Irontown Blues

Twenty

I like vanilla ice cream. I also like tutti-frutti ice cream. I also like strawberry, peach, butter pecan, apricot, fig, and papaya ice cream. These are the flavors of the Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae that Hazel makes in her ice-cream parlor. There are eight flavors in the Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae. I once ate a Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae. It had eight scoops. I ate eight, get it? Ha-ha.

But I was not eating a Cosmic Catastrophe Big Glitch Sundae on the day when we found αChris and αChris was taken to see Mary Smith, AKA Delphine RR Blue Suede Shoes. AKA is a word we private detectives use. It means Also Known As.

On that day I had eaten three scoops of vanilla ice cream. I think vanilla is my favorite flavor of ice cream. Though I also like butter pecan and strawberry. Spike was beside me, nodding off. I did not call him αSpike anymore because αChris was now my only alpha. This made me happy.

(And I must cut you off there, feeling happy, Sherlock. You will get to speak again, I promise, but since I have been given the role of amanuensis, historian, and editor of this strange tale [or tail, if you will, ha-ha!] more or less by default, I must let Chris continue to have the floor, to preserve some sort of continuity. He still has more to tell of his reunion with Gretel. — PC)

“There’s a lot going on here that I don’t understand,” I said. “At least, it seems to me that all that incredibly complicated business of the para-leprosy — which didn’t exist — and the trail through the Chinese restaurant, all that bullshit, that was all just a scam, you were actually leading me to that empty apartment… but why? Why didn’t you just invite me? I would have come, you know that. Then you locked me up. Why didn’t you—”

“I’m really pressed for time, Chris. Let me go on for a minute or two, okay?

“Remember I told you about the shell game we’re playing? We shuffle and jive, we spoof and we fake, we hoax and we counterfeit. We cover up everything. If I had gone straight to you and asked you to join us here in Irontown, the CC would have seen it, and you would likely be dead by now. Me, too, probably. So we have to keep that little pea moving.

“We have created blank spots in the cyber world. We move things in and out of them. I wanted you here, but I didn’t dare approach you. That apartment doesn’t exist in any database. In fact, that whole corridor is a ghost. Nobody lives there, but we maintain records showing that they do. We gassed you and took you down a stairway that doesn’t exist, and along a corridor linking Irontown to the outer world that also does not exist.

“Before that, I left a trail for you to follow. The whole ruse with the leprosy. I thought that would get your attention. The business of me working at the Chinese restaurant. I was only there long enough to leave a scent trail for Sherlock. Pumpkin lied about knowing me. She’s one of us, one of the people who work what we call the Underground Railway. She’s a lot smarter than she acts, by the way. In fact, she’s one of our best cyber-wonks. She was the one who wrote that whole scenario

“There is also another problem. There are those… well, let’s just say that not all Heinleiners wanted you here. There is still resentment over the invasion, and you were on the other side, don’t forget.”

“…I don’t know how to say I’m sorry for something as awful as that.”

“Don’t worry about it. As the boss, I can do a lot of stuff, but I’m not all-powerful. In the end, a compromise was reached. We decided that if you were good enough, smart enough, to follow me to the apartment, well, then you could have an invitation. If you couldn’t find me, you would never be the wiser, and you would be on your own.”

“An invitation to what?”

She drew herself up, looked into my eyes, took a deep breath, and finally got around to it.

“We’re going to the stars, and you are invited.”

“What… you mean Alpha Centauri in a few days?”

She smiled.

“No. That was an exaggeration. And it’s not really a ‘hyperdrive,’ in the sense of going into hyperspace, whatever that is, or through a wormhole, or a black hole, whatever those are. I don’t understand it, but it’s something new my father invented. It works, it doesn’t use rocket engines, and it is very, very fast. Alpha Centauri in… about ten years, ship’s time.”

“But there’s nothing—”

“No, we’re not going to Alpha, you’re right, there’s nothing there that’s worth the trip. That was just an example. The star we’re heading for is more like forty light-years away. There are two Earth-like planets in that system. We’re hoping at least one of them is habitable and doesn’t have people, or intelligent beings, anyway, already living there. If neither is suitable, we move on to the next star.”

