by Diane Carey
His guardian angels were back. His Blue guardians that made his future surge and swell. He would have all these jugsuckers indebted to him someday. Soon—months, perhaps weeks. They would all rely upon him and speak well to him and call him “sir.” There would be shameless extravagance of gratitude to him.
He felt tired in his mind. Tired of somebody else being in charge his whole life.
“I’ll get it,” he whispered.
The deflector mechanism hummed softly back at him as it pressed into his cheek. He heard a corresponding velvet bip-bip-bip, and knew the beautiful blue light on the control panel above was going on, off, on, off, its activity proof that there were shields again. This was the only beauty on the bridge of the Shark.
The Shark. As if this was one ship, and not a stitched-together Frankenstein without a soul. That’s why nobody knew for sure what the ship looked like—because it was constantly changing, weekly added to or subtracted from, built upon or repaired. None of their victims had survived so far, and even if they had, there would be no describing the Shark, because the looks of the ship kept changing.
So his shields had to keep changing. Bigger, smaller, angled beam fragments, intensified here, reduced there. And no one knew how to make it work but him.
“You can get what I need,” he murmured. “We’ll have a reputation of our own. Our destiny will arrive.”
“Who you talking to, tail?”
Big Rex’s bark bit off the moment of adoration. His vast form loomed overhead, carrying with it its own smell and a corona of heat. “Don’t you know how freakish it looks to other people when you talk to the scrap? There’s always been something wrong with you. Swear I’d pay to fix it if I knew what it was.”
He backed away, since he was too big to turn in this cramped section of the bridge, then lumbered away on his tree stumps.
Roy ticked off the paces until he was safe, then grumbled, “Devotion on the hoof.”
Having his father in charge had rallied him the resentful silence of the others, but not the respect he coveted. No one seemed to realize that his shields were the only reason they could hide and pounce as they had, make careers for themselves rather than shoveling manure on some subsidized colony, which was where most of them belonged. They knew his special delicate deflectors were their lifeline, yet they didn’t quite realize how heavily they already relied on him.
Nothing else had gone right this trip, and they were back to relying on him, whether they knew it or not. The ship was stumbling around, blown open in a dozen spots, a third of the crew dead or dying on the deck. They were back to relying on him and his shields to pull the Starfleet cutter into the Blue Zone and crush it.
They should realize their dependence. He shouldn’t have to tell them. He shouldn’t always have to remind them, “It’s all because of me, and only because of me.”
The words buzzed on the end of his tongue day after day, and especially at moments like this, when he could still sniff the essence of Big Rex lingering on his own clothes like smoke. He’d stopped saying it out loud long ago. Ever since he was fourteen he’d said it, then somebody would hit him. So he stopped saying it aloud.
Five years . . .
He lowered again to his task, his body stretched out on the deck as he shouldered his way deeper under the cracked and chipped control panel, and parted his lips against the cool, murmuring deflector mechanism.
“Sooner or later,” he whispered, “we’ll convince them they can’t survive without us. They won’t have any choice. It’s on our calendar . . . it’s fate. It’s destiny.” A squint through damage haze showed him the sweaty, stubbly rolls of his father’s neck. “He’ll learn. Even he can learn. We’ll convince him . . . to let me be in charge.”
Pure common sense, after all. At barely nineteen, he had more intellect and better brains than any ten of these others. They just didn’t know brains from beans, or they’d put him in charge right now. Everywhere, it was like that. Recognition. That’s all he needed. The whole Federation would be indebted to him someday.
“It’s on my calendar,” he murmured, and turned back to his fine-tuning.
“Shut up, I said!” Rex glared at him with one eye, because he couldn’t turn all the way around in the command chair. The eye was glistening grotesquely in the bad light from the main viewscreen, on which the ravaged Starfleet cutter hung helpless. A handful of other men on the bridge twitched when he waved at them also and blared, “Keep working!”
Lou Caskie interrupted as he appeared in the open crawlway and cried, “We found blood!”
Coming up the rest of the way, he showed Big Rex a piece of shattered plastic with blood splattered diagonally across it.
“We found it in the E-cell. He was there! The main stator casing has a hole in it!”
“Can you patch up the hole?” Big Rex asked.
“Well, yah, but all we got is backup gravity, backup respir—”
“Do it, then. If you can’t live on backup, get out of space.”
Behind them, the voice of aggravated youth clipped, “There was a hole?”
The two antitheses turned to him. “Said that, didn’t I?” Caskie lisped at him.
“No weapon,” Roy muttered. “What kind of blood is it?”
“Who cares?” Big Rex huffed.
“Maybe it’s his,” Caskie bug-eyed, then laughed, showing where some of his teeth had been knocked out—the ones he’d had at the start of this, at least.
“Go retch,” Roy snapped back as he got to his feet and tried to see through the stinking tendrils of smoke. “Is it red?”
“Red,” his father said, “pink, green, who gives a rat’s ass.”
“Dark red?”
“Here!” Big Rex held the plastic out at him. “You wanna lick it and see what it tastes like too?”
Roy screwed his brows together, looking at the splatters. “Red . . . dark red.”
