by Mark Gardner
“I’ll let you rest,” he said and patted her hand gently. “Have they spoken to you about your condition? What happened to you that caused you to be out for so long?”
“Trauma to the head and hypoxia,” she said. “Apparently, we all had a bit of that, but I took it the hardest, somehow. They say I should be up and about in a day or two, barring anything new showing up in my readouts. Before you go though, Winchester Hayes, I have a question for you on another matter.” She spoke in a low tone, to where he could barely hear, but the expression on her face made him wonder about the question she was about to ask. “I’ve been awake for a while, and I overheard things, one being a little rumor about you, sir.”
“Rumor, what rumor?” Winchester asked, leaning in.
“This Adelaide woman. Who is she? And why were you in her room for an hour?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Days Until Home: 82
A klaxon sounded, and the passageway lighting faded from brilliant to dark and back to brilliant in time with the klaxon’s wail. It had been less than twenty minutes since an explosion rumbled the Matsue’s deck plates, triggering the alarm. The crew of the Matsue wouldn’t stand for saboteurs aboard their ship any more than Erika or her surviving Kerwood shipmates would, and the Matsue crew was determined to stop the mutiny. Mutiny, Erika Ängström thought, as if they would call it anything else.
“Stop!” A Matsue crewman burst around the corner, leading with his tranquilizer gun. He dropped to one knee, his forearm resting on the other knee. He sighted the running form of Captain Winchester Hayes of the crippled Kerwood. “Don’t make me shoot you, Captain Hayes!”
Erika stepped out of an alcove where she watched the scene unfold and thrust a syringe into the security man’s shoulder. The hiss was more felt than heard as the syringe discharged the sedative directly into the man’s skin. He had only a moment to look up at the new threat before he collapsed onto the deck.
Captain Hayes returned to the scene and eyed the pair of launch suits in a pile in the alcove that Erika had hidden. His eyes kept wandering to Erika’s missing hand on her right arm. The suit glove was required to maintain suit integrity, but her glove was limp and ineffectual.
“Stop staring,” Erika grumbled and flipped her launch helmet over her head with her good hand. She rotated the collar of her suit and helped Captain Hayes into his launch suit. “We’ve only got six or seven minutes so get your slag together.”
Captain Hayes’s eyes were blank and uncomprehending. Erika reached up with her good hand and rotated the captain’s collar. “It’s a race against time,” Erika said over the private communication link she and Captain Hayes had created. “We’ve got to be through the umbilicus by 17:30 Kerwood time.”
Captain Hayes gave her a thumbs up. He shifted to look at Erika’s flaccid glove. She rolled her eyes, pushed the captain away with her good hand, and jogged down the passageway. Captain Hayes fell into step beside her. When they arrived at the makeshift airlock that the Matsue was using to shift goods and matériel from the Kerwood to the Matsue, they stopped to see two suited figures guarding the temporary airlock. One was rotund, and the other was so tall he had to stoop in the Matsue passageway.
A pair of Matsue security personnel lay at their feet. A third figure knelt over the prostrate guards and was affixing oxygen-breathing apparatuses over their noses and mouths. The figure turned, and Erika heard her over the comms, “Just in case this goes sideways.”
“Move it, Funky!” Captain Hayes ordered.
Femke rose and placed her hands on her hips in defiance. She turned to respond to her captain, “Stealing the Kerwood is one thing, but if anyone dies, it’s all our asses.” Femke pulled the recessed handle in the hatch, swung it open, and stepped through.
“It’s our ship,” Captain Hayes grumbled. “We’re not stealing anything.”
“We’re stealing their supplies and delta-V,” responded a female voice over the comms. “Quit your bellyaching and get yourselves on the other side of that hatch.”
Captain Hayes appeared to ignore his main propulsion assistant. “Is everybody here?” he asked.
Erika looked at her forearm cluster. “Three minutes,” she yelled. “If they’re not already in the umbilicus, then they’re staying on board the Matsue.”
The five pirates crammed themselves into the airlock, and Erika worked the controls. Because the airlock was large enough in diameter to accommodate wheeled carts, it took longer than the standard sixty seconds to oxygenate and pressurize the airlock.
“Ninety seconds,” Erika chimed over the comms as a light on the outer hatch switched from red to green.
One by one, they launched themselves past the hatch and into the umbilicus. Erika was the last one through, and she pulled the hatch closed. She wedged a device into the panel already pitted by exposure to the black. “Fire in the hole!”
Everyone stopped their exit and looked toward Erika. She had wrapped copper mesh around her forearm cluster and pressed a button on the device. Lights along the circumference of the round hatch winked out. Erika tapped a button on the device and patted it lovingly before following her comrades.
The umbilicus was translucent on three sides with a solid carbon fiber deck. It was actually translucent below the deck, but to make a flat surface to work on, the plates that made up the deck overlapped, allowing the umbilicus to spiral around to the floating Kerwood. This imparted a fraction of the gravity the Matsue enjoyed and allowed ingress and egress to a ship they had written off as scrap.
