Pandion (Genera #1)

Chapter 38

Y ou absolute barrel of garbage, why are you lying to me? Satoru’s projection was like a sharp kick in the groin.

What? I’m not… Oh, for fuck’s sake, why did Satoru have to be so perceptive? Couldn’t there be at least one thing that went right in this mess?

There’s no other life raft. Where the hell are you? Still somewhere down there?

Don’t mind me, idiot. Get in the goddamn raft!

I’ll get in the goddamn raft as soon as you do!

I’m fucking stuck here! You need to go!

Well, I’m not leaving without you.

You promised me you’d take care of yourself!

No, I didn’t!

Yes, you did!

No, I most certainly did not. You’ll have to put your fucking back into it and save yourself because I’m not leaving without you. What an ass.

Fuck, fucking fuck… Fuck. What the hell was he supposed to do now? You piece of fucking shit, goddammit… Was there a way to force Satoru on that raft, through the link? Ayase, we need to project something over the link to make him leave, fucking anything…!

Don’t even think about it. I’m going to dampen this thing into oblivion if you try something fishy! It was useless to try to keep anything private when Satoru was specifically paying attention.

Fuck you! Furious beyond reason, Kagesawa let go of the pile of trucks and let the docking robot fall so that the cockpit dragged against the hull and screeched to a halt just short of the deck.

The landing was rough enough to knock the wind out of him, and he spent a good few minutes gasping for air and coughing. The window in front of him cracked, and its safety glass popped off like corn kernels in a hot kettle. The ferry keeled back to a more extreme bank angle as the trucks slid across the deck. The noise was deafening.

Once he managed to breathe again, Kagesawa pulled himself out from the seat and squirmed, squiggled and bent his body in unnatural and ridiculous ways to fit through the opening.

The heat outside the robot was overwhelming. He scrambled to a more upright position and searched for anything he could use for his escape.

Now that the ferry was almost on its side again, he cringed at the thought of what might have happened to the people boarding the last life raft somewhere above.

What’s the situation up there? He tried to regain control of his anger.

Stop worrying about other people, and get your ass over here! Satoru was still seething.

The topmost car deck was a hellscape of metal debris and vehicles enveloped in fumes and smoke. With the ferry at this angle and the staircase he’d used to come down already damaged, Kagesawa tried to locate another exit or some other piece of machinery to use to carve himself a hole through the hull.

If there were two docking robots in here, there could be a third, but with such poor visibility, finding it was going to be a matter of luck.

Smaller unfastened items such as trunks, containers, motorcycles, generators and other machinery were rolling down the deck, but thankfully, with the movement slowing down, nothing was launching at him at a great speed.

Breathing was getting increasingly difficult, though. Kagesawa used the hem of his t-shirt to cover his mouth and nose, but it wasn’t much use, and he needed both of his hands to wade safely through or climb over the rubble. He felt dizzy from the fumes and the lack of oxygen, and the acrid smoke burning his throat and lungs was making him cough.

What’s taking so long? I’m coming down there to fetch you if you’re not up here in two minutes!

The thought of Satoru making his way to this deathtrap was frightening enough to amp up Kagesawa’s motivation, but two minutes was a completely unreasonable deadline.

I’m trying! For fuck’s sake, please get on the fucking life raft… please… There were rows and rows of cars squished together but nothing large enough to be useful. The exits he found were all locked. What if he couldn’t find a way out and Satoru really refused to leave?

Ayase, what do I do? There was no response from Ayase. He’d been heading away from the flames, so it was cooler, but the smoke had become a thick suffocating blanket, and he could barely see in front of his face. It was possible Ayase’s functions had ceased due to the toxic fumes.

Shit. He was on his own, and it was only a matter of time before he, too, succumbed to the fumes.

His two minutes were probably up. Shit! He glanced back. Shit, shit, shit. What if… what if he went back? What if the rest of the ship was nothing but small cars?

The weight-distribution was wrong.

