Not With A Whimper: Survivors

by D. A. Boulter

  “Longshoremen coming.”

  At that moment, a dishevelled, unshaven man came running up. Wen thought he recognized him, but the name slipped his memory.

  “Captain Yrden?” His memory had finally placed the man he’d only seen once.

  Yrden stopped, peered at him, and then nodded as if his memory had likewise made a connection. “Pilot Pearson. I’m commandeering your shuttle.”

  And he had expected anything but that. A passenger who had slept in, maybe. “The hell you say. Venture’s captain expects me back—”

  “Life and death, pilot. Besides, I am captain of Venture; Bettina is only acting captain. Call Venture from the dock. Tell them the situation; have them send another shuttle across for you and your cargo.”

  Pearson frowned. Let a shuttle that he had signed for into someone else’s hands? “I signed her out, I go with her. Besides, you said life or death. You’ll want a co-pilot.”

  Johannes looked at him. “Chance that the shuttle won’t be coming back up, pilot. Not your job; not your problem.”

  And no one had made him a better offer all week. A chance to have it all end. No more pain, no more memories.

  “Hell with that.” He saw the longshoremen coming with his load, and jogged over to them. “Back to the warehouse,” he ordered. By the time he had finished a short argument with the leader of the longshoremen, Captain Yrden had already closed and checked the cargo hold hatch.

  As the passenger hatch remained open, Wen stepped inside, took a quick look to ensure no one had boarded while he had his back to the shuttle, and then stepped onto the flight deck where Yrden had already begun to close the hatch.

  Yrden gestured that he should go, but Wen shook his head.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  No, he didn’t. But it had to beat a job as a bus driver.

  “Then tell me ... on the way.” He did a physical check. “Hatch sealed. Start the checklist, I’ll get us booted from the station.”

  The shuttle, on acknowledgment from Flight Control, fell free of the Station. He noted a communication – data. “Incoming message – coded.”

  “Good. Open it up so we can figure out where we’re going.”

  Didn’t Yrden know? What had he gotten himself into? He hoped for something interesting, at least. “You haven’t filed a flight plan?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh joy.”

  Wen glanced at the decoded message. “Co-ordinates give us the southern coast of Nigeria, Captain,” Wen told him after calling up the map.

  “Good.” Yrden fired the main engines, and the shuttle headed down on a re-entry vector.

  Wen checked the math.

  “That will put us six hundred miles out into the Atlantic, Captain. The co-ords put our objective as the coast.”

  “We head for Douala, Cameroon. At the last moment we change course for our beach in Nigeria. We come in low, land on the beach, pick up our passengers, head back out over the Atlantic, and then back to orbit.”

  “Wastes a lot of fuel,” Pearson said.

  “Better than meeting a missile-armed fighter after radar picks us up on the way down; better than everyone knowing it was us by following our track on the way up.”

  Wen sat a moment, staring at the screens. Not something he expected of the Yrdens, who told everyone they were for “fair trade”.

  “Smuggling? The Yrdens?”

  “Picking up some friends. ‘Ben and Geri Smith’ and their family. Went for a picnic, got lost.”

  Ben and Geri Smith? Pearson threw back his head, and laughed. “As you say, Captain. But, as co-pilot, I have to tell you that you look like shit. Put your head down, and I’ll wake you up when we near Nigerian airspace.”

  Yrden did look like shit. Rumpled, as if just out of bed after having gotten there without undressing, unshaven, hair not combed, and a look of weariness around the eyes.

  The shuttle lost altitude rapidly. Radar picked up a storm front closer in to shore, and Wen shrugged. He aimed the nose directly towards it, half hoping that they would get out of this without attracting the attention of a Nigerian anti-air missile, half hoping that this might end it all.

  The wind began to buffet the shuttle. Wen reached over and shook Captain Yrden awake.

  “Weather,” he told the waking pilot. “Not the best, but possibly just what we want. Low clouds, rain, storm. Not many will be out and about sightseeing.”

