Chapter Text
Ryland hadn’t had a gun pointed at him in… well, ever, probably, and to be honest, he’d kind of hoped to keep that streak running. Buuut he’d developed a bit of a knack for ending up face down and helpless in the dirt, so perhaps it was an inevitability that he’d wind up back here, again, this time with a pistol pointed at his cerebellum.
Honestly, he’d take it over the coma needle. Getting shot felt more honest.
“I told you I’d repay you for the shiner, Grace. How’s my knee feel digging into your back, huh?”
“What’s the plan, Harken?” Ryland asked, struggling to breathe under the pressure. “You kill me, and then what?”
Harken scoffed. “Haven’t decided if I’m gonna kill you yet. It all depends on how carefully Liz follows my instructions.”
“Take the gun off of him, Harken,” Elli said calmly. “We can talk about this like adults.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll talk, and you’ll listen. Without talking back please, for once in your fucking life.”
Ryland could feel Harken… vibrating on top of him, a jittery, shaky, erratic mess. The guy was coked out, wearing an awkward-to-manoeuvre EVA suit, and pointing a gun at Ryland’s brain. Not a great combination for him, specifically.
“Just… get off of him,” Elli asked, her voice breaking a little. “Please. Just let him up.”
Harken’s knee came off of Ryland’s back. “Don’t tell me I never did anything for you.”
Ryland rolled over, wheezing, as his lungs fully filled with air for the first time in too many breaths. Harken’s grip on the gun was, as he suspected, awkward and precarious. One wrong slip and he’d pull the trigger.
“You’ve done so much for me, Harken. I really am so grateful for everything. To be here… wow, right?” Elli said, struggling to hold it together. “It’s only fair that I do whatever you need me to do. And I’ll do it. But that gun… with your EVA gloves… we don’t want an accident to happen, right?”
Harken grimaced, wiggling his jaw absently. “I could give a fuck if an accident happened, Elli. Get back on the fucking lander, please.”
Elli nodded. “Okay. I can do that. And then what?”
“You’re gonna go back up to Collaboration, and you’re gonna send me the rest of my bots. Then, if you come back, we can talk about what happens to you and lover boy.”
If you come back? What does that even mean?
“Harken, with decompression… that’ll take hours. You and I should both go. Leave Ryland out of this.”
Harken shook his head. “That’s exactly why I’m not going, Elizabeth. I don’t want it to take hours. Skip decompression and get me my fucking bots.”
Elizabeth gulped. “I’ll get decompression sickness. I could die.”
“Yeah, well, if you’d turned on your fucking tablet when you were up there, this would have been done already,” Harken huffed. “These academic types. So fucking stupid, you can’t even trick them right.”
“So you did hack my tablet,” Elizabeth said. “You did launch those bots on Neighborly.”
“I wouldn’t have had to if these rock-spider freaks had left my equipment alone,” Harken hissed. “Honestly, who gets squirrelly over one measly test launch? Unfounded paranoia.”
“Their paranoia is extremely founded, actually,” Ryland said, sitting up gingerly and gesturing to the hulking mining robot just a few feet away.
Harken whirled on him. “You shut up. Traitor. After all humanity did for you - the parades, and the holidays, and the statues - you side with these… things?!”
Ryland blinked. “I think the statues went up after humanity sent me into deep space to die.”
“Fucking… whatever! Liz, get on the fucking ship. Connect your tablet to the ship’s network, and don’t fucking touch anything. I’ll do the rest.”
Elli stood resolute, chin cocked. “Tell him I didn’t know about any of this.”
Harken laughed. Actually laughed. “Why? Who cares?”
“I do. If I’m going to die, I want him to know.”
Harken rolled his eyes and turned to Ryland. “Your girlfriend didn’t know anything, because if she did, she’d cause nothing but problems for all of us. Lucky me, she figured out how to become a problem anyway, and that’s why you’ve got a gun pointed at your head right now.”
Harken turned to Elli. “Happy?”
“No.” Elli was crying now. “I was gonna stay. We were gonna be together. Ryland, I wanted to stay. Leaving you was never an option, and I can’t believe I ever thought it was.”
Ryland’s heart felt like it had been cracked open with an axe. She wanted to stay. Staying would have cost her everything… but she wanted to stay. With him. Every happy fantasy he’d ever had about sharing his life with Elizabeth played in his mind’s eye once again. They’d been so close. So, so close. The grief was nearly overwhelming.