The idea of getting on a ship and heading out to Betelgeuse or some damn place like that was alarming, but there was something else that somehow took precedence in my mind. I found it hard to express. But it had to be said.

“So everything I did to find you, all the tracking I did… well, actually, Sherlock did, mostly… that was all you leading me around by the nose. All that time, you were playing me for a sap.”

“I don’t know what a sap is.”

“Old pulp-fiction slang for a clueless idiot.”

“Okay, you could say that—”

“I don’t know how else you could put it.”

She looked a little angry at that.

“How about I was working very hard to save your ass?”

“I didn’t ask for it. I don’t think I want it. Why would I want to get on your crazy starship, which will probably blow up halfway to Neptune? I’ve got a life here.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to say anything. I felt my face getting hot. Sure, Chris, you’ve got a life, pretending to be a film-noir shamus from the twentieth century. Sitting on my ass in my retro office and waiting for clients to come in the door. And how many clients have you had in the last few years, Chris? Well, it wouldn’t take long to count the custom-made manila folders in my big metal file cabinet.

Sure, you’ve got a life. A pretend life. A make-believe life.

But it was my life, and I intended to go on living it.

“One more question,” I said. “Why me? Of all the millions of people who don’t live in this crazy Irontown, why me? You think you will desperately need a private detective in interstellar space?”

“Actually, we are trying to take at least one of every skill, every profession, because if we need one, it won’t be possible to go back.

“But that’s not the main reason, Chris. You could say that I have an investment in you. I spent a lot of time keeping you alive, and I can’t bear to think a Charonese assassin is going to come along and murder you. So it’s personal.”

“Gretel, I have about as much faith in these Charonese assassins and this coming Big Glitch Part Two as I have in your dad’s hyperdrive.”

“Well, you don’t have to believe me. You have the option of staying behind. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we will blow up on takeoff, and maybe the killers will never find you. But the Second Big Glitch? That’s real. I have spent the last five years of my life battling to keep it from happening. And I’m losing. We are all losing.”

“I think I’ll stay behind, then, and thank you very much for the invitation and the unexpected stay in your little hotel. So, can I go?”

She grimaced.

“I’m afraid not. See, you know too much now. You can’t go back home until just before the ship takes off.”

“And how long is that? You have a timetable?”

“No. No set date. But it will have to be soon.”

“Terrific. So I guess the gorilla will take me back to my cell now.”

“Soon.” She leaned forward. “Chris, I wish you would think about it some more. Everything I’ve told you is very real. The ship is being readied and provisioned and stocked with everything we think we could possibly need at our destination. And if you think getting you here was insanely complicated, just think how hard it has been keeping all that work, all those preparations, secret from the CC.”

“I guess so. It hardly matters to me, though. I’m going back into the can. Stir. The slammer, the hoosegow, the calaboose.”

“I’m sorry, Chris. I really am. I had so hoped that you would go with us.” She looked down, then into my eyes. “See, there is one more reason I wanted to rescue you. Like I said, it’s personal. During that awful time, I… well, I developed quite a crush on you.”

Her face was actually red. I had no idea how to respond to that. I was still getting used to the idea of Gretel, little heroic Gretel, as a grown woman. Now I looked at her, and saw her as an adult for the first time. I could see the ten-year-old I had known and the woman she had become.

And I didn’t want to think about it. I’d think about it in my cell tomorrow. Because tomorrow is another day.

“I do want to know one more thing, though. Where is this ship?”

She laughed out loud.

“You’ve been living in it.”

“But…” That didn’t seem possible. Not that I had been in a ship, I knew that. But I hadn’t realized it was the ship.

The Heinlein was a derelict on a grand scale. Pretty much everyone who had been paying attention at all to the history of the last hundred years knew it was out there, a giant beached steel whale, rumored to be five miles long. In reality, who knew? Because you could hardly see it. For a hundred years the crater where it lay had been used as a dumping ground for all the junk of three cities. In fact, the Heinleiners had used this junk when they built their separate city.