The ship wasn’t merely leaning sideways, it was aft-heavy. That meant the trucks and the heavy industrial machinery were all at the other end.

Shit! Kagesawa turned around. Why the fuck am I this slow? Goddammit… pay attention… for once in your fucking life, pay attention!

He clawed his way back through the car deck until his face was burning hot in the heat of the blaze.

There was the T-7500. It was crushed. What about the T-8000? It had started this mess by ramming into half of the trucks in its compartment, but was it still operational?

He spotted the familiar blue-painted operating arm. The thing was buried under a truck on its side and a pile of unidentifiable vehicle parts, some of which were on fire.

Where was the cockpit? Was it accessible, against all odds? Do not just assume. Check. Where the fuck is it? If he climbed up the truck, reached the door to the cab, dropped himself through the cab and the opposite side window, maybe… It was a long shot, but it was the only one he could think of.

Satoru, I swear to god, do not come here. Please. I’m doing my best, I swear. I can’t do this and worry about you at the same time.

He searched around for anything he could use—cargo, rubble, debris, the lines fastening the truck’s load—to access the cab door. It was locked, but the window was cracked open, so he thrust his arm in, ignoring the pain, and opened the lock from the inside.

He lowered himself into the pitch black cab and its other door, now underneath him. The space was much darker than he’d expected. His eyes stung from trying to hold them open to see something, anything, as he felt for the door handle for what felt like ages. When his hand finally landed on the handle, the door gave way under him, and he fell down a metre with a heavy thud.

With the exception of an orange glow up above, everything around him was black. Something moist ran down his side. Whether sweat or blood, it didn’t matter. He flailed his arms around, searching for anything recognizable. He could feel the game over clock tick in his gut.

Even if he found what he was looking for and it was operational, with Ayase silent, he had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to operate it. He was tempted to give in and cry from the pain and helplessness, but with Ayase no longer projecting a cover to Satoru, he was forced to keep himself together. If any of his efforts to save himself were keeping Satoru away from here, he’d struggle with all his might all the way to the very end.

There! The fucking cockpit window. There was a push-handle to the side of it on the T-7500, and hopefully they hadn’t changed the design for this model. No. There it was. And it opened the cockpit hatch with a ‘zoosh’ like it was supposed to.

Kagesawa wormed himself through in the limited space allotted to him. The air in the cockpit was merely lukewarm and fresh compared to its surroundings. What a relief.

He closed the hatch and hurried to start the engine and activate the air-filtration system. It alone wouldn’t have saved him since the docking robots were designed only for brief periods of submersion, but it was a welcome temporary improvement. Kagesawa hoped it would give Ayase a chance to recover enough to regain consciousness.

The initialisation processes started without a problem. The cockpit lights turned on, and everything inside looked hale. If this thing was indeed still operational, it would have no trouble digging itself up from underneath the truck once it had fully initialised.

Where are you? Deck five? Deck six? Is the life raft still there? He was not about to bust out of here without being absolutely sure Satoru was not somewhere on this ship looking for him.

I’m on deck five. The others have left. Satoru’s reply made Kagesawa’s insides lurch, and he wanted to vomit.

Ayase? Are you still there? I can’t do this on my own… Too many simultaneous command processes were needed to launch this thing, and that multitasking prowess Kagesawa supposedly had was all down to Ayase’s efforts. This fucking ship is going to sink, and we’re going to sink with it. Holy shit, that thought was scary if he stopped to think about it for too long.

Satoru was still on this ship. The controls in front of him were daunting. The two other seats beside Kagesawa were a stark reminder he wasn’t supposed to be here alone. Would Satoru be able to do something through the link? But what? And there was no time to teach him the ropes; it was too complicated.

If it could have been done via automation, the engineers would have done it. It wasn’t rocket-science, but manning these machines required a three-week training period.

No, wait. There was a familiar pattern emerging from these thoughts. It was difficult, it required several empaths, it required training, it can’t possibly be done via automation… why?

Because automation was cheap.

