by R. M. Olson
“Com wasn’t working.”
“We could hear you. After you called in that first time, we kept trying to call, but you didn’t answer.”
“I didn’t hear anything but static.”
“Why didn’t you just come back, then?”
He sighed, and leaned his head back. “I should have. I wasn’t paying attention, and by the time I realized it was getting low, it must have already started to affect me.” He half-laughed. “Honestly, all I could think of was getting the part in. It was not one of my more lucid moments, I’m afraid.”
Tae nodded, but his face was creased in concern. “Yeah. Well, you almost died out there.”
Lev shrugged, despite the cold in the pit of his stomach. “I didn’t, though. Thanks to you. Thank you for getting me back in time.”
Tae raised an eyebrow. “Don’t thank me. Jez hauled you in. All I can say is, thank goodness Olya wasn’t around, because I haven’t heard that kind of language in a long time. Even from her.”
Lev allowed himself a slight smile.
Then he paused a moment, and glanced behind him.
Ysbel sat there. She was watching him, and there was a strange look on her face. He was generally good at reading people, but he had no idea what she was thinking.
She’d been the one to bring the oxygen tank.
It had probably been compromised before she’d picked it up. Almost certainly. And almost certainly, she would have had no way of knowing.
Still …
It was odd, really. The oxygen in the tank had been just enough to let him get to where he needed to be, and he very likely would always have managed to get the thruster component in. It’s just the getting back that would have killed him.
Could she have done it?
He cast another quick glance at the stocky, silent woman, with her emotionless face and dead eyes.
She’d killed thirty-five people at the shuttle launch station the government had brought her in to build. She’d planned for it, probably for months, to get the exact composition of people there that she wanted dead. And that whole time she’d worked alongside them, eaten alongside them, slept alongside them, and not one of them had ever suspected.
No. If there was ever someone who would be capable of something like that, it would be Ysbel. He wasn’t sure if she had, or if it had just been an accident.
But he was very, very certain she was capable of it.
He shivered slightly as he turned back to Tae.
It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve it. He deserved it as much as that student, back in the university, had deserved it. And aside from his obvious self-interest, intellectually he felt no more regret for what was coming for him than he’d felt for what he’d done to the other student.
But there was something about working with a woman who had once been his friend, and never knowing when or what she’d decide to do to take her revenge.
Honestly, he almost wished she’d just used a heat-gun in the first place.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Hour 18, Ysbel
Ysbel stood, without looking at Lev.
“Tae. I’m going to check the reactor. It will only take me a moment.”
“Call me when it’s ready,” said Tae. “I’ll head into the cockpit with Jez, so I can watch the controls.”
She nodded, and turned back down the corridor to the reactor.
She was biting the inside of her cheek so hard she could taste blood.
In about five minutes, she was going to find out if they were going to live or die, if Tae’s insane fix had worked, if they were going to tear Jez’s ship apart, but by doing so save their own lives.
That was what she should be worried about. Not about the slightly pale-faced scholar-boy slumped in a chair on the main deck.
He’d almost died.
The thought should have made her happy.
He’d have done what he needed to do, and then he would have died, and it would have been exactly as it should have been.
But there was something sick and cold in her stomach, and something burning at the corners of her eyes.
She’d seen plenty of people die. But when the airlock doors slid open and he’d been laying there, limp, when Jez, face frantic, had depressurized his helmet and yanked it off and Ysbel had seen the blue tinge to his lips, the unnaturally greyish tint to his skin, she’d thought she might actually be sick.
She tapped her com. “Tanya,” she whispered.
“Ysi?” Tanya answered immediately.
“Are you alright?”
There was a short pause. “Of course I’m alright, Ysi. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I was only worried about you.”
“No need to be.” Ysbel could hear the smile in her tone, and she closed her eyes for just a moment. “I’m with Masha. We’ve finished up in the systems room. I’ll meet you in the cockpit.”
“I’ll see you there in a few minutes,” said Ysbel. “The children are still sleeping?”
“Yes. Hopefully by the time they wake up, we’ll be on our way.”
“Yes. Hopefully,” said Ysbel. She sighed, and tapped the com.
They’d be on their way home.
And she wouldn’t, for now, think about what that would cost them—the Ungovernable, Jez’s pride and joy, ripped to shreds. Masha gone, Lev gone. Their crew torn apart as surely as their ship.
She’d be home, with Tanya and Olya and Misko, and a gaping wound where the past five years’ memories should have been, and maybe one day she’d learn to live with it. And until then, she’d pretend to be happy for their sakes, pretend to be whole, pretend that she’d never wanted anything but this after all.
She blinked. She’d reached the reactor deck without noticing it. She pulled the door open and stepped through.
Just a short fix here, nothing major. She pulled up her com and checked the readout Tae had sent her, and made some minor adjustments to each of the controls.
Even here, in the reactor power core, she could see the damage they’d taken from the hit. Every readout was haywire, and the sides of the heavy reactor shell were misshapen from the blast, the faint red glow from the power cell inside it visible even through the metal.
