The Spiteful (Trapped.2)

I landed on my feet, somehow. My hand was resting on a chunk of rock to steady myself. I didn’t remember moving, at all, or the gravity returning to the moon’s normal.

The first thing I thought was that the pain was gone. My head wasn’t throbbing anymore, and my mind was clear. Everything moved smoothly in a way it hadn’t in years. It was like I was high on something. I wasn’t struggling to think through poor sleep or long hours.

My radio crackled, and I heard the voice of another human being. Heller.

“Gannon? Gannon, do you copy? Are you still alive in there?”

I let loose a breath of relief, and keyed my radio back.

“You haven’t gotten rid of me yet,” I drawled.

“Oh, that’s a relief.” He sighs finally. “We’ve been trying to contact you for like, twenty minutes. Our scans say there’s a lot of rock in the way. We’ve got a crew digging through, but it’ll be a minute. There’s a lot of rock on you right now.”

“How many minutes?”

“... The stresses on the surrounding rock is pretty bad. If we’re going to do this without causing a worse cave-in, I’ll say you might be in there a day or two.”

“About that,” I say. “My recycler’s toast.”

He pauses.

“And I had a crack in my visor for who-knows how long.” I add, injecting cheer into my voice that wasn’t really there. “Had to make an adhoc repair, but based on my math I’ve got maybe an hour. Or two, if I get really good at holding my breath.”

“... Don’t fucking lie to me, Vree.” He says.

“Trust me. I wish I was.” I add.

“... I’ll knock my head against Lin’s. We’ll figure something out.” He says.

“Yeah. I might have some ideas too.” I tell him. “I do have access to the Driller’s innards.”

“Okay.” He says, though I can tell from the tone in his voice that he doesn’t think I can do anything. “I’ll keep in touch when we figure something out.”

Then, radio silence. I knew Heller and Lin would try and figure something out… but I wasn’t going to put my life in someone else’s hands.

I would survive.

I glanced back down to the curved metal. With the stalactites, it was able to create an accidental graviton loop, to create the ‘anomaly’ Lin had been looking for. If I could do the same thing, by design… 

How gravtech worked- the specifics- wasn’t really public knowledge. I’d poked into a bit of it, the stuff I could access, but somehow I could just sort of tell how the loop was created. How the caelumite was pulled in by the artifact siphoning against the moon’s magnetic field, until it formed the loop. Once that loop was formed, the charge built and built over centuries, getting stronger and stronger.

And that’s without the direct application of electricity.

I wasn’t just a technician. I was an engineer. And engineers solve problems.

With that strange clarity in my mind, I picked up the chunk of metal. As long as my arm and a few inches thick, it was much too light to be real titanium.

“Hey, uh,” I said. “I’ve got an idea. Bring down the zero-G tools, and make sure the guys have boostpacks.”

“What?” Heller asks. “What do you mean?”

“Making sure gravity isn’t a problem.”

“What? The hell are you going to do that?”

The curved piece of metal tingled in my hand. A part of my brain worried it might have been radioactive, but a different, separate part of my brain just knew it wasn’t. Just like it knew it was even more resonant than Caelumite. Just how the properties of gravtech- the things I hadn’t known, the equations and specifics- bloomed in my mind like flowers on a sunny day.

“I’m going to make a gravdrive in a cave. Out of scraps.” I grinned, and made my way over to the driller.

All I had was a bunch of scraps of metal, some wire, and a quickly dwindling air supply. But I’d make it work.

=====

It wasn’t pretty.

It looked like the driller- what’s left of it- had disgorged most of its insides. The back half was still trapped under the rubble, and I couldn’t really do anything with the drill itself, but the mess of wires, control circuits, and other technical viscera was pulled completely out of the thing.

It may have been made by the lowest bidder for the cheapest price, and I’d definitely violated its warranty, but If this worked I’d never call the driller a piece of shit again.

Tangled in the mess of things was the curved piece of metal. It was nearly indestructible, as far as I could tell, and it definitely wasn’t any of the elements I was familiar with. Some kind of alloy, perhaps, or one of the many new elements we’ve found since humanity left earth. All that really mattered was that it would work the I thought it would.

It was a strong impression. I wasn’t sure how I knew it. Could be the brain damage, the concussion. Could be that I’d had some kind of induced epiphany like the Universalists liked to claim. Or maybe it was the last hope of a man who didn’t want to die.

I’d find out in a second.

“So, wait. Explain this to me again.”

“I don’t have the ability to program shit on this side,” I said. “So instead, I had Isabelle punch it all into a computer, and then I want you guys to transmit it.”

“Over the radios?”

“Low frequency. ELF if need be, it’ll get through the rock better.” You say. “Then I’ll hook my radio in. Computer runs the software, beams it over to me, pushes the instructions into my grav drive. Then we’ll have an inverted gravity sphere. Theoretically. Then it should be as easy as, well, shifting the rocks aside.”

