101 Things To Do In Zero Gravity - Chapter 7

[acroamatica.livejournal.com]

Title: 101 Things To Do In Zero Gravity
Status: WIP - Part 7/?
Author: Pip of acroamatica
Pairing: BB/DM
Rating: R
Summary: A wee little space opera in the classic style, with added Hobbity goodness. Obviously rather future AU - begins in June 2087, in fact, slightly before the events depicted in Sniper 470.
Content/Warning: Language, MEGA angst.
Spoilers: Sniper 470 (note: You don't need to have seen it, but it helps.)
Disclaimer: If I told you I owned them, that this was all real, and that I was making loadsamoney writing about it, would you believe me? Because I would find that very entertaining. I don't own Sniper 470 or anything connected with it either.
Author's Notes: Egad. One day. I feel like Sema. :D I remember when I thought this was only going to be seven chapters long. HAH. This chapter is for all of you who've been howling and throwing rocks through my window with notes tied on - "OMG WHERE'S DOM???" Short answer: Hell. Longer answer: Having a Crisis. Long answer: under the cut. And this is also for the Disastrously Loveable Person currently putting my puir wee heart through the shredder, 'cos hey, if it weren't for him, how would I write angst?

Previous chapters: [1][2][3][4][5][6]


Chapter 7

The little station was cozy enough, if your tastes ran to sheet metal. But really, Dom thought, he didn't want to leave because here he felt closer to Billy than he had in months. There were little signs of Billy's inhabitance everywhere - pictures on the walls, personal stuff tucked into lockers - and Dom had gone round and collected it all, looking closely at each item. He wasn't sure why, exactly, he had done it. He wanted to think it was because Billy would want it, and they wouldn't have to come back for anything this way.

He didn't want to let himself admit that really, there was a more-than-equal chance that these few scattered objects were all he had left of Billy.

He hadn't been able to locate Billy's suit transceiver anywhere. Every ASDF spacesuit, of course, had a radio unit, and every unit broadcast a very specific signal. He'd hacked deep into ASDF Supply files, found the serial number of Billy's suit, found the specific frequency, and set Aureen searching space for it. Whether or not Billy was alive, as long as his suit existed, Dom should have been able to find it. And he couldn't. One way or another, the suit had been destroyed.

His latest message home had mentioned these facts; Aureen was beginning to get reports now of a team of ASDF repair technicians and a relief gunner coming to take over Station 470, which made Dom glad, but no-one had really mentioned the disappearance of Gunner Boyd. His name hadn't even appeared on the casualty lists yet. Dom was grateful for that. It didn't feel as though it could be true, as long as it wasn't official.

But now he stood, boots gluing him to the station wall, and wondered what to do next.

It wasn't in Dom to sit in a corner forever, no matter how devastated he was. He had forced himself up and out of the chair after only a few minutes, pushing back the irrational certainty that Billy was dead and the grief that came with it, and throwing himself into the task of collecting up Billy's kit. Now that that exercise was over with, he had nothing in him but a curious apathy.

He recalled full well what his earlier messages had promised. He had said he would infiltrate the Cbase. It had seemed such a grand and glorious plan to begin with: heroic, doubtless, and requiring all his considerable skills, and besides that it was one of those things the upperups tended to refer to in capital letters. A Boon For Humanity. A Great Day In History.

Ordinarily Dom rather liked the idea of doing things that would be worthy of capital letters. It was the major reason he'd got into the spying business at all, apart from the obvious adventure, excitement, and really cool weapons. Just now, though, a Boon For Humanity seemed less crucial when the very most important element of Humanity, in Dom's eyes, had gotten himself some capital letters of his own: Missing In Action, Presumed Dead.

He thought about going home. Just fly Aureen back to Armstrong, take the transport planetside, go back to the quiet little house he had shared with Billy. Wake up every morning in a bed that still sagged a little on the side where Billy had slept. Run into reminders of him wherever he looked. Call Billy's family, and then his own, and then their friends. Or call no-one, and just stay there, alone with his ghosts.

