by Diane Carey
Rousing himself, George unpursed his lips and said, “Anybody who could get into space would have to be able to pick up transmissions. They’d know the Federation runs this sector. When’s the last time you saw Aborigines inventing a space vessel? Communication always comes before space flight. I can’t believe they didn’t know.”
“Right . . . good point.”
“Whatever else they’re doing, they’re talking about us. That’s for sure.”
“You don’t suppose you said something just right, do you?”
Still in a lump on the deck carpet, Jimmy stared at the adults and past them at the invading ship. How could they talk so casually? How could they talk at all?
He saw the fear in their eyes, but it wasn’t coming out in their voices, not even when they shouted.
Not much, anyway.
What did come out was shudders of anger and grief. He knew what those sounded like.
He placed his shaking hands on the deck, flat, fingers spread. He shifted his weight and started to get onto his knees, pressing the carpet and using it for some kind of ballast. At least he was relatively sure where the carpet was.
And here was the bottom of the pod ladder.
With a glance at the others to make sure nobody was watching him, he used the ladder to stand up, then started climbing it.
The pod was still stenchy and filled with smoke, the atmospheric compensators whizzing a futile battle to save whoever was up there, and the seals frantically trying to keep open space out even as they cracked more and more.
Jimmy sensed the danger and forced himself in up to his shoulders. He waved at the smoke.
Something wet sprayed his face, then a flap of oily strings hit him across the cheek and mouth. He clawed at the strings, pulled them off, cast them aside wildly as he might cast away a big caterpillar crawling across his face.
And he found a hand!
“I got him!” he called over the whine and shriek of the ship trying to save itself. “I got one of them! Dad!”
He grabbed the hand and pulled, putting his thick arms to their best use. Save a life, save a life—
He leaned back against the hatch edge and drew hard on the weight of whomever he had hold of. Maybe the gravity was flooey in here because there wasn’t much resistance. Maybe he could get one of these guys below!
With one more heave he could get this person into the hatchway—just one—
A wet mass suddenly released and flew against him, striking him and driving him backward against the edge of the hatch.
He choked. A disembodied arm, shoulder, and half a rib cage anchored itself around his throat.
Flailing senselessly, Jimmy felt his mind go numb and leave him to pure panic. His hands smacked wildly at everything, including his own face, his own hair, his own chest, until the gory mass fell off and was sucked back upward into the tornado of air and supplies twisting around the broken seals.
Jimmy lost his footing and dropped straight to the main deck, curling and gagging.
The cutter might as well have been on the end of a whistling string. Jimmy couldn’t get up, couldn’t get a thought, couldn’t open his eyes. All he saw in his head was Thorvaldsen and Bennings and what was left of them. . . .
There were voices around him, but his brain was turned off.
Until that ship out there fired on them again.
The cutter rocked violently. Jimmy pitched and hit the nearest wall just as he heard his father yell:
“So much for saying something right!”
WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP
“Hull rupture!” Florida shouted over the hideous alarm. “Sixty-four seconds to atmospheric zero!”
Even more hideous than the alarms was a telltale hsssss from somewhere in the superstructure of the cabin.
George made a sweeping gesture. “Go, go!”
“Aft, everybody!” Robert called at almost the same instant. The shouts overlapped, but the message was the same. “Open the seals to the hold!”
“They’re open!” Florida responded.
“Get below! Seal off!” George shouted.
Jimmy felt his father grip his arms and almost instinctively pulled back from it, but there was no fighting the determined force above him. His father hauled him to his feet without even looking at him, because he was busy shouting orders to the others as they scrambled across the tilted deck toward the aft companionway that led down into the freight hold.
Staggering, Jimmy grabbed the seats for balance and hated feeling his father holding him upright, but he was too terrified and sickened to argue about it. When his father let go, Jimmy turned to see what was wrong.
George was half turned back toward the pilot station, yelling, “Carlos! Come on!”
