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Note: Literary fans might be interested to know that the name and
inspiration for the space station in the Ghost Ship campaign (Rodina)
comes from a screenplay drafted by cyberpunk author William Gibson
for the third installment in the Alien saga.
Patwardhan thinks she's dreaming. She's on the Korea, shining her
light into the dark. Pressure suits hang like gutted corpses between
lockers like coffins. Explosion. Flash and light, the scream of
vaporized predators, Vitelli's failing voice. Booths is a heap on the
floor, his heavy legs blocking the hatch. Gotta close that door,
Booths. Move it, trooper! Booths is out. Maybe dead. Pull him in.
Haul him. Can't breathe in this place.
PoppPP! Noise like a turbine between her ears. A tornado picks her up
and hurls her against a wall, a tremendous energy pulling her under,
out out out out The hatch closes on its own! The vacuum pulled it
shut tight. Decompression. Hull breech. C deck. Pulling on a suit,
zip-zip, hiss of oh two in the helmet, breathe deeply, feels tingly.
Shove Booths' legs into another suit, way too small goddamnit check
his pulse. Another suit. Dizzy. Deep breaths. Shove Booths' legs into
the suit. Check his pulse. Gloves. Check his pulse. Helmet. Air.
Let's get out of here.
The hatch opens on its own. A figure floats inside. Leon, in a
pressure suit, marine gray, oversized and overfunctional. He drifts
in, holding what looks like a noose at the end of a coil of slender
rope. "It's okay," he says. The comm doesn't seem to work. She's
reading his lips. "We're getting out of here." Drifting closer. Can't
see his face. Patwardhan feels something yank on her hair, inside her
suit! A slimy claw closes around her neck. Leon's face, behind the
bubble of his helmet, is all dripping teeth and black, eyeless
monstrosity.
His name is Booths and he has a bad headache. Body feels like it's
been laying under a tank. Otherwise, not so bad. The rest is only
meat, after all. Crutches have to go, though. And the dress uniform?
On this fucking tinkertoy heap floating around an oversized galactic
fart? He could just about ring Leon's neck, if the mechanical bastard
hadn't saved his life back on the Korea.
Booths doesn't remember any of it. He remembers counting thirty-six
stitches and eight staples in his side, though, and how about a liter
of blood went down with the lukewarm shower. Everything on Rodina's
like that. A little cold and clammy. Just too warm to be
uncomfortable. The chill is internal, but also partly external. The
view out any window is either cold black space or frozen methane
clouds. Either way you look, you kind of shiver.
Wouldn't be so bad if that big planet seemed to curve a little. Damn
thing's so big it just takes up half of the sky and seems to stretch
forever, almost appears to curve BACK IN on you. Too big. Some nurse
mentioned little microbes living in the upper atmosphere. So fucking
important they built a space station and moved three hundred people
into the depths of space to study them. Turns out they don't do much
special. Survive on pure methane, shit out hydrogen. Drift in huge
swarms, clinging to each other, whipped around in the winds, whole
vast spiral galaxies of them down there below the first few layers of
clouds.
The Gaines has a nice way of blotting out a big chunk of that blue-
white world, giving Booths a reassuring deaths-head sillouette,
something concrete to latch onto, ripe with ATAC missiles, guided
nukes, a faster-than-light drive to get him the hell out of this
place.
Booths can't remember when he picked up smoking. Somebody handed him
a cigarette a couple hours after he arrived, and he accepted. Been
chaining ever since. Sent the nurses to out to get them. Now he's
trying to balance himself on a pair of aluminum crutches, in full
indigo-blue dress uniform, tapping off the end of his cigarette.
"Bong-bong" goes the door chime, and in comes Leon with some broad in
a khaki uniform, badge, gun, nightstick. Kind of divorced-looking,
intense, introduced as "Sergeant Healy." Cordial nods, get down to
business. Leon: "The colony administrators wanted to speak with you
as soon as possible. The Gaines is docked. The Korea is tethered, but
no one's been allowed to enter. If there's anyone still alive on that
ship, we need to make an effort to find them. I was only able to
rescue you and Private Patwardhan. Do you think anybody could still
be alive on the Korea, private?"
"They're all fucking dead," he blurts out, because he believes it.
Except Booths can't remember any of his fellow marines actually being
killed, per se. The aliens just kind of TOOK them. Snatched them up
like prey and withdrew into the shadows. It's easy and comforting for
Booths to think of McKenzie or Vitelli being munched on in some dark
corner, out of sight. But he begins to imagine other scenarios, much
more gruesome and disturbing.
Wake up to a hospital room. Of course. Private room, some flowers
(Booths' irregular handwriting on the card: "PVT PATWARDIN GET WELL
SOON ANONYMOUS"). A creepy feeling that one of those big slimy
unstoppable things is going to break down the door any second.
Nervous just thinking about being anywhere near the USCSS Korea.
Pretty certain that the Korea's just next door.
Doorbell nearly makes her scream. Leon. Booths on crutches. Some
Rodina cop, Federal badges, big ass revolver. Looks divorced. No big
surprise. They crowd in and sit on anything that's not a chair. First
words out of Leon's mouth: "Do you think anyone could still be alive
on the Korea?"
The colonist's face leaps into her mind. Sherman. That was his name.
Yes, he could still be alive. But those aliens were crawling all OVER
C deck, and he was only protected by a flimsy cryotube canopy. Still,
he could be. She'd made sure that he'd have a chance. What Leon was
asking her was would she go back.
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