The more he thought about it, the less he liked it. Not that he could let himself feel anything stronger than mild displeasure, but still. It didn't seem right, to be where Billy had been but was not, would never be again.

Mulling that thought over, he packed Billy's belongings into a bag and drifted back to the Aureen. Everything needed to be stowed right away, because Dom knew well that a meticulously tidy ship was a safe ship, even in his current introspective state. Looking for the best place for the bag, he opened the locker nearest the sleeping couch. It would be about the right size.

But there was something in that locker already. Something which he should have known was there, because it was always there. He'd stowed it there himself, after the last time they'd used it.

He dropped the bag, leaving it floating in mid-air, and reached in to pull out the book, turning it over and over in his hands.

He ran a hand over the cover, as if to smooth nonexistent dust away, and let it fall open to the page still marked with the bookmark that Billy had put in it on the last night of his last shore leave. #59.

"Just so we don't forget," he'd whispered to Dom, still lying sweatily interlocked with him. "Between this time and the next. We can pick right up where we left off, can't we, love?"

"Of course we can," Dom remembered whispering back, feeling a delicious sleepiness in every part of his body and an all-encompassing love for the man he held so close. "And so we will, sweet thing, so we will."

Dom stared down at the illustrations they had always perused with such glee until they had blurred so badly that he couldn't even make out the outlines of the book, and was forced to admit that he was crying. And that admission just made everything worse. Before he knew it the comforting blanket of apathy in which he'd wrapped the bruised bits of himself had disappeared, vanished as though it had never been. And without that protection, exposed to the truth, something in him broke, exploding into a million jagged little pieces that stabbed into him with every breath; he thought it might have been his heart.

He was sobbing out loud now, releasing all the tears he'd tried so hard to keep back before and clutching the book to his chest as he wept, knowing that the bookmark would now mark #59 forever, because Billy was dead, his Billy was dead, and he didn't know how he was meant to go on without the most crucial thing in his world, the one thing that nothing else could ever replace. There had never been anyone but Billy for him. And there would never be now. There couldn't. Billy was gone. Billy was dead.

"Billy," he whispered brokenly through his tears, "oh, Billy, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Billy. I should have saved you. God knows I meant to. I meant to. But I was just too thick, and too late, and I'm so sorry, Christ, Bills, I'm so sorry. Why couldn't I have been there to save you, Billy? How could they take you from me? How could they? How could anyone just - just kill you? How could they?"

That was what he couldn't understand, above all other things. His Bills, so sweet and gentle, being shot in cold blood. Or whatever they had done. Really, he had known it, though, as soon as he'd seen the blood in the air at Station 470. The Coalition never took prisoners. Deep inside him, then, he had known, and it was just false hope that had made him think that maybe, by some freak chance, they wouldn't have killed him on sight. Or that Billy could have escaped. Or something. Or anything that would mean that his Billy was not forever lost to him.

But he was. He had to be. The CFleet wouldn't even have got the capture-if-practical orders until probably today - the proof being that he hadn't run into any Coalition troops at Station 470, which there should have been, by the new protocol. So they would have done what they always did.

Which meant there was no hope left, none at all. Not for Billy.

Nor for himself, really.

No wonder Hope had come out of Pandora's box. For all her beauty, all that pale innocence, the little sprite was every bit as lethal as the rest of the Evils that had been loosed with her.

Finally, completely shattered and cried out, with bruises starting on his chest from the corners of the book, he drew his sleeve across his face a couple of times, mopping the worst of the wet away. Then he pushed off against the wall, floating across the cabin to the pilot's seat, and had Aureen lift off from the asteroid and get a safe distance away. It wouldn't do for the ASDF to find him and think the Aureen was a Coalition ship: they'd probably blow him out of the sky, and dying under friendly fire wasn't part of his plan.

He knew, now, that he'd been thinking wrong, back at the station, when he'd considered giving up and going home. Not totally wrong, granted, because he'd correctly identified that there was nothing for him there. Not without Billy.