For many decades, no one thought it would ever rise again. Hell, right then, I didn’t believe it would ever fly. It was not as if they had just heaped the rubbish against the sides of the ship, to be shaken off when it rose on… what? The hyperdrive? The ship had been built right into Irontown. From where I was sitting, I could see a small piece of its massive hull, and the attachments were far more than just a clothesline strung from an apartment to an anchor point on the ship.

No, stuff was welded to the ship. Apartments clung like barnacles to the metal. There was trash surrounding it, attached to it. There was no way in the world that the Heinlein would ever shake free of all that.

I mentioned some of this to Gretel.

“That’s exactly what we want the CC to think,” she said, placidly. “We have built a dummy ship five hundred miles from here, and there’s where the CC has been looking. If we keep it looking there just a little while longer, we should be okay.

“And I’m sorry, but I have to go now. Please don’t fight it, Chris. Tom will take you—”

I never got to hear the end of that sentence because a huge blast blew her across the room and against Hazel’s service counter.

I was dreaming. I was half-asleep, but I can dream when I am only half-asleep. I was with αChris, and I was happy. He was throwing a ball, and I was running after it. Then there were rabbits. I do not know where the rabbits came from, but there were rabbits. I was chasing one of the rabbits. I have never chased a rabbit, but I have often dreamed of that.

I was with αChris and I was very happy in the dream. I opened one eye and looked up. There was αChris. I had lost αChris for a while, but I had looked for him, and I had found him. Everything was all right in the world.

Chris was talking to the woman named Gretel. Gretel had petted my head and scratched behind my ears when we were introduced. I liked Gretel. I did not hear what they were saying to each other.

I was on the floor next to Spike. We both had bellies full of Hazel’s vanilla ice cream. Spike was twitching in his sleep, so I knew he was dreaming, too. I wondered if he was chasing rabbits in his dream. I wondered if I could join him in his dream. I do not know where I go when I dream, so maybe we could both be in the same dream. I would like that.

There was a very loud noise. I do not like very loud noises. This was the loudest noise I have ever heard. I have learned that the very loud noise was caused by a bomb. The bomb was thrown from a special gun that throws bombs. As soon as it exploded there were more bomb explosions from outside the ice-cream parlor, but these were not so close.

The closest bomb had blown out the window of the ice-cream parlor. Spike and I were on the ground, and the broken glass passed over our heads. But some of the pieces of glass had fallen on me and Spike. There was also a lot of dust on me. I leaped to my feet. I shook off the dust and glass. I was very scared.

αChris was shouting, “Gretel! Gretel!”

There was more shouting outside. I did not know where to turn. I saw Spike. I had thought the flying glass did not hit him, but I was wrong. There were some big pieces of glass in his side and in the side of his head. He did not get up.

I saw αChris kneeling down beside Gretel. Gretel was not moving. There was a lot of blood. I smelled many things, too many things to sort out. I have learned that some of the things I smelled were from the exploding bomb. I have learned that that is what gunpowder smells like when it burns.

I nudged Spike with my nose, and then pawed at him. He whined and tried to sit up. He could not sit up. One of his eyes was gone. I howled.

But I could not be afraid. I had to be strong. I heard people outside running toward the ice-cream parlor. I had never smelled people who smelled like that before. I have learned that the smell was the sweat of humans called Charonese. These Charonese humans liked to fight. When they decided to fight, they took a drug that made them stronger. They took another drug that made them not afraid. They took another drug that made pain go away. All these drugs came out in their sweat and in their piss.

Charonese are bad humans. I do not like Charonese humans.

I could hear them coming. I could smell them coming. I went to the door of the ice-cream parlor and looked out. I saw many humans lying on the ground. Some of them were moving. Some of them were screaming. Some of them were not moving. Some of them were in pieces.

There were two large humans coming toward the ice-cream parlor. I knew these were the Charonese humans who smelled so different.

I wanted to run away. But αChris was behind me. I must protect αChris.

I must become a wolf.

I felt the rage boiling up inside my heart. I would be strong, and I would be brave.

I would kill. I would kill and kill and kill.

The bomb went off about thirty yards from where we were sitting. Sometimes your life is determined by a roll of the dice. I had been sitting in a chair with a wall to my left. The force of the blast buckled the wall, but did not blow it down.

