Stars Uncharted

by S. K. Dunstall

  Snow’s voice was shaky. “Carlos is banged up a little. Concussion, but otherwise fine.”

  “And you?” Nika asked.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, Snow. You. Clinical assessment.” Otherwise he would gloss over any problems. She needed to know he was all right.

  “I’m not a doctor.” But he gave an honest assessment. “Bruised. My left elbow is swollen. Twisted, and the bone chipped. Emotionally shaken, but I should be fine.”

  He might not be a doctor, but he sounded like one. A good one.

  Roystan sighed. “The young. They bounce back from everything.” He turned back to the link. “Jacques?”

  There was no answer.

  “Jacques.”

  Roystan pressed a series of buttons, and there was another orange flash.

  “Markers,” he told her, although she hadn’t asked. “Not that it’s going to help. We’ve a million square kilometers of space to search. It’s as close as I can estimate to where we parted ways with the spur, but the spur is nowhere in sight. A human body is tiny, compared.” His voice broke on the last word.

  Roystan would find her. Nika was sure of that. Whether she’d be alive when they did was an entirely different question.

  Roystan choked off a sound that might have been a sob. He made for the door. Nika followed, trying not to think. Josune had been the closest thing to a friend she’d had in a long time.

  21

  JOSUNE ARRIOLA

  The Road accelerated away.

  Josune would never catch it. She looked back toward the spur, so far behind her now she couldn’t see it.

  She was here, alone in space, with—she checked the suit stats—fourteen and a half hours of air left, and a ratty suit communicator with a range of only 3.6 kilometers.

  Being out in space had never bothered her before.

  Now it was just her and black, empty, lonely nothing. Except for the stars, which were bright points of light wherever she looked. But oh so far away.

  She was in an open-air coffin.

  And she had fourteen and a half hours to contemplate her future. Or lack of.

  Her shipmates had gone, long before her. The Hassim, the ship she had called home for more than ten years, was gone. The Road was gone. Roystan was gone.

  She was alone.

  Josune switched on the suit emergency beacon.

  Nothing happened.

  She looked down at the arm of her suit. The distress beacon was smashed.

  She closed her eyes momentarily, took time to savor the fact that she could. At least if she was to die she’d do it with two functioning eyes. So the old-fashioned way. Through the link then.

  Where the signal would travel all of 3.6 kilometers.

  Roystan would come back for her. There was comfort in knowing he would. But he would be too late. He had a million square kilometers of space to search. How likely was he to get within three kilometers of her? And if by some miracle he did, she had to know he was there, for she couldn’t keep up a manual send for the full fourteen and a half hours.

  She cut the suit jets. No point in wasting what little fuel she had.

  The suit continued on, following the trajectory her initial burn had set. It was as good as any other path. She imagined she could still see the yellow burn of The Road’s jets as they cooled. Which was impossible, of course.

  But she could.

  The ship was coming back.

  She stared at it for long, wasteful seconds. Impossible. And yet not.

  It wasn’t coming back on the same path. No one was that good a pilot, but it was close, spatially speaking. Nika and Roystan, between them, made a perfect team. Josune kicked her jets on.

  She’d only get one chance at this.

  Her distress beacon might not be working, but the homing guide was. She set it to the ship, coming up faster than she wanted it, and let the automatics do the rest. They would take her home.

  * * *

  • • •

  She hit the ship hard.

  Her chin went down onto the suit communicator. She heard something crunch, loud in her ears, thought she’d broken her jaw. Realized after a second she’d broken her communicator.

  She blacked out.

  22

  NIKA RIK TERRI

  They found Jacques curled up on the floor. Bleeding, but not badly. Bruised, but not broken. The cacophony of alarms around him was deafening.

  He rolled away when Roystan and Nika knelt beside him. “She said she couldn’t get back in.”

  Nika could hardly hear him above the noise. She checked him over, trying to make it as professional as Snow might, although her hands were shaking.

  Jacques covered his eyes with his arm. “She told me not to open the door.”

  Roystan stood up and turned off three of the alarms. He looked around, his eyes scanning the docking area, a hand to his mouth. For a moment Nika thought he was going to throw up again.

  There was a groan from behind. She turned. Snow, with an arm around Carlos. Shuffling, weaving. Neither of them steady. Snow held his left arm awkwardly, but otherwise his analysis of his own wounds seemed to have been accurate. Nika expelled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Snow was fine.

  Roystan circled the area. Looking. Not touching. He didn’t say anything. Nika thought he might have struggled if he had tried to speak.

  “She said it would kill us all,” Jacques whispered as Carlos and Snow reached them.

  Roystan bent to inspect the airlock. He opened the cupboard marked Emergency Repair Kit.

  It was empty.

  Carlos staggered. “Gave it to Josune. Remember?” His voice was slurred.

  Roystan nodded and walked silently down the passageway. They stared after him. No one spoke.

  When he came back, he had a repair kit in his hands and his voice was normal. “There’s foam on the door. She repaired it.”

  Nika looked closely at the airlock door.

  There was foam. Two tiny hardened tendrils, where it had forced itself through the door and hardened.

