Cold Sleep, page 10
Without hesitation, they abandon their task and push off to join us, unhooking themselves from anchor points as they come. Surrounded by guns, it doesn’t feel safer. Something about this is wrong, screaming at me to think again, but swept along in the Captain’s wake, I can do nothing but follow orders. All the while the other part, the one with the plan, rumbles inside me. Awaiting an opportunity.
The central corridor has changed in the minutes since I’d come through. Blood streaks its walls and hangs in droplets, colliding, forming great globules. A half-dozen corpses float about. One spins through the air towards us, arterial spray still gouting from her savaged throat, her eyes bulging. Williams. Crewmember. Nothing to do but watch her die or move on. My gorge rises, but it helps to look past the dying woman and focus on the airlock ahead of us. Crimson smears streak its grey-white surface.
I duck my head away from the floating mass of ruptured intestines trailing from a dead revenant; his shattered body leaks profane fluids and chokes the air with the stink of shit and death.
“Where’s M’Benga?” I ask, meaning it as a thought but finding my mouth moves on its own.
“She’ll be around. She’s the sharpest coño on board… after you. Always underestimated her, haven’t you? Because of her stature. Not realizing the advantage it gives her here and the hard edge she’s developed succeeding despite prejudice.”
“I never took you for a bleeding heart, Captain.”
“Then you’ve always been right about me.”
What she said hits me harder than you might expect. Let’s be clear, I’m not prejudiced against M’Benga because of her physical differences. I’m not stupid. In space, she has significant advantages—greater g-force tolerance being but one. A research paper, now many years out of date in objective time, had said germline editing to create a new generation of spacers with conditions previously seen as disabilities is the future of interstellar travel was required reading at the Academy. Truth is, I’ve never thought less of M’Benga for any other reason than she’s a jealous bitch who lacks imagination. Stuck in her narrow way, unable to change.
Lashing anchor-lines to the airlock, Dominguez sets her feet down.
“You, Martinez. Stay here. Kill anyone who fails to identify themselves. I don’t care if they’re crew, I don’t care if they’re your steady bunk mate. If they do not identify themselves when challenged, shoot them. Is that clear?”
Martinez grits his teeth. “Aye, ma’am.”
Dominguez engages the airlock cycle. We squeeze in, three of the crew walking up the sides of the airlock until they appear to stand above us, or is it below? The cycle drags. If time’s a measure of heartbeats, my subjective timeline has constricted as the universe streaks away from me near lightspeed. Seconds become years. Have to tell myself to get a grip and watch for my chance.
A dead revenant bumps off the narrow corridor walls ahead of the airlock door, the small change in pressure pushing it away from us so the corpse tumbles end over end, leaking beads of blood which coast through the air, striking each other and melding.
Dominguez takes a cautious step. “Dawkins, stay here. You know what to do?”
The scarred man anchors himself in place. “Aye, ma’am.”
I clear my throat. “Captain, I left Hiroki on his own in the medibay. With a live revenant…”
“And?”
“I’d like to check on him.”
Her eyes are hard, pinning me to the deck as surely as the stikpads do. Leaning in so it’s for my ears only, she says, “I wouldn’t turn my back on you now for anyone, Kara. Not for a second.”
“But…” I regret it as soon as the word leaves my lips.
“One more word and I’ll have you stripped of rank. Understood?” She growls.
What can I do but nod? The eyes of the crew make my back burn.
“You. Meecher. Go to the Medibay and check on the medic. If he’s alive bring him to the engine-room. If not, don’t hang around. Stay sharp.” Under her breath, the Captain mutters, “Siyanda, where are you when I need you?”
The middle-aged woman who’d lost her partner on the earlier sweep trembles at the order but starts moving. She wouldn’t have been much use anyway, the way her hands shake.
We inch along the corridor, to the rhythm of twist, release, step, test, repeat. Any revenants we encounter will float while we stay stable and blast them—hopefully, it’ll be advantage enough. Doesn’t stop my heart from thundering.
