by Jake Elwood
"Brady …"
She shook her head. "Listen. Thrush. I've been watching you. You have the makings of a good officer. You have to do two things. Trust your own instincts. They're sound. And forgive yourself when you screw up. If you don't do both those things you won't be any damn use, and the crew needs you."
He tried to speak, couldn't do it, and shook his head instead.
"Get out of here," she said. "Take care of your crew. The ones who aren't dying." She grimaced. "Go. And don't come back. I don't want to see you again. Understand?"
She twisted her foot out of his grasp, and he turned, his eyes filling with tears. He stumbled toward the exit, stopping when he blundered into a wall.
"Mr. Thrush." It was a man's voice that spoke right beside him. Tom took a deep breath, wiped his eyes, and turned.
Dr. Vinduly stood at his elbow, staring at him with bleak, haunted eyes. "You're back. That's good."
Tom whispered, "Can you do anything for them? Can you save them?" His stomach heaved, and he gulped. "Can you save anybody?"
Vinduly's mouth drooped. It was the only answer he gave.
"Are you all right, Doc?"
Vinduly nodded. "I was in bed when the missile exploded. I lost half my staff." His mouth twisted. "Not that it matters. There's nothing we can do but clean up the mess."
Tom leaned closer. "I don't know what to do, Doc."
"I've got problems enough of my own." Vinduly scowled at him. "I'll be working around the clock, accomplishing nothing at all, until my patients finish dying. If you need advice, I suggest you get it somewhere else."
Tom nodded and blundered past the surgeon and out of the mess hall.
It was the same ship he had left such a short time before, but everything was different.
Tom walked through the corridors, feeling a scream building up inside him and knowing he had to keep it bottled away. The Kestrel was like a ghost ship, or a ship full of zombies. Hollow-eyed people stared at him without recognition, or shuffled aside to let him pass without looking up, or stood in the corridors or compartments, oblivious to his presence, so that he had to circle around them. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought most of them were among the casualties.
He toured the ship from nose to tail. Only in Engineering were people busy, moving with a strange numbness as they carried tools or pulled on vac suits. He spoke to Sawyer, who seemed to look through him as she answered his questions. "We're working through the repairs, Lieutenant. I don't know how long it will take."
"I'll get out of your way," he said at last. He wasn't in the way in the undermanned Engineering section. He just wanted to get away from Sawyer's terrible traumatized gaze.
When he finished his tour he retreated briefly to the wardroom, the one place on the ship guaranteed to be almost empty. He had the room to himself as he gazed out at the stars and wondered what to do.
Inactivity, he quickly found, was intolerable. And if it was unbearable for him, it couldn't be good for anyone else. He made a circuit of the forward section, gathering a squad of listless spacers. He put them to work carrying bodies from the surgery to the morgue, and bringing stricken people from the mess hall to the surgery. The crowding in the mess hall eased as patients died and the spacers carried them away.
Moving bodies was macabre work, and he didn't feel right ordering others to do something he wouldn't do himself. So he participated, helping lift the dead onto stretchers. He learned that however shrunken and reduced a person might look in death, human bodies remained heavy, awkward burdens. He wanted to treat each corpse with the utmost respect, but he soon began to see them as objects, bulky massive things that were maddeningly difficult to handle.
The sick spacers were frustrating in their own way. He didn't want to touch them. He especially didn't want to look in their eyes. He told himself he was doing the right thing, helping them in the only way he could. Deep inside, though, he yearned to recoil from them, and the knowledge made him ashamed.
The wardroom now seemed like an extravagant waste of space. Tom made it an auxiliary morgue. As people died, one by one, the wardroom filled and the mess hall emptied until the patients were no longer jammed together.
At some point an exhausted spacer suggested returning some of the patients to their own cabins. It would give them a bit of privacy and a comfortable bunk instead of a table top. Tom agreed, and before long every table in the mess hall was clear. Someone put a splash of yellow paint on the hatch of every cabin that contained the dying, to help the orderlies as they made their rounds. When no live patients remained in a cabin, the orderlies would put a red stripe through the yellow splash.