  Carlos went whiter than he already was. Nika hadn’t thought that possible. “If the foam came through this far—” He didn’t finish, but Roystan nodded, grimly, at what he didn’t say.

  “I’ll get a suit.”

  “No.” Snow and Roystan said it at the same time.

  “You’re concussed,” Snow added.

  “There’s a massive hole out there. Someone has to fix it.”

  “I’ll do it.” Roystan looked at Jacques. Then at Snow and Nika. “I’ll need help.”

  Nika nodded.

  “I’ll do it,” Snow said. “Nika’s probably never been out in a space suit before.”

  Which she hadn’t. “What can I do while you’re doing that?”

  Roystan looked at Jacques.

  Nika nodded. She watched Roystan and Snow suit up before turning to Carlos first. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  “I need to check the rest of the ship.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “We were hit twice.” Carlos wove his way across the width of the passageway. “Josune would check it.”

  Josune would have, too.

  “Jacques,” Nika said quietly. “He’s too heavy for me on my own.”

  Jacques dragged himself up and moved to Carlos’s right side. She moved to his left.

  “I can check the ship for you, if you tell me what to look for.”

  “I need to check—”

  “Even I can check oxygen and temperature from a control panel. You’re not going to let a mere modder beat you at that, are you?”

  “I know what you’re doing.” Carlos staggered to the left, into Nika. “I can see.”

  “Well then, you can see that I’m doing what n
eeds to be done. The sooner we have you sitting down, the better. You can use machines to do the initial testing, surely.”

  “Of course I can.”

  “Then tell me or Jacques where to go to look at any problems.”

  “I’d rather have Snow. At least he’d recognize the problem.”

  “You don’t have Snow. You have us.”

  With Carlos ensconced in the crew room, Jacques made for the galley.

  “Let him go,” Carlos said, putting a hand out to Nika when she went to stop him. “He’s stressed.”

  “So tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Give me time.” Carlos tried four times to pull up screens.

  Nika bit down on the knuckles of her right hand, so she wouldn’t tell him to hurry. The ship could be falling apart while he was fumbling around. Probably was. Something was tap-tap-tapping over her head and Carlos hadn’t noticed it. Neither had Jacques.

  “Temperature in the cargo bay is down,” Carlos said. “I need you to look at that. Take some oxygen.”

  “Oxygen?”

  He looked at her. “You really don’t know?”

  If she’d known, she wouldn’t have asked, would she?

  Carlos saw her face and stood up. He went to the nearest cupboard marked Emergency and took out an oxygen bottle and a face mask. “Technically you should suit up. But I bet you don’t know how to suit up, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  Carlos sighed. Long and dramatic. “Save us all.” He held up the mask. Put it over his face. Flicked a button on the cylinder. He switched it off and took the mask away. “If you can’t breathe, put this over your face. Then get out of wherever you are.”

  “Understood.”

  “And if you find you’re freezing cold, get the hell out of there as well.”

  She took the oxygen and the mask. “Shouldn’t we be fixing the things we know are broken first? Like whatever’s causing that tapping.” It sounded like a sail flapping in the wind.

  “What tapping?”

  “That tapping.” But the tapping had stopped. “It was there a minute ago.”

  “You’re imagining things.”

  The tapping started again. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

  * * *

  • • •

  Tap-tap-tap-tap. Pause. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

  “Counting,” Carlos whispered.

  Jacques came out of the galley to listen.

  “How do we contact Roystan?” Nika asked. No one else was moving.

  “His handheld,” Jacques said.

  “No,” Carlos said. “Ship suit. He gave the handheld to Josune.” He brought the link up on the screen, the view from one of the suits. “Roystan. You out there?”

  Roystan grunted. It was Snow who answered. “He’s busy right now. What do you want? He’ll hear you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Airlock.” Roystan sounded as if he was gritting his teeth. “Hold. There. Perfect.”

  “Both of you?”

  The suit view stopped on a sheet of what looked like plastic, or maybe metal. “Why do you ask?”

  The sheet floated up, and away. Someone, probably Roystan, snagged it.

  Carlos was silent a moment.

  Snow swam into Roystan’s view. Gestured. Roystan nodded. “More to the left,” he said, and lifted a screwdriver attached to his arm. “Why did you ask, Carlos?”

  Carlos waited until he’d finished fastening the bolt. “There’s a noise—” He hesitated.

  “Sounds like someone’s up there,” Nika said, because Carlos was never going to get to the point. “They’re tapping. Counting.”

  Roystan screwed in another bolt. “Up where?”

  “Above us. Above the crew room.” But it couldn’t be, could it, for the crew room was in the center of the ship. “They’re inside.” They had to be.

  “Not necessarily.” Roystan screwed in another bolt with maddening slowness. “Seal the edges,” he told Snow.

  Nika almost didn’t recognize his voice. She saw, through the display coming from the helmet camera, that his hand was shaking as he screwed the next two bolts in.

  “I’ll check it as soon as I can.”

  One last bolt. Roystan watched Snow seal the patch.

