Chameleon in Chrome Ch. 01

In the pro-military society in which they lived, to open her mouth and complain was to begin a process that she just couldn't win, since she'd basically used Ryan from the view of any judge who liked his or her position and wanted to keep it.

"Wait, Ryan, can we just talk?" she'd said, but he ignored her, picking up his duffel bag to leave the room. She'd followed him all the way through the apartment, trying to explain something which he understood perfectly. Finally, he'd just stopped and turned around.

"Look," he'd said, "I understand, Sarah. I really do. If it was me in your place, now that I think about it, I don't know if I'd have been able to keep it in my pants either. Anyway, I'm not going to go after the money. It's all yours, all you need to do is sign the documents and you're set. You take care of yourself."

He'd turned to go then, but he heard her voice from behind him as she spoke through the very first of her tears, "You're lying, Ryan. You'd never do that. I know you."

Ryan didn't turn around because he couldn't.

"Yeah," he'd sighed heavily, "I am."

He was also fooling himself about her choking on her cereal. Sarah had been the reason that he'd done all of this, chosen this path. All that he'd ever dreamed of was to live with Sarah after he'd gotten done earning the money for them to live on happily ever after. Now he was ten years into a fifteen year career with nothing at the end of it. The options were limited to one, as far as he could tell.

He placed another call and requested immediate redeployment as he walked out and down the long hallway. He left the rest of his life there and was on a flight out the next day.

He didn't want to do the whole broken-hearted husband thing, though to that point, he'd been faithful. He was just trying to get what he could for himself, needing to do this since Sarah had taken all of the savings that he'd managed to build up over ten years. With only a few years of military-grade employment left, he had to hustle to make some money for the rest of his life, if case nothing else worked out.

He never went back to Earth again. On the money that he'd be able to scrape together, he couldn't afford it.

After five high-risk tours back-to-back for the higher pay rate and hazardous-duty pay, Ryan left the service and took a year off to unwind, living as frugally as he could before signing on as security and shuttle crew on this deep-space run. His one extravagance had been to fly his parents to where he'd lived for that year to visit with him.

His military specialties fit really well for this job, they let him retain his rank, since the structure was the same, and he figured that one run out and another back in, and he'd be set, even better than he'd have been with Sarah. These trips paid like crazy in exchange for the personal cost to most of the people who did them. His parents had died sometime during his second "year" while he'd slept. Many more years had gone by for them. It was a long haul on a fast freighter. That velocity compressed time, hence the pay.

And unless she was sleeping in some cryo chamber herself onboard a luxury cruise to one of the pleasure worlds, living on the money that he'd had to kill to earn, McCallum liked the rather pleasant thought that Sarah was now dead -- or at least very old, along with everyone he knew while he was still only in his early-thirties.

There were times when he'd actually felt that coldly toward Sarah, but mostly, he'd never gotten over her at all. He'd just wanted an end to the possibility that he'd ever see her again, somehow or somewhere. That would have been more than he could stand. This way, it was out of the question.

What had happened with Mandy had been a bonus. They only saw each other for about a week a year, but he liked the voluptuous blonde for more than the obvious reasons. After the third year, he found himself with some feelings for her -- but that was over with now, and he just kept to their original agreement.

Without meaning to, he'd accidentally found out that Mandy had volunteered for triple-duty and was awakened every four months to his twelve.

She was screwing Ryan for a week, and then months later, she was alone with another member of his detachment for a week so that he could rail her as well. He just didn't know the identity of the other party in all of this. Somewhere else in her busy year, Mandy was with somebody else, a third person.

He'd never said a thing to her about it, since he didn't want to mess up the arrangement. It didn't matter, really, since they hadn't exactly sworn to be monogamous or anything. He'd just assumed that he was the only one that Mandy was fucking, that was all. He just decided that he was something of a fool who was not equipped to have relationships without at least something going on behind his back.

He was still wondering about what he'd heard in Berkov's voice.

"Hey," he said, "You didn't answer me. What's up, Mandy?"

"I'm fucking busy and living a nightmare up here at the moment, "Berkov replied a little frantically. "We're off-course and have been for almost five months as far as I can tell! I don't know what happened, but it looks like Danny and Harris had some kind of a fight in here. The Nav station is shot to shit, though I don't get why I wasn't pulled out of cryo then over a system alarm.

They're both long-dead along with the rest of the crew. From what I can tell from the life-support display, you and I are the only ones left alive on this thing. I've got two rotted corpses floating around up here with me, and I can't decide if I'm supposed to shit myself or throw up again.

Where's your cryo chamber?" she asked him.