Caskie gurgled another laugh, but Big Rex paused. “Mean something to you?”
Straightening his tortured back muscles, Roy paused too, enjoyed the moment, and let it go on as long as he could. When he spoke, he did so in such a way as to make theatrical use of the curling haze and the silence on the bridge.
“It means,” he said, “we’re looking for . . . a human.”
Big Rex threw his arms up. “Well, goddamn! Think of that! We’re looking for a human! And to think we’ve got only thirty-nine people on board and only thirty of ’em are human! Why, hell, why didn’t we think of that! What were the odds! I’m surprised enough to shoot my cookies! Damn, boy, damn.”
Burning under the sarcasm, Roy felt his face go hot. The other workers paused, and were looking at him.
He shifted uneasily, bitterness rising in his mouth.
“It means we can flush him out,” he attempted. “We know what air he needs to breathe, and how often he needs to eat, and what will kill him.”
The strategic line of thinking didn’t impress Big Rex at all. “If we were a shipload of Tholians, that might do some good. What do you want me to do? Let all the oxygen out and see who chokes? That’s great.”
“It’s great,” Roy responded, “considering there are only sixteen of the thirty-nine left on their feet since you took command. Don’t you even know your manpower numbers?”
Heavy silence erupted and held them all hostage for a few seconds—the terrible kind of silence that says throats are being held the hard way.
Lou Caskie backed off a few steps, just in case. The other crew barely breathed. Some were poised in the middle of carrying a part or twisting a bolt, but they had stopped and were watching to see whose orders they’d be taking ten minutes from now. On this ship—ten minutes was about average.
But Big Rex only glared at his son for a beat, then said, “Thanks for telling me. Couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you? Had to blare it all over that we’re down. Yeah, boy, that’s command material. I ought to just step aside, eh? Hand the old crown on down. People used to say
you were a smart little kid. I’d like to have ’em here now and let ’em listen.”
Roy flinched so violently that the clipping tool in his hand bit his thigh and drew blood from the big muscle.
Human blood.
The pain gave him purpose.
“I’ll find him,” he said. “I’ll find him and show you.”
The hand-held tracer wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but it had been confiscated from one of the less sophisticated ships they’d plundered a year ago, and he’d been tampering with it. He had it set to pinpoint blood of the type found in the E-cell, and project the find visually on a small screen, with the blood showing up as green on the black and white screen. Worked fairly well.
Well enough, since he hadn’t showed anyone else how to use the tracer and they’d all have to tell him he was smart for knowing how to track a chemical compound.
He looked forward to that. If it didn’t come today, it would come months from now, when he took over and they thought back on these events. Sooner or later, it would come.
He moved one step at a time through the ship, having started at the place where the worm had done the sabotage. Not easy—the crew were already repairing the G-stator, stomping their big fat feet all over the traces of evidence. Good thing he’d gotten there in time to get a big enough sample for his tracer to read.
Then he found lots more of the same blood anyway, out in the corridor. The tracer lay in his palm, happily displaying chartreuse smears. The worm had taken a pounding out there. Caught in his own gravity trick.
Roy snickered and enjoyed, thought about how he would have avoided the same mistake, then turn his tracer on the corridors. Three directions, one at a time—
There was a dot. Very small, but very green. Roy followed it.
No weapon, and injured. So the worm would want to stay low, probably the bowels of the ship. Probably engineering. Clever enough to use the fire extinguisher to smash the stator housing, but not smart enough to hide the pressure suit helmet they’d found outside the trunk deck. Forward thinking only.
That meant . . . more destruction. The same trick twice, that’s what people with forward-only thinking would do. Not a takeover attempt, or a capture or a trap, but destruction. Physical damage to stall the ship. What this worm had done once, this worm would try to do again. What would he try to damage?
Engineering.
Roy licked his lips with anticipation and let his logic guide him to choose the right corridors when there was no dot, no smear of blood for his tracer to pick up. His intellect served him, as always. Where there were expanses with no blood, he would aim for engineering, and ultimately there would be a dot or a streak of green, and he would know he was right.
The bowels of the ship. That’s where a saboteur who had no weapon would go. Wounded too. Time might be a factor, weakness, fatigue, success the first time . . . all these were elements to consider. Roy had a good time considering them and playing his game of plot and stealth, until it paid off.
He peeked into an eight-inch-diameter porthole in the door of an engineering subroom, and there was his—
A kid? A curly-haired teenager with dirt on his face and a crowbar in his hands, working at ripping and smashing the mechanics in there? A squirrel storing nuts.
“Oh, this is too easy,” Roy mouthed in near silence.
Also in silence, he reached sideways to the door panel controls and very quietly turned the locking mechanism. Then he fingered the intercom.
“If you had any brains at all, you’d realize there’s no power in there. We already rerouted.”
Inside the subroom, Jimmy Kirk slammed backward with shock and dropped his crowbar. It clattered as though to call attention to the smug face in the eight-inch window. He knew that face already. He knew the two wings of brown hair flopping from the middle part. He knew those eyes.
He knew he was sunk.
“Disorderly conduct,” the face said snidely. “Just pranks. I realized I could take your one little naughty as a pattern, and it worked. I found you. Here you are, trapped like a bug.”
