by R. M. Olson
He pushed the door gently open and stepped through.
She was sitting propped up in the corner of the small room, one knee up, the other leg stretched out in front of her, her head tipped back against the wall. She raised her head with an effort as he came in, and then shoved herself up into a sitting position, swearing softly.
He hesitated again, then walked over and sat down on the cot beside where she was sitting.
“Hey, Jez,” he said at last. “How are you doing?”
“How do you think I’m doing?” she said, letting her head drop back against the wall. Her tone was more weary than angry.
“I’m—sorry. About the ship.”
“Yeah,” she said.
He paused a moment. “Jez? You’re angry at me.”
She lifted her head and glared at him, and he was shocked to see tears in her eyes.
“Yes I’m angry at you, genius-boy. What the hell were you thinking? Look, I don’t have time for this, OK? I don’t have time to be worried about you. I don’t have time to be wondering if you’re going to be still alive next time I see you. I have plenty of other things to worry about. My damn ship is broken. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to fix her again, and if we do, I don’t know if she’ll be the same ship she was. Lena wants to kill me, and now all of us are going to die because Lena wants to kill me, and someone tried to beat you up back in the zestava, and I don’t damn well have time for this!”
He stared at her. “I—”
“Just shut up, OK? Just shut up. Why the hell did you go tell Ysbel that?”
“I—Jez, because she deserved to know. I—”
“Well, you know what, you damn soft-boy? Next time you decide to go get yourself killed, why don’t you find someone else to care?”
He let out a breath of exasperation. “Jez. I didn’t intend for you to hear that. I wasn’t expecting you to—”
“Yeah?” she turned on him. “You just expected her to kill you, was that it? And you thought that would be just fine?”
“Jez, listen to me.” He was speaking through his teeth now. “I thought it through, alright? If she had chosen to kill me, it would have been her right. I—”
“Just shut up, you damn idiot,” Jez snapped. “Just shut the hell up, OK?”
“Jez—”
“I’m fine. I’m trying to get some sleep.”
He looked at her for a moment. She was steadfastly refusing to look at him, and she wiped her eyes angrily on the sleeve of her jacket.
“Jez, look, are you sure you’re—”
“Leave me alone,” she muttered.
He sighed and shook his head. “Alright, Jez, I’ll leave you alone. I’m sorry for bothering you.”
She didn’t answer, and he stood slowly.
Something inside him twisted to see her like this. Something about Jez crying was wrong. She should be grinning, or laughing, or making some smart-mouth remark, and when she was crying he felt like something solid and constant in his world had turned upside down.
“Look, Jez,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry for everything. We’ll fix the ship. I’ll do whatever I can to fix the ship. I’ve spent the last few weeks reading everything I can find on her, and we’ll put her back together. I promise.”
“Yeah,” she said bitterly, without looking up. “And then you’ll leave, right?”
He paused. “I’m beginning to think that’s going to be the best option for everyone.”
She didn’t answer, and finally he turned and stepped out the door, closing it softly behind him.
He wanted to swear, but he couldn’t even bring himself to do that.
Masha was probably right. He probably just needed some sleep, before he could screw anything else up.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Hour 11, Tae
“Tae.” The voice came through his earpiece, and he jerked awake, staring around him at the darkened room and trying to remember where he was and what he was doing there.
“Tae, I’m sorry. It’s time to wake up.”
It was Masha’s voice.
Masha. The ship.
Damn.
The heavy weight in his stomach, that had been there since Jez had told them she was leaving, breaking up the crew, settled back into place.
They had thirty-some hours before they all suffocated, unless they could get the thrusters back online.
He wasn’t sure if the three hours of sleep Masha had promised had helped clear his head, or only served to muddle it more. He wasn’t sure he wanted a clear head at this point, because he wasn’t sure he wanted to have the energy to think about everything that had happened, and everything that was going to happen even if they somehow got the ship running again.
He sighed and staggered upright.
You’d think, after all this time, that he’d be used to running on no sleep. He kept thinking that if he just finished this one job, he’d finally be able to catch up on all the sleep he’d missed. But at this point, all the sleep he’d missed was starting to look too long for one lifetime. He fumbled for his com, and tapped Masha’s line.
“I’m up.”
“Good.” She paused. “We’re meeting on the main deck.”
“Be there in a minute,” he mumbled. He hadn’t taken the time to change out of his clothes, so he leaned his head against the doorframe until he was pretty certain that he could stand up without falling over, and then he made his way down to the main deck.
The others had already gathered, blinking and shivering, and everyone was huddled in their own corner. Jez managed a tired grin as he came in.
“Thought we’d give you a couple extra minutes while the rest of us got up.”
“How long has it been?” he asked, his voice thick and hoarse with sleep.
“Three standard hours and twenty minutes,” said Masha. Of all of them, she was the only one who looked relatively normal, but then he’d seen Masha look relatively normal after she’d been hit by a blast from a heat gun, so that wasn’t actually saying much.
“I’ll go down to the supply room and grab the thruster parts,” he said, still trying to clear the fog from his head.