"My chamber is in the second bank," Ryan said, wondering why she'd need to know this now. She'd never asked before. From the pause that he heard, he wondered if she knew that there even was a second bank of chambers in security.

He listened to the quaver in her voice. Ryan thought that Berkov sounded as though she was having a hell of a time holding herself together as well as whatever else was going on. Since his comm system was still on, he heard her distress call over the company channel, over and over -- as if somebody was just going to head on over to pick them up by six o'clock. He knew that wasn't going to happen.

It would take about seven months for the signal to reach the nearest shipping company post.

While she was stating their position, he used the time to head back toward the security section. He wanted to get a look at what was going on from the displays and logs there.

What he saw was more puzzling than it was helpful. Someone had loaded up a rifle and shot up the other cryo chambers, killing the people inside. It came to him as something of a strange feeling to discover his incredible luck. Whoever had done this must have forgotten to check the chambers on the other side around back. He'd been the only occupant there, and when he'd been awakened, he'd just had his shower, ate, and suited up, walking out to begin his normal job without looking back, and with the cryo chambers closed, he hadn't smelled anything.

As he worked his way forward again, he began to think this out. Danny Aldridge was the other security detachment member that the pilot was involved with. When Ryan had put it together a year ago, he'd scanned the system logs and noted the presence of two active humans at those times. A check in his detachment duty logs showed that Danny was the one who'd been awake then. Today, he accessed the flight crew's logs again as well.

Harris was the flight commander. Ryan read in his log that during one of his routine and random awakenings, he'd read the cryo logs as well and noted what was going on. His notation to have his chamber wake him the next time that Berkov was awake to sort this out told Ryan a lot. Somehow this had gone from a little fucking on the side to something deep into stupid. By dumb luck, it had been Danny who was awake at the time and paid the price.

Apparently, Harris hadn't thought about the second cryo bank either.

Ryan didn't have everything figured out just yet, but it was beginning to look to him as though Harris himself was doing Mandy at some time, and there was nothing as deadly out here in the long silence of space as a triangle -- and this was now a what? A parallelogram?

Berkov was sawing her life short by going into and out of cryo so often, if this was what it was, but he guessed that Mandy liked to have a pretty full dance card.

There was a tortured silence now from the comm system. Mandy had finished her transmission. Ryan strained to listen. He stopped moving so that he could concentrate on what he was hearing.

She was straining, moving, fighting with something up there as she made emergency changes in their configuration.

The decking tilted a little under his feet and it caused a thrill of uncertainty to shoot up his spine as he fell. What had begun as a routine wake-up out of cryogenic sleep for the annual security and soundness rating for his shift rotation turned into a nightmare for Ryan in that second, because it shouldn't be happening -- not this far out from their destination. It signalled a rather ominous change. He shouldn't have been able to notice the inertia of whatever change she made.

Mandy had actuated the internal gravity systems. He heard her breath as she worked something frantically. What she'd done had brought him to his knees for a moment, but he was fine now. He guessed that the corpses up on the flight deck had stopped floating around.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked.

She didn't answer. He heard her crying a little as she prayed in Russian.

Ryan had left security and had been working his way for the last few minutes to the ladder that would take him up to where she was. He didn't know why, but it suddenly seemed to him to be the right thing to do to get toward the cargo shuttle flight deck instead. He turned and with gravity now present, he ran all the way.

He wanted to see what it was that she was seeing, since she didn't respond to his calls much. He wondered if she might be the one who'd gone a little nuts a few months ago. He hadn't checked the last part of her cryo log and now wished that he had.

The freighter itself wasn't made to actually land anywhere. It was made to spend its entire working life where it had been built -- in space. Mostly, it was a very strong backbone studded with cargo hold latches, huge fuel tanks, racks of fuel cells, and engines. If it wasn't going to dock with a station, the cargo shuttle was what brought loads up from the surface and back down to whatever world the port of call of the moment happened to be. For this trip, there hadn't been any other cargo holds attached yet, and all that they carried for cargo was already in the shuttle's hold to save moving it around on arrival.

The shuttle pilot belonged to the security detachment, and he was now dead in his cryo chamber along with his co-pilot there in hers next to him.

Other than his being there to handle the load-outs and act as a deterrent for hijackers, Ryan was the back-up shuttle pilot. The back-up shuttle co-pilot was also dead.

Ryan strapped himself in and activated his cameras. He saw a planet, or rather; he saw a portion of a planet since it more than filled his camera's field of view. Another display showed the feed from the main flight deck where Mandy was, above and hundreds of yards ahead of him. She was obviously working her ass off dealing with too many things at once.

He heard audio alarms and warnings from the computers.

"Shuttle to Flight Deck; are you ever going to tell me what the fuck is going on?"