Without Billy, there was nothing for him anywhere.

Well, except in the little fingerprint-locked box that he kept stashed beneath the pilot's console. There was something for him there. The only thing he'd need, now.

He drifted over to it, and wiggled it free from the clasps that held it in place. The lid, marked with a Firm logo, lifted easily.

There were three cylinders inside, along with some wire, a small spot-welder, and the transmitter board. Dom sat crosslegged in mid-air and distributed the objects around him, where he could reach them easily. He reached around behind him, too, and pressed a fingertip flat against the sensor pad that unlocked the "safety belt" connecting his vital signs to Aureen's self-destruct system. Then, very carefully, as befitted their contents, he began to weld wires from one cylinder to another, from the other to the transmitter board, and from the transmitter board to the belt. He wasn't quite as good with the hardware side of electronics as Billy (oh, Billy, my sweet lost love...) but he was still more than competent, and in fairly short order, everything was neatly assembled.

Once the solder joins were cool enough to touch, he brought the belt over to the secondary terminal and started up a subroutine he'd never run before. He connected the system to the belt's old transmitter, which knew how to talk to the new one, and reprogrammed it the way he'd been taught, enabling all manner of hidden capabilities it did not normally use.

When the programming was complete, he stowed it back in the box under the console. He wouldn't need it quite yet. Then he turned back to the computer.

The Coalition intelligence files he'd hacked into earlier were still open, and he glanced over them until he found the particular ones he was looking for. Three maps, all involving the new Cbase: one of the inside, one of the outside, and one of how to get there and what to avoid. He downloaded them to his pocket datalink, and ran all the initialisation programs on that while he was at it. After a good look at the area map, he fed the data into Aureen's astrogation computers and let her plot the route - she was probably smarter than he was, just then. He knew his normally sharp brain was dull with grief. But he'd be all right, trusting her. It felt good to trust her, besides - with the level of intelligence of which her computers were capable, Dom fancied sometimes that Aureen was almost human. And human or no, she was all Dom had left to love, and trust was part of love, wasn't it?

He thought back to the way he and Billy had trusted each other, how deep it had gone. They never doubted each other. Not ever. No matter how far apart they were, or how long they'd been that way. They doubted themselves, yes, sometimes, but never each other. And when they did doubt themselves, the other was always there to reassure them. Dom had to cry a little more then, because he could desperately have used that reassurance right then, to know that what he was going to do was right, but the feeling passed quickly and he was able to continue with his work.

There was quite a lot to do. A couple of legal forms had to be filled out and sent back to the Firm. He adjusted his data-collection programs so Aureen sent updates of her auto-searches every minute. He looked closely at the maps of the inside of the Cbase, making careful note of the maintenance hatches and what sorts of interesting and important places, exactly, they could lead one to if one were sufficiently determined. The electropigment was reprogrammed, to make Aureen look as much as possible like a rock, and Dom fired up the radar bollixer, which would make any Coalition ships (or ASDF ones, for that matter), overlook him as though he just wasn't there, as they would do with any rock. Maybe they'd even avoid him.

Then there was a bit of research. He checked recent regimental IDs and decided that what he'd got by way of costuming would be good enough, but that close inspection might be a very good thing to avoid. That meshed nicely with his plan. Close inspection shouldn't ever be necessary.

After he had his clothes laid out, he went into the head and washed his face, attempting to remove most of the tear traces. He shaved quickly - when he was alone or at home, it was fine to let himself get a little scruffy, but not when he went undercover.

Then he sat down in front of his computer terminal, and set it up to record a message.