Another roll of the dice determined that Gretel was sitting facing me over the table, with a big glass window to her right. The blast shattered the window and picked her up, along with her chair and the table, and threw them across the room.

The fact that I had been shielded didn’t mean I was unharmed, but I didn’t know about my injuries until later. They were minor compared to the devastation visited on Gretel. Some of the shards of glass slashed at my arm and the side of my face.

Worse than the minor injuries was the sense of disorientation. I was not concussed, but I was damn close to it. I was deafened, unable to hear anything but a very loud ringing in my ears. I found myself on my hands and knees. I looked up and saw the Dalmatian that had come with Sherlock. He was on his side, pretty torn up, not moving. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. I looked around, but I didn’t see Sherlock.

What I did see was Gretel, crumpled up, twisted, flayed open from scalp to waist. I got to my feet and staggered over to her.

I was amazed to see she was conscious. Her right cheek was ripped open. One of her eyes was wounded, and I’m sure she was as deaf as me, but she was moving, trying to get to her feet.

The ringing in my ears was still loud, but I was beginning to hear other sounds. Somewhere water was jetting and splashing, probably from a broken pipe. There was a loud hissing sound.

Was that gunfire I heard?

“Help, help, help me…” She slurred her words. It was a wonder she could talk at all. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “An explosion. A bomb?”

“Are we being attacked?” She tried even harder to get up, seemingly unaware that her right arm was almost ripped off, and both of her legs were twisted in ways they aren’t supposed to twist. I could see bone poking through her pants.

“I don’t know, Gretel. You need to calm down. I’m sure help is on the way.” The only good news I could see was that no arteries seemed to be opened. She was oozing and dripping blood all over, but it wasn’t spurting.

As to the help… I said it was coming to try to calm her down, but now I wondered. I was sure I heard gunfire. I was unarmed. It seemed the best idea was to lie low until I had a better idea of what was happening.

But it was getting noisier out there. I decided I’d better get up and try to find out what was going on.

“You just lie quietly,” I told Gretel. Her eye wasn’t tracking all that well, and I thought she might be beginning to feel the pain. I wondered if she was going into shock. I didn’t know what the symptoms were. Hell, I barely even knew any basic first aid. Hoping I was right in leaving her for a moment, I cautiously got to my feet and, keeping my head low, went to the remains of the window.

It was a mess outside. It was all too reminiscent of the day of the Big Glitch. It was like I was reliving it, and that was the last thing in the entire universe I wanted to do.

Wreckage was strewn for quite a distance from Hazel’s parlor. Most of it was off to my left, though, so I thought it was possible the bomb had not been thrown directly at us. It was much worse over there. I couldn’t remember what had been there, and there wasn’t much left to tell me what it had been. Another several storefronts, I thought.

There were bodies everywhere.

Just outside the parlor, they were heaped in a horrific tumble of torn limbs and blood. No one over there was moving. I remembered that those had been Gretel’s lieutenants, the dozen or so people who had been waiting impatiently for her to get through with me so she could get back to the important business of organizing the final preparations for the departure of the Heinlein. None of them would be organizing anything now.

Elsewhere I saw people crawling. A few had made it to their feet and were staggering around. None of them seemed to be very aware of where they were going. Some were horribly maimed and burned.

I wondered again if Gretel had been the target, or had it been just a bit of bad luck for us, or good luck for them, that she had been hit.

Once more, I saw that in the heat of battle it can be impossible to tell what is going on.

I saw people beginning to move in from the edges of the destruction. Were they on our side, on Gretel’s side? Or were they attackers? It was important to know, because I had a growing certainty that this was part of the continuation of the Big Glitch Gretel had spoken of. In which case, the invaders would not be friendly forces.

Some of the people were clearly trying to render aid to the injured, but that didn’t last long. I saw one would-be rescuer go down in a spray of blood, then another, and then everyone was taking cover as gunfire began peppering the open area. So I had an idea where the enemy was.

From the other side of the plaza, the side where I knew the Heinlein was, a few people had begun to return fire. For the moment, none of the fighters from either side were showing themselves. So again, I decided the best course was to keep my head down and try to shield Gretel from what was still going on outside.

