“Thanks, but we’ve got some waiting,” one of the doctors replied with a quick look at Carmen. Her eyes lingered on the rifle. “We’re not expecting any more trouble here, are we?”
“No,” Carmen said. “I’m visiting my husband.”
“Oh, good! Um, I mean . . .”
“I understand.” Carmen nodded around her. “They didn’t damage this place?”
“No,” the other doctor said. “They probably wanted to be sure it was completely intact when they took over. Didn’t work out that way, though.”
The elevator stopped on the fourth floor, and the two doctors moved to get off. “Thank you,” Carmen called after them.
“Just doing our jobs,” the second doctor said, but he smiled at her as he left. “Thank you.”
Carmen got off on the fifth floor and followed the signs, not wanting to bother pulling out her pad for personalized directions.
Bay nine had several occupants, all but one of whom were either asleep or sedated.
Dominic looked over as she came in. He grinned.
She stumbled to his bed, wiping away from her dirty face tears that had unexpectedly appeared. “Hi, Domi.”
“Hi, Red.” He reached up for her hand. “Good to see you safe. We got lucky.”
“Sort of. You lost a few pounds.”
“Yeah,” Dominic said. “Nothing I can’t live without. It might take a little while for them to set me up with a prosthetic. Sudden high demand for those, you know? And eventually they can try regrowing the part of my leg that’s gone. I hear knees are still a little tricky.”
She sat down on the side of the bed, gazing at him. “I seem to be more upset than you are.”
“I’m probably still numb. And realizing how lucky I am.” He looked at her in a way that made Carmen feel embarrassed. “Hey, Red. I’m going to have some time off. Convalescing, you know. Maybe we could find something to do.”
“If you don’t have half a leg, and there’s no prosthetic,” Carmen said, shaking her head, “you’re going to be stuck in bed while you’re convalescing.”
His smile took on an unexpectedly wicked aspect. “Maybe we can think of ways to pass the time while I’m, um, stuck in bed.”
She laughed. “Maybe.”
Dominic’s smile faded. “Seriously, though. What would you think of starting a family?”
“We’re already . . . you mean have kids? Now?” Carmen waved around. “We’re in a city that’s half-wrecked, there are still the remnants of an invading army on the planet, you’re lying there with half a leg gone, and you want to knock me up? That’s what seems like a good idea to you? What have they got you on?”
“It’s not meds talking, Red.” Dominic looked away, upset. “I could have lost something more important than my leg, you know.”
“If that’s what’s worrying you, we can have a bunch of your little guys frozen,” Carmen said. “Available in case of need.”
“That’s not it. Really. Red, it could have been you. Or either one of us could have been killed. I’ve been talking to some of the others in here,” Dominic added earnestly, gesturing to the other beds. “There’s going to be a pause now, a break in big hostilities. Because we hurt them bad. They can’t come back in strength tomorrow. But in another year or so, maybe a couple of years, they might come back.”
“And you want me walking around nursing a baby when that happens?” Carmen asked.
“If it’s ours,” he said.
She looked down, sighing, not wanting to reject the idea out of hand but also worried for reasons that went back to her own childhood. “Domi, you’re being romantic, thinking of something that doesn’t just symbolize the future but is the future, and I’m being practical, seeing all the problems. I guess that’s how men and women think of children. The men are all about the promise and the potential, and the women worry about what can go wrong and all the demands. Here I am, the person who gives speeches about not losing hope, and I’m afraid to risk something that’s all about hope. Let me think about it. You might have second thoughts as well, you know.”
“I might. Red, something tells me that Kosatka is going to need more Desjanis.”
Carmen gave him a cross look. “And why are you certain they won’t be Ochoas?”
“Good point. We haven’t discussed that. How about if the girls are Desjanis and the boys Ochoas?”
“Turnabout? All right. But that doesn’t mean I’m agreeing to starting anytime soon! Not yet.”
“Fair enough.” Dominic sagged back in bed as if exhausted by the brief conversation.
“Look at you, overstressing yourself,” Carmen chided, fussing with his pillow. “Do you need anything? Stop talking strategy with your fellow wounded and get the rest you need.”
He smiled. “Hey, you know what else I heard? The government is thinking about creating a royal family.”
“A what? You mean, like a queen? For Kosatka?”
“Yeah. Because, what do we look to that makes us all Kosatka? There are political parties and stuff, but those divide, too. If there was a royal family that had no political power but served as symbols of Kosatka, they’d be something everyone could rally around. Can you imagine if the call to arms had come from Kosatka’s prince or princess instead of First Minister Hofer?”
Carmen made a scoffing laugh. “That’s crazy.”
“Red, you’ve told me that one of the problems on Mars was that there wasn’t anything to tie everyone together. It was lots of different groups with different agendas, and when that all fell apart no one knew what to turn to. Right?”
“Right,” Carmen agreed reluctantly.
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea. I mean,” Dominic added, “as long as they don’t have any real political power.”
“Maybe. Where would we get a royal family from?”
“Import one from Old Earth, maybe. Or just pick someone who seems right. That’s how all royal families started originally, right?”
