by Sean Danker
For all the good it was doing her.
The medical bay itself was a mixture of Ganraen and Evagardian stylings. New white fixtures stood out jarringly against the gray of the original Ganraen engineering. The room was cold, but at least the examination table was padded. I didn’t care for the harsh lights, but my eyes were drawn to the lockers filled with chems and medicine.
Deilani didn’t hide her lack of enthusiasm for treating me. She dabbed at me with soothing antiseptic before spraying on an icy bandage that applied a mild anesthetic. It wasn’t a large cut, but it was over my eye, so we couldn’t just let it bleed. I could feel my suit beginning to mend itself, repairing the tears where I’d been struck in the back by shrapnel.
“Give me your supply,” she said, putting out her hand, and wearing the expression of someone only acting under the direst duress.
I decided to show a little trust in the hopes that maybe she’d send a little back my way. I handed over my hypos. She plugged one into a hand scanner, and her eyes narrowed. “This is high quality,” she said, giving me another look. “Very pure.” She frowned. “You’d almost have to be an admiral to afford this,” she mused, giving me another funny look.
“It was a gift,” I said. “You know how it is. Someone gives you something, it’s ungrateful not to use it. I’m not into that stuff.” I glanced at Salmagard. “Honest. I’m all about clean living. True story.”
Deilani’s curiosity had vanished, replaced by familiar contempt.
“I didn’t know what it was,” I went on. “I thought it was for my allergies. That’s how they get you.”
I’d given myself only half a dose earlier. It wouldn’t hold me long. My eyes would start to look bloodshot. I’d probably be developing a little nervous tic soon. It would get worse fast, though.
It’s true what they say: drugs and sleepers don’t mix. My body chemistry was a disaster. We were in serious trouble and I needed to be at my best. I needed Deilani’s help. It looked as though it was a good thing we had a doctor along after all.
She made a noise of frustration and closed her eyes. “We’re going to have to shut this down here and now. A few more hits of this and you’ll probably go into shock this soon after coming out of a sleeper.”
“Sounds good.”
She blinked at me. “That’s it?”
“You think I use it for my health? No. Lieutenant, chem me off, by all means. The sooner, the better.”
She looked me up and down.
“Yeah,” she said. “All right.”
She wanted me to have a miserable detox; what she didn’t grasp was that I didn’t care. My need for drugs had ended when the party did. I could handle any amount of suffering if it meant being free of my dependency. “Just don’t kill me until you don’t need me anymore.”
“Then I’ll give you a stim too.”
“Now you’re speaking my language.”
Nils was still gaping at the shards of plastic that Deilani had pulled from my back. He looked impressed.
“I’ve had worse,” I told him. My suit had almost finished repairing the tears.
“You look a little familiar. Sir,” he added, squinting at me.
“Is it my lips? I’ve been told I have very common lips,” I replied.
He kept staring. I sighed.
“Do I?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop treating him like an officer,” Deilani groaned, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Why was the shuttle sabotaged?”
“Ask Tremma,” I told her. “I’m less worried about the why than the who at the moment.”
“But what do we do?” Nils was close to panic. He was holding it together, but after that brush with death, we were all starting to feel it. Deilani didn’t like me giving orders, but she was conspicuously quiet when it came to proposing solutions.
I straightened up a little, gently touching the cut over my eye. She’d done a nice job on it.
“We’re out of options. You’re good, but you’re not good enough to get this whole ship moving, Nils. It’s like you said. We’ll have to wait for rescue.”
“No power means no beacon,” Deilani pointed out. “And if someone wanted us gone badly enough for this level of sabotage, then we probably are off course. We could be anywhere. Surely whoever sent us out here covered their tracks.”
I was glad she was thinking clearly. “Probably,” I admitted. “But there’s something you’re forgetting.” I pointed at Salmagard. “She can’t go missing forever. They’d come looking for you, but they might come looking for her even sooner. There are ways for them to find us. We’re lucky. We’re stationary. If we’d just been pointed out past the frontier and sent off still asleep, no one would ever find us. And I think that was our saboteur’s plan. But that didn’t happen, and that means we’ve got a chance.”
“Provided we haven’t been asleep for, say, a couple of years,” Deilani said, massaging her temples.
Nils shook his head. “We haven’t, ma’am. The sleeper records showed we were two weeks out from the courier. So that’s longer than the trip was supposed to be, but it’s not really a long time. Not long enough to send us too far.” He was fidgeting. Nervous energy filled the room, hanging in the air like static electricity. “So we’re already overdue.”
“It’s out of our hands now. We’ll have to wait.” I rubbed my chin, wondering if there was anything in Medical that I could use to shave. There were lasers that could remove body hair for surgery. I wondered where they were kept.
No. The stubble was good. It was helping me. It felt weird, but I was better off keeping it.
“Shuttle’s gone,” Nils said. “Emergency power won’t last.”
“We’ll have to get creative,” I said, focusing.
“Excuse me?”
