by Diane Carey
“Get out of that smoke, Ensign!”
“Life support on secondary backup—switching priority to respiratory systems . . . grav generator is down to one-eighth. Inertial potential varying—”
“See if you can’t bleed it for stability.”
“Aye, sir!”
“Robert? Where are you!”
“I’m starboard of you, I believe.”
“Are you okay?”
“I believe so.”
“Can you reach the ventilators?”
“Ah . . . yes.”
“Be careful of your arm. Don’t hurt yourself again.”
“Thank you for thinking of that, George.”
“Everybody sit down till we can see.”
“I feel like I’m floating—”
“Well, hang on to something until he gets over there.”
Click—
Little frantic ventilators began to whine in three places, and grayish-brown smoke piled in those directions. It never did clear completely, but in a few seconds the crew could at least make each other out in the near darkness and move without tripping over one another.
A moment later a few of the last-ditch emergency lights flickered on in the forward side of the hold.
None of them was spared the shock of what they looked like to each other after the laser hit. They were smeared with filth, coughing, beaten, and bruised, as though they’d spent a month in the woods without a decent meal. The hold around them had erupted into a junkyard of detached plates, burn streaks on the walls, crates turning lazily on their edges as though floating along a streambed, and squirts of fluid, gas, and sparks from a dozen broken conduits and power veins.
Carlos and Veronica immediately started pushing around the cabin, closing off whatever they could.
Jimmy was clinging to a loading dock utility handle when his father pulled himself around a smoldering crate, lowered his voice, and asked, “You all right, Jim?”
Blinking the sting out of his eyes, Jimmy hoped the moisture wouldn’t be mistaken for tears. “I guess. Got something in my eyes.”
“Chemical fumes. We’ll put the air on priority as soon as we stabilize the gravity.”
“The gravity’s out? Is that why I feel like I weigh thirty pounds?”
“It’s on, but not much,” his father said.
Jimmy managed a shrug, and only then noticed that his arms were trembling. He tried to ignore that and said, “Well, it’s one way to lose weight.”
His father looked at him, paused, wiped a dirty hand across his own mouth, then said, “Great—great. Try to hang on. You’re doing fine.”
He moved away, toward where Carlos was shoulder-deep in the open wall.
Jimmy blinked after him and wondered what he was doing fine at. Not panicking? He didn’t dare. Nobody else was.
Guess we’ll all panic later. Maybe that’s how it works. Just keep putting it off.
That had to be it, because he sure wasn’t being much help.
Great. He was doing a fine job not being an annoyance. There was something to take home.
If they ever got to go home . . .
Home. The place he’d tried to get away from.
He shoved himself away from the handhold. “Dad?”
George turned. “Yeah?”
“Do you want me to try to stop some of those coolant leaks? Maybe I could plug them up some way.”
“No,” George said. “Only trained personnel are allowed to tamper with exposed coolant tanks. You just sit tight. But . . . thanks.”
Frustrated, Jimmy settled back and realized that all he was good for was staying out of everybody else’s way. Not a very noble way to go. Not much of a story to tell later.
Maybe he could help Veronica.
More swimming than walking, he bounced awkwardly across the cabin and took a hell of a lot longer than he expected to get to her. Halfway there, he felt like something was pulling him back, and two feet later felt like he was being tugged upward. Nauseating, but he ignored it.
“Can I help you with anything?” he asked when he finally got over there and pulled himself down to where she was working inside a hole in the flooring.
Veronica looked up at him, managed a halfhearted smile, but immediately went back to her work. “Oh, I don’t think there’s room . . . well, know what you could do? Hold my legs down, can you?”
“Oh . . . ” Hoping for something more glamorous, Jimmy started to feel disappointed, then decided not to, and put himself to use where he was needed—ballast. “What is it you’re doing down there?”
“Trying to stabilize the gravity.”
“No, I mean what are you . . . y’know—doing.”
“Can you see this saucer-shaped thing under my elbow?”
“Uh—the red and black thing with the manufacturer’s name on the side?”
“Right. That’s the superconductor. A gravity generator. Inside, there’s a pressurized gas. It spins around and provides a gravity field. Basically, it’s not able to spin fast enough to give us what we need to feel normal. All I’m trying to do right now is make it work enough so we don’t get smashed up if we manage to get the cutter moving.”
“Why would we get smashed up just from moving?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense just to turn it off completely and float around, and put all our power into life support? Or the engines?”
“Gravity is life support,” she said. “If Florida gets even part of the propulsion going, we’ll need artificial gravity or our acceleration would have to be so slow that we’ll never get away.”
Jimmy frowned, annoyed that these things weren’t making sense fast enough for him. Any other time he would have just ignored whatever he didn’t understand.
This wasn’t any other time.
“Gravity has something to do with acceleration?”
“Artificial gravity is what compensates for acceleration,” she said, wincing as she tugged on something down inside the hole. “If you accelerate in a matter of moments even to something like one percent sublight, you’d be slammed through the back of the ship. Unless gravity is tugging you in the other direction, compensating like crazy, I mean. Even in airplanes a long time ago—jets—they could turn so fast that the pilots would black out. So they wore special suits that squeezed the body during a banking turn and kept the blood pushed up into the brain. And one percent sublight is a lot faster than they went. Artificial gravity is just something we’ve got to have. If this thing isn’t generating at minimum rpms, we might as well hand ourselves over to those people out there.”
