Black Sheep

by Rachel Aukes

  BLACK SHEEP

  ©2020 RACHEL AUKES

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  ALSO IN SERIES

  BLACK SHEEP

  FREE STATION

  ROGUE PLANET

  Contents

  ALSO IN SERIES

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  ALSO IN SERIES

  Chapter One

  Captain Halit “Throttle” Reyne ran her third lap through the Gabriela’s vacant corridors. She could hear her boots hit the floor, but she couldn’t feel them. In fact, she couldn’t feel anything below her hips.

  The ship’s motion sensors turned on the lights before her, and she knew from fifteen years of being on board the Gabriela that the lights would also turn off behind her. Her lungs burned—it was a good burn, like sipping a glass of dark rum. She pushed herself to run faster. Her leg braces clicked with every step.

  The cargo hauler that had been repurposed as a colony ship was over a half mile in diameter and seven levels high. Much of the ship was divided into cargo holds around a massive central storage space capable of carrying anything under eighty feet tall in its hold. She knew every inch of the ship and could run it practically blindfolded.

  A smudge of grime on the wall caught her eye. The hallway curved to the right, and she took the turn while still looking at the stain. Her left leg brace squeaked, and her leg went out from under her. She tried to catch herself, but her momentum propelled her forward and sent her toppling to the floor. She put her hands out in front of her in time to keep her forehead from slamming into the hard plastic surface.

  She grimaced from frustration rather than pain, knowing that she’d allowed herself to become distracted. She should’ve been focusing on keeping her feet squarely planted on the floor. The distraction had cost her. She pushed up and rolled onto her butt to examine her braces. The spiderwebs of black alloy and straps remained wrapped around her legs, and each pivot point showed no damage. That was the good news.

  The bad news was the dark wetness soaking the material covering her left knee.

  Throttle blew out a breath. “Not again.”

  She tugged at the fresh tear in her gray pants to find a deep gash across her kneecap where a strap of her leg brace had sliced. Practically indestructible, rilon was a strong yet flexible alloy used to build warship hulls, making it the perfect material for printing leg braces. Unfortunately for Throttle, that meant her body would give out long before her braces.

  She pressed her palm against her knee, trying to staunch the blood. Rivulets formed between her fingers and small streams ran over her skin. She smacked the floor with her free hand. If Birk was awake, he’d scold her for running so fast, like he’d scolded her dozens of other times before. But then he’d feel bad and tinker with her braces, trying to improve them.

  She wiped her bloody hand on her pants before pulling her feet closer and planting them squarely on the floor. With them under her, she used the wall to help press herself upward into a standing position. The braces worked great at giving her stability to walk, but they did nothing to bring sensation back to her legs. She was paralyzed from when she’d been shot in the back at two years old in an execution lineup with her family. She’d been the only survivor, but she faced a lifetime battle against a broken body.

  All the corridor lights snapped on and alarms blared, giving Throttle a start. Her wrist-comm chimed a split second later. She swung up her forearm and tapped the device. “What’s going on, Eddy?”

  “Sensors have picked up flooding in cargo bay twenty-three B. Diagnostics show that it’s not a system error. I’m heading there now to check it out.” The hardware tech’s voice came through unevenly through the comm’s speakers as though he was running.

  She exhaled before speaking into her comm. “On my way.”

  “Every damn day, something has to break around here,” she muttered to herself. The previous day, it had been a malfunctioning solar sail. A week ago, they’d lost their fourth passenger to a cryopod’s faulty carbon dioxide exhaust system.

  She took two steps to stabilize her rhythm before breaking into a run back in the direction from which she’d come. As she ran, she tapped her wrist-comm, tapped on the image of one of the other crew members on duty, and brought her arm closer to speak. “Nolin, shut down all water lines on level B. And turn off that damn alarm.”

  “Working on it,” the ship’s navigator replied.

  Throttle ran through the hallway, past several dozen cargo hold doors until she reached one near the end of the corridor. The alarms silenced, leaving a ringing echo in her ears. She swiped her wrist-comm over the small wall screen by the door. The screen chimed, and the door unlocked. She slid the door to the left, into its wall casing, and stepped inside. Lights came on through the long compartment, showcasing two rows of cryopods. Pausing long enough to close the door behind her, she took off at a jog between the rows, paying no attention to the hibernating occupants, and headed straight toward the end of the compartment where there was a second door.

