
With no one monitoring him, Ace helped himself to the clipboard hanging at the foot of his bed. Fatigue caused by physical strain, ruptured stomach ulcers, g-force induced bruising, ruptured capillaries in face and left eye. Ace gradually registered everything he read on the paper. Red dots drew maps on his arms. His cheeks were swollen, thanks to his moment of inattention and consequent tilt down. The bloodshot eye he couldn’t see must have looked worse than it was. Nothing he couldn’t walk off, which is exactly what he did.
He slipped past a doctor making rounds between the cots, but a nurse by the door tried to stop him. “Sir, we still need to test you for brain injury.”
“I’ll be back.” He waved her off. Then something freshly exposed in him made him stop. “I promise.” Only then he continued.
This rescue spacecraft carrier grew to sizes larger than its military relatives, adapted to house additional specialized facilities such as the field hospital. Aside from the room he had woken up in, Ace glanced into all the others but didn’t find Spanners.
Only one other option came to mind, so he headed to a common area adjacent to the main hangar. It was a large hall equipped with ample seating, water tanks, and stands handing out food, blankets, and other necessities. A long rank of payphones occupied one of its walls. Ace walked through the extensive waiting lines until he spotted a short man in a baggy flight suit at the very head of one of them.
He stopped for a moment, watching Spanners tap his foot impatiently with his hands on his hips and his head characteristically tilted. He suddenly struck Ace as a man he shouldn’t intrude on. Ace gave in to temporary hesitation he wouldn’t entertain before they left the base, before he almost got Spanners killed, before he was put back in his place by Spanners himself. It was selfish to expect that while waking up from unconsciousness after a thousand near misses, Spanners would be thinking of him. Of course Spanners’s mind would instead push to the forefront his actual dearest. Only to Ace, it was Spanners who was too dear to leave alone in this whole mess.
“Spanners?” Ace’s speech lacked its bravado even if he managed to brave closer.
“Ace!” Spanners turned on his heel. He looked better than Ace felt, with only a fresh bruise on his forehead, lighter swelling, and definitely more spirit.
Ace desperately wished Spanners would fling himself at him. That he would squeeze the air out of his lungs and bury his head in his chest. That Ace would sway under the weight and chuckle as he wrapped his arms around him.
Spanners staggered instead. “Are you okay?”
Ace shrugged. “You should have seen the other guy,” he quipped out of habit.
“I’m the other guy.” He stepped closer. “Technically at least,” he whispered as he inspected Ace’s face. “And you go through this daily?”
Ace could say a lot of things. All part of the job. Daily bread. A regular Tuesday in the cockpit. “Not quite like that, no,” he whispered instead.
Spanners didn’t give him that coveted look of admiration Ace was so fond of. It was something less and yet lodged itself deeper in Ace’s heart than he’d like to admit.
“Shoulda been you wearing this.” Spanners tugged at the collar of the flight suit.
“And let you end up even worse than me?” Ace looked away. Not my style, old sausage, he should have added. “I’d rather be pushing up daisies,” he muttered.
“What?”
“I just came here to make sure you’re okay.”
“Some bad air and a lil’ concussion, the doctors say.”
With Spanners’s seat tentatively in a space it wasn’t designed to be, he must have hit his head in some nasty and unlucky way. He could have been dead. They both could. Maybe they even should. Ace had been good at this for so long he forgot what a near miss felt like. The relationship between a pilot and his ship was not a guaranteed happy ever after. It was a threatening entanglement not for the faint of heart with a nasty break up lurking around every takeoff. But still, the shrew could be tamed with gentle flowers and soft loving—humility in the face of one’s skill and respect to the strength of one’s ship.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Spanners frowned. “You saved my life.”
“I’m…” Ace didn’t even know what he wanted to say. Something fitting. Something that made sense. Something that perfectly contextualized his sense of failure and misguided feelings. There had to be a quip for that.
Spanners yelped. He pushed past a man walking away from the payphone and took the handset, patting his thighs with his other hand. “I was sure I had some… Oh.” He raised his eyebrows at Ace.
Ace slipped his hands into the pockets of Spanners’s boilersuit he was still wearing. Spare change rattled in his hands. He handed a few coins to Spanners.
“Neither of us was officially accounted for in the evacuation.” Spanners’s bracelet peeked from under his sleeve as he loaded dollarpounds into the slot. “If the suits get to Krissie first, she’ll kill me for real,” he groaned. “I’ve been waiting here for hours.” He dialed his home number.
Ace nodded. “Say hi to the missus and the boys for me.”
Spanners nodded with a tentative smile. Ace paused to watch Spanners turn away from him then did the same.
“Oh, Ace! I almost forgot!”
Ace looked back to see Spanners with his hand over the transmitter. A beautiful radiant smile bloomed on his lips, lighting up sparks in his eyes.
“Thanks, big man.”
That was all it took for Ace to realize he was an idiot.