Because after all she had gone through, all we had both gone through, I was not about to lose her. Come what may, I was going to be by her side.

Looking back, it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but it seemed like much longer. I spent most of that time trying to keep Gretel from attempting to rise. She was stubborn, she was a leader, and she was determined not to just lie there.

I ducked my head around the corner again when it seemed like there was a lull in the fighting. No one was moving in the devastated open area, but I could see muzzle flashes now and then coming from what I thought was the enemy side of the plaza. It didn’t look like a good idea to try to get out of the parlor. So I checked the back, hoping there would be a service entrance leading deeper into the mazes of Irontown. I figured anything would be better than being pinned down here.

There probably was a back entrance, but the explosion had piled so much tangled wreckage that I couldn’t budge any of it. I could see the door back there, but the frame seemed to be warped, so even if I could reach it, there was a good chance I wouldn’t be able to get through to whatever was on the other side. I was frustrated and came back to Gretel, who at least had stopped struggling.

All this time I had hardly been aware of Sherlock. When I did notice him he seemed to be sticking close to my heels. Probably terrified, I thought, and who could blame him?

Suddenly a horn began to blare. It was very loud, a rising and falling tone interrupted by an earsplitting on-and-off buzzer, then a horrible hooting sound that seemed to split my skull. Sherlock began to howl. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to his sensitive ears.

My wrist was seized in a grip that I thought might break my bones. It was Gretel, grabbing me with the strength of hysteria. But when I put my head down to hear what she wanted to say, she was eerily calm. One side of her face was a horror mask, but her one good eye bored into me.

“Emer… emerg… emerge…”

“Emergency?”

She nodded, quickly.

“T… t…” She shook her head in frustration, then made a strange gesture with her good hand. Palm down, she swooped it through an arc until the fingers were pointing up. I didn’t get it. She did it again.

“Emergency… emergency… you’re kidding me. Takeoff?”

She nodded, her good eye boring into me.

“You can’t do that! The ship is still hooked up into town, isn’t it?”

She nodded again.

“How soon?”

She spread her fingers. Twice.

“Ten minutes?” She nodded. “Gretel, we’re all going to die.”

She shook her head.

“Not ffff… not fuh… not if—”

“Not if we hurry?”

She nodded.

“What do I do?”

She made a lifting gesture.

“Gretel, that’s going to hurt like hell.”

“Do it… no choice.”

I sighed and got my arms under her. I was afraid her arm was going to fall off.

She never made a sound. I went through the door and out into the plaza. If things had been confused before, it was pandemonium now. People were emerging from hiding, clearly worried about getting shot, but even more afraid of being in Irontown when the Heinlein took off. If it took off, I added to myself. But if it exploded, or even if it just sat there on the ground, it was clear that all connections to this area and all the other areas around the ship were going to be severed. If I were doing that, I’d probably use explosives. Far away, back toward civilization, pressure doors would automatically shut, sealing those of us who didn’t make it to the ship inside what would soon become a death chamber.

“Which way?” I asked. Gretel managed to nod toward my right. I started off in that direction, Sherlock trotting along at my heels. There was still shooting going on, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about that. I had to hope that the attackers were as confused and disoriented as I was.

A bullet went sizzling by so close I could hear it. I picked up my pace. A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one. Isn’t it?

Most of the folks I could see were heading in the same direction. I hoped they all knew where they were going. I hurried along a wide connecting corridor, and at least the gunfire stopped for a few minutes. But I came out in another plaza, about the same size as the first one, and there was fighting there, too. Ahead of me a man was struck with a bullet. He went down, and I almost stumbled over him. I looked down and saw him clutching his thigh, which was spurting blood. I wanted to help him, but there was no way I could manage to do that and still carry Gretel. I chanced a look back after I’d gone a few yards and saw someone grab his arm and yank him to his feet.