“This is crazy. We’ll be out of contact if you pull out your radio. You sure this is what we want to try? The laser’s about halfway through.”

“I’ve got half an hour left.” I responded. “It’s this or suffocate. Izzy?”

“I typed it in all like you said. The compiler didn’t have any problems.” Isabelle responded. She was the only other technician here. Well, the only other heavy equipment specialist.

I’d taken her shift on the Driller today. Bet it in a game of Caravan.

Today would have been a lot different if I’d won.

“Good,” I said. “Heller, Lin. I’m going to disconnect. Give me… three minutes on my mark. to hook it up and get clear. Then start the broadcast. Remember, ELF frequency. Channel three.”

“Got it.”

“Ready on our side.”

“Good luck.” Heller sighed. For such a relaxed guy, he was taking this pretty seriously.

“Mark.” I said.

Then, without any hesitation, I ripped the radio receiver module out of the side of my helmet.

There’s a hiss and a pop from my microphone and speaker- and then I was deaf. The radio module had hanging wires dangling from it. I quickly scraped the plastic off of them, and twined them into the wires hanging out of the driller’s control circuit. With my oversized, brutish gloves, it was easier said than done. Especially considering I didn’t have any tools.

I slapped the final bit of damp mud around the three sets twined-together wires, and then twisted the dial on my radio. Carefully, I double-checked and triple-checked that it was on the right frequency, the right channel.

Then I flicked it on.

The power lit up… and I backed away. For all I knew, the tangle of wires and mess of parts was a bomb waiting to go off. If the curved chunk of metal actually was titanium, all it would do is fizzle and burn out like someone had shoved a staple into a fusebox.

I ducked behind the stalagmite. Held my breath. Waited.

The junkpile pretending to be a grav drive shuddered. It sparked. The driller’s headlamp flickered on and off for a moment.

Then, the control circuit flicked on. I could see LED lights flashing, flickering. The software, the programming I’d painstakingly had Isabelle transcribe for me… It was working.

The piece of metal sparked. It shuddered. It should be charging, right now. Once the loop spun up, the density was high enough-

Then the driller gave a sound like a cough. The lights shut off. The assembly went dark. My blood turned to ice in my veins.

Before the despair could set in, though, just as quickly as it had shut off, it suddenly flickered, light again.  Trickles of white light- charged graviton bleedover- started drifting in the air around the curved chunk of metal, the engravings gleaming with an inner light.

Boom.

A pulse of energy blew dust and rocks away from it. Scattered chunks of stone ricocheted around the cavern. I ducked behind my cover, and then looked back at the grav drive. 

A soap-bubble of alien, exotic energy filled the section around the cave in. Objects were rattling in place, and the stones themselves were shifting, pushed away- upward- from the drive. The driller started to list, slightly, and the rubble slammed upward, into the ceiling. Everything was being shoved away from the drive. Anything above went down. Anything below went up. Just as designed.

Slowly, light started to peek through underneath the rubble and rocks. As they shifted and ‘fell’ upwards. I could see into the rest of the mineshaft. I could see the tools and equipment.

There it was. A window. Two feet of space.

With my body and my pack, I wouldn’t be small enough. I wouldn’t fit.

But I couldn’t hesitate, either. The device was smoking. The wires were burning, and the grav drive was affecting the cables as well- pulling them apart.

I didn’t have time.

It reminded me of Toliman. Of scything claws. Horrifying screeches.

I couldn’t hesitate then, either.

I got to my feet and charged toward the hole. I ripped the hose out of my suit, and all of the alarms my helmet had started to blare. With one hand, I scooped a rock off the ground. With the other, I ripped the pack off my back, its hose dangling free. I slammed the rock into the water reclaimer, and it started to hiss, water dribbling out of it. Then, with another savage smack, I punctured a hole into the coolant loop- and winged the thing into the soap-bubble, into the grav drive’s zone of influence.

The pack slid forward like a puck, skipping and rumbling across the floor of the cavern. Water scattered over, freezing nearly instantly as the endothermic fluid sprayed out and activated, turning the water into ice.

I followed it. I threw myself to the ground before slamming into- and through- the soap bubble. Gravity slammed down on my body, pinning me down, as I slid along the makeshift ice path. The pressure was too hard for me to even move, and it pushed me down hard enough that I was starting to worry the friction would be too much.

My leg slammed hard into a chunk of rock. I could feel something scraping along my back, but I just kept my helmet down, as far down as it could get. The ice squealed against my visor, one of the only sounds I could hear over the alarms.

Then, the pressure quit. Arms grabbed my shoulders, pulled me to my feet. Heller examined me, worried, and slammed a hose into my helmet.

In the reflection of his visor, I saw a blue flash from the crevice below the cave-in- and the soap bubble simply ceased to be.

The ceiling rumbled, the rock burying the cavern that had been my prison, and the crew dragged me away. Toward the elevator. Toward the surface.