When the wardroom table was full the spacers covered the floor in bodies. When the last floor tile disappeared beneath a layer of the dead a stretcher party came to ask Tom what to do next.
His solution was to clean out a storage room. He asked his squad if they needed a break, and some of them trickled away, but most of them chose to keep working. He got them started in the same cargo bay where he'd once worked, moving everything that could be moved to the back wall. It demolished the careful indexing system he'd gone to such pains to manage.
He couldn't quite make himself care.
He headed off down the spine, recruiting spacers as he went. The marines he encountered were just as idle as the spacers, but he decided to let them be. There were Harper's people, not his.
When he had a good big squad trailing behind him he returned to the forward section. There, he had them start moving bodies from the wardroom to Storage Two.
By that time, the first squad was pretty much done reorganizing the storage bay. He led them back to the mess hall. "We're moving everyone to the wardroom," he announced. "It's the new auxiliary surgery."
No one asked about the bodies. They just grabbed stretchers and got to work.
By the time the job was done there were three marines among the spacers. They looked just as stricken and shocked as the Navy people. Does everyone look a bit better because they're busy? Or have I made it worse for them by making them move the dead and the dying?
"This one's dead, Lieutenant."
Tom turned to see who had spoken. A pair of marines stood at either end of a stretcher in the mess hall. One marine had a couple of fingertips against the artery on a young woman's throat.
Tom opened his mouth to ask if the marine was sure, then realized it didn't really matter. If she wasn't dead now, she would be soon. He sighed, wishing he was anywhere in the universe but here. "Take her to the storage bay," he said.
They nodded, took the handles of the stretcher, and rose. He hadn't noticed when marines had joined the work crew. Another pair came in, carrying an empty stretcher. They were for the most part stronger than the spacers, better able to move the injured without jostling them. He nodded his thanks as they laid the stretcher on a table and began to shift another patient.
At last the job was done. Tom found himself at the front of the mess hall, facing almost two dozen spacers and four marines, all of them gazing at him and waiting for his next order.
"Marines," he said. "Stow those stretchers. I don't know where they go. Find out, and put them away. After that, you're dismissed." He scrubbed a hand through his hair, wishing a situation like this had been covered in his training. "You people." He gestured, indicating seven or eight spacers near one wall. "I want you to start cleaning and disinfecting this room. Put the tables back the way they were. Try to make it look like it wasn't just a hospice."
He looked at the remaining spacers. "Do any of you know how to use the kitchens?"
A couple of hands went up.
"Good. I don't think anyone has eaten anything but meal replacement bars in quite a while. Start putting together a meal. How many people do you need?"
When half a dozen spacers were busy in the kitchen he told the rest of them to take a break, then watched as they dispersed.
Chapter 21
For a time Tom stood at the back of
the mess hall, watching weary spacers wipe down tables, wondering if he should grab a rag and join in. Instead he went into the corridor, spent a moment standing there uncertainly, then headed for the bridge. He didn't have a purpose in mind. The bridge represented authority. It was the one place where someone else was always in charge. It was also the only place he hadn't visited when he'd taken his tour of the ship.
He walked into the bridge, and was shocked to find it empty.
For a time he just stood in the doorway, staring at all those unmanned stations, feeling cold and sick. It's true. It's really true. This is an absolute disaster, and no one is going to take charge and make it right.
At last he moved to the communication station. He stared down at the controls, thinking, then tapped a panel to life. He pinged O'Reilly.
"This is O'Reilly." The man's voice was flat, emotionless.
"This is Lieutenant Thrush. I'm on the bridge. Can you join me here?"
"I'm on my way, Sir."
