by Diane Carey
Now what?
They were going to barge in here, find him trapped inside a stupid-looking cocoon, and they were going to slaughter him.
“Well, they’re not gonna kill me in here,” he snapped. He pounded the viewport material and shouted, “You’re not gonna kill me in here!”
Was there a way out from the inside? There hadn’t been much to work with. What if there were no way out? They’d be down here any second—
He looked up at the vault hatch. No handle. The original had been cannibalized for the propulsion unit—there hadn’t been anything left to make another one. He tried to bend, but there was no way for him to reach the bottom hatch. With boots on, he had no way to pull the latch off its housing with his feet.
That meant . . . no way to get out.
The pirates were on their way down, and he was a sitting duck!
In anguish he hammered his fists against the sides of what could very well be his coffin, even now—and his right knuckles bumped what felt like flesh. It startled him, and he looked. Beside his face, valiantly clamping the respiration unit, was Veronica’s pale hand. Yellow lights from out there buttered the skin. The crafted fingernails looked like hers. Unpainted and slightly tattered. The fingers were long-boned and waxy, knuckles pronounced and a little pink.
“Okay, all right,” Jimmy huffed.
Even with gloves on he was bothered by the idea of touching the hand. If it hadn’t been attached to a friend once, things might be different.
He forced himself to grab the bare wrist. Lubricant squirted back on his glove and he flinched, but didn’t let go. Holding the wrist with one hand, he reached inside the open end with his other fingers and tried to find whatever mechanism made the limb work like a real hand. There had to be something mechanical. It couldn’t all be computer signals. Somewhere inside, there had to be strings that acted like muscles and a structure that pretended to be bones and joints. He had to find those—fast.
“Uch . . . oh, this is sweet . . . ” He winced as though it were his own hand being violated. “Sorry, sorry, sorry—”
All at once the hand unclamped, fingers flying as though startled, muscle reaction thrust it backward into Jimmy’s face shield, and he batted it off in a childish reflex action, then barely managed to catch it before it got knocked to the other end of the tube, where he couldn’t reach. That would be too stupid. Then he’d have to kill himself again just to avoid letting the story get around.
Bending upward, he arranged the hand’s fingers on the housing where the vault latch had been taken off, then stuck his own wet, gloved fingers back inside the wrist and hunted awkwardly for those contracting muscles. A moment later, the strong mechanism so daintily disguised as a woman’s hand was doing a great imitation of a pipe wrench.
“Please hold, that’s all,” Jimmy muttered as he grasped the wrist firmly with both hands. “One, two . . . ”
He cranked hard. The delicate-looking hand held, but so did the latch housing. Sweat broke on his face. He kept cranking, his legs braced against the inside of the tube until he thought he was breaking his own kneecaps. His teeth grated fiercely, but he didn’t stop. More and more muscles in his body knotted against the strain. He had to get out. He had to. Any minute they could come in and hit him with a laser. If he could get out, he might still die, but he wouldn’t die idle.
His arms suddenly flew sideways as though he’d thrown a punch at a bad dream and missed. His entire body twisted, and half his muscles pulled. There was fluid on his face mask.
The latch! It was down!
Without pausing, he put his shoulder to the vault hatch and shoved—
And found himself flying across the open area, right into a pile of garbage.
Then he bounced off that pile and flew sideways into another pile, then a wall, then caught himself with one hand on a parted-out tail fin from some kind of atmospheric aircraft.
He hovered there, panting, sweating inside the suit, gathering his wits, trying to figure out what had just happened. Across the open area he saw his tube, stuck halfway through a horrible gash in the skin of this ship.
“Weightless,” he gasped. “Why didn’t I think of that? Why don’t I think of things?”
Made sense. Why waste energy putting gravity and pressure in a storage deck used for storing salvage? This way, all they’d have to do was open those big segmented folding doors over there and swallow up any ship they . . .
Suddenly his arbitrary analysis turned deeply personal. Resentment surfaced, and anger came close under. Anger made him determined.
He let himself be angry. It was easier than being afraid and made him want to do something.
Trying to assess where he was, he forced himself to calm down, to breathe deeply and slowly in spite of the claustrophobia of being inside a helmet, and to look around.
On two sides of the big, dirty, cluttered area were stenciled the words TRUNK DECK. Clear enough. Below that were handwritten numbers on a board, the words LOAD DRAFT, HEATED CARGO AREA, and the letters L. D. P.
Familiar words, but didn’t apply to what was being stored there. This might once have been a Federation loading deck, though nothing around indicated Starfleet. Probably an Earth merchant vessel. Probably old.
Old, and full to the gills with parts of hulks, whole engines, entire computer cores and pieces of others, struts, sheeting, ribs, rolled insulation, small warp nacelles from little interstellar ships, generators, jacketing, coils, frames, shield grids—almost anything, in no particular order, most of it broken.
So his father was right. This was a salvage ship that attacked ships, wrecked them, killed the crews, and thereby created its own salvage for a melting-down market with no questions.