“I suppose. But none of that will matter unless we get help,” Carmen added. “We would’ve been in a hopeless situation if that ship from Glenlyon hadn’t shown up and helped. A royal family might make a nice symbol, but what we need now is for Lochan to make it to Eire and convince others to finally offer some real assistance.”
“Lochan’s a lot tougher than he looks,” Dominic said. “I mean, in ways that matter.”
“He is,” Carmen agreed, worrying about her friend and hoping he was safely almost to Eire by now. “I’m glad that you see that, too. How long are you going to be in here?”
“They’re already talking about moving me out, but there’s a shortage of undamaged beds at recovery facilities. I heard they’re using hotel rooms.”
Carmen smiled. “I got to stay at the Kosatka Grand Centrum for a while after I first got to Kosatka. That’d be a nice place to spend a few days. I’ll see if I can talk to somebody. It looks out over Centrum and . . . where . . . Domi . . .” Sudden tears threatened her again.
“I know,” he said. “Red, I know.” He clasped her hand.
They sat like that for a long time, not speaking, but together.
* * *
• • •
Lochan Nakamura had spent a day and a half waiting, as the combined speed of both freighters closed the distance between them. A day and a half spent waiting for periods when his display worked so he could check the situation and try to refine his plans. A day and a half hoping that Freya would somehow contact him.
Lochan knew he couldn’t claim any special skills or experience when it came to figuring out intercepts in space. But the math was the sort of thing any computer could handle with ease, and at the velocities he was dealing with straight Newtonian physics was apparently good enough. The math had given him a time when it had to be done, a period of time it should take, and a time when they should arri
ve.
He was hazy on the rest. Maybe Freya could fill in the blanks.
The optimum time to do it would be early in the ship’s day. Fortunately, the captain had dictated that Lochan, and he hoped Freya, only got one meal a day, which arrived about noon. If he did things right, he could escape his cabin, find Freya, and they’d be gone long before anyone noticed.
The time had come, well past midnight on the ship’s clock. He either acted now or gave up, but nervousness threatened to paralyze him. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the thought of Carmen’s depending on him that got Lochan moving but the memory of Mele Darcy telling him to trust his own abilities and judgment.
Lochan knelt by the door to his cabin. He couldn’t hear anything outside. The crew hadn’t bothered posting a guard because where could Lochan go? He didn’t think there’d be much risk of encountering anyone else at this time. Only the crew members standing watch on the control deck and in engineering should be awake. If even they were.
He’d once owned a company that, among other things, manufactured locks. The company had failed for reasons that had everything to do with Lochan’s mistakes and little to do with the quality of the locks and other products. The lock on his door was similar enough to the cheapest designs he’d sold back then that he knew how to pop it. Locks on cabins were sort of a luxury item on freighters, so no one invested in top-of-the-line models. As long as it held the door shut, that was enough.
A thin slice of what was supposed to be meat, though Lochan wasn’t sure what creature it might have come from, had been easy to palm at his last meal. Trying to keep the spork would have been noticed instantly, but who counted pieces of mystery meat? As soon as it had cooled and dried, pressed under Lochan’s pad, the slice stiffened into a rigid blade, apparently as hard as iron, and the length of Lochan’s thumb. It wouldn’t have been good enough to defeat a decent lock in a well-set door, but it was plenty good enough to slide between door and jamb so that Lochan could unset the lock he was dealing with.
Outside, the passageway was silent, dark with the lights dimmed. It felt a little absurd to take his carryall along, but Lochan did, walking as silently and quickly as he could to Freya’s cabin.
That lock was also easily defeated, though Lochan jerked with worry every time he thought he heard someone approaching.
To his surprise, Freya didn’t get up when he opened the door. She lay still in her bunk. He approached her carefully, reaching out as far as he could to nudge her, not even wanting to whisper in case her cabin was still bugged.
She didn’t react. He nudged her again, harder. Still nothing. If not for the sound of her breathing deeply, Lochan would have worried if Freya was all right.
He finally crouched over her bunk, using his pad to illuminate her face. Freya didn’t react when he pried open one eyelid. Her pupil looked unusually large and shrank slowly under the light from his pad.
They’d drugged her. Maybe in her meal, judging Freya to be far more dangerous than he was. Before about three years ago, they would have been right.
He got Freya across his shoulders, moving awkwardly in the small cabin, used one hand to grab her bag as well as his, and shuffled out of the cabin. He needed one hand to hold her across his shoulders, so Lochan had to bend his knees and put down both bags to close the cabin door behind him. Picking up the two bags again, he headed for the place he had seen while moving around days before with Freya.
The hatch had a label, of course. Personnel Air Lock. He remembered coming in through it, seeing the lockers on one side holding survival suits. And another important item fastened on the other side, a strap-on maneuvering system to let someone in one of the survival suits direct their course through space.
Lochan paused, breathing heavily from his burden. He’d expected Freya to identify any alarm here, but she was still out cold. He examined the hatch carefully but didn’t see any obvious signs of an alarm.