  Yrden blinked a few times, and his eyes went to the navigation screen. “Nigerian airspace?”

  “Ten minutes. How many passengers?” He wondered if he would get the truth.

  “Five – if they make it.”

  “If they make it?” So, not a picnic after all.

  “Possibility they won’t.” Yrden paused a moment. “If they don’t, it won’t be our fault.”

  Yrden seemed willing to let him pilot the shuttle. He brought it in carefully. He hadn’t done this sort of piloting for years – then again, he doubted that Yrden had, either. He turned on the shuttle’s floodlights, and ran them across the beach. Nothing. He landed it on precisely the co-ords given. The searchlights ran up and down, from ocean to the trees. Nothing.

  A thought occurred. This mission seemed too hasty for it to have been planned long in advance. “They expecting a shuttle?”

  Yrden looked at him. He opened the loudhailer. “Ben and Geri! Vattune.”

  “Vattune?”

  “ID code.”

  “Ah.”

  Still nothing moved. Wen started to ask how long they needed to wait, when Yrden reached for the loudhailer again. But Wen saw something on the screen.

  He pointed, and said, “There. Your people?”

  “Well, we’ll have to hope so, otherwise we might be in a spot of trouble. Get the engines started, I’m going out to bring them in. No time for the stairs.”

  If he were that eager to get away, this had to be an extraction with opposing forces – whatever or whomever that might consist of – hot on the trail of the evacuees. He began the take-off checklist once more.

  The hatch opened. Through it, he heard a man’s voice shouting, “They come; they come!”

  Another glance at the screen showed the man who had yelled stumbling, carrying one child, and leading another. In the background a dim figure limped, carrying something in her arms – likely a smaller child. That assuming the figure belonged to ‘Geri’.

  Wen leapt from the seat. Yrden would need help – especially with pursuers closing in. Before he took his second step away, he heard Yrden’s voice over the comm.

  “Kill the lights.”

  Good point. No need to give an enemy their precise location. The lights died, and he headed for the hatch. He saw Yrden running for the woman; Wen dropped out to the sand, into the wind and lashing rain, and aided the man in hoisting the smaller of the two children into the shuttle. Then the larger.

  Behind him, he heard Yrden breathing heavily, turned and saw him carrying a third child, smaller than the other two.

  “Get in, get in!” Yrden yelled.

  Wen didn’t wait to argue the point, as he heard angry voices carrying in from beyond the tree line.

  He jumped up, then turned to accept an almost-thrown child. Both men on the sand went running back for the woman. He took the moment to get the three children, all crying, seated, but didn’t strap them in.

  “Stay there. Don’t move,” he admonished, and they looked scared enough of him to obey.

  “Grab her!” Yrden yelled over the wind.

  The two men lifted the woman, and Wen grabbed her, lifting her and turning in the same moment. He carried her, held tight against him, and deposited her in a seat. “Strap in if you know how,” he said, then whipped back to the door, where Johannes aided ‘Ben’, whose breath came in gasps. With him pulling on the man’s hands, and Yrden giving him a boost, ‘Ben’ almost flew into the shuttle. Johannes hoisted himself up, right on Ben’s heels.

  “Get them s
trapped in, and then strap in yourself. Don’t try to get to the deck, I’m taking off now!”

  Yrden began to close the hatch, using unseeming haste. Wen directed ‘Ben’ to a seat, bent over him, and strapped him in. “Just stay put. We’ll be off in a moment.”

  “You must hurry!” Ben said. “They will shoot on sight.”

  Wonderful.

  Geri groaned, holding her ankle. He straightened her up, fastened her in, then moved to the three children who cowered in their seats. He did his best, but they were too small to properly do up, and he had no time to get special restraints for them. He did his best, then sat down himself just as the craft left the ground, and began to accelerate. He strapped in.

  “Glad to have you aboard,” he yelled at the couple over the roar of the engines.

  They looked at him, fear still in their eyes. He smiled his most reassuring smile. They didn’t look reassured.