The quiet bothers me. No matter where you are in the ship, you grow used to the constant background vibration which becomes an actual humming near the engines. Now they’re still. Like being at dock. Only then, you’d be focused on getting your duties out of the way, briefing the crew not to mess with the colonists or Earthside gangs, collecting your pay, and enjoying the all too short shore-leave before prepping Charon for its next journey and dealing with whatever fallout there was from the ranks being let off the leash. In the absence of that low frequency, my ears whine.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
Corpses soar in a tangled constellation through the engine vault. Leaking fluids and body parts orbit them; a nebula of blood hazes the air. The visible sections of the great fusion rockets are spattered with gore and scuffed by flechette rounds. The ion drive, running under the walkways we stick and unstick ourselves to, is dark, all displays dead. Maybe permanently out of commission. In which case we are as good as dead.
The calculation runs itself in the back of my mind without urging. Spin the Charon; fire all fusion rockets at the limits of ship tolerance until they expend their fuel. Velocity’ll still be too high by the time we enter the Gliese 892 system. Maybe, gravity assist could shed enough speed—weaving a complex path among the planets. The sheer complexity of the course we’d need overloads me. It’d take days of calculations with the navicomp’s help.
I’m not convinced we have enough reaction mass to make the course corrections but it is possible. If the course corrections and gravity assist didn’t work, we’d hurtle out of the system and into forever. The vessel itself might be worth several billion new-jiao but the cost of a rescue would dwarf that. Sevran Corp would be pragmatic.
“Captain. We’ve got to end this now. There’s no time if we don’t want to end up on a one-way trip.”
Her fist comes up. Hold. I set both feet, brush the lenses of my rebreather clear of blood, and look about for threats. Something’s wrong about the scene before us. Not simply the bodies tumbling about, bouncing off each other and the walls. They’re enough to crack anyone’s sanity, a whirling waltz of the dead, the danse macabre of legend in the flesh. Painted with the colors of blood and shit.
No weapons.
Not a single corpse has a visible deckgun and none of the weapons float free. There are seven dead revenants—three whole, four floating in pieces, one torn in half, the others missing limbs and in one case a head. The dead crew are all the same: throats torn out with the savagery I’d first seen in the VIP lounge.
It makes little sense.
If they’d been overwhelmed, why don’t their corpses bear signs of other wounds? Bites or scratches to their arms should be clear as defensive injuries. If they’d been ambushed, how’d they manage to kill all of these revenants?
I realize our mistake and cry out as the first of the intact revenant corpses opens her eyes and draws the deckgun lashed to her back up and around.
Twist, twist, I free my feet.
The muzzle of the gun points at me.
Kick.
Launch myself away from the deck. She pulls the trigger. A cluster of flechettes tear through the flesh of my left shoulder. The crewman who’d been standing behind me screams. Pain flashes, eclipsing all my senses in a white haze even as my throat lets loose a shriek of agony. The training saves me, leaves me enough focus to keep conscious and do my job. Spinning around, I set my feet to the deckplates which had been above my head.
The recoil of the deckgun had sent each of the ambushers tumbling backwards and I pump shot after shot into them while the Captain does the same from her position ahead and below/above me. Not one of the schizoid killers had hit her but their attack’s slaughtered the rest of our group. They stand, still stuck to the deck but shrouded in their own broken pieces and haloed in blood. I turn away, unable to cope with seeing the inner workings of people I’d spoken to only moments before.
“Kara? You still with me?”
Dominguez is in front of me. I must have blacked out. The urge to swing up my deckgun and end the Captain while I can still blame the revenants swells and breaks as the pain in my shoulder blows away thought, leaving me whimpering in agony.