Down yet another wide corridor, then out into the largest open space I had yet seen in Irontown. Off to my right was a smooth surface that I hoped was the outer hull of the Heinlein. I tried to remember just what the ship looked like from the pictures I had found after the Big Glitch. What I recalled was a series of shapes with no obvious pattern to them. Cylinders, spheres, irregular trapezoids. A fair amount of ports and larger windows. Nothing I could see looked familiar, except for what was clearly an extralarge cargo lock. Boxes and pallets were scattered around the lock. I guessed it was cargo that was yet to be loaded. I hoped there was nothing absolutely critical in the containers because there was no chance at all that most of them would ever make it aboard.

Still, some of them must have been pretty important, as stevedore robots were hard at work lifting the boxes and carrying them toward the lock, supervised by frantic men and women in yellow coveralls.

“Yellow uniforms, cargo handlers,” Gretel told me. “Blue… crew.”

“Blue crew?”

“Blue uniforms. Crew. Know where to go.”

“We have to get there first.”

“Get us inside. Hurry.”

The lock was drawing people like a big magnet. People in all manner of dress were funneling toward it, some of them pausing to turn around and get off a shot or two, others trying to shield small children. Off in the other direction, invaders must have been converging because I could hear more gunfire coming from there and I saw another person go down.

The crowd was inevitably compressed as it neared the lock. This made them easier targets. But off to each side and from vantages higher up on the hull, people in red uniforms were returning intense fire toward the invaders. I could hear it even over the racket of the multiple klaxon horns.

“Almost there,” I breathed to Gretel. I looked back. I couldn’t see Sherlock. I shouted his name.

I had to save Gretel. I had to save Sherlock. What to do?

I decided I would get Gretel to the lock and give her to somebody, then go back for my dog.

Something caused me to turn. A sixth sense? I could not possibly have heard anything. For some reason I turned a full one-eighty, and saw a two-legged rhinoceros headed right for me.

Okay, he wasn’t quite that big, but he was at least double my size. He was part of a line of charging pachyderms, and I didn’t have to take too many guesses to figure out where he was from.

There is a certain sameness to Charonese, or at least to warriors, which is all I have ever seen. Maybe they have little guys and gals back home, where the babbling brooks of liquid nitrogen meander through the summer landscape. Or maybe not. They’re not telling.

Half his head was blown off, and he was still coming. Whatever had hit him had just peeled back the skin from the entire right side of his face, exposing his steel skull, taking a lot of his cheekbone and lips with it. One eye was torn out. The skull replacement helps them survive injuries that otherwise would certainly be fatal.

But what no steel plate can protect you against is concussion. Whatever hit him had rattled around whatever he used for brains inside that silvery skull. He was staggering, looking quite confused. I could see a deep dent the bullet had made in the steel. He was just part of a line that was advancing steadily. They were taking casualties, but they just kept coming.

I was directly in the line of sight of his one good eye, which slowly began tracking. He pointed a pistol at me. It was an old-fashioned automatic, from a design hundreds of years old. I figured I was dead. He pulled the trigger. It clicked. It clicked again, and again. Cursing, he dropped the gun and lunged the last few feet between us. Before I knew it, he was on me.

I dropped Gretel. For the first time, she cried out. I probably did, too, as fingers like grappling hooks bit into my shoulder. He pulled his fist back for a punch that would have taken my head off.

That’s when Sherlock came flying through the air like a guided missile and bit down on his forearm, hard. I could hear bones crack. At that moment other loud sounds began to be heard. It was a series of explosions, distant, but getting louder with each big bang. I realized it was the sound of the Heinlein being blasted free of all its encrustations.

But I had an even more immediate problem, which was to somehow keep the warrior from tearing my shoulder from its socket. And an even bigger problem was to keep the son of a bitch from killing Sherlock.

It’s a good thing he was concussed. He reached toward me with his free hand, then realized it wasn’t free, that there was a rather large dog clinging to that arm. So he turned his attention to Sherlock, and I did my best to use my only useful thumb to put out his other eye. Blinded, he went after me in a rage, grunting like a pig. And Sherlock was there again, not letting go except to get a better grip.

We only had minutes. Maybe even less than a minute. The explosions were very loud now. They were set to explode in a series, and each one was closer to us. There was the loudest bang of all, and with a screech of tortured metal, the ship began to come free. The warrior and I both looked up, and I could see the side of the ship coming free of all the things that had been attached to it. Walls tore open. Things spilled out. A gap began to grow. And a high wind began to howl. Clouds of condensation formed and swirled like some awful fog from Hell.