All around the trunk deck was the evidence. Jimmy pulled himself slowly along the industrial webbing, and discovered a tragic gallery opening beneath him.
Pieces of vessels, torn apart so they couldn’t be identified, huddled against each other, cold and shamed, stolen from the dignity of transportation and shoved into the realm of contraband.
Jimmy touched the ripped side of a personnel transport—he knew that’s what it was because there were two windows still in it and a bolt where a seat had once been attached. A seat where a living person had been sitting. A seat where terror had gotten somebody by the throat.
He turned above the blackened, scorched transport section and floated to the other side of it, and there he held himself still for a moment, his heart beating in his throat.
Blood was smeared across the broken part. Some of it was just a grotesque spray. The rest was even more gripping, for it was smeared into letters, drawn by a human finger.
Jimmy shuddered and sucked his breath as though he’d run a mile. The reality of danger and the violence around him plunged back on him and made him cold again. This was real blood. The blood of a slaughtered crewman. Maybe a family member . . . a mother, a child, a father. It was all they’d possessed with which to write a message no one would ever be able to answer. December 4. Which year?
No year. Of course not. Nobody would put a year on an SOS. Whoever they were, they’d hoped to live longer than another month.
Nauseated, haunted by thoughts of what he’d been wasting his time doing back in December, Jimmy dug deep through regurgitating fear for that anger he’d had a few minutes ago. He needed it.
With his gloved hand he touched the long-frozen, crusted plea for help, and drew the anger from there, from the blood of those he hadn’t been there for. Maybe all they’d needed was a quarrelsome plain dealer with a good right hook.
They’d needed him, or his dad.
They handed him their hope and their strength through the connection of crusted blood. He hovered there and got angrier and angrier, adding their loss to those he’d already endured. He would need this rage to get out of the trunk deck and do something for his own people that had come too late for these.
In his heart he made a promise to the blood people. They were par
t of his crew now, and they hadn’t died for nothing.
Through his anger came another sensation. One that filled him up, one that helped. If only he had been there for those others, he could have changed everything. He was glad he could be there for his father and his friends, and suddenly wanted to be there for any who came after. A glimmer of why they had all come to space, why Starfleet was here at all, expanding like crazy, flashed in his head, and warmed him up fast.
In fact, he was hot now. Good and hot.
Hot to get at the targets of his anger—the foul lowlifes who didn’t even have enough dignity to wipe up the blood of their victims.
He could still change everything! He had a chance to survive! If he did things right, maybe they could all survive! Dammit, they could all still live—he might still have the chance to make everything up to his father, make it up to his mother, tell them what a jerk he’d been . . . go back to Tom Beauvais and Quentin and Zack and Emily and all the others, and tell them everything, go back and show the whole world that he wasn’t an idiot after all! He had to survive, and he had to make sure his father survived.
But the Blue Zone burned too close. The cutter was going to be blown up any second.
He pushed himself off with a snap of aggravation, and determined that if he didn’t find a door, he’d chew his way right through the wall and teach these scavenging maggots a lesson.
There it was.
His way out. A man-size vault door, a big version of the hatch on his tube. A conventional airlock—a way out.
With a shove he flew off the plundered pile and back past his tube, where he caught hold long enough to retrieve Veronica’s prosthetic hand from the hatch housing. He wasn’t going to leave any part of her in this dump, and if possible he was going to give the hand back to her. This sorry excuse for a voyage wasn’t going to cost her any more than it already had.
Tucking the hand into the straps that would ordinarily be used for tools, he yanked a jagged piece off an unidentifiable piece of junk and swung it like a bat a few times. He now had a weapon.
“That’ll work,” he breathed.
It would have to work. They must be waiting for him to come out. They must not have pressure suits, so they were waiting outside that airlock for him to come dodging through.
Preparing himself for the street fight of all street fights, he shoved off again for the vault door.
Expecting trouble with the door, he got a surprise when the thing opened with a simple one-two-three combination that was right on the wall beside it. Apparently these pirates didn’t expect problems down here. Probably they’d just never thought about it.
Jimmy paused, glowering inwardly, his eyes tightening to crescents.
“I can use that . . . I can use it. There’s got to be a way to use that.”
There was only one of him. He couldn’t punch them each in the face—well, he could—but there had to be a better, smarter way. He decided to start collecting anything these guys didn’t think enough about.
It had no pressure, but there was gravity activated in the airlock. He knew, because he stepped through the vault door and fell flat on his butt. His weapon clunked over his shin, and he found out it was doggoned heavy.
He sat on the floor of the airlock, gasping and trying to remember what it was like to weigh this much. He hadn’t felt his normal weight since the laser attack. This was like dropping onto the dock after being stranded in water for a day.
With arms heavy as iron bars, he crawled to the trunk deck hatch and put what felt like tremendous effort into yanking it shut. The gaskets compressed, and he hauled down on the locking handle. One down.
On hands and knees he turned around, pulling his weapon along with him, and crawled the four feet to the inner vault door that he hoped led to a pressurized deck or a corridor and not out into some ripped-open section. This ship was almost salvage bait itself, thanks to Dad and Captain April.