All of a sudden a bit of reality that Jimmy had almost ignored turned on him and got particularly unignorable.
He watched her work with the generator, and noticed he was listening to his father, Robert, and Carlos talking behind him as they surveyed what few were left of the monitors and gauges.
“Life support’s on secondary backup. I wish we had more light—”
“We’ve beastly little technical integrity left to be repaired.”
“And nothing to repair it with . . . ”
“We can pick at things indefinitely . . . but not if there’s no air to breathe.”
“What condition are our friends in? Can we tell?”
“Look at this screen. They’re barely two kilometers away. I’m not even using the magnification. They’re right there, hanging off our bow.”
“And they’re still alive. Some of them, at least.”
“How can you tell?”
“They’re not spinning . . . their failsafes are coming on. See the spurts cutting off one by one? Some sections are ruptured, but their automatics are still protecting somebody.”
“There’ve got to be places to hold out on a ship like that.”
“We’re both floating hulks. Can’t seem to get an upper hand, either of us.”
“And they’ve got a lot more to work with than we do.”
“Hall? How’re you doing over there?”
Under
Jimmy, Veronica pushed onto an elbow, rested a moment, then said, “Nineteen percent, sir.”
She nodded at Jimmy to let her up, but suddenly Carlos Florida pointed at one of the gauges and yelled—
“Mother a’ God, the compressor! It’s not holding! It’s gonna blow! It’s gonna blow!”
Drowning him out, a plume of supercoolant broke from the burned upper part of a port side sectional tank and turned loose a solid blue-white sheet of spray, cutting Jimmy and Veronica off from the others and splattering them all with what felt like needles of ice. If it filled the cabin—
Frantic shouts erupted almost as loud as the dangerous gush.
“Lock it down again!”
“The discharge buffer grip’s on the other side!”
“Veronica!”
But Jimmy realized he was still lying on top of her, holding her down against the minimal gravity, and that put him in the best position to move. He held an arm near his eyes to take the spray and looked for the discharge cutoff next to the tank. Was that it? That red handle under the two blue ones? Had to be!
SECTIONAL COOLANT GRIP – AUTHORIZED USE ONLY
Made sense—if he could pull that handle down, the sections of the tank would seal off. At least, that’s what he figured would happen, and things couldn’t get any worse, so he determined to take the risk himself.
“I’ll get it!”
He pushed off Veronica, forgot all about the gravity, and virtually flew toward that handle—almost flying into the spray. He caught the handle with one finger and kept himself from plunging right through the spray, and levered himself back.
“No, no!”
Was someone shouting at him? Was it the hiss of coolant spewing six inches from his head?
He fumbled for a grip and to get his feet against the wall for leverage. Something hit him from behind just as he got the leverage he needed and cranked down on the handle. A force hit his shoulder, shoved him sideways, and at the last second he glimpsed Veronica’s synthetic hand close around a bright orange compensator fishtail and crank it sideways.
The plume of spray turned into an umbrella and enveloped half of Veronica’s body!
She screamed—it was a horrid, gulping scream—as she was blown in a heap toward the opposite side of the hold. An instant later the spray dropped to a bitter hiss and the last of it was slurped back inside the tank’s cracked shell in some kind of automatic suction.
Jimmy pulled himself over the top of a seed storage box and tried to see through his watering eyes.
The girl lay on her side in a puddle of expended coolant fluid that was quickly changing its chemical composition with exposure to air. It changed, as they stared, from ice-blue to a wine-pink as the supercold crystals melted. In moments, even before anyone could move, it would be inert.
But not soon enough for Veronica.
She lay with her pale hair soaking up the fluid.
Stunned, as they all were, George Kirk was the first to move to her, to touch her. Carlos stepped in behind him and knelt there. Pushed her over, gently . . .
Her prosthetic hand stuck to the frozen metal floor—and tore part of her arm off with it. Hair on the right side of her head snapped like dry straw. Her right thigh tore almost in half lengthwise, clothing and all, leaving a gaudy section of torn muscle on one side and a patch of gore on the other.
George sucked a breath through his teeth. Carlos shuddered, fighting not to throw up on what was left of his crewmate.
They hovered over her, helpless, as the torn thigh and arm crinkled with crystallized blood and skin cells.
Mind empty, hands spread, legs bent, breath coming in puffs, Jimmy hovered a few feet away, staring in some kind of automatic disbelief.
He barely felt the hands on his shoulders.
“Jimmy,” the captain said, “come away from there. Come with me.”
“She—she’s—”
“I know, my boy. Come with me.”
“But that’s not . . . that’s not how it’s supposed to be . . . the girl’s not supposed to . . . it’s supposed to be the guys who—who—get—”
“Our poor Jimmy,” Captain April sighed, “you’re an old-fashioned lad, I’m afraid. . . . ”
Letting himself be led away, Jimmy went on mumbling over and over.