"Hello," he said, calmly, coolly. "This is Dominic Monaghan. I have just investigated Gunner Station 470. The station is badly damaged, as you know, and Gunner Billy Boyd is missing. I have attempted to locate him but have not been able to do so. I am forced to assume that he has been killed by invading Coalition forces. In my last data packet, you will find the major encryption keys which gave me access to the Coalition database. I do not expect to be using them again after today. I recommend you send this information on to Wood, in Computing. He is probably skilled enough to get back into the databases." Of course he would be; Dom had trained Wood himself. He thought of the fresh-faced lad, wondered if perhaps Wood might be the analyst the Firm chose to take over from him entirely. He doubted it, though. Wood had very distinctive and memorable features, especially his blue eyes. Anyone who saw him would remember him - not an advantage when one was a spy. The boy did have a knack with computers, though.

"I will now be going on with the plan I outlined earlier," he continued. "I expect to reach the Coalition base in just under an hour, at which point I will infiltrate it by whatever means possible. I will be looking principally for any information or materials related to their new initiative of capturing Snipers. Anything I do find will be analysed, and then destroyed to the best of my ability."

He swallowed, and ran a hand over his face. This would be the difficult part.

"I have enabled the self-destruct system on the Aureen. When I leave her rockside and go EV, I plan to park her as close to the base entrance as I can without being spotted. If I should be captured or killed during my infiltration, the self-destruct system will be activated. Please keep all ASDF ships out of the direct vicinity. I expect that the explosion would destroy or badly damage the base and would not like for ASDF ships to be implicated. Should it be necessary, I would prefer - as I'm certain you would as well - for the cause of the explosion to be untraceable."

He ran a hand over his face. "I must say that I do not expect to come out of this. I am fairly certain that at some point I will be captured. I will do my best to make sure that I cannot be traced to anyone. Aureen will continue to send data back for as long as possible. Thank you."

He reviewed the message, seeing himself stony-faced and unflappable. His eyes were a bit red, but there was nothing he could do about that. It would do. He sent it off to the Firm, feeling as though he'd just signed and sealed his will.

That wasn't too far from the truth, really. Because he hadn't told the Firm the whole truth. In true analyst fashion, he'd given only as much information as was absolutely necessary.

He got up, and stripped out of the suit he'd worn to the station. The Coalition suit the Firm had issued him went on instead.

He had to admit, as he looked in the mirror, that the Coalition suits were a lot nicer than the green ASDF jumpsuits or the white ASDF spacesuits. The Coalition uniforms were mostly skin-tight, sleek and black, except for a couple of small insignia. It was very warm, very comfortable, and very practical for zero-g, seeing as there was no loose material to float about and get caught up in things. He was able to improve upon it, though, by swapping the heavy, clumsy, loud magboots for a pair of soft-soled magslippers - an infinitely better choice, in terms of stealth operations, although the magnets weren't as strong.

Then he took another look at the station blueprints he'd turned up in the searches he'd made the day before - could it have been just the day before? He felt as though it had been a lifetime ago - and memorised a couple of key structural points. The Coalition built damn good stations - had the ASDF beat all to hell for geoforming - but no matter how good a station was, there were always weak points, if one took the trouble to find them. There were always points where a strategic explosion would bring the whole place down around the ears of the occupants. True, they were usually so deep in the bowels of the station that no invader would ever find them unless it was already too late to save the station, but they were there. And Dom knew where they were.

The thing about being Dom Monaghan, see, was that one could get into all manner of places one wasn't meant to be. And the thing about being a Firm analyst was that he had more than enough explosive and know-how to make things very interesting for the Coalition. And the thing about just having found out that the single most important person in one's life had been killed by the people whose station one was about to come visit was that one didn't really mind if one didn't come out of it alive.

In fact, that wasn't quite strong enough to describe how he felt, he thought, as he dug the box out from below the pilot's console and buckled on the belt inside it, just above the Coalition gunbelt. The medical sensor bit in, made itself at home, and he shifted the weight of the explosive cylinders that rode just over his right hip. The Coalition was going to be very, very sorry indeed that they'd dealt so harshly with Sniper 470. Especially once he found his way down to their station generator room through their maintenance ducts and popped out to say hello. They could shoot him, then, if they liked. It wouldn't make any difference to him.

Simply put, Dom was going to die today, one way or the other, but he planned to take as many of the bastards as he could to Hell with him.