She finished the adjustments, checked the bolts, tightened the ones that had come loose, and turned to go, grabbing her tools and closing the door firmly behind her.
“Tae. I’ve finished the adjustments. You should be good to fire her up,” she said over the com as she started down the hallway.
There was something nagging at the corner of her mind, an unease, and she wasn’t certain what it was.
Probably something to do with Lev, or maybe just the lingering dread of looking at Jez’s face once they got out of this, and she had time to think about what had happened to her beautiful ship.
No, it was something else.
The memory of the day on the deck of that ship, that for some reason lingered in her mind.
The terror of that moment, of the shards of shrapnel raining like fire around them, the fear on her parents’ faces. “Ysi,” her father had said, kneeling next to her in their tiny cabin, when they were finally safe and the ship had finally left atmosphere. “How did you know that oxygen converter was going to explode? I didn’t even see it.”
“I—” she wasn’t certain how to explain. “It was the metal. It wasn’t shaped the way it should have been.”
“Ah,” he’d said, understanding in his eyes. “You saw it bulging. You have good eyes, Ysi. I wouldn’t have seen that. I didn’t see that.”
Why was she remembering this right now?
Something bulging. Not misshapen from the blast, but warping under too much strain—
Behind her, she heard the low hum, underlaid with a harsh grinding, as the damaged thrusters came online, a low whine that shouldn’t have been there, like the protest of a wounded animal.
She swore and hit her com. “Tae! Shut it down!”
“What—”
“Shut it down!” She was sprinting for the cockpit, faster than she’d run in her life. “Shut it down now!”
She wasn’t certain she’d be in time.
Jez closed her eyes and rested her hands on the familiar shapes of the controls.
They felt different. Lifeless.
There was a reason she hadn’t been back in the cockpit since the accident, and it was because she hadn’t been sure she’d be able to handle it.
She opened her eyes and turned quickly at a noise behind her. Tae stepped through the door, followed by a pale, but upright, Lev. Masha and Tanya stepped in after him.
She jumped to her feet, swore at the jolt on her ribs, and glared at Lev. “What are you doing up?”
He gave her a wan smile. “I’m doing OK. Feeling a lot better, thanks to the painkillers you left me. I believe the only major side-effect will be a headache.” He grimaced. “Although, I will say, if you’re going to have this sort of headache, it seems slightly unfair not to have at least had some wild evening to remember for it.”
She could still feel her breath catch at the memory of his limp form, the panicked realization that this time he might actually be gone, and there might actually be nothing she could do to save him.
She glared at him as he slipped into the copilot’s seat and pulled up the holoscreen.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. She ignored him and turned back to her own holoscreen.
She couldn’t think about it right now, because she couldn’t afford to have a panic attack in the cockpit, right before she brought up the power and destroyed her ship for what looked to be the last time.
“Tae. I’ve finished the adjustments. You should be good to fire her up,” Ysbel’s voice came over the com.
“Alright, Jez,” said Tae. His face was grim. “Go ahead.” He was crouched to her other side, the paneling removed from the compartment under the controls. He and she had painstakingly gone through the melted, ruined wires, salvaging what they could, replacing what they couldn’t with whatever meagre supplies they’d been able to scrounge.
The whole time she’d felt like she was taking a knife to her chest and cutting out her own heart.
She was fixing the Ungovernable up so she could kill her.
She’d thought she’d die rather than do that.
She would die rather than do that. But … she glanced at Lev in the seat next to her, Tae, scowling as he crouched by the open panel.
She couldn’t let them die rather than do that. In the end, that was the one thing she couldn’t do.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and fired up the engines, pulling the ship online. She gritted her teeth against the grinding whine of the motors, where there should have been no noise at all, only a barely-sensed hum, the faint breathing of the ship.
She was tearing it to pieces, and it was all she could do to hold her hand steady on the controls.
“Go ahead and bring the thrusters online,” said Tae quietly. The strain in his voice was audible.
Slowly, she pulled the thrusters online, and there was a faint, grinding thunk and the ship shook slightly under her feet.
Sweat was forming on her forehead, and a drop of it trickled down the side of her face into her eye. She brushed it away with her elbow, not daring to move her hands from the controls.
“Tae! Shut it down!” Ysbel’s voice came over the com, and she jumped.
“Shut it down! Shut it down now!”
She glanced at Tae, then shoved back on the controls, pushing the thrusters offline.
The ship, though, was still trembling, shaking beneath them.
Ysbel burst through the cockpit door.
“The reactor is overheating. It’s going to melt down. Get everything offline, now!”
There was half a moment where they all stared at her. And then everyone seemed to move at once. Tae leapt to his feet, Lev jumped up, Masha and Tanya both started for the door.
“Lev, Masha, Tanya, come with me,” said Ysbel. “We’ll have to try to shut it down from down there. Jez, Tae—”
“I’ll do what I can,” Jez said through her teeth.
Damn.
A meltdown.
She’d always managed to avoid a meltdown up to this point. But this—wasn’t looking good.
“Go!” Tae snapped. “Jez and I have the cockpit.”