“That’s not right . . . it’s not right, it’s not the right way—that’s not supposed to be how it is—” Then he suddenly gasped, “What happened? What’d I do wrong?”
“You didn’t understand.”
“Tell me . . . I’ve gotta know . . . ”
“The pressure compensator has to be in the on position before the safety buffer is activated. Or the whole tank could blow up under the pressure of sudden cutoff.”
Only authorized personnel are allowed to tamper with exposed coolant tanks.
“I didn’t know . . . ”
“We realize that, my boy. We understand. Sit down . . . that’s right. Don’t move for a while. I’m going to see to the others.”
Trembling so hard he thought his bones would fall out, and only vaguely noticing Robert moving away from him, Jimmy stared across the deck at Veronica Hall’s mutilated form. His mouth hung open, his throat drying.
He wanted to make this feel unreal, like a dream, that’s how it was supposed to feel—
But it didn’t.
It felt damn real. Damn real. She was dead?
And all for him. She’d knocked him aside so he wouldn’t be lying on the floor, half frozen.
Until now, giving lives for others had always been song lyrics. He’d never seen a group like this Starfleet bunch. They weren’t losing their heads. They weren’t giving in to the terror chewing at them all. They were obeying orders one by one, step by step, to accomplish something very specific. They even obeyed orders when there didn’t seem to be a reason to do a particular thing. They didn’t ask why. They asked what, but never why.
When are you going to realize that rules exist for a reason?
The echo of his father’s voice . . . he looked for his father, needing to see him.
And there he was.
Crumpled in a corner with his back against the hull and his knees up, his arms braced across his bent knees, his head down. The perfect quintessence of misery.
Robert April was kneeling beside him, touching George’s shoulder, gripping his friend’s trembling wrist in a simple human bond, ready to listen, since there wasn’t much to say that would help.
Before long a pathetic sound rattled from George. He didn’t look up.
“Robert, what’ve I done?”
In a soft, scolding, troubled tone that couldn’t nurture away the guilt, Robert simply murmured, “Oh, George.”
George shook his head and pressed his other hand to the back of his neck.
“I can’t do this . . . Robert, I can’t handle this . . . she’s just a kid . . . it could’ve been Jimmy . . . it could’ve been my kid . . . what the hell have I done?”
There wasn’t a sliver of hardness or rigidity left in him. His saw-file temper was utterly gone, invisible. His face was parchment, his eyes glass, ready to shatter. Insufficiency weighed him down.
“There’s nothing left to fight with,” he said. “Nothing we can do is enough . . . can’t save ourselves . . . can’t stop those bastards from doing this to anybody else . . . ”
His voice fell away as though expended, and he closed his eyes, consumed by the impoverishment of hope from the bottom of his soul.
Even in the big hold, even with broken machinery hissing and crackling and spitting, Jimmy heard his father’s voice as though tuned specifically in.
“What’d I drag him out here for?” George Kirk murmured.
“You couldn’t have known,” the captain said. “There could be accidents on Earth just as easily.”
“This isn’t an ‘accident.’ This is plain wrong. You and I know the risks. We chose this for ourselves. He didn’t want to come and I made him. I chose for him and that’s
not fair. He’s right . . . I got him into this.”
His heart twisting, Jimmy heard his own words and felt them rush back to bite him, to infect him. “You got me into this.”
When he’d said those words he was after the quickest, sharpest hurt he could inflict. He hadn’t given a thought to how long words can last. The future had always been ten or twenty minutes. He rarely considered that something he said could come back to do damage later.
At a moment when there might be no “later,” he was finding out how long words could go on hurting. As he saw how bad his father felt, he realized that he would have to learn when not to talk—when things he might say could last a hell of a lot longer than the anger or passion that made him speak.
He knew he’d lied in that old fit of anger. He knew he’d gotten himself into this.
Yet never once had his father said, “I wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d behaved yourself.”
He gazed at the two men who had tried to change him against his own will and suddenly saw a vision of his father that was utterly new.
I thought he was goofing off on some pretty planet with some pretty technician . . . I thought he left us and went off for fun and games and irresponsibility in space . . . I thought space was easy for him.
But his father hadn’t been out gambling or taking dips in an alien lake or schmoozing on some cushy starbase.
He was out here. Doing hard, hard things.
Staying on Earth would have been the easy choice.
The easy choice . . .
It left a bad taste. Jimmy bit his lip and tried to get the flavor of cowardice out of his mouth. These people—people he’d come to admire—Captain April, Carlos Florida, Uncle Drake, First Officer Simon, the engineers, Veronica . . . his dad . . . all said they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, in spite of the risk.
They can’t all be stupid. For all these people to go out so far . . . there must be a lot out there.
Robert was holding on to George as though one of them were going over a cliff, and it was hard to tell which one. His expression ran through changes, from pain to empathy, to a sad, regretful Mona Lisa smile that had some true misery behind it. Somehow right on Robert April’s gentle face, it still wasn’t even close to what smiles were for.
Finally he regained control, patted George’s shoulder as though to awaken him, and asked a question both official and personal.