“Hold on. I’ve got the emergency medipack. Here.” She holds something to my neck and prickles my skin, a shallow and insignificant pain next to the screaming torture of my shoulder. My heart thuds in my chest, each beat driving back the agony until it exists in the far distance. Not gone but something I can ignore. The pain rockets again as Dominguez does something and my vision blurs…
I’m aware again. Floating near the engine controls, anchored to them. I look to my shoulder—the Captain’s torn away the arm of my wearall to get at the injury. Wound sealant closes the rents in my flesh but the razor tip of a flechette protrudes, seeping droplets of blood which swell and float free. She must’ve freed the ones that weren’t too deep and left the sealant to slow the bleeding. The patch of springy foam covering my shoulder is pink in places and blistered around the protruding tip of the flechette. Don’t need to hear it from Hiroki to know that without surgery, the barbed end of the flechette will keep ripping at my flesh as it works its way deeper and deeper. Without help, I’ll bleed to death.
I look round for the Captain, but there’s no sign of her. Only one place she could’ve gone. Into the ion drive to restart it. She wouldn’t be able to do the calculations I’d rushed; she wouldn’t realize there was a chance we could use a gravity assist to slow us down. The only choice Dominguez would see was between getting the ion drive working or consigning us all to an eternal sleep between the stars.
What to do? I need Hiroki. If he’s still alive. And, though I had been happy to contemplate her death when all other options ran out, I can’t ignore that the Captain saved my life. There’ll be more revenants waiting for her. Probably the first one who’d woken when Zed and I had made our play for our big score. It’s obvious—these things, whatever their origin, aren’t rabid beasts. They act with purpose. Not one had tried to kill the Captain. Which means something—they need her alive. Why? If they get what they want, will they be satisfied or will it spell death for the rest of us? No way will I chance finding out.
Something nags at me. My QI virus. Either it’d been prepared to release the first revenant, Revenant Zero as I now think of him, or there’s some force active aboard ship. Could Dominguez have triggered the release? It makes no sense. Maybe the creeping numbness of the painkiller’s affecting my mind but when I think of a simple calculation, the numbers crunch as they always have.
There are too many variables I don’t know. Nothing to sink my intellect into and rip out an answer. Only one choice lies open to me. Choose myself or choose the Captain.
My shoulder throbs as I bump against the ladder. I’m pulling myself along the ion drive’s half-kilometer housing, one rung at a time, sticking both feet before reaching out with my right arm. Easy prey if a revenant attacks. My left arm’s useless, I’ve tried using it but the agony pierces even the icy haze of the painkiller. When it runs out, I’ll be nothing more than a coiled-up ball of misery. To keep control, I used an anchor line to bind my left arm across my chest. It helps, but every now and then, I catch my arm as I move and pain spears through me.
My plan? No, I’m shit out of plans. So much for finding a way to use the QI virus or eliminating the Captain. Survival has boiled down to the realization Dominguez is vital in some way. My career might never recover but if I live, opportunities will open. Dying or being stuck on a vessel doomed to fly forever into the dark between stars leaves no chance of a comeback.
The ion engine stretches the entire length of the ship—its intake, and during deceleration its exhaust, angled below the Charon’s armored prow. But its heart’s in the aft compartment. In many ways, it is the rear section with what remains of the engineering space given over to the fusion rockets we’ll use when our speed drops to a point the interstellar medium is too diffuse for the ramscoop to properly fuel the ion drive. Dispose of them and it’d take over a century to slow down on ion drive but what’s time to an interstellar traveler? Each journey drags you farther in spacetime from any world you know and anyone left on it.
The engine itself is a small section at the very rear of the vessel. Most of what’s visible as a giant tube running the length of the engineering bay is part of the ramscoop, drawing in the sparse dust and gasses of interstellar space and funneling them along, building a charge as it does so. The final hundred meters are where the magic happens. Where propulsion becomes significant. It can’t safely exceed one-point-one-g and takes its damn time getting there, but the fuel it scoops in the seeming emptiness of deep space allows the ship to accelerate ever closer to lightspeed—far beyond the redline where friction and radiation become too great. Unless the final reaction chamber gets damaged. Then it’s nothing but a magnetized tube.