  Well, he had done his job. He unstrapped, fetched the proper restraints and did the children up right. He went forward to the flight deck of the pitching shuttle after it had ceased accelerating. Nothing like flying through a storm.

  “Got them all settled. Terrified bunch. Won’t talk to me. What now?”

  “Now we go back to FTL-1. You don’t let them out, or anyone else into the passenger compartment. You load your cargo, take it back to Venture. By the time you get there, Bettina will know all about it, and know what to do.” He paused. “Good work. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Who are they, really?”

  “Yeah, about that: you don’t know anything about this little trip.”

  “Me?” Wen raised his eyebrows. “When I got to FTL-1, I decided to get a little kip time in. They woke me up after they loaded the shuttle. Passengers were already in their seats.”

  “That’s a good story,” Johannes said. “Stick to it.”

  Wen glanced at the radar.

  “We have aircraft coming up behind us – fast.”

  The shuttle couldn’t match a fighter jet in the atmosphere, but Yrden didn’t look worried. Wen shrugged. If a missile caught them, a missile caught them. He had had too many missiles catch him in the game for him to worry about it. It didn’t seem real.

  “We’re out of Nigerian airspace in thirty seconds,” Yrden said. “Unlikely that they’ll follow us. Shooting down a shuttle that has probably sent a call to its superiors might cause a problem back in Nigeria – depending on just whose shuttle they shot down. Especially since the signal would have come from over international waters.”

  “You hope,” Wen replied.

  “I hope.”

  An hour out, fifty-five minutes after the fighters had given up and turned back to Nigeria, Yrden nodded, as if to himself.

  “We’re going up, now.”

  “I’ll go play Flight Attendant. Give the kids instructions on the barf-bags. Hope they didn’t have big lunches.”

  No one vomited. No one complained, no one even asked him anything. So he just smiled. He wished he’d brought a guitar – not his, not the Ellery Flon – to calm them with. He settled for handing out headphones, and dialling in music.

  They didn’t have survival suits on – neither had Yrden, he’d come directly from his bunk, he said – and so he hoped that everything would go as planned. It did.

  The kids got a kick out of weightlessness, the adults less so. Finally, the ship docked, and Yrden’s voice came over the intercom. “Ben and Geri Smith will wait in the shuttle. Your pilot – that’s the man with you, now, will take you to the Yrden ship, Venture. From there, the Yrdens will see you to your destination. Good luck.”

  The Smiths stared at the front bulkhead, as if they could see Yrden there. Then the woman turned to him.

  “You are Yrden?”

  He laughed. “Me? No. I work for them.”

  “He told the truth?”

  “Yes. We are now at the Family Trading League station. I have a load waiting to carry back to Venture. I’ll seal the door, so no one can get in to see you. Then, in about an hour, we’ll take another flight through space, and you’ll end up on Venture, as promised, Ms Smith.”

  She smiled at her name, and Wen could see she was about to correct him. He held up his hand. “I don’t know who you are or why you’re here. I’m only obeying orders from Captain Yrden. He didn’t tell me, so I suppose I’m not supposed to know.”

  The two adults nodded.

  “So, best, I think that you don’t tell me.”

  “You are a good man, Pilot of the Yrdens,” Ben said. “I thank you, and I thank God for you. We will pray for you.”

  Geri nodded. “We will pray for you.”

  Wen didn’t believe. But if they wanted to pray for him, let them pray. It certainly wouldn’t do him any harm.

  He smiled humbly. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  Outside, the longshoremen reappeared, and he supervised the loading of the shuttle. When done, he signed for the load.

  “Okay, Smiths,” he said, grinning at them. “We’re all locked up and ready to go. I have three empty seats up front. If the children want to get a good view of things, of the stars, of the station, and then a spaceship from the outside, we can get them settled in up there. Give them something to tell their own grandchildren.”

  “Took you long enough, Pearson,” Dave Patterson said, when he stepped out of the shuttle. Then he stared at the five passengers, the woman supported by the man.

  “Passengers?”