He hesitated. Once he opened that door, he’d have to be ready to fight. There had to be somebody out there, setting a trap, and here he was with bricks for arms and legs.
He struggled to his feet, then lifted his jagged piece of metal into swinging position.
“What the hell,” he grumbled. “Been dead once already.”
Feeling as though there were a buffalo corpse on his back, he got a one-handed grip on the other hatch handle—a bolt of shock went through him when the handle snapped down and the gaskets expanded!
“What the hell—” he gasped.
Open! The vault door was open! Why hadn’t it waited for him to tap in the open signal?
He looked accusatorily back at the other airlock door. Why hadn’t the safeties come on? One hatch open should automatically prevent the other from being opened without proper pressurization. Any decent airlock had double and triple backups! At the very least, both doors wouldn’t be allowed to open at the same time. He could just walk back there and open up that trunk deck door, and whooosh—depressurization. The whole section of the ship would collapse on itself.
Either this ship was busted up bad, or these jerkweeds didn’t even bother with safeties on their airlocks.
Shivers numbed Jimmy’s arms, and he called these guys names in his head. He knew the type a lot more intimately than he wanted to recall right now. He could too easily look back, not very far, and hear himself saying, “Forget the safeties. Who needs ’em? We know what we’re doing.”
Rules exist for a reason.
Authorized use only.
With his hands on the heavy white latch handle, Jimmy closed his eyes for a moment, drew a steadying breath, and demanded of himself that he not forget.
He shoved the flat of his upper arm against the vault door, raised his jagged bat, pushed—
And spilled himself out into a dimly lit corridor, legs spread, weapon back, and yelling, “Hah!”
Holding his breath as he waited to be hit by a guard or caught in a trap, he looked from side to side.
Nothing. Not a thing. Nobody.
No safeties. No warning lights. No red alert. Big ship, little tube, no pressurization backups, no shields, no alarms. No organized damage control, nobody here to attack him . . .
The revelation went up like a flare.
“I don’t believe it!” he choked. “They don’t even realize I’m here!”
Possibilities spun in his head. This was a whole new game all of a sudden, with new rules.
This meant he could make setbacks for them, provide unseen chances for his own team. He could be tricky. His dad and Captain April would figure out ways to take advantage . . . sure they would!
As long as they didn’t blow themselves up or get dragged into the Blue Zone before he could do something—he suddenly had double the chance.
The stupid pisspots don’t even know I’m here! Don’t do anything, Dad! Don’t blow up the cutter! I’m working! I’m working!
He started thinking ahead. What could he do for his team if they did get dragged in? He’d have to be ready for that.
A click, and his helmet dropped to the black deck. He glanced one way, then the other. A triangular corridor with a black floor of some kind of hard rubber, ribbed with red structural members whose padding was sparse and worn, and lit from a single long panel in the bottom of each section. Some of the panels were flickering. Some were completely dark.
“It’s going to get a lot darker,” Jimmy promised through gritted teeth. “These pigs got a hundred-sixty-pound worm in their apple now.”
Cradling Veronica’s disembodied hand to his chest, he picked a direction and ran off down the narrow corridor.
“We’re going to do it.”
“I beg your pardon?” Robert blinked himself out of his sad reverie about Oxford and Coventry and fishing in the Cotswolds and Jimmy and never being able to show his godson a few simple things before life got too complex. He looked again to his left, at his greatest immediate concern. “Sorry, George?”
George didn’t look back a
t him. He thrust himself up on numb legs and wavered, but there was nothing unsteady in his face.
“We’re going to do what we planned to do. We’re not going into that Blue Zone. We’ll blow the whole sector apart if that’s what it takes, but my son’s not dying alone out here. We’re going with him, and we’re taking those black-hearted bastards with us.”
He gathered every ounce of fury to push down the grief so he could function, and crossed the deck.
Carlos was lying prone on the deck, his head resting on one outstretched arm as he watched the monitor with reddened eyes.
Kneeling beside him, George touched him and said, “Still with us, pal?”
The other man flinched, glanced at him, regained control over his expression, and sat up. “Oh, yes, sir . . . I’m with you all the way.”
Warmed by the devotion on Carlos’s face, the willingness to go with him into the fires of hell if that’s what he chose as their leader today, George had to swallow a couple of times before he could talk.
“You know what we have to do, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Carlos said quietly. “Sure do.”
“Want help?”
“No, sir. I think this is one I’d like to do by myself. I don’t want to have time to . . . ask myself any questions, if you know what I mean.”
Solemnly, George nodded. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”
He helped Carlos to his feet and only then noticed that the starship helmsman was still limping.
“You okay?” George asked.
Carlos hesitated, almost answered, then gave him a quirky little smile of all things, and commented, “What difference does it make?”
Something about that smile, without a touch of irony or resentment, made George’s own mouth tug upward on one side. “Not much, huh?”
They chuckled briefly, then moved to two different parts of the hold deck.