“Take ’em!” Florida shouted back, waving. “I’ll fire an SOS!”
“You can’t! Communications are out!”
“I’ll launch a buoy!”
“Hurry!”
“I will!”
Jimmy gagged a protest. “But he’ll be—”
“Go!”
His father gave him a shove between the shoulder blades that sent him flying toward the aft companionway with most of his air knocked out of his lungs so he couldn’t protest.
His hands bloodless and his breath coming in chunks, Jimmy fought to control the trembling of his thighs and shoulders as he climbed down the companionway tube after Captain April.
It seemed like a long, long climb. Eight feet? Ten?
The companionway was nothing more than a tube with a ladder in it and a hatch at the top and another at the bottom that could be shut and made into a contained airlock. It led down into the twenty-five-foot tin can of a freight hold attached to the underside of the flight section, but they might as well have crawled through a looking-glass into another dimension. The only company here was crate after box after stack of supplies bound for the colony at Faramond. Out of the environment friendly to people, with cushioned seats and carpet, warmth, lights, and fresh air, they crawled into a cold, echoing metallic rectangle whose minimalist control panels were meant to be used only in emergencies.
As Jimmy dropped into the hold, he heard his father shout above him.
“Carlos! Get down here!”
George’s legs appeared, but he didn’t come all the way down.
Stumbling aside, Jimmy found himself staring at a flashing panel bright yellow in the wall.
WARNING–AIRLOCK AUTO SEAL–CLEAR PASSAGEWAY
It repeated, but he already had the message.
“Dad! Get down!” he bellowed. Lunging forward, he grabbed his father’s left leg and yanked.
Jimmy wasn’t a skinny boy, so his weight meant something in spite of his age. With a gulp of protest George came tumbling down and crumpled on top of him in a heap.
Overhead, the secondary hatch slammed shut automatically. The bolts clacked—and that was it.
“No!” George howled. He shoved Jimmy off, but it was too late.
Barely five seconds later they heard the second automatic slam—and more bolts ramming home. The upper hatch!
“Oh, God—” Captain April gasped.
The panel on the wall changed, and flashed red instead of yellow.
MAIN CABIN DEPRESSURIZED–DANGER–DO NOT OPEN SEALS–DANGER
George vaulted to his feet.
“Carlos!”
ELEVEN
“It’s wrecked! The sensor pod! Wrecked!”
With ten long fingers stabbed up against the viewscreen and his eyes in slivers, Roy John Moss spat saliva across his own knuckles as he shouted.
“Do you know how much that pod was worth? How many times do I have to show you porks how to aim these weapons!”
He took a breath to continue yelling—
But someone grabbed him by the ponytail and hauled him backward, then yanked him sideways and knocked him out of the way with a cuff across his cheek. He fell onto both knees.
“Down in front, bobbysox.”
&nb
sp; The drone was an insult in itself.
Roy Moss rubbed his slick raisin-brown hair now that his scalp was aching, and began again to despise.
He despised the captain for that tone of voice. Despised the crew as they gawked beyond him to their victims on the viewscreen. Despised himself for being only nineteen.
In the dark porchlike cubicle, which could only be called a bridge in a card game conversation, a piecemeal gaggle of racketeers glared out their own viewport at the sleek white cutter they’d just grabbed.
In the captain’s seat, Angus Burgoyne chewed on the end of his long mustache and offered no more attention to the annoyance he’d just kicked out of the way.
At Burgoyne’s left, old Lou Caskie clunked forward on two arthritic legs. “What you worried about? We’re the Sharks, ain’t we? We take what comes past here. Federation!” He spat onto the deck. “Probably got a woman running it. Deserve what they get.”
“Daon’t spit on moy deck, pig,” Burgoyne commented.
His Australian accent clipped his words, left the ends off most of them, and changed the angle of all his vowels. He broadened his accent on purpose, to sound like a legend with an eyepatch and a hook. He had neither, so he relied on the accent.
