Cara's Ablation
A short story
Three rapid beeps.
The car’s open-door chime pulsed in Cara’s ears, eyes closed, returning to consciousness. Liquid traveled up her ankles, as the vehicle sank under moonlight.
Three rapid beeps.
“Cara, you are dying.”
Three rapid beeps.
“Cara, you are dying.”
In front of Cara, cockpit armor was punctured and shorn off its hinges. The planet came into view every-other 3rd axial rotation as her breath wheezed.
“Cara, you are dying.”
“Cara. HOLD STILL.”
Exosuit tensed, G-attenuation bladders inflated to immobilize its passenger – punching through chest wall into the heart. To deliver a last-wind dose of amphetamine and adrenaline. Simultaneously, the pilot felt a rush of air through her teeth as the hole in her chest was suctioned and combat-sealed.
“Cara. Aprox 10 MINUTE to INCAPACITY.”
“Cara. CORE is UNSAFE."
An acid of neuroaccelerants swirled through the only organ without capability to feel them melting it, piercing haze of concussion. This was risky to do, for someone with a tomorrow.
Sunrise will arrive in 22 minutes at this orbital decay.
Cara tested quivering muscles as the suit responded to multiply her efforts. Everything in the cockpit was ruined. She smashed it away. It was designed to be.
The exterior of the craft continued its pentalobe rotation around center of mass in the fusion loop. Cara correctly estimated her boost phase had already detached from the craft by performance the tight perturbance, accentuated by camera flashes of a star coming into view – as vestibular fed her a nonsensical.
“Cara. SHORE has BROADCAST,” a pause as voice switched its vocoder semblance to a baser, more guttural ancient tone, “PINNACLE STARFISH.”
Cara immediately understood why the spacecraft no longer treated her survival as ultimately important. Because it wasn't. Only the mission.
Which had changed.
Centuries ago, on another planet, a nation detonated a weapon in high atmosphere. A starfish primed and detonated.
They were far more primitive in electronics, which spared them.
But Proteus - hosting an advanced civilization, circling a mature star, surrounded by metallic oort cloud - had nothing engineered in defense.
Cara was flight commander aboard SALIENTREACH, an experimental craft using a fusion-backed particle acceleration loop for intrasolar boosting.
This craft was exploration anew.
If SALIENTREACH’s transit thrust was hit from the outside – a scenario not anticipated – a weaklink designed for internal failures may have seized, leaving it in a critical failure mode.
There was no bus communication with the module from here. Cara had to go. She had to leave.
Kick.
It doesn’t start with the kick. But the kick is when driving ends, and the ride begins. There is no driver after the kick, and thus no automobile.
There is just the ride.
Cara’s vehicle dug into muddy soil at a 55-degree angle, beginning the first crushing quarter rotation.
Rotate. Collapse. Rotate. Engineered attempts to degenerate energy, whilst gravity and vector compelled the crush.
A rear quarter-panel touched ground, its sponge insufficient to halt progress towards the engineered pond.
The car flipped again, and again, pulled by gravity down. An endless fall that had to end. But wouldn’t. Not until it took everything.
An ANGEL kill vehicle would likely not meet SALIENTREACH in time. Considering coordination and boosting from differential courses, orbital intercept would take longer than the unplanned disintegration of the fusion loop within metallic cloud of Proteus.
This was not supposed to happen.
So they fired three.
Three ANGELs into the night to chase their child. Three candles burn. Three stacks built to save the world by existing to end it – each roar to die first.
Chhuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhjhhhjhhhhhuhhhhh eminated from the launch sites. It was the only cry this animal had. The call of a predator. A performance to announce a trophy kill. They make sewn mission patches for this. This one would be a mirror.
The loudest things on a planet announce themselves as they exit, and – in doing so – become silent, leaving atmosphere behind. Now, they hunt. Now, they were just another star. Angels of unusual velocity, for those willing to pay attention.
Cara levered her exosuit to pry away blockades from exiting SALIENTREACH.
The nonsymmetric rotation messed with her hippocampus, forcing re-evaluation of the direction of “down” by fractions of a second.
Exiting by strapholds, she rotated, but exosuit held firm her higher weight. Some engineer foresaw this potentiality.
Moved by the exercise it took to be an astronaut on a military experiment, Cara moved outside, towards the fusion loop, centrifuge pulling her from center.
The exosuit’s grip was designed to lunge between strongholds on the outside of the craft, as she made her way center.
Cara found a reaction mass nozzle spewing its contents, stuck inclined, exacerbating the deleterious rotation. Straying from the most direct path, her grips were unable to overcome its stator, but found its hood easy to bend against the craft’s rotation in at least one degree.
Almost at the fusion drive.
Consisting of an infinite loop in three dimensions, it was machined to tolerances where no sealant was needed, only pins holding its frame together. The bends suffered immense forces as they electromagneticly contained a stream of heavy iridium isotope.
Cara’s arms and exosuit strained to pull herself inwards towards the apparatus, every centimeter relieving rotational impetus. Instead, the perceptual rate of rotation increased in frequency.
Cara woke as water filled the car from entrance ports unknown. She looked forward – into a sky of stars away from the pollution of city light. God, it was beautiful. Why hadn't you seen this before?
Liquid periodically crested over windows as the car twisted back and forth, a bathysphere imperfected.
Reaching the fusion loop on SALIENTREACH, Cara selected a pin and – with impossible calm – cut the retention cable through its head. Then a next, and third. Vibration would back them all out shortly, Cara knew. This was a prototype. She twisted the bolt.
It's more important for the prototypes to pull apart. And it did.
A quarter panel of the fusion loop blew out, instantly streaming metric tons of iron-alloyed iridium away from its engineered magnetic confines. In milliseconds of prompt torque it accelerated to incalculable rotation, spinning in place, lancing everything nearby in a continuous microscopic sword of matter.
Through suit like cheesecloth, metal ions severed tissues in her neck, immediately depressurizing blood to the brain. Liquid traveled up her ankles, robotic grips holding her fast.
~~~~~
“Cara. You are dying.”
“Cara.”
A voice etched silicon on black-box, to be recovered later.
“You are dying.”
Three rapid beeps. One for each angel, coming to meet her.