Free The Seventh Angel by jeff edwards

Just for a few minutes. And, while he was sleeping, he could trace the wiring harnesses in his mind. When he woke up, he would fix the broken whatever it was, and they would get back to the ship in time for lunch.
    Everything was going to be fine now. Charlie knew that. Everything was going to be just fine.
    “ You never asked me out.”
    The words caught him as he was dozing off. “What?”
    “ You never asked me out,” Gabriella said again. “I kept waiting for you to ask me out, but you never did.”
    Charlie smiled languidly. “Now I’m hallucinating.”
    Gabriella’s French-Canadian accent was like birdsong in his ears. She wasn’t shivering any more either.
    “ No you’re not,” she said. “You may be dying, but you are not hallucinating.”
    “ This is my fault,” Charlie said softly.
    “ Yes” Gabriella said. “It is your fault. You’ve had plenty of chances, but you’ve never asked me out.”
    “ That’s not what I meant,” Charlie said. “We’re going to die here. We’re already dying. And it’s my fault.” He was getting sleepy now.
    Gabriella sighed, the sound echoing off of unseen surfaces in the darkness. “If you don’t ask me out, I’m going to kill you before the cold does.”
    “ And that damned dog,” Steve said feebly.
    “ Right,” Gabriella said. Her voice was getting sleepy too. “You and that damned dog.”
    Charlie nodded, although no one could see him. This was all part of the hallucination; that much he knew. But what better time to do the impossible? The unthinkable …
    “ Would you like to go out to dinner with me?” He winced at the sound of his words. Even in this dying world of frozen dreams, he was terrified of what Gabriella might say.
    “ That’s the best you can do?” she asked. “You’re in your dying moments, and possibly hallucinating, and you ask me out to dinner ?” She snorted. “If this was my hallucination, I’d go straight to the sex.”
    Charlie felt himself grin. “Can we go straight to the sex?”
    “ Of course not,” Gabriella said. “You have to buy me dinner first.”
    And with those words, Charlie suddenly knew that it was okay to die. He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness, still smiling. He could feel sleep tugging at him. But he wanted to be awake for another minute or two, to savor the amazing idea that Gabriella actually wanted to go out with him, even if it was only the delusion of a dying brain.
    It took him a few seconds to notice the light. It started small, a tiny glowing pinprick moving through the curtain of black water outside the view port. He watched it idly as it grew, moving closer in a series of looping zigzags that reminded him vaguely of a bloodhound sniffing out a trail. Still it moved closer, the light growing to the size of a golf ball, and then a basketball.
    Charlie lifted his head to get a better look at it. The thing, whatever it was, came to a stop about ten feet from the nose of the Nereus , and hovered there. Charlie raised a cold-numbed hand to shield his eyes against the light. He squinted into the hallucinatory brightness.
    He could see something behind the light now: some sort of bizarre machine, perhaps a quarter the size of the Nereus. It was vaguely disk-shaped, with a pair of heavy-looking mechanical arms, flanked by clusters of lenses. To Charlie’s foggy brain, it looked like a crab riding a Frisbee.
    The strange machine turned to the side, revealing a yellow-painted stretch of hull marked with large black lettering. Charlie struggled to force his blurry eyes to focus on the words. ‘Something-or-other DEEP WATER SYSTEMS.’
    Then, the machine moved again, curving to the left until it had disappeared from the viewport’s line of sight.
    Charlie’s eyes remained locked on the place where the machine had been. Could he have imagined it? He was still trying to figure that out, when the water outside the viewport lit up with an eerie blue-green light. For about a second, the