  “Do you need me, Captain?” The soft voice of the ship’s medic came through Throttle’s wrist-comm.

  “Not yet, Aubree, but you’d better get a kit ready just in case. I’ll update you as soon as we know this isn’t a false alarm,” Throttle replied.

  “Understood,” came the other woman’s voice.

  Throttle opened the door. Before her stood the ship’s massive central cargo hold. A full seven levels high and nearly three hundred meters across, entire ships could b
e—and had been—built within the bay. Now, the space held thousands of crates of food and supplies, with a single massive 3D printer sitting in the middle. Everything was strapped down since gravity was kept at .05 g to increase the lifespan of food and to make moving crates easier with less effort required.

  She stepped out on a gangway and grabbed the railing as she immediately felt her loss of weight in the lower-gravity cargo hold. She scanned the cavernous space to search for the right compartment number printed large on each door. When she found the door that read 23-B, she swung over the railing and positioned herself across from it and three levels down. From the corner of her eye, she saw Eddy pulling himself along the B-level gangway, wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and carrying his tattered black tool bag.

  With a deep breath, she pushed off from the gangway and shot like a torpedo toward 23-B. She aimed high to let gravity bring her down to the right level. She flew across the open space and savored the exhilaration she felt every time she flew around the central hold. It was her favorite activity on the ship, and she never went a day without flying.

  The gangway approached, and she reached out. She grabbed the railing and twisted herself around to land on her feet moments before Eddy reached her.

  He scowled. “I hate it when you do that. You make it look easy.”

  “I told you I’d show you how. You just have to show up.” She gave the pale, skinny mechanic a once-over. “Though, I hope you decide to wear clothes when you do.”

  “I was getting ready for bed when the alarms went off.”

  “Good thing you don’t sleep naked.”

  “I do sleep naked, but I took the time to put my underwear on.” He squeezed past her to get to the wall panel outside 23-B. He set down his tool bag, swiped his wrist-comm over the panel, and typed in several commands. His body relaxed and he gave her a smile. “Good news. The compartment’s not flooded. It’s just another sensor malfunction.”

  “So it says,” Throttle said with little confidence and tapped her wrist-comm. “Nolin, confirm the water lines have been shut down on level B.”

  “Confirmed, Captain.”

  She grabbed the railing and wrapped her other hand protectively around his wrist and tugged him to not stand directly in front of the door.

  He eyed her grip and gave her a frown. “It’s just a malfunction. Nothing to worry about.”

  “It’s my job to worry,” she said.

  He shrugged, turned, and grabbed the handle with his free hand. He slid the door open. A wall of water slammed outward. Propelled by the buildup of pressure from within the cargo compartment, it knocked both crew members off their feet. Throttle held tight as a waterfall shoved them off the gangway. The minimal gravity in the central cargo hold did nothing to stop the onslaught. Throttle’s fingers slipped on the wet railing, but she tightened her grip. After spending much of her life confined to a wheelchair, her upper-body strength was superior to that of many men, and she used every bit of it to hold on to her crew member.

  The onslaught punched at the pair with brutal force. She couldn’t tell if Eddy was still conscious. As for herself, she could neither see nor breathe, but she held on, hoping the lashing torrents would soon end. If she let go, Eddy and she would be smashed around the cargo hold or, worse, drown in a low-gravity pool of water, unable to swim free. Her lungs soon burned. The muscles in her fingers ached.

  The water volume decreased, and the pressure no longer slammed liquid against her body like a million icy needles. Throttle sucked in a breath. She pulled herself and a coughing, gagging Eddy over the railing and lowered both of them to the gangway. Water still trickled out from the compartment, but at least it was no longer a tsunami.

  She grabbed his shoulder. “You okay?”

  He continued to cough while he slowly held up his thumb.

  She patted his back and took in the scene around the open area. A white-rapid river of water was ricocheting off the far wall, the first of which had already returned to the side of the bay where Throttle and Eddy were, pounding the wall a level below them. Water hit the cargo hold’s surfaces in a surreal game of Ping-Pong as it slowly descended downward in the low g. Already, water dripped from several crates of food, and rivulets ran off the printer. She turned around to look inside the compartment to see cryopods overturned and sitting askew. At least half of the pods had red warning lights flashing.

  She grimaced and tapped her wrist-comm to open the channel. “Nolin, Aubree, this is not a false alarm. I need you both down at cargo hold twenty-three B right now. We have a flooding mess and cryopod problems.”