“Lieutenant, you’ve just spent a substantial portion of your life training to become a leader.” I looked at her expectantly. “Surely you know what to do.”
It was the chemicals talking. Deilani just scowled at me. I went on. “We have to buy ourselves as much time as we can, and stay alive until they get here. That’s it. That would be pretty simple if we didn’t have two dead men in the airlock. They didn’t kill themselves.”
“Yes, they did,” Deilani said. “We saw it was their own incinerators. But what made them do it? If it wasn’t you. That wasn’t one of them murdering the other, or a suicide thing.”
“That’s what I’d like to know. I wasn’t going to worry about it as long as I thought we were just going to get out of here. Now that we’re staying it’s an issue again.”
“Are we in danger? Apart from this?” Nils motioned at the ship in general.
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I don’t see how we could be. But they’re dead, and ending up that way was not their goal—so something happened here. I can’t explain it. We’re missing something.”
“How do we wait for rescue without life support?” Deilani was doing her best to stay on task, but she was afraid. I couldn’t blame her. We could have died in that shuttle, and that wasn’t something any of them would forget.
“Two ways.” I got off the examination table and started to pace. Salmagard had been standing by the door with her hands behind her back and head bowed, but now she looked up to watch me. “First, the sleepers. We rig up some kind of power supply and just go back to sleep. The problem with that is that mine’s no good, and even though your suspicions are completely unfounded, I’m sure you wouldn’t be comfortable going under with me still up and about. And repairing my unit is probably beyond even the ensign’s abilities. Likewise putting me in one of your sleepers would let the other two rest easy, but the third would be awake and alone on a dead ship on what looks to me like a dead planet. No power, no life support. Survivable, but not ideal.”
I looked them over as they digested that.<
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“I think that at the end of the day, this is something we’re better off facing together.”
If I had three Salmagards, this would be easy. But Deilani wouldn’t be willing to take her eyes off me, and there was enough doubt in Nils that neither would he. None of them were keen to get back in their sleepers—especially after seeing what had almost happened with mine. How could they trust anything when it seemed as if literally everything on this ship had been sabotaged? The sleepers were off the table.
“Then we’re agreed,” I said, sweeping my hand at the medbay. “This is our new home. We’re lucky. We’ve got lots of resources on this tub. There’s plenty of air and water—we just have to get at it, and use it intelligently. We have everything, or at least most of what we need. We’re going to turn Medical into our own little tree house.”
“Our what?” Deilani glared at me.
“Get some culture. Don’t you know Old Earth history? I don’t know how long the air’s going to last. If we seal off a room like this, rig up a recycler and bleed in oxygen, we can last a while.” Trainees or not, they understood the concept of an air pocket. “But we also need heat.”
“EV suits will keep us warm,” Deilani pointed out. Evagardians and their blind faith in Evagardian technology. I envied them.
“Until they run out of power, which will be sooner than you realize once the temperature equalizes. Which it will,” I promised. “It’ll get cold, and the suits will have to work harder to keep us warm. The EV charges won’t last. We need to conserve them, and think about O2 in case we have to leave the room once the air’s gone out there. For water, for example. We can’t go breaking open pipes in here. We’ll have to bring in water by hand.”
“We can just use a grav lift.”
“We still have to open the door, and we’ll lose air every time we do.” I sat down on the examination table again, and they gathered around me.
I hoped my facade of confidence wasn’t the only thing holding them together. It was a good thing I was used to being the center of attention.
“We were in deep space travel,” I went on. “Most of the ship was sealed off and depressurized. There’s not as much air as we think. We have to get to work. We don’t have to rush. We don’t need to panic, but we do need to get started. If we’ve overlooked something, the sooner we find out, the better. And things are far enough out of hand that I don’t think we should be making irresponsible assumptions about how much time we’ve got.”
“We’re with you,” Nils said. Deilani grimaced, but didn’t protest. She probably had the highest test scores in the room, but Nils was the one making rational choices. He understood that we were all in this together.
“With four of us we can make this work.” I pointed at Nils, making sure the gesture was all business. “You get the big job. Find a grav lift. Rip the recycler out of an escape craft, bring it here, get it running.” Escape craft designed for use in open space weren’t any good to us on the surface, except for whatever we might be able to scavenge from them.
“It’s not going to be at full efficiency.”
“Bring two if you have to. I’m not grading you. There aren’t any points for Evagardian elegance here. There should be at least a dozen ECs on a ship this size. Do what you have to. And don’t worry about being neat. Break what you have to break. They can bill me.”
“Yes, sir.” Nils took a deep breath and nodded.
“Private, I want you to collect survival packs. There’ll be some by every airlock and loader, more by the ECs, and even more in the ECs. One’s supposed to be enough for one person for a week—four of us, you do the math. If we end up with too much stuff in here, we can put some of it across the corridor so we won’t have to go too far for it. Speaking of suit time, Lieutenant, find out if there’s an EV charger. If there isn’t, collect power packs and O2 cartridges. I’ll see about finding us a heat source.”
