Burning Chrome: 10 Shorts by William Gibson

Author:William Gibson [Gibson, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi Shorts, Cyberpunk
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He waited alone in the docking sphere. The silence scratched away at his nerves; the systems crash had deactivated the ventilation system, whose hum he’d lived with for twenty years. At last he heard Tatjana’s Soyuz disengage.

Someone was coming down the corridor. It was Yefremov, moving clumsily in a vacuum suit. Korolev smiled.

Yefremov wore his bland, official mask behind the Lexan faceplate, but he avoided meeting Korolev’s eyes as he passed. He was heading for the gun room.

‘No!’ Korolev shouted.

The Klaxon blared the station’s call to full battle alert.

The gun-room hatch was open when he reached it. Inside, the soldiers were moving jerkily in the galvanized reflex of constant drill, yanking the broad straps of their console seats across the chests of their bulky suits.

‘Don’t do it!’ He clawed at the stiff accordion fabric of Yefremov’s suit. One of the accelerators powered up with a staccato whine. On a tracking screen, green cross hairs closed in on a red dot.

Yefremov removed his helmet. Calmly, with no change in his expression, he backhanded Korolev with the helmet.

‘Make them stop!’ Korolev sobbed. The walls shook as a beam cut loose with the sound of a cracking whip. ‘Your wife, Yefremov! She’s out there!’

‘Outside, Colonel.’ Yefremov grabbed Korolev’s arthritic hand and squeezed. Korolev screamed. ‘Outside.’ A gloved fist struck him in the chest.

Korlev pounded helplessly on the vacuum suit as he was shoved out into the corridor. ‘Even I, Colonel, dare not come between the Red Army and its orders.’ Yefremov looked sick now; the mask had crumbled. ‘Fine sport,’ he said. ‘Wait here until it’s over.’

Then Tatjana’s Soyuz struck the beam installation and the barracks ring. In a split-second daguerreotype of raw sunlight, Korolev saw the gun room wrinkle and collapse like a beer can crushed under a boot; he saw the decapitated torso of a soldier spinning away from a console; he saw Yefremov try to speak, his hair streaming upright as vacuum tore the air in his suit out through his open helmet ring. Fine twin streams of blood arced from Korolev’s nostrils, the roar of escaping air replaced by a deeper roaring in his head.

The last thing Korolev remembered hearing was the hatch door slamming shut.

When he woke, he woke to darkness, pulsing agony behind his eyes, remembering old lectures. This was as great a danger as the blowout itself, nitrogen bubbling through the blood to strike with white-hot, crippling pain…

But it was all so remote, so academic, really. He turned the wheels of the hatches out of some strange sense of noblesse oblige, nothing more. The labor was quite onerous, and he wished very much to return to the museum and sleep.

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