Erika looked up to see the Kerwood floating as if it were a kite caught in the wind. She smiled when she saw the Kerwood’s running lights flicker on and a trail of exhaust flare into existence from the thrusters. The Kerwood was maneuvering into a station-keeping position with the Matsue.
“Good work, Gauge,” Captain Hayes said over the comms. Erika doubted the navigator-turned-pilot heard the captain’s praise as he was no doubt on a separate encrypted communications channel with the ChEng and Crazy Ade.
As they floated down the semi-gravity of the umbilicus, Siebert and Telly pried up the plates, handing one to each of the Kerwood pirates. The loss of each section allowed the umbilicus to bend at an even sharper angle, allowing the Kerwood to roll, and produce its own gravity. Each plate removed allowed the Kerwood to roll over them, rising over the hull of the Matsue like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Erika thought that that was an apt description given their circumstance.
“Time!” Erika shouted as an indicator flashed on her heads-up display.
Everyone stopped in the microgravity and held a section of decking over their heads with their feet planted on the remaining deck.
The first pop resulted in the umbilicus detaching from the Matsue’s hull. If anyone stood there, they would’ve seen a surge of green electricity that melted the translucent wall. The umbilicus bucked as the atmosphere within leaked out the breach. Erika stared down at the deck markings and realized she was on the wrong side of the apex marking that indicated the halfway point between the Kerwood and the Matsue. She felt the tug of outgassing and the Matsue’s gravity.
Telly dropped his deck plate and stumbled toward Erika, fighting against the new gravity field the Kerwood created as she increased her roll. The umbilicus started to fall toward the Kerwood and wrap around its hull. Erika was caught between competing gravity fields. She knew she would be all right if she could just stay within the umbilicus as it wrapped itself around the Kerwood. Telly lost his fight against the Kerwood’s gravity, and she saw the pained look in his eyes as he plummeted toward the Kerwood’s hatch. Erika turned toward the breached end of the umbilicus and saw only the endless black.
Days Until Home: 82
Gauge and Jeremy Thompkin wrestled with manual control. “Now,” Adelaide yelled over the 1MC at the navigator and pilot. Jeremy could see an indicator light up on his panel as Adelaide activated a sequence in main engineering.
Jeremy could feel the gravity shift in
his knees. When the Kerwood fired her station-keeping thrusters, the gravity from the spin with the Matsue shifted as the crippled tin can rotated in the opposite direction. He smiled and looked down at the magnetic boots he liberated from the Matsue’s stores. He felt bad injecting the Matsue’s quartermaster with the sedative, but he had no qualms about restraining the young man. If the quartermaster had warned the Matsue about their piracy, everyone would’ve spent the remaining time on the journey back to Earth in the brig instead of the hastily readied quarters that were provided to the Kerwood survivors.
As it were, no one questioned the Kerwood’s Chief Engineer when he headed back to his ship with a repair kit and a clanking duffle bag. Jeremy had been worried, leaving the man tied up for over six hours, but the final phase of the repairs to the Kerwood had to have the higher-quality magnetic boots. When Jimmy and company arrived in the trunk with four crates of foodstuffs, Jeremy knew for certain their timetable had been accelerated. When he asked Jimmy if he had been discovered, Jimmy replied with a wide grin and his arms spread wide. The twinkle in Jimmy’s eye wasn’t what told the whole story though, the green-haired woman on his arm with a hickey on her neck told Jeremy all that he needed to know. She self-consciously tore the Velcro Matsue patch from her uniform shoulder and liberated Jimmy’s to replace it.
As they disappeared into the hatch leading to the passageway to the cargo bay, Jeremy stared at the floating patch as it sailed and tumbled on currents of microgravity. The last he had heard of Jimmy and his new girl was a pointed comment about hearing the sound of more Velcro tearing before the day was through.
“ChEng!”
Jeremy’s Main Propulsion Assistant interrupted his reverie. Even over the 1MC her voice had a certain grating quality to it. His eyes darted to his console, and he raised his eyebrows. “Do it,” he commanded is MPA.
Adelaide acknowledged over the 1MC, and the confirmation sequence scrolled across his screen.
Jeremy felt his stomach lurch as down became up. He could feel the deck plates rattle as the two remaining Kerwood thrusters and the temporary thrusters installed by the Matsue rumbled to life.
Jeremy patted the flat bulkhead that the pilot’s panel mounted to. He had been leaning against it and chit-chatting with Gauge only moments before they liberated the Kerwood. That’s a good girl, he thought. They can’t keep you down. The Matsue Conglomerate wasn’t being magnanimous when they installed the pair of multi-purpose chemical thrusters into the Kerwood. They needed the Kerwood to orbit the Matsue to augment ship spin and the thrusters to assist in propulsion. When Captain Hayes confided in the Matsue Conglomerate’s plan to pick the Kerwood clean and jettison her, Jeremy was furious.
“Her spine is broken, Jeremy,” Captain Hayes had said.
“Just because someone’s old and a little persnickety, we don’t just throw them away, Skipper,” Jeremy had retorted.