  “I’m on my way. Are either of you hurt?” Aubree asked.

  “We’re fine,” Throttle replied.

  “My tools,” Eddy said between coughs.

  She glanced at the mechanic to find his bag missing. “And, Nolin, bring your tools,” she added.

  “I have them with me, and I’m heading down to you now,” Nolin replied.

  Eddy dragged himself to his feet. “I need to find my tools.”

  “We’ll find them later. We kill the crisis first,” she said, voicing what had quickly become her most used maxim, with crises appearing nearly daily of late.

  She stepped inside the compartment and the gravity immediately weighed her down. Her legs would’ve buckled if the braces hadn’t held her in place. The water that had drenched her a minute earlier now poured down her skin and clothes, leaving hair clinging to her face. She wiped the long strands away from her eyes and walked around a cryopod that had nearly detached from the floor. The passenger, a middle-aged man, remained asleep, oblivious to the chaos that had taken place around him.

  Eddy stopped at a pod with a solid red light. “Oh no.”

  Throttle looked over his shoulder to see the pod broken open and filled with water. The occupant, a teenaged girl, lay inside the small pool with several of her connection cables detached. She looked asleep, but the screen on the pod displayed DECEASED in bright red letters.

  Eddy hurriedly tried to reattach the cables, but the system wouldn’t allow them to connect.

  Throttle swallowed the lump in her throat. She’d have to write another name on the remembrance wall—it was by far the worst activity she had to do as captain of the Gabriela, and something she had to do far too often.

  She placed a hand on Eddy’s arm. “Stop. We can’t do anything for her.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late. If we can get the cables reconnected…”

  She tugged him back. “Eddy, she was dead the moment her pod failed.”

  “But she’s just a kid. It’s not fair.”

  Throttle turned him to face her. “Death doesn’t give a damn about how many years someone lived when it comes to take them. You can’t help her, but you can help the rest of the passengers by getting that water line fixed.”

  He gave a slow nod and yanked away. He walked toward the wall where a panel had been blown outward while Throttle weaved around the twenty cryopods in various states of disarray. She was relieved to find that none of the other pods had been breached.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Eddy said.

  “What doesn’t?” she asked, walking over to him.

  “Look.” He pointed to the narrow metal line that forked off into two lines. The line had blown out just before the split. Water still dripped from the open line.

  “What am I looking at?” she asked.

  “Both lines are closed. That’s not supposed to happen. One line should always be open. No wonder the pipe blew.” He shook his head as he thought. “The sensors should’ve picked up the malfunction and turned off the water before the pressure blew the line. We had a malfunction on top of a malfunction.”

  The sounds of footsteps caused Throttle to turn around to see Aubree rush into the room. The medic’s dark brown skin was flush from running all the way from her quarters. She carried a medical kit, and her eyes grew wide as she took in the pods.

  “See what you can do,” Throt
tle said, though Aubree had already moved to check on the first pod.

  “It seems that Gabriela’s ghost is getting busier and busier with her shenanigans around here,” Eddy said.

  “Yes, she has,” Throttle agreed. The Gabriela was a quirky ship. Ever since the colony transport departed the Collective over fifteen years earlier, odd things had happened. Lights would randomly come on, cameras would shut off, and rooms would erratically lock or unlock. The crew blamed it on a ghost. Throttle, on the other hand, wasn’t superstitious and didn’t believe in ghosts. While many of the events could be attributed to general system failures, common on any multiyear trip, some of the occurrences couldn’t have been caused by bugs in the Gabriela’s systems. Things like a missing crate of food, a wet shower stall on a level no one used, and smudges on walls convinced Throttle that either they had stowaways, or—more likely—a handful of sleepers didn’t follow the rules and stay confined to their quarters when they were on their monthly three-day wake cycle from their cryopods. Not trusting anyone except her crew was why Throttle always carried a photon pistol and knives any time she was outside her cabin.

  The cool air drew Throttle’s body heat through her wet clothes, and she shivered. She then noticed Eddy’s fingers shaking. “You need to get into some clothes,” she said.

  He shuddered before taking a step back. “What I need to do is patch the line, but I can’t patch the line without my tools.”

  “I have my tools,” Nolin said as he jogged into the wet room. Like Aubree, his eyes grew wide as he took in the scene, slowing to take tentative steps. “What a mess.”