When O'Reilly stepped onto the bridge, a look of startled dismay crossed his face before vanishing behind a mask of professional calm. I know how he feels. Finding nobody here but one inexperienced sublieutenant isn't much better than finding nobody here at all. "I want you to take the helm," Tom said. He thought for a moment. "I'll take Navigation. Let's figure out where we are. After that, we'll figure out what to do next."
The ship was adrift, but fate had been kind to her. She hadn't floated into any storms. "I don't like the look of that mess to starboard," Tom said, looking at a bank of lumpy brown clouds. It was a fair ways off – hundreds of kilometers at least – but he wanted more distance. "Let's back away, shall we?"
"Aye aye, Sir," said O'Reilly, and lifted a hand.
"Hang on," said Tom, feeling foolish. "Let me check with Lieutenant Sawyer." He called Engineering. "Ms. Sawyer, I want to move the ship. Are the engines ready to go?"
"Is it urgent?" she said. "Can you wait a few minutes?"
"Sure," he said.
"I need to bring in a few people from the hull. It should take, let me see, ten minutes?"
"Anything less than half an hour is just fine," he told her.
"In that case, let me take fifteen or twenty minutes. I'd like to let my people finish the things they're working on."
"Sure."
"I'll call you when we're ready," she said, and broke the connection.
Tom turned to O'Reilly. "We need a bridge rotation." He spread his hands in a helpless shrug. "I'm not sure exactly how to do it. There's no other officers to relieve me." That set off a panicky clamor in the back of his mind, which he ignored with some difficulty. "I don't even know who else is qualified to stand bridge watches." He shook his head. "Among the survivors, that is."
One of the worst parts of the current situation was that "survivors" was coming to mean everyone who wasn't sick. The endless rows of stricken crew in the surgery and wardroom weren't survivors. They were corpses who hadn't stopped breathing yet.
"I know Harris is okay," O'Reilly said. "Let me see …"
"I guess we need a list of survivors," Tom said. He started to groan, and suppressed it. His to-do list was getting out of hand. "I'll work on that after we've moved the ship."
O'Reilly gave him a pointed look. "You need to delegate, Sir."
Tom shrugged. "It's not like I have something else urgent I need to do."
"Yes, you do." There was surprising force in O'Reilly's voice. "You're almost the only officer we've got. You're the only one in the chain of command."
That set off another panicky reaction in the back of Tom's mind. He silenced it.
"You need to be out in the corridors," O'Reilly continued. "People need to see you. They need to see that someone is in charge."
Tom lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. "But I'm not in charge!"
"Yes." The look O'Reilly gave him was charged with meaning. "You are."
"But-"
The hatch to the bridge slid open and a woman stepped through. She was a middle-aged spacer, no one Tom recognized. Or had she been among the volunteers who had stayed to man the kitchen?
The tray in her hands said that she was. "I brought dinner," she said." She glanced at O'Reilly. "Sorry. I didn't know how many people were here. I'll bring another tray for Mr. O'Reilly."
O'Reilly said, "If you could manage some coffee with that, it would be fantastic."
Coffee. The word filled Tom with a sudden craving so strong it was all he could do not to follow the woman as she left. Instead, he carried his tray to the counter that ran along the aft bulkhead. He lifted a plate cover, caught a whiff of roast beef and gravy, and forgot all about coffee, the war, and the burdens of command.
By the time he left the bridge an hour later he had a watch rotation set up with two sets of three people, standing alternate watches. He and O'Reilly would alternate command.
The corridors had a different feel now, with fewer idle spacers. He saw teams opening floor hatches and replacing components while repair crews trudged past in vac suits on their way to or from the airlocks. There was a sense of purpose that hadn't been there before.
Most of the marines were still idle, though.
The surgery, by contrast, was quieter. The medical staff, limp with exhaustion, rested on chairs or quietly made rounds. They seemed to realize they couldn't save their patients. There was no urgency in the way they moved, just a quiet resignation.
Tom glanced up and down the rows of patients, then walked to Vinduly's corner office. The surgeon was slumped in his chair, hands curled around a cup of coffee. He looked up when Tom tapped on the door frame, then raised a shaggy eyebrow.