“Jeremy,” Captain Hayes replied, and placed his hand on his shoulder in a rare display of human behavior, “we call her a ‘she,’ but she’s just metal and plastic. She’s not a real person.”
Jeremy still remembered the heat of anger he felt as he scowled at the captain and brushed his hand away. “Look, Captain, Crazy Ade and I have been on this ship almost the entire time we’ve been here. The EXTs are fully operational and, thanks to the Matsue Conglomerate, most of the breaches are sealed. She’ll still hold an atmosphere. She’s begging to deliver us safely to Luna with our cargo.” Jeremy felt the ghostly flare of the impact of his open hand into his palm as he emphasized the word with.
Captain Hayes had smiled a wolfish grin and said, “I’d hoped you’d feel that way. I have a plan.”
Now, that plan had reached fruition.
“Full mixture,” Adelaide’s voice echoed from the overhead. Jeremy nodded absently and complied.
Gauge’s eyes twinkled, and his devious grin couldn’t possibly have gotten any bigger. “Let’s wake them up,” he declared.
Jeremy swiped a control widget on the pilot’s panel. Gauge nodded and mimicked his movements on the navigator’s panel.
“Time!” they heard Erika Ängström shout from a speaker embedded in the overhead. Jeremy forced his stomach to stop churning as the Kerwood thundered out of the Matsue’s gravitational field. At that exact moment in time, it was as if there were two different downs. The gravity from the Matsue was what someone would expect to be down since the Kerwood orbited the Matsue with her wounded belly exposed for all of creation to see. The new down, that was something else entirely. It was off to the port, and aft of the bridge. They couldn’t justify to the Matsue bean counters the necessity of repairing the artificial gravity of the bridge sphere, so they all had to have the best magnetic boots to pull off the heist.
Over the secure comms link, Jeremy heard the gasps of excitement. Or was it, terror, he thought as the captain and the remaining crew in the umbilicus detached from the Matsue.
“Increasing roll,” Jeremy declared and worked a mechanical lever between him and Gauge.
Each grunt or exhale of air from those still in the umbilicus caused Jeremy to cringe. Whoever was in there, they would be exposed to the black until he could get them safely inside the Kerwood. He hated being responsible for so many souls. The crew in the umbilicus would need to rely on the modular deck plates to protect them from the collapsing shell and the deadly solar radiation they’d be exposed to repeatedly during their escape. They weren’t able to move atmosphere around properly without alerting the Matsue crew still on board to their plans. Speaking of the Matsue crew on board, he thought.
He tapped an icon on his forearm cluster. “Jimmy,” he threw his voice to a microphone embedded in the bulkhead behind him, “how are our guests doing?”
“Uh,” came a breathless croak from Jimmy over the comms, “they’re not too happy that we’re taking Mom and Dad’s Porsche for a spin.” A dull thud followed by an echoing clank could be clearly heard in the background.
Slag it, Jeremy thought, but before he could reply, a female voice sounded over the comms. “Hey, this is Rebecca, Jimmy got hit by some falling junk, and he’s out cold. You’d better send someone down here or this jailbreak is going to be short-lived.”
Days Until Home: 82
“I’ll just pop the cargo bay ramp.”
“We’re not sentencing them to the black, Adelaide,” DeJoseph hissed and looked across the gap at the Matsue crew member that Jimmy had recruited. “She did drag Jimmy back here so they couldn’t hold him, hostage.” He crouched behind Adelaide to the left of the open hatch leading to the cargo bay. DeJoseph had been ordered to help Jimmy and Rebecca, but Adelaide felt the need to be involved. She needed to resolve the situation quickly and get back to engineering.
“She has a name, and it is Rebecca,” Rebecca declared. She crouched behind a stack of crates two high and two wide with the prostrate body of Jimmy. She ducked each time a thud echoed in the passageway and one of the crates moved slightly. She was only separated from Adelaide and DeJoseph by two feet, but she couldn’t drag Jimmy across the gap before one of the Matsue loaders could hit her.
Adelaide did her best to stop the roll of her eyes. “Well, Rebecca, your former shipmates are launching chunks of slagging Egeria-13 at our only food for the return trip.” She lowered her hand from the ramp control console embedded in the wall. DeJoseph seemed to relax visibly.
Adelaide turned to Rebecca, who flinched as another projectile whizzed over the crates, rebounded off the passageway bulkhead, and clattered onto the deck. It left a dent in the door with a red X hastily painted across it. Adelaide took notice of the red X and matching ones along the passageway at each indentation as far as she could see. “Do they have helmets?” she asked Rebecca.
Rebecca smiled and held up a pair of helmets. “They can’t talk to anyone either,” she declared.
Adelaide reached up and tapped an icon on the panel.
DeJoseph’s eyes followed her every movement.
“
We can vent atmosphere from the bay,” Adelaide whispered loud enough to be heard above the din.
“Bloated and burned is just as bad as the black,” Rebecca retorted.
Adelaide threw up her arms. “I