I gain the bottom or is it the top of the ladder? My mind’s begun to wander again, thoughts fuzzed by shock and the drugs. The colossal cylinder ahead of me, the ramscoop itself, is dim. No scintillation of particles being accelerated and condensed. No hum of power—have to hope the magnetic cowl is still being generated. I can’t see the Captain if she is ahead. It’s dark where the tube I’m standing on runs under the engineering deck. The strong desire to shine a light down the cramped space wars within me against the certainty it’ll give away my position. Guided by the grainy image of the deckgun’s thermal sight, I stagger forward—all grace gone from my steps so I tug at the stikpads and lose my balance as often as I twist them free. My shoulder burns.
Too soon for the painkiller to wear off.
It bothers me. Had bumping the injury driven the flechette deep enough in to nick an artery?
Stop thinking about it!
Ahead, maybe a hundred meters, is an access port to the inside of the engine. There’d be a voidsuit there, not armored to allow for true EVA but a light model to protect an engineer from vacuum so they can work on the inside of the ion engine if necessary. Such a suit wouldn’t survive long outside the ship at the speeds we were travelling. The slightest impact from dust would tear through it but with the intake of the ramscoop closed—and it has to be closed since the engine is dark—there’s no threat. If a revenant has climbed into the engine, the access would cause an automatic safety shutdown. But what could they do there? If the Captain’s followed them, I’m out of luck. The need to work on the ion engines is so rare even two suits are considered a luxury and Sevran Corps doesn’t bother with those for haulers like this one. By the time I can find my way back to the hard suits, whatever’s going to happen here will already be over. All I can hope to do is watch Dominguez’s back and make sure she can get back in.
The port is visible now, a dark hump on the surface of the engine cover. What had seemed pitch black isn’t total. Another shape rears up on my thermal scope—the Captain?
The time for worrying about giving myself away has passed. I flick on the deckgun’s light and frame the figure.
Male. Dark-haired. Wide shoulders, powerful waist. He turns and my finger tightens on the trigger. And then I see his face.
“Zed?” I say.
Maybe I scream his name, maybe whisper it. Blood loss and shock combine, making me sway. If not for the microgravity and being stikpadded to the engine mounting, I’d have fallen. As it is, the next moments come as a series of still images. Events strobing before my eyes as I drift in and out of consciousness. Zed calling out. Now he’s halfway to me. Every detail of his face his crystal-clear. Now he’s ten paces away. My heart leaps—an unfamiliar feeling filling the empty space in my chest, the chasm that’s been there since I left him.
He’s alive!
Now he’s in front of me, holding an arm out towards me. He’ll take care of me and I’ll never let him down again, no matter the cost to my bullshit career.
My navigator conditioning—the cutting, the reshaping of who I am to better serve the Company—is tied to my emotions. They’d been dragged from me, not removed but turned to serve the all-important goal of making me function as a navigator needs to.
In many ways, they’d left us navigators with a shred of a personality. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter. You get the big things, the primal emotions. But anything more subtle… Don’t get me wrong. All the fundamental needs of a human—to feel valued, to seek approval and love—they all remain but they’re undermined. You end up not callous as much as preoccupied with things that affect you. The fundamental drives mean survival, the things you can’t cut away.
Seeing Zed brings on a surge of feeling that threatens to break down all the Company had rewritten in my mind. Threatens but fails. In the last blink of consciousness trying to slip from me there’s a stretching of time. The moment dilates to a singularity of existence.
All the power of my mind leaps to deal with the tide of emotion. It seeks facts and draws conclusions. Where are the injuries Zed must have suffered? Why isn’t he speaking to me? Why isn’t he angry after I left him?
It looks like Zed, but it can’t be him. Blink and there he is before me. Now see the glint of something in his hand. A blade coming straight for my throat.
I fling myself backwards.
There’s no time for the twist of feet to release the stikpads” grip. Instead, I bend against the tendons in my ankles as far as a person can go, knees at right angles and back arched. The knife punches through the air where my head had been.