Harken grinned. “If you survive you can still stay, Liz. In fact… you might have to. For the breeding program.”
Ryland’s stomach turned. Gun be damned, he clambered to his feet and took a step towards Harken. “The what?!”
Harken pressed the gun against Ryland’s visor, square between the eyes. “Endeavor needs a permanent human staff on Erid to oversee our glorious partnership for generations to come. We had plans to make our own. Did you not notice that all of the engineers were women?”
Ryland seethed. All of these women, flown halfway across the sky… unknowingly enrolled in some sort of harem with this pig.
Harken grinned a little too wide. “Don’t worry, Grace. Genetic diversity is nothing but a win for Endeavor’s staffing goals… so I’ll let you take turns.”
That was about all Ryland could take. He grabbed at Harken’s EVA suit, pulling him in close, his gun arm sliding up over Ryland’s shoulder. At this angle, he couldn’t get a decent shot. He had one chance…
As soon as Ryland managed to knock Harken to the ground, all hell broke loose.
—
It almost happened too fast for Elizabeth to track.
In a flash, Ryland was on top of Harken the ground, attempting to wrestle the gun from his hands. Three heartbeats later, the landing pad was swarming with Eridians, systematically dismantling the mining bot. And, if the frantic chittering of carapaces in the darkness was any indication, the same thing was happening to the other mining bots out of sight.
“No!” Harken screamed. “No! Attack!”
The mining bot clicked pathetically, its systems already damaged by frantic Eridian claws… but the air cannon still whirred into place. Aimed directly at a small Eridian clawing at some of the bot’s leg wiring.
“Look out!” Elizabeth yelled. But there was no time. The cannon was charging.
Without a second thought, she dove on top of the Eridian, scaring the absolute crap out of them.
“--What— HUMAN?” it squealed, spinning in confusion. Elizabeth held on as a white-hot blast of pressurized air washed across her back. It was… uncomfortable. But it wouldn’t kill her.
POP.
A sudden, violent something happened somewhere near her shoulder. She wasn’t sure what, but it was loud. And it hurt. Maybe something to do with her oxygen rig? The cooling system in the suit? Had the hot air caused the liquid cooling to, uh… what’s the word… un-liquid-ify?
Somewhere beneath the flood of adrenaline, Elizabeth felt an odd, distant wooziness pooling in her brain. She tried to shake it off, holding onto the Eridian as the oxygen gun blasted across her back. The faint smell of ammonia scorched her nostrils, and her mouth tasted like a shiny copper penny.
No. That wasn’t right. Why was she smelling ammonia?
She looked to her left shoulder, where she’d felt the popping sensation. Something had poked a wet, red hole in the shoulder of her suit.
…No. Wait. She’d been shot. And the only reason she was still conscious was because of the compressed Earth air blasting at high force, directly into the hole.
The airlock was 10 steps away. She’d be crushed by step three. Besides, if she rolled off of this Eridian now, it’d be like exposing the poor creature to a direct blast from an instant-death flamethrower.
Elizabeth had no idea how much air was in the cannon, but she did know that when it stopped, she’d die.
She looked over at Harken, slumped over Ryland’s shoulder, seemingly bewildered that he’d actually pulled the trigger. Ryland turned, and she saw the look on his face when he realized what happened. She wished she hadn’t. He looked so scared.
“Elli?!” Ryland screamed, rushing over to her. Three Eridians took Ryland’s place atop Harken, disarming him and pinning him down.
“Elli!” He screamed. “Get her to the airlock!”
Someone was fussing with her shoulder. It was making it hurt more. “Stop…” she said weakly. But she was too tired to jerk her shoulder away. Too sleepy. She needed sleep. Maybe she could just close her eyes for a moment…
“Elli, no. You have to stay awake for me, okay?” Ryland said, shaking her good shoulder frantically. “Airlock! Airlock!”
The Eridian underneath her began waddling towards the airlock, Elizabeth thought. Or maybe she was floating towards it. It was hard to say.
Ryland looked so scared. So panicked. She hated to see him like this.
“Ry… it’s okay,” she said. She wanted to cup his face, but she couldn’t move.
“Elli… I love you, okay? I love you. Wherever you go, I’ll go. Earth, Erid, I don’t care. I can’t be without you either.”
“Hell?”
“You’re NOT dying, Elizabeth. I won’t let you.”
Something made a nasty hissing sound. It was the last thing Elizabeth heard before she blacked out.