The lights in the passageway began glowing steadily brighter, warning that the ship’s day was about to begin. With no alternative, Lochan crouched to set Freya down, then rose again to open the air lock’s inner hatch.
Nothing obvious happened in the way of alarms or alerts. Lochan dragged Freya inside the air lock, grabbed both bags, and stepped inside again to close the hatch.
He sat in the dark for a few minutes, getting his breath back and waiting to hear any reaction, dreading the rapid thump of running feet headed for the air lock. But nothing happened. He did hear one set of footsteps clumping by but at the leisurely pace of someone who wasn’t in a hurry.
Checking the time, he saw that he still had an hour left. Lochan used his pad to provide light again since he didn’t want to fumble around in the dark and maybe activate an alarm, or the outer door to the air lock, while looking for a light control. The lockers did hold survival suits, and Lochan was able to figure out the suit-controls-for-dummies they all used, ensuring the air recyclers were working and the suits ready to go. Their outer shells seemed far too thin to trust against the emptiness of space, but the basic design was over a century old. Tough enough to hold up to the usual bumps and other hazards, cheap enough to be easily replaced if something important in the suit failed.
Lochan saw something else, an emergency medical kit. Maybe there was something in there that would help Freya. Digging around in it he found an item labeled “broad spectrum drug/poison neutralizer.” That sounded useful.
Wishing he could ask Freya’s permission before taking this risk, but knowing he had no choice, Lochan opened her mouth, lifted her tongue, and meted out several drops.
Sitting back again, Lochan waited.
It only took about a minute before Freya’s breathing changed, growing quicker and shallower. Worried, he bent over her just as Freya’s eyes opened.
Her stiffened hand stopped just short of his neck.
“You’re lucky I have good enough reflexes to override them when I recognized you,” she whispered. “What the hell is going on?”
“They drugged you,” Lochan explained, moving a bit away from her. “I don’t know when.”
“Me neither. I was being careful about my meals. They could have sent gas into my air vent, though, to knock me out, then followed up with something to put me in a deep sleep.” Freya sat up cautiously, looking around. “Is this the passenger air lock? What are we doing here?”
“We’re escaping.”
“Do you have time to explain this? Where are we escaping to? Are we at Eire?”
Lochan shook his head. “We’re still at Tantalus. They reversed the ship to take us back to the jump point for Kosatka.”
“Oh, hell. How long was I out? And how are we going to . . . ?” She frowned at him. “You’ve got a plan?”
“Yeah. Since we’re coming back to the jump point for Kosatka using the most economical trajectory, and since that other freighter, the Bruce Monroe, is coming from that jump point using the most economical trajectory, the ships are going to pass fairly close to each other.”
“Really?” Freya gave the air lock’s outer hatch a worried look. “What does fairly close mean?”
“A few hundred kilometers. I mean, practically touching in terms of space, you know.”
She stared at him. “A few hundred kilometers?”
“Two hundred, plus or minus fifty. We get into two of these suits,” Lochan explained. “And there’s a maneuvering unit over there so we can accelerate and slow down a bit. We jump along the right vector at the right time, and we’ll meet up with the Bruce Monroe.”
“Which will be going along a different vector at a very high speed compared to us,” Freya said. “Have you ever seen a bug hit a windshield? This would be a lot worse than that.”
“Maybe the Bruce Monroe will change course a bit to pick us up,” Lochan said, worried by her reaction. “They came from Glenlyon. We should be able to trust them.”
Freya lay down flat again, looking up at the top of the air lock. “This ship is taking us back to Kosatka. The reason for that is obvious. There’s no other way off, is there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So, short of killing the crew and all the other passengers and taking the ship to Eire ourselves, this is our only way to avoid being turned over to the bad guys.”
Lochan stared at her. “I have to admit that the killing everybody else on the ship option hadn’t occurred to me.”
“It wouldn’t be easy, and we’d have some trouble explaining doing that when we got to Eire,” Freya admitted. “I never would have thought of jumping to the Bruce Monroe, though.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Because . . . it’s really insane. You know that, right?”
“I know of a guy who led a bunch of people in a jump across space to another ship,” Lochan argued.
“How far did he jump?”
“It was . . . something like . . . a hundred meters?”
“Which is a little less than two hundred kilometers!” Freya sat up again, rubbing her head. “Whatever they used on me gave me a headache. Is there any aspirin handy?”
“Yeah,” Lochan said, depressed. “So we’re not doing it?”
“Who said we’re not doing it?” Freya popped the painkillers before giving him a small smile. “A couple of hundred kilometers across open space to a ship on a different vector in suits designed for emergency use. What could possibly go wrong? It’s crazy, but it’s our only chance. And if the worst happens . . . it’s liable to be a whole lot less painful than whatever would be waiting for us at Scatha or Apulu.”
“We are doing it?”
“We’re going to try. Amazing idea, if I didn’t say so. Crazy enough to maybe work. When do we have to jump?”
Lochan checked the time. “Thirty-two minutes.”
“Plenty of time. Let’s make sure everything on those suits works, especially the comms, and see if we can figure out how to use that maneuvering unit. And Lochan . . . thank you. You’ve given us a chance.”
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