The others almost sprinted from the room, but Tae had already turned back to the wiring.
“Jez,” he snapped. “I can’t do anything from here.”
“I know,” she murmured. She closed her eyes, and let the ship talk to her through her fingers.
It wasn’t talking. It was screaming, shrieking, dying.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, my sweet, sweet angel. One last time. You need to talk to me one last time.”
“Jez—”
She didn’t even look at him. Gently, she pulled the ship power down, just a hair. If she tried to pull it all the way offline now, it would cause a chain reaction and the whole thing would go up.
“Get the converters lined up,” she whispered, and Tae bent over the control panel.
She nudged the thrusters back online, just enough to engage them. Under her, the ship was shaking harder, the floor trembling so that she could feel it through the walls and the panel. The grinding whine of the damaged thrusters was audible now.
She nudged the power down another notch. The whine increased, and she flipped on the side stabilizers.
“Ask Ysbel how they’re doing,” she murmured.
“Ysbel,” Tae hissed, but she was only half-listening.
The ship was crying, she could feel it all the way through her bones. But it was talking to her too, telling her everything she needed to know.
Stabilizers forward. They were dead, of course, wouldn’t do anything, but it would shunt some of the power away from the main reactor.
Thrusters online a little harder. They whimpered in protest, but she ramped them up, ignoring the tearing, shredding screech of tortured metal.
“Ysbel is holding down the override button, Lev and Masha have the manual bars, Tanya’s got the access panel off,” said Tae. “What do you need?”
“It’s going to melt down in about sixty seconds,” she said. Her voice sounded slightly dreamy in her ears. “If it does, they’re going to die, but then, all of us will. On the count of ten, I’m going to pull everything online—shields, weapons, everything—and try to shunt every last bit of power I can out of the reactor. And then I’m going to shut it down. On my count, Ysbel needs to let go of the override, Tanya needs to hit the accelerator, and Lev and Masha are going to need to find something to hold on to, because it’s going to try to throw them off. They can’t let go, no matter what happens, or everyone on this ship is dead. Got it?”
Tae was already muttering into the com.
“It’s alright, sweet angel,” she whispered. “It’s OK.” There was a lump in her throat. “Ten. Nine. Eight.”
The ship shook harder, like it was trying to pull itself to pieces.
“Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three.”
It was dying. It was dying, and still, somehow, she could feel it trying to save her.
“Two. One.”
She tightened her fingers on the controls.
“Now.”
With one hand, she pulled everything online. The ship screamed in protest, every system sparking and jumping. The acrid smell of burnt wiring scorched her nose, and the floor paneling shook beneath her feet. She sucked in her breath, slid her fingers across the power bar, and, as gently as if she were smoothing a dying friend’s brow, pulled it down.
For a moment, nothing happened. Her pulse spiked. She must have done something wrong, or Ysbel hadn’t released the button in time, or Lev and Masha had been thrown off the manual bars—
And then, like a child falling asleep, the ship sighed, shuddered, and stilled.
She blew out a long breath, suddenly lightheaded. Beside her, Tae did
the same, dropping his head against the panel in relief. Then he turned, and they grinned at each other. She hit the com.
“Well you idiots, you managed to hold on. Not bad.”
“I honestly thought we were all going to die,” said Lev, his voice still shaky.
“Probably should have. But then, you don’t get a pilot like me every day,” she said, still grinning.
Then she glanced down, and sobered.
You didn’t get a ship like this every day either.
She ran her hand along the controls softly, lying quiet and dead under her fingers.
“Well, Jez,” said Tae. His voice was slightly shaky as well. “I think that’s the second time you’ve saved us in the last twenty-four standard hours.”
“Yeah? You’re not even counting all the times before that,” she said. She hoped her voice sounded cocky, rather than hollow.
A few moments later, Ysbel, Lev, and Tanya came into the cockpit. She took a deep breath, bracing herself, and looked over at them, trying for a jaunty grin.
From the look on Lev’s face, it wasn’t a success.
“I’m sorry, Jez,” he said softly, and it was too much, and she had to bite down hard on her teeth to keep herself from breaking down.
“What’s the damage?” Tae asked.
“Well, thanks to our crazy lunatic pilot, we’re still alive,” said Ysbel. “But other than that, it’s not good. The emergency oxygen generator wasn’t online for long enough to make any difference, and the meltdown killed most of the power cells, I think. We’re going to start losing power soon.”
“Where’s Masha?” asked Lev, frowning. Jez glanced around, and shrugged.
It was just as well, really. She wasn’t entirely certain she could face Masha right now.
“Maybe the bastard decided to take her chances in deep space,” she said.
“Maybe ‘the bastard’ stopped by to find out what caused the meltdown,” said Masha sharply, stepping into the cockpit.
Jez frowned.
There was a small device in Masha’s hand.
Tae stood slowly, staring at it. “Tracking?” he asked.
Masha nodded. “It’s a tracking device. We didn’t find it, because it was placed behind the main reactor. That’s why none of our searches picked it up, and also why the reactor was overheating.”