“I can grab the thruster parts,” said Jez, trying to get to her feet. He glared at her.
“You can stay where you are. I don’t want you nearly passing out on me again, because I need some actual help putting the thrusters together.”
“She nearly—” Lev started, throwing a concerned look in Jez’s direction. She glared and muttered something that was probably rude.
“Looks like none of you are morning people, then,” murmured Tanya, so low that probably only he and Ysbel could hear. He turned to stare at her. When he caught her eye, she gave him a small smile, like they’d just shared a joke.
He shook his head and turned away. There was plenty to get done, heavens knew, unless they wanted to suffocate to death as they argued on the main deck.
Ysbel stood. “I’ll come,” she said. “I can help you carry things, at least.”
He nodded, lips pressed tightly together, and turned down the short corridor to the ladder-stairs that led down to the middle deck. By the time he’d reached the hatch to the storage level, he felt slightly more awake. He shook his head.
He wasn’t entirely sure what all the way awake felt like anymore, at this point.
He caught a whiff of smoke on the air as he climbed down the narrow ladder under the hatch, and frowned. Probably just from the burnout the previous day. He’d checked the damage report, and it looked like there’d been a small fire on the bottom deck at some point.
His boots echoed on the metal floor as he made his way cautiously across the wide storage bay, its walls scorched and blackened. It was mostly empty, thank heavens—they’d loaded the ship’s parts and most of their supplies into the smaller storage room, where they were easier to lock down, and if they were lucky, nothing had been banged around too badly.
He put a hand on the door handl
e. It was warm—probably retained heat from the fire.
At his feet, a tendril of something that looked like smoke wisped out under the door, then sucked back inside. He blinked and shook his head, trying to push back the dull headache of too little sleep.
Behind him, Ysbel had reached the bottom of the ladder, and he could hear her boots on the floor behind him.
He twisted the door handle and it wasn’t until his hand was pulling the door open that something in his brain screamed an alarm. Ysbel’s shout came from behind him, and her footsteps broke into a run, and time seemed to slow. He half-turned to shout at her to stay back, something, but before he could do more than turn his head, the door exploded outward in a ball of flames. The corner of it slammed into his forehead and threw him to the ground, and a wave of fire leapt out over his head. The heat hit him like a wall, and he couldn’t see or think or breathe. His whole body was burning, and for one brief, lucid moment, he knew he was going to die. And then something grabbed him by his jacket and dragged him backwards. He tried to struggle on instinct, but his body wouldn’t respond the way it should, and a moment later he was clear of the flames and someone shoved him painfully against the hard deck. He tried to open his mouth to protest, but instead he choked on smoke. Fire licked hungrily around the walls of the storage bay,
“Go!” someone hissed in his ear, and then he was being pushed up the ladder, and somehow his blistered hands grabbed the rungs and he pulled himself up, Ysbel behind him. When they got to the deck floor above them, Ysbel slammed the hatch shut and shouted something into her com, and Tae rolled gingerly onto his side. His hands were blistered, his clothing blackened and scorched.
Ysbel dropped to the ground beside him, her face grim. “Are you alright?” she asked urgently.
“I—” his voice was a croak.
“It was a backdraft. When you opened the door it exploded.”
He should have known. He would have, if he wasn’t so plaguing exhausted. “The fire retardant—”
“Is down there. But we’re not going to get to it. Any other ideas?”
“Did everyone get out?” Lev’s voice was calm as usual, but there was sharp tension running beneath it.
“Yes. But we can’t get to the fire retardant, and heat like that will melt the deck soon enough. Not to mention what a fire will do to our oxygen supplies.”
He could feel the heat through the floor now, the deck warm to the touch.
“It’s right under the engine room—” Tae began, voice hoarse from smoke.
“I know. And the life support system.”
Jez was grinning, that grin that meant she was about to do something crazy.
“Jez—” Lev began. She shrugged.
“Been in plenty of ship fires before. It’s under the oxygen converter, right? So vent the waste CO2 tank.”
“That’s a wonderful idea, Jez,” said Lev through his teeth. “Except that someone would have to get the venting tube through a hatch that’s currently on fire, and will blow up in their face the moment it’s opened.”
“I’ll—” Jez began.
“No, you won’t,” Lev said at the same time. “You have four broken—”
She glared at him. “I know, genius.”
“I’ll do it,” said Tanya.
They all turned to stare at her.
“Tanya—” began Ysbel.
“Ysi. Of all the times you’d have to worry about me, this is not one of them.”
To Tae’s shock, Ysbel nodded resignedly. “You are right, of course.”
He stared, but to be honest, he didn’t have the time to wonder about it at the moment.
“The rest of you, get somewhere safe,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “The med bay should work.”
He hesitated.
“Quickly!”
“Come on,” said Ysbel, half-dragging him to his feet. “You need the med bay anyways.”
He stumbled to the short hallway that led to the med bay, and over his shoulder, he caught a glimpse of Tanya kneeling at the access port to the tank of waste gas.