Caskie leaned back and spoke past him. “Don’t you think that, Okenga? Ain’t I right?”
Behind Burgoyne, an Andorian engineer’s two antennae turned forward slightly in reaction and his blue face darkened almost to indigo. His enunciation forced him to speak slowly. English was far, far from his native language, and his tongue didn’t want anything to do with it.
“We take old merchant barges,” he said, hitting the consonants too hard. “Cargo tanks, private sloops, transports—”
“That’s no Federation barge, you lardhead,” a heavy bass voice argued from behind.
Virtually the medical-textbook antithesis of his skinny son, Big Rex Moss turned his three-hundred-plus pounds and stabbed a fat finger between the Andorian and Burgoyne.
“We got a Starfleet reconnaissance cutter,” he went on. “These people aren’t gonna just die. We should drop this and beat it out of here while the beatin’s good.”
“And they will go back to say all about us,” Okenga said with cold irony.
“I see no Starfleet signs,” said a short, thick Klingon built like a New York City antique fire hydrant.
Burgoyne jabbed his finger forward and spat his mustache out so he could speak.
“It’s roight theh, Dazzo,” he said. “See it, mollyhead? ‘UFP Sta’fleet.’ Plain as bloody dayloight. That’s what you get for spinding too much time behoind bahs.”
Daring to wander forward again, still fascinated by the chemical destruction and the frozen atmosphere pouring out of the Starfleet vessel, young Roy Moss quietly mocked, “What’s a ‘baaaah’?”
Burgoyne ground his teeth and knocked the young man aside again, this time with a foot.
“Hey, Mr. Nobody! I said git your fracking becksoide outta my way! I can’t frackin’ see through your skinny butt, can I? The captain’s supposed t’be ayble t’see, ain’t he?”
Roy leveled a bitter glare on the back of Burgoyne’s head, and felt his father’s disgust from across the bridge. He enjoyed a moment of contemplation, imagining his father as a parade balloon and Burgoyne as Ichabod Crane. His father floated by, bumping into buildings, and Burgoyne, who was all neck and no chin, was constantly being suctioned from above. Eventually he would just suck all the way up and be gone for good, and Big Rex would be pierced by a flagpole and explode.
Roy fought a grin and waited until Big Rex lost interest in the altercation and looked forward again at the Starfleet craft slowly turning and gushing the last cloud of its frozen air into space.
“No,” he murmured, “you can’t see through me.”
“Carlos! Carlos!”
George pounded on the locked overhead hatch.
“Dear God” was Robert April’s shredded whisper. “Carlos . . . ” He closed his eyes and brought a shaking hand to his mouth. “What shall I tell his poor mother . . . ”
Jimmy stared at April and was suddenly aware of his own mother. He watched the captain and wondered if the line was some kind of joke or exaggeration. It wasn’t.
Backing away until the cold metal wall stopped him, Jimmy shook until he thought he would shake apart.
His reaction was punctuated by his father’s hammering on the hatch and angry shouts. Over that terrible noise there was another noise—the whine of lasers and the hum of that tractor beam.
“What are they doing?” Veronica Hall gulped as she huddled among the crates near the opposite bulkhead. “Why did they do this?”
Captain April finally stepped into the hatch cubby and took hold of the raging creature there.
“George, stop!” he said. “Stop . . . don’t harm yourself. If we don’t rock the boat, so to speak, they won’t know we’re here. This hold is sensor-immune for security reasons. They won’t be able to read our life signs, and they won’t notice us if we remain calm.”
His soft English trill made the warning sound like a reading of poetry.
It had the right effect.
Swallowing his agony whole, George sank down to a crouch, gritted his teeth, and crammed his eyes shut to lock inside what he was feeling. He boiled and seethed, fighting for control. The single yellow utility hatch light, very small and direct, shined on his hair and turned it to copper. His features looked harsh in that light, skeletal, like a boy playing with a flashlight under his covers.