By the time he moved, the line had already connected. “Kris—”
Ace spun Spanners around and embraced him hastily enough to pin them against the wall. His fingers dug into Spanners’s back, knuckles scraping the cold metal behind them. Spanners let out a surprised choke.
Kris’s staticky voice came from the handset Spanners held near his head. “Dave? Is that you? Everything alright?”
“I just called to say…”
Ace buried his head deeper behind Spanners’s neck. “You’re welcome,” he mumbled against his skin.
“Dave?”
“I love you,” Spanners blurted out. Ace’s ear caught words meant for the transmitter. He smiled and hugged Spanners tighter.
Kris reciprocated the words and followed up with concerned questions. Spanners struggled to get a single word out. “Give me a moment,” he stuttered finally.
“Someday I’ll take you on a proper ride,” Ace said. “Maybe when this project is done and behind us, we could go somewhere. The two of us. To just spend time together. Because…”
He couldn’t get the last part out even with Spanners’s free hand placed firmly on his back. The brush with death should have made it easier, but it didn’t. No matter how inconsequential the outcome would be with an already given misinterpretation of the words, consideration for others held too much power over Ace and would smother him until the person who should have heard the confession didn’t walk the face of any of the planets in this solar system anymore.
Ace had made peace with that. He forced himself to. It was the right thing. The only thing he couldn’t do was remove himself from the equation. Even if he had the guts to do it, Spanners wouldn’t let him. Ace’s biggest mistake was falling for him late enough in their friendship that he couldn’t let go without hurting him, so he chose to bear the other side of that hurt himself. His broken heart was only held together by Spanners’s unconditional friendship. And that alone was a beautiful enough force to make all the pain in the world worth it.
“You’re my best mate, Dave.” Ace murmured into his neck.
“Arn, man,” Spanners whispered. “You’re mine too.”
Ace couldn’t help a surrendered half-chuckle, half-grumble. Spanners never told him the same words he would tell Kris, not even with the platonic meaning. Maybe he waited for Ace to say them first. Maybe he deemed them an obvious fact not worthy of discussing. Whatever the case, Ace welcomed that status quo. The ambiguity of the words would leave him too bare, too open to letting someone he held dear hurt him unwittingly and repeatedly.
Ace peeled himself off him. His hands stayed on Spanners’s shoulders, heavy as rocks. It was nothing like the idealistic hugs he had often imagined.
“Ace?”
He had to sniff. Did that mean he had been crying? His numb face and strained eyesight failed to let him know. He turned away to wipe his face. Not that he could get much of his dignity back. Not that he had any left anyway.
Spanners touched his arm. His other hand held the phone muffled to his chest. “You’ve never been to Earth, right?”
Ace looked at him. He shook his head.
“Tell you what. Once I make the fastest ship in the universe, and you break the speed of light, you’ll take us to my home city. We’ll be heroes, and everyone will be pouring us drinks for free. I’ll take you on a pub crawl so long we’ll forget our own names. Just us. What do you think?”
Ace thought he wanted to give Spanners a long cathartic kiss. “Sounds like a plan, old love.”
Spanners winked. “Lunch later? I saw them handing out some of that delicious dehydrated space food over there.”
Ace nodded. “I ran out of a check-up. I’ll see you after.”
“Come back healthy, big man.”
“For you…” Ace let a genuine smile lit up his face. His budding crow’s feet were invisible on the swollen skin. “I’ll come back reborn.”
Spanners slapped him on the shoulder and put the phone back to his ear.
Ace backed up a few tentative steps. Spanners fell into an animated conversation with his wife. He laughed and apologized, made pained and affectionate expressions, and showered the receiver in sweet nothings. Ace’s smile mellowed.
Corridors led him back towards the field hospital. As he passed direction signs, he made a short detour to follow one that caught his eye.
The emergency runway was open. With no crises on the horizon, Wildfire was allowed to recuperate right in the hangar. Mechanics swarmed around its wreck like a squad of ants. It was clear of the barricade and had been towed away from the wall. Ace didn’t expect the team to get it up and running then and there, but the dedicated mechanics were clearing the damaged engines and leveling out the torn hull to get it into a condition that would at least withstand manipulation.
“You sure did a number on her, Commander,” a familiar face from the team approached Ace.
“And she did a number on me.” He raised his eyebrows. “I’d say we’re even.”
The mechanic chuckled. “We’re lucky you got the fruits of our labor out of there at all. Thank you.”
Ace gave him a curt nod. The mechanic turned back to the ship and barked a few orders at his subordinates.
Even without the experimental fuel, the ship kicked like an untamed horse. She was strong, sturdy, ferocious, and most of all tough. It was hard to give up, sitting in that cockpit. The perfect partner to break a few laws of physics with.
And break laws he would. Then once Ace emerged on the other side of that endeavor in a world that no longer made sense, maybe then would be the ideal opportunity to go on a proper vacation with the love of his life. Because only in that strange reality could Ace allow himself the luxury of satisfying his neglected feelings.
Ace dropped down by the wall and watched the ground crew take care of his new ship that would take him to that kind of world.