  “Where should we start, Carlos?” Nika wanted a weapon. A blaster, or even Josune’s sparker. No matter what damage the sparker did.

  “The overhead compartment?” Carlos suggested. “There’s a cabling duct up there. You have to crawl, but if it’s big enough to fit—”

  Roystan said, “Some of the cables lead outside. If anyone knew that, they could use it to get your attention.” He held out an arm to Snow. “Latch on to me.” And Snow had only just latched on before Roystan fired his rockets.

  His voice still didn’t sound like him.

  Tap. Pause. Tap-tap.

  Roystan and Snow sped around the ship so quickly Nika’s stomach flopped just watching.

  Roystan fired the brakes before he even came up on the final curve. Before he could see.

  Before they could see through the camera on his suit.

  A space-suited figure. Twisted awkwardly out of place. One leg free in space, the other trapped in what looked to be a hole in the side of the ship.

  Roystan came to a stop in front of the figure.

  Josune.

  * * *

  • • •

  They didn’t see much from Roystan’s suit camera. Didn’t hear anything either. Roystan wasn’t talking. He and Josune had a silent conversation. Josune pointed down. Roystan’s suit camera bobbed up and down in a nod.

  “What’s going on?” Carlos demanded.

  No one answered him.

  Nika wiped away tears she hadn’t known she was spilling. “Do you have another camera out there?” She sent a prayer of thanks to any god who was listening. Things like this didn’t happen. Not in real life.

  “No.”

  Roystan indicated to Snow, who nodded. It was impossible to see what he was thinking inside his suit.

  Roystan’s suit moved close to Josune’s. The drill came out. Or was it a blade? He cut carefully around the metal of the ship. Josune pulled her leg away, bringing the cut-away metal with her.

  Snow used sealant around the metal on her suit leg.

  Roystan raised the other arm of his suit and sprayed out something into the side of the ship. It foamed up and hardened instantly, filling the hole he’d made.

  “Where will they come in?” Nika asked.

  “The airlock,” Carlos said. “Roystan finished that repair first. Get down there. I’ll keep watch.”

  Jacques hadn’t waited. Nika arrived as the door started to open.

  Roystan and Snow shed their suits, then turned to help Josune out of hers. Afterward, Roystan hesitated, as if he’d forgotten what he had to say.

  Josune put a hand to his shoulder, briefly. “Thanks.”

  Why didn’t they just hug each other and be done with the awkwardness?

  Josune limped over to Jacques. She did hug him. “I’m sorry I put you through that, Jacques.”

  He hugged her back. Hard.

  Nika, standing behind Jacques, saw the agony Josune bit down. Cracked ribs, at a guess. And a mildly sprained ankle, for she could still walk on it.

  Jacques pushed her away. “I’ve got flatbread in the oven.” He looked at Roystan, who looked in worse shape than Josune. “Bring her down to the crew room.”

  Roystan nodded.

  Jacques left.

  Nika looked around. They were in the cargo bay. There’d be a medical kit here. There was. She moved over to check the supplies.

  “Bandages,” she told Snow. “Painkillers. Nerveseal.” She pulled it out. “You’ll need to renew your medica
l supplies,” she told Roystan. To Josune, she said, “Let me see your ribs.”

  Josune started to lift her tunic, then stopped. “I can’t do this right now.”

  Nika turned back to the medical cupboard for the scissors she’d seen.

  Josune winced as she cut it away. “My favorite top,” she told Roystan, who hadn’t said a word.

  “We’ll get you another one.” He bit at his bottom lip, but it seemed to have broken the silence. “What happened out there?”

  Josune’s ribs were red. Whatever she’d hit, she’d hit it hard. She’d be bruised tomorrow. Nika ran careful fingers over them. “Sorry about the pain, but I have to know if you have any broken ribs.”

  She couldn’t feel any bones jutting out. “We’ll put you under the Dekker to be sure, but I think they’re only cracked.” She looked at Snow. “What about her ankle?”

  “Sprained. But Nika, the Dekker doesn’t calibrate. And we don’t have supplies.”

  “We can still diagnose.” She’d repaired the broken diagnostics on the way to Atalante. She sprayed nerveseal onto Josune’s chest.

  Josune hissed with pleasure. “That feels so good.”

  Or didn’t feel, in this case. Nika, having recently been on the receiving end of nerveseal herself, could imagine the relief it would be.

  Snow bandaged Josune’s ankle silently. Roystan checked his own suit and Snow’s, and refilled the oxygen tanks.

  “Try to breathe properly,” Nika told Josune. “Real breaths, not shallow ones. Even if it hurts.”

  She checked the medical cupboard again and found some anti-inflammatory pills, which she handed to Josune. “Take two of these when the pain gets too much. No more than two every three hours.”

  Josune nodded. She looked at the last suit. Her own. “Put that one in engineering. I’ll see if I can fix it.”

  Roystan put the two good suits into a locker. He took the damaged one out with him, and came back sans the suit, but with a front-buttoning shirt over his arm. “Arms down and a little back, if you can. One at a time.”

  Josune stretched her arms out with a sigh. “You know exactly what I need, Roystan.”