Then they were out of sight, and he heard a sudden roar of flame, and Ysbel’s face paled for a moment. And then a long hiss of gas, and the noise of the flames quieted.
A few moments later, Tanya appeared in the doorway. Her face was blackened, but she looked unharmed.
“It’s out,” she said. “I’d give it a few minutes to cool down, though.”
Tae sank down on the floor in relief and leaned back against the cot, closing his eyes. Now that he had time to notice, the burns on his hands and arms ached and throbbed.
When he opened his eyes, Masha knelt beside him, med kit open on the ground in front of her.
“I’m fine,” he croaked.
She ignored him, and pulled out a burn kit. “Let me see your hands.”
He sighed and held them out, and she applied the patches to the blistered skin, along his arms and to the raw skin on the side of his face and neck.
Ysbel came over and crouched at his other side, concern on her face. A moment later, Jez pushed her way through.
“Masha,” she said at last, as if the name tasted slightly rotten, “How’s tech-head?”
Masha glanced up. “First degree burns, mostly.”
“The door knocked him backwards, so he missed the worst of the heat,” said Ysbel, and when he glanced up, he realized there were raw, burned streaks up her arm. She’d reached over Masha and was applying the burn patches to her own skin with a stoic matter-of-factness. “How’s your head?”
He touched the throbbing bump gingerly, then sat up abruptly. “I’ve got to get those parts.”
“I don’t know how many of them will be left,” said Ysbel quietly.
“I’ve got to check. We lose those parts—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“They aren’t going anywhere,“ said Ysbel. “You’ll have to wait until it cools down in there anyways.”
Tae nodded finally, sagging back against the cot. Every muscle in his body was tense, but Ysbel was right. No matter how urgent it was, there was nothing they could do right now.
He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting down the sick nausea that was a combination of pain and the smoke in his lungs and too little sleep.
To think, once upon a time, he’d thought this bloody crew could do anything.
They couldn’t even bloody well keep themselves alive.
Maybe Jez had the right idea after all.
“Let me go down,” said Ysbel, finally, when enough time had passed. He shook his head, struggling to sit up.
“I know what I’m looking for. And I’ll have a better idea if any of the parts are still usable.”
He pushed himself to his feet, steadied himself on the wall until he was able to stand, and then stumbled back towards the hatch, his whole body aching. He paused long enough to pull out an oxygen mask and hook in a tube from the oxygen storage, then he clipped it over his face and, after a moment of hesitation, pulled back the hatch.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hour 11, Tae
He felt slightly sick as he started down the ladder past the blackened skeletons of the structural beams of the beautiful old ship.
It was just a good thing Jez hadn’t come down with him. She probably would have burst into tears.
The bay stank of burnt metal, the deck still steaming slightly under his boots. When he reached the supplies room, he hesitated, dread settling into his stomach. The twisted husk of the door was hanging open, the metal of it warped and half-melted. He shoved it out of the way and peered inside.
The inside of the room was a graveyard of blackened ash and scorched metal. He stood looking at it for a moment, then sighed and bent down, sifting through the ash-covered mess in a sort of hopeless optimism.
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting his fingers run over the melted, warped metal of what was left of their spare parts, searching for something that felt even slightly salvageable.
&n
bsp; Not like he didn’t have experience salvaging stuff he knew was crap and trying to make it work anyways, back on the streets of Prasvishoni.
482 Standard, seven-month, third-day. The date on his com.
He’d told them it was a week or so before he’d been thrown in jail. It was true.
It was also the reason he’d been thrown in jail. The day he’d made what turned out to be the biggest damn miscalculation of his life.
He’d been angry, of course, and it had been his own plaguing fault. He should have suspected from the beginning. No one hired street kids. Still, he’d known he had a reputation as a tech-head, and so when Vadym Dulik had brought his people to come find him, and offered him what seemed, at the time, an obscene amount of money for his help with some tech—
He’d probably still have refused, honestly, if he hadn’t woken up that morning to find Mila delirious with fever. She was only six, the youngest kid in their rag-tag gang, and there was no money for medicine when you were a street kid. The others weren’t his family, not technically, but he was the oldest, and they looked up to him to keep them safe, and Mila’s brother, who was only thirteen, had looked at him with those pleading eyes, as if he thought somehow Tae could save his sister—so he’d said yes, in exchange for some fever medication and a few stacks of ration-packs.
And then, two weeks later, he found what Vadym really wanted—the plans for all the tech he’d built from scraps over the past few years, that made it possible for his little gang to beg or steal enough to keep them alive. And he found it when he woke to the man’s hired thugs standing over his bed. They threatened to beat him, and when he refused to tell them anything, they threatened to go back to where they’d found him, find Mila, and beat her instead. So he’d told them. He’d given them everything he had, and they’d taken it, and then they’d thrown him out.
They’d expected him to slink back to where he came from. That’s what he probably should have done. But he’d been angry. And so instead of going back to the others, he’d staked out a place near a tech building, where he could easily mask his signature, set up in a makeshift shelter in the doorway of an abandoned building across the alley.