Finally he grated, “We’ve been losing ships in this sector for years! All the time we thought it was because of the Blue Zone. How many went to these bastards? How many good people! And three more today!”
He slammed his knuckles on the deck.
“George, your voice,” the captain admonished.
Teeth still gritted, George crouched there, breathing like an animal, quaking with misery and rage.
“Everyone sit down,” Robert said. “We’ve got to think. Is everyone all right?”
In the corner Jimmy Kirk sat, staring death in the face. His wits were in shreds. He barely understood what was happening around him and his limbs wouldn’t move anymore. His own who-cares-if-we-live-or-die attitudes came rushing back to haunt him. At sixteen, he thought he had lived all of life. Lived it all, and none of it had been under his control.
His friends felt that way too. A friend had committed suicide last school year, and one more had attempted it.
Suddenly he felt foolish, having thought he understood their motivations and for mocking the adults who tried to save them. The paramedics, the police, the parents, the teachers.
He remembered standing on the school grounds with his gang, as though they had a secret language that no adult could speak, plotting subterfuge. Who wanted to live a life that was in some teacher’s control, or some parent’s, or some case worker’s?
“Better to control your own death, at least,” he and his friends had concluded. “Better to go out with your name in the headlines.”
It had sounded right back then. Somehow, he thought it might not hold today, though.
Seeing his father’s reaction to the deaths of three people, two of whom he had just met, abrupt shame washed over Jimmy. The shame was a shock. He felt oxish and unfledged. Realized there was nothing he could do to change this.
He bent into a ball and stared over his knees down the fifteen-by-thirty-foot chamber at the aft bulkhead. Trembling. The metal wall was trembling. The thin doors on the storage closets and the cramped toilet were rattling. Something had the cutter by the throat.
For the first time in his life, Jimmy saw what it was like to really not be in control.
Thorvaldsen, Bennings . . . Florida . . .
“We’d better get our radiation suits on,” his father said ultimately, “just in case.”
He got up and nearly ripped the door off a rattly utility cabinet next to the toilet. Inside were eight white spacesui
ts, adjustable for size and loaded with hookups. On a shelf above were eight headpieces, and on the side were eight double sets of narrow oxygen tanks, each about the size of a woman’s forearm.
He started pulling the suits off their hangers and tossing them across the deck.
“Everybody put a suit on. Never mind the helmets and tanks for now.”
Halfway across the hold, Captain April caught his suit and Veronica’s, then crouched near her, looked into her eyes, and was apparently satisfied at what he saw there.
Jimmy was barely aware of his father’s approach until the off-white protective suit appeared beside him. Suddenly the twelve or so feet between them and the others was an ocean of separation, and the two were sorely alone.
“Here,” his father said quietly. “Can you get this on?”
Fighting against himself, Jimmy grabbed the suit. He didn’t meet his father’s eyes, afraid the scared sixteen-year-old was showing through his protective shell as he made a Herculean effort to hide his fear.
“I could’ve been cut in half by that hatch,” George said. He lowered his voice even more. “You probably saved my life. Don’t worry. I’ve been in worse . . . I’ll get you out of this.”
Resentful of parent-to-kid lies, Jimmy crawled back into his self-imposed mental seclusion and saw lying there a prime opportunity to stab. His voice was stern, black.
“You got me into it.”
A hit—low, sharp, and hard. The truth was a poison stinger today.
Jimmy watched in unanticipated surprise as his father failed to react the way he expected. Instead, George stopped in the middle of a step. He looked stricken. Instead of leaning closer, he leaned away, and turned. Put space between them. Slowly. The walk of a wounded man.
How could something that sounded so right feel so wrong? Jimmy watched and watched, perplexed. For the first time, he felt bad about getting a win. He’d been wanting to hurt his father for years. . . .
So why didn’t it feel any better than this?
As though he’d smashed his own head against a wall, he realized for the first time that he wasn’t the only one with feelings.