The air was going. With it went small objects, sucked right up and out through the gap. Eventually, we would all be lifted. Me, Sherlock, the Charonese, and the Dalmatian.

The Dalmatian? Where had he come from?

Injured as he was, he managed to get into the fight, grabbing the killer by the ankle and pulling. The killer tumbled to the ground, taking me with him. And then there were even more dogs on him. For a moment I couldn’t even see him for the snarling, twisting, tearing mass of dogs.

Pieces were coming off the Charonese. Mostly it was bits of his clothes and equipment belt, but some of it was chunks of flesh. I hoped they would strip him to the bone.

I realized that the hard object under me was the gun he had dropped. On his belt I saw a full clip of bullets. I managed to get it without getting my hand ripped off by the dogs. And now my addiction to violent movies from the past came in handy.

I knew how to release the empty clip. I knew how to jam the full clip into the butt. I knew how to jack a round into the chamber. I jammed the pistol against his lips. He cried out, giving me just enough room to slip the muzzle inside his mouth.

I pulled the trigger, sending a bullet through the soft, unprotected roof of his mouth. The metal cranium was tough. The bullet did not go through it. I could only imagine the bullet bouncing around in there. Smoke came out of his mouth, nose, and ears. He went instantly and totally limp.

I got to my feet. The wind was really shrieking now. I could feel it, a steady blast against my back, blowing toward the ship.

I saw the air lock begin to crank closed.

“Sherlock, let go!” I shouted. “Come on, boy!”

I actually had to kick him. He let go and looked at me in shock.

“To the ship!” I yelled. He began to bark, but he trotted along beside me as I picked up Gretel and staggered toward the ship.

The dogs were faster. All but the Dalmatian ran past me. Sherlock lingered with me.

People were still getting through the closing air lock. The gap between the ship and where I stood was five feet, and getting wider. Guards were looking at us all suspiciously. They didn’t want strangers, like me, to get inside. The wind wasn’t whistling quite as loudly now. The air was very thin. I would soon pass out. But I was still able to shout.

“This is Gretel, you guys!”

I must have been heard because when I jumped the gap, they let me in. I worried that they would not admit Sherlock, but they did. Already inside were about a dozen other dogs, all of them with blood around their mouths. I think the guards had seen them take down the Charonese.

The lock clanked closed behind us, and I heard the welcome air hissing into the lock.

I kept waiting for the ship to blow up. But it didn’t. Whatever driving power “Mr. Smith” had invented was getting us up and away quite smartly.

Naturally it was chaotic for a while there in the lock and the spaces beyond. Gretel was not the only one badly injured. There were several dead people, and at least one who died right there in the lock before help could get to him. Gretel was recognized and whisked away, and soon the other casualties were either being treated or taken to medical facilities.

I didn’t have much to do but sit there and try to catch my breath. There were several big screens on the walls, and I watched numbly as a hundred cameras both from the surface and aboard ship relayed the pictures to us. I saw the massive ship rising from the sea of trash like some iron whale breaching… but this whale never splashed back down. I saw the view looking down on the huge hole where Irontown had been. Debris was spewing into the vacuum, strewing itself over the ancient Lunar plain.

Many people died that day, but no one from beyond Irontown. The Heinleiners had been scrupulous in shutting the air locks that led to the city.

Sherlock rested his head in my lap. Someone had borne away the Dalmatian. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive. The other dogs stuck close to me. I wondered what that was about.

Sherlock and I were pretty far down the triage list, but eventually a medic got to us. He saw to my wounds and gave me something for the pain. He even called in a vet for Sherlock.

In time someone asked me where I was to be billeted, and I told her I didn’t know, that I wasn’t on the passenger manifest. She gave me a cabin number, and I found my way to it in the massive maze of the ship. It turned out to be a barracks very much like the one where I had been held captive for all that time. I was too bone weary to laugh at that.

I threw myself down on the nearest bunk and slept like the dead.