"I need to talk to the captain," Tom said. "Where is she?"
Vinduly stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head ever so slightly. "Storage Bay Two."
It should have been obvious, but the news still hit Tom like a sucker punch. "The captain is dead?"
Vinduly nodded.
"Where's Commander Boudreau?"
Vinduly shrugged and gestured to the surgery behind Tom. "Out there somewhere. I can't remember who's where." He lifted his coffee, took a sip, and grimaced. "I'm tired," he mumbled. "So tired."
Tom returned to the main surgical bay and moved down the rows of patients, looking into each face. He almost didn't recognize Boudreau. The man had deteriorated in just a few hours. His skin was like so much wet paper draped over the bones of his skull, but his eyes opened as Tom approached.
"Lieutenant Thrush."
"Commander Boudreau."
Boudreau grinned, a skeletal leer that made Tom want to back away. "I guess you should call me Captain now. I seem to have inherited the position."
Tom stared at him, at a loss for words.
"Not for long, though." Boudreau lifted a hand in a weak gesture that seemed to encompass the surgery, the entire ship. "This is not quite how I pictured this voyage. But it's not for long. Nothing is for long for me, now."
Tom shifted from one foot to another, wondering how to ask what he needed to ask. Boudreau's eyes fixed on him before he could speak. "I relinquish command to you, Mr. Thrush. You're in charge now."
"But-"
"But what?" Boudreau said impatiently. "If you don't like it, take it up with the captain." His eyes closed. "It's your ship now. Go run it." One bony hand rose from the gurney and waved dismissively.
Tom spent a long moment staring down at the man. He wanted to protest, but what was he going to do? Insist that a dying man rise from his bed and take command?
He went aft. The spine of the ship was treacherous to navigate, at least on the lower deck. Repair crews had lifted deck plates in a dozen places to expose damaged conduits underneath. He found the largest concentration of marines he'd seen so far, clustered around the brig. The pirates had survived the nuke, then. They hardly needed much guarding, but Tom supposed the marines had nothing else to do. It seemed a shame to see so many people, prisoners and marines, sitting idle while the spacers
were so busy. But, since there was nothing to be done about it, he pushed the thought from his mind and continued on his way.
He found Sawyer in the middle of the engine room, hands planted on her hips, giving directions to one spacer after another. They would approach her, ragged, exhausted figures in filthy coveralls with streaks of dirt on their faces and tools dangling from their hands. They would hold quick consultations, then hurry away to do her bidding.
Tom waited until there was a break in traffic, then walked up to stand in front of her.
"Mr. Thrush. I'm kind of busy right now. What do you need?"
"You have to take command," Tom blurted. He opened his and closed his mouth a couple of times, realized he had no idea what else to say, and fell silent.
Sawyer shook her head. "I can't do it."
"But … But there's no one else!"
Sawyer folded her arms. "I'm not in the line of command, Lieutenant. The regulations are quite specific on this point. I can't take command of the ship." Tom opened his mouth to argue, but she stepped around him. "Run those back to Perkins. He's on Deck Two Forward. Then get back here. I've got a whole bunch more for you to do."
Tom turned in time to see a spacer hurry away.
"In another hour we'll be ready to open a portal back to normal space," Sawyer told him. "That will take some of the urgency out of the repairs. Normal space puts a lot less stress on the components. Give me a few more hours after that and we'll be ready to come back into hyperspace and head for Garnet." She gave him a hard look. "And we need to head for Garnet, understand? We don't have enough crew, not for a ship with this many problems. We need to get back to a proper station as quickly as possible. Otherwise we'll have crew falling asleep at their posts."
"Sure," said Tom. "I understand." Did she imagine he wouldn't want to get back to Garnet as quickly as possible? "It's not up to me, though."
"Of course it is," she said. "You're in command now."
Her words echoed in his head as he headed back to the bridge. You're in command now.