“Who are you!” Jimmy demanded.
“I’m Roy John Moss and I’m about to kill you. Say good-bye.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I’m Jim Kirk and I’m about to spit in your face.”
And he did.
Saliva dribbled on the window, mixed with blood, illustrating how it would have gone right into Roy’s left eye if he hadn’t been cowering behind glass.
Jimmy sheered with satisfaction. He’d seen this Roy flinch when he spat. There wasn’t as much confidence on the other side of the wall as the bluff pretended.
Maybe he could stall.
“I had a good time,” Jimmy said, and waited to see if curiosity popped up in the face.
Roy frowned. “Doing what?”
“Being a worm in your apple.”
“Worm?” Roy shorted. “That’s what I called you.”
“Guess we think alike.”
Roy grimaced with true distaste and muttered, “Oh, go retch. As soon as the engines have enough maneuverability, we’re going to pull your pals into the Blue Zone and crush the guts out of them. Then I’m going to open up a solid waste chute and flush you too, maggot.”
“Come on in here and we’ll see who’s about to kill who,” Jimmy added. “You . . . have picked on the wrong people.”
A match flickered in the other young man’s eyes. Brown brows closed together.
“Just say good-bye,” Roy insisted.
Fear crept in on Jimmy and squeezed his throat shut so he couldn’t say anything else. He was trapped, and there was no fixing that fast enough.
The face, Roy John Moss’s face, was still steaming up the window, but Jimmy could see the shoulder moving out there and knew Roy was doing something with the controls to this subroom.
When it got hard to breathe, he knew what was being done.
And his pressure suit was gone now. And he’d left his helmet in the back alleys of this ship.
Pressure . . . he felt it now . . . the air was slowly being sucked out of this room.
In his mind he imagined the dial on the side of the wall there, outside the door, and Roy’s hand on the dial. It was an old-type mechanism, meant for a medical unit, and made to fit onto this engineering cubicle. So was the door, and the porthole. He could scoop up his crowbar—break the window—then came the realization that a confiscated medical pressure-chamber door wouldn’t have a breakable window in it.
Mustering his most defiant expression, he tried not to show how much the effects of depressurization were starting to hurt. His ears popping and crackling . . . his eyes hurting, starting to push out . . . head pounding . . . his lungs crying, expanding . . . like flying too high, too fast . . . it was getting hard . . . to breathe . . .
Black barn doors closed slowly in on his vision. At least he would be unconscious when the truly gruesome part came and his body was blown apart from the inside.
As the blackness engulfed him, he focused through the strip of vision on the face of Roy Moss, and his last thought was to curse himself for having been predictable.
“George?”
“Hmm.”
Robert knelt beside his personal thundercloud, but made no such commitment as sitting down, for both their sakes at the moment. Mellowed by his natural Lake District affability, he gazed at George in genuine concern, and tried to read an expression that to a stranger would be simple crankiness served on a slab of crust. Robert knew George Kirk, and knew there was much more going on behind that ruddy face.
Ultimately he asked, “Are you all right?”
George didn’t look up. The answer was a rasp. “I guess.”
“Awfully quiet, is all.”
“Yeah, I’m quiet.”
“Any reason?”
“Because there isn’t much left to say, Robert.”
“Oh, now . . . mustn’t pout. Why don’t we stop all this crepe-hanging and say our sorries, eh?”
&n
bsp; “Because I was right.”
The ramrod statement hit hard. Hit them both. Robert’s forbearant grin dropped like stone.
After a pause he did sit down, for they were at least back on some common ground.
“Never said you weren’t,” he offered, and quirked a scolding, amused gaze that didn’t really fit the moment, then a sigh of regret to show he knew it didn’t fit. “Now, did I?”
“Guess not.”
“Listen, old boy, Carlos has a new twist for you. He’s found that he can turn on our tractor beam, what’s left of it, and in combination with theirs it might pull us closer to that ship out there without their realizing it straight off. We can move in on them slowly. What do you think?”
“How slowly?”
“One to one and a quarter meter per second. We should close the distance between us in roughly—”
“Twenty minutes.”
“That’s if they don’t happen to notice our closing in.”
“How the hell can they not notice?”
“We’ll do whatever you want, George,” Robert said, “although I’m not certain there are many cards left to draw.”
They fell back into the pitiless, unyielding silence neither of them liked. There wasn’t anything to like. It wasn’t really a lack of words, but a silence of the soul.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
Robert smiled, though not at ease. “Shall I tell him to do it?”
A half-dozen snide replies flashed on George’s face as he ran through childhood tantrums, the strain of puberty, and the groundwork of what it was to be an adult all over again in about four seconds. Maturity forced him to be more resilient than he either felt or looked at the moment.
After an uncomfortable few more seconds he sighed and simply said, “Yeah, tell him to do it.”
Relieved, Robert raised his head and waved a hopeless hand at the smoke that still snaked around the hold as though confused by one-third gravity.
“You have the go-ahead, Carlos,” he called. “See if we can’t get up against them. Perhaps we can find a way to disentangle ourselves from this yet.”