  “I don’t know. I got told there was a delay, put my head down for some sleep, and when I got back, they were there, all strapped in. Cargo loaded, everything. Don’t have a clue. I just follow orders.”

  “You just wait right there,” Dave told the Smiths. He bustled out, and returned with a chair for Geri. “You just sit. We’ll get medical down here. They’ll take care of you.”

  Tanaka appeared. He didn’t seem surprised by the presence of the Smiths. Jane Yrden, the doctor, strode through the door, checked out the passengers, and then got Geri into a wheelchair. They all, except Dave, disappeared.

  “So, put your head down for some sleep?” he asked.

  “Yep. That’s about it.”

  “Good. Then you’ll be fresh enough to help me unpack this load.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” Wen muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “I said that I would be overjoyed to help.”

  Dave laughed. “That’s what I thought you said.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Venture

  Wednesday 14 July

  Wen Carson waited with the rest of the cargo handlers for the workboats to arrive. Young Sean stood by his side, as he often did. Wen figured Sean liked to show off his skills to the less experienced, but much older man.

  Wen tousled the child’s hair, and gave Dave a smile, which the Cargo Master returned with a wink. Behind Dave, Wen noticed a woman. She moved slightly, and he saw her face.

  “Ms Korbin,” he said, nodding politely to her. “What brings you to the hold? Surely not to handle Cargo? You have to take care of those hands.”

  “My equipment comes on the next workboat, Mr Pearson.”

  “Equipment?”

  “Yes. Don’t you know that I won a two-year working trip on Venture? I get to go around to the various worlds that Venture visits, check on the woods that they have on offer, and make instruments for sale – the price of which Venture and the Yrdens get a share.”

  He regarded her more closely. “Lucky you. And your equipment?”

  “To make the guitars,” she said, probably thinking him a fool. He rather felt the fool. “Perhaps you can help me set up. I have my own space.”

  He caught another wink from Dave, and ignored it. He didn’t need to be thrust at another unattached female. He didn’t need to get involved with any female, at all. If he got involved, he’d soon lose Lil, both in reality and in his own mind. He couldn’t accept that loss.

  On the other hand, he�
�d love to see what Korbin could accomplish; he’d never had the pleasure – or otherwise – of handling one of the instruments she made.

  “I’d consider it an honour, Ms Korbin.” He bent in a modest bow, which brought a smile to her face. “And I’d like to see you at work.” At least he didn’t lie there.

  “Perhaps, then, we should dispense with formality,” she said with all due formality. “I’m Janice. And I’d like to hear you play what I make.”

  “Wen.”

  “Alright, everyone. Workboat on approach.”

  Wen watched the lights above the door. Red for vacuum. He felt a small vibration through the deck. The workboat had just dropped something heavy in the next room. Then another vibration. The second workboat had dropped off its cargo.

  “Workboats away,” Dave said. “Two minutes to opening.”

  “She’s nice,” Sean said.

  Wen bent over to put his head nearer the boy’s. “Who is nice?”

  “Janice. And you’re nice to help her.”

  Wen choked back a laugh. Now even children were trying to set him up with female companionship. “Think I’ll need a trolley?”

  Sean nodded, serious. “Yes. I looked at the manifest. The stuff for the music room is heavy.”

  The kid had read the manifest. And he hadn’t. The kid would go far in Cargo Handling, just like he wanted to. As for himself, Wen would only go as far as he needed to. Right now, he didn’t know if he had already passed that mark. He wouldn’t be sure until he found a way to beat the pirates.

  The barrier opened, and the cargo handlers pushed forward. Sean led him to a pallet, on which rested two large, obviously-heavy cases – secured against vacuum.

  “These two belong to Janice,” Sean said. “You’ll need a trolley – and a jack to lift the cases onto the trolley.”

  “Me?” Wen asked.

  Sean made a face. “They won’t let me try. They say I’m too small. I can show you where to get the trolley, though.”

  “Good man!” He followed Sean to a storage locker. Inside he saw a typical trolley, one that could make it through the doors, into the ship proper, and be able to navigate the hallways.