With nothing better on hand, Kagesawa smashed his palm reader, pried open the control panel with pieces of the casing, wired the gutted reader to the panel and connected straight to it.

He would fucking code the second set of inputs through the reader while using the main controls to steer the limbs. This fucking thing was not that complicated. Every fucking thing the EA played up as the best thing since self-sorting recycle bins was not that sophisticated.

He was a glorified secretary, an over-paid fucking vehicle handler. He was trained for this shit. He was an instrument of their decades-long scam.

If the JufO could manage to remote-start this thing and ram it to a bunch of trucks, surely he could get it to haul itself out of this dump.

Kagesawa ran the first script on loop to keep the 16-track multi-level track-system in balance via an algorithm that propelled the robot forward according to some of the steering inputs associated with two of the foremost arms, while the two remaining acted as counterbalance.

He probably could have made it more graceful had he had a couple of hours to play with, but there was no audience, and this was not a dancing competition; it didn’t matter if it looked ridiculous so long as it did its job.

The thing lumbered steadily through the flames toward the hole he’d used to come down to the car decks. The ship was now almost sideways. Satoru was somewhere on the deck ‘above’, much too close to the now roaring inferno ‘below’.

I’m coming up now. What’s your precise location? Kagesawa steered the robot-arms to pull the robot where the whole staircase was now a massive hole half-filled with seawater. The amount of water that had flooded in was deceptive; it was as if half of the decks below—now to the side of him—weren’t engulfed by the flames.

I’m at the information desk. There’s water all the way up to the counter. Most of the promenade area is submerged. Where are you?

Here. Kagesawa emerged from the car deck, using the robot-arms to pull the robot towards the information desk. Satoru was perched on the side of the counter.

The docking robot had sustained some damage from having rammed into the trucks, so water was slowly leaking into the cockpit, but even wading through and under the surface, the leaks were mere trickles along the walls.

This thing was robust and built for dock work; a few minor leaks into the cockpit weren’t going to cause any significant damage to the sealed, water-proof circuitry.

Kagesawa manoeuvred the robot into position to pick Satoru up. It took a fair amount of tries, several strings of expletives and experimental on-the-spot coding to get the tracks to sync with the robot’s limbs in a space where its movements were restricted. When he could finally open the hatch to let Satoru in, he was sweating and swearing profusely, wiping the sweat off his face, trying to clear his lungs by coughing them out, turning them over and giving them a good shake. Satoru looked at him startled.

Close the hatch and sit down. As soon as he’d wiped the sweat off of his face to see in front of him, he resumed wrangling the docking robot astern and port side. With the largest windows on the starboard side now submerged, his best bet was to aim for the women’s baths on the opposite side in hopes they offered a lovely scenic view of the sky.

Kagesawa climbed up and past the enclosed smoking area and the laundry room, the robot’s tracks and limbs ploughing through the lightweight wall structures. He ripped off pieces of wall to make the opening large enough to enter into the baths.

The tubs had long since drained and buckets and pails had collected into piles on the back wall. With the handrails and edges of the tubs, there was plenty to grab a hold of while climbing up towards the three large sections of windows above them.

Tiles cracked and crumbled under the pressure when Kagesawa pinned the docking robot between the walls with its robot-arms extended. They hung there precariously with just three of them when he used the fourth to maul through the windows. Then he swung two of the arms up and outside and operated the snapping mechanism to fasten them to the outside wall.

Here goes—! He retracted the arms to lift the robot up and through the windows with force enough to break through the two narrow strips of wall in between. The sound of metal hitting metal in one fell swoop was earsplitting. The robot rolled across the outer side of the ferry in a series of clanks and clatters.

Disoriented by the speed of the roll, all Kagesawa could do was try to stabilise the thing and stop it from rolling. There was no time for a plan B and nothing to grab, so while he managed to slow it down, it still rolled all the way into the ocean.

The only saving grace was that despite its weight, the docking robot was designed to be buoyant. Once it had hit the water and sunk some ways, it slowly started to climb back up to the surface.