Mandy sobbed as she cursed, "We're caught in the gravitational pull of this fucking planet. It was already pulling us for I don't know how long. All that I can get from the Nav system from pulling what's left of the data to my screens is that this thing's got some oxygen and it's temperate. I can't see through the heat of the atmospheric flare yet.

We're too heavy like this! We're already too fucking close from here." she cried out. "I can't get this pig straightened out. We're just falling!"

"Listen," he said tersely, "I'm in the shuttle now. Get your ass down here and we'll drop off. The ship wasn't made to fly in any kind of atmosphere. You stand a better chance with me, Mandy. Get down here while there's still time!"

He looked at his flight instruments, seeing that this was bad and getting worse by the second. They weren't in any kind of attitude for flight and they were falling fast. The rate of descent was off the scale and he saw that the temperature of the ceramic tiles which were to act as a heat shield for the shuttle's belly was headed to the point where they'd just fry off. They weren't made for this.

"Drop the load!" she yelled.

He could barely understand her, but he got it. The load to this point in the trip was mostly machinery destined for the mines far out at their first destination. Ryan's hands flew as he configured the drop. Four seconds later, he jettisoned the contents of the cargo hold of the shuttle and closed the doors.

He had an ominous feeling about this and he switched on the pumps that would pull fuel to his tanks, but then he saw that he was full anyway and shut them off. He activated the quick disconnects. Things were already glowing hot. He didn't need to spray fuel onto his bird.

Ryan looked at the monitor which showed Mandy's face. She didn't look relieved at all.

"Not enough to get my nose down!" she shouted.

"Get down here!" he shouted back, but she shook her head.

At that instant, Ryan saw what Mandy was thinking. She was dead wrong, but he couldn't believe it anyway.

"No, Mandy," he said, "Don't."

"Don't do it."

He watched her look over at the monitor where his image was displayed right under the little cam that allowed him to see her.

"I have to, Ryan," she said, "Without the shuttle's weight; I ought to be able to get my nose down. I've got plenty of fuel to get back on course and make it the rest of the way. I just need to reach escape velocity. There's no time for you to get up here to me."

"That won't work," Ryan said, "You don't even know what that value is on this planet. You can't calculate the mass of the planet and the gravitational potential energy that this ship has here without a lot of computation that we don't have time for. The main ship isn't meant to handle stresses like that anyway.

You're running out of time. Get out of that chair and run for the ladder. Get down here and run back to me. I'll have the hatch open and waiting for you. Hurry!"

She shook her head. "And go where? The shuttle doesn't have the engines to make it anywhere on its own. At best, you can make it out of the atmosphere and float until you get pulled down again."

He wanted to plead with her, but he could already see it in her face. She'd made her decision. He heard alarms from his own systems indicating that the locks on the latches which held the shuttle tightly to the underside of the main ship were being actuated. Ryan toggled the shuttle's power from the ship to his own supply. The hydraulic pumps which powered his control surfaces were coming online.

"Don't, Mandy," he said, "Please don't."

He saw her look at her monitor once before she looked away. Ryan watched her hand reach to her left -- and he knew what she would do next as well.

His monitor went dark as she cut the connection.

Ryan actuated the retraction of the protective covers over his windscreen. He had to get the shuttle away before she firewalled the engines or he'd be fried. The covers pulled downward. All that he could see was the flare of the atmosphere glowing around everything.

He had no time to think about it. His hands flew over his own console as he watched the pump pressures come up. It just hit the green when he felt the downward lurch and thanked God that he'd had the presence of mind to fasten his harness. The shuttle was falling and without his harness, he'd have been smashed against the ceiling.

She'd cut him loose and he was in free-fall away from her.

Ryan nudged the nose down and feathered the speed brake panels so that they extended just a little. He wanted to slow a bit without having them rip off. He saw his airspeed dip a little and then he retracted the brake panels as he eased the nose down a little more. The drop in his speed and his distance from the ship caused the atmospheric flare in his windscreen to disappear and he could at least see where he was flying now.

When he saw the ship above him pulling away, he slid and rolled to his right gently. Eight seconds later, he straightened out again on a parallel heading and watched as the main ship's engines flared brightly.

Mandy was pouring it on, giving it everything that she had to stop her descent as the nose levelled a little to get her speed up in at least a straight line as she tried to leave him behind. He knew that she'd try to stand that long thing almost on its tail to power out of sight, leaving him to his fate here all alone.

Ryan watched from a mile away, knowing that the frame of that long beast had never been designed for something like this, and already heated by the friction of this atmosphere, there was even less strength to it.

The long frame began to fold itself in half backward to tumble and disintegrate for a second before it exploded in a blinding flash.