“No.”
“If it would help, you can think of these as orders.”
“I don’t acknowledge you as my superior, and I am not letting you have the run of this ship alone. And,” she added, “you shouldn’t move around until that booster thins.”
Touching. Venomous distrust mingled with concern for my well-being. She was convinced I was a spy, and determined to hand me over alive. To her I was nothing but a big, juicy medal with her name on it.
Yet that didn’t fully explain her animosity. She believed I was an enemy combatant, but she was treating it awfully personally.
Well, if this went well, we’d be stuck together for what could turn into a matter of weeks—so we’d have plenty of time to talk it over. I wasn’t really looking forward to that. Maybe I could go into medical stasis or something.
For now, we had to build trust. It might reduce our productivity, but not as much as it would if things came to a head right here.
“All right,” I said, trying to sound conciliatory. “Secure me. We’ll do business over the com. How’s that?”
She glowered at me for an uncomfortably long period of time. “All right.”
“Less work for me,” I said, as Nils and Salmagard trooped out.
“Get used to how this feels,” Deilani said, strapping my wrist to the examination table. She engaged the patient safety catch. Even with one hand still loose, I wouldn’t be able to get free unless I could grow another thumb.
“Give it a rest.” I shook my head. “By order . . .”
I stopped myself. It was a sign of the depth of my exasperation that those words had come out. She was staring at me again.
“By order? By order of whom?”
“By order of the guy you need to be listening to,” I told her sharply, and she flinched. “I’m good here,” I said, tugging at the strap. It was tight. Seeing that, Deilani swallowed and backed out of the room.
I took a couple of deep breaths, then settled back and closed my eyes. If Deilani was determined to force me to slack off, who was I to argue? Besides, whatever she’d given me had sapped my energy, and not in a good way.
I did what I could over the com to help them find their way through the dark ship; or rather, I helped Nils. Salmagard was silent, and Deilani would run herself ragged before asking me for anything. At least they were all in shape.
“It’s going to be ugly,” Nils said of the recycler he was working to extract from an escape craft. “I don’t have any tools. Do you know where I can find some?”
“Tremma’s maintenance supply. But where that is, I don’t know. Just break whatever you have to. Stuff on the inside of a Ganraen EC can’t be all that sturdy. And if you can get that running in a timely fashion, you should see about a combiner.”
“Really, sir?”
“Unless you want the last thing you ever eat to be field rations.” The food produced by a molecular protein combiner was never anything to get excited about, but it was still a step up from field rations.
“You really think this is it, sir?” Nils sounded shaken. He still wasn’t over the exploding shuttle. My hearing was still a little dull too.
Until a few weeks ago these trainees must have believed that they were going to war. The conflict with Ganrae hadn’t been going one way or the other too decisively. Things had been leaning in the Empire’s favor, but it hadn’t been such a one-sided conflict that the Empire would be feeling invincible.
Maybe Nils had thought that nothing would happen to him on the Julian. That was reasonable, and the cease-fire had come abruptly with the destruction of the space station that served as the center of the Ganraen Commonwealth’s government. He must’ve felt even safer knowing the fighting was over.
But now he had no choice but to think about his own mortality, a subject that his service training had probably glossed over.
“It’s not outside the realm of possibility,” I told him.
“Yes, sir.”
Even in my suit, I could feel the temperature dropping. It wouldn’t be long before our EV suits were the only things keeping us from freezing.
Salmagard returned, her grav cart stacked with survival packs. Enough to hold us for a while, even without a combiner. The meals in the packs came in numerous varieties, but the selection wasn’t infinite. I did some quick mental math, and decided we’d be sick of all of them depressingly soon. Though when it came to rations like this, imperial ones were probably the best you could ask for.
I hoped Nils had the technical prowess to get a combiner running. We’d also need protein gel for it—and that would need to be kept at a certain temperature. Well, that would be easy. We could just leave it in the corridor and thaw it as needed. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d eaten food from a combiner. Ages ago.
I was too spoiled, and I needed to get over myself. I was going to be eating that sort of humble food three meals a day for the foreseeable future, and that was only if I lived through this.
Salmagard finished unloading her cart.
“Private,” I said, and she went to parade rest. I looked down at my bound wrist. “You know I can’t actually put you at ease.”
“You’re saying it would be wrong for me to follow your orders, sir?”
That surprised me. Her voice was perfectly even. I almost couldn’t tell she was joking. She was joking, right? She had to be.
So she did have a sense of humor.
“You’re sure?” I asked. “You might be better off on Deilani’s good side. I don’t have much to offer you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.” I cleared my throat. “Lieutenant?” I said into the com.
“Yes?” Deilani sounded a little out of breath. She was trying to compensate for not having a clue where she was going by running the whole way. Her pride couldn’t be blamed on the Service. They hadn’t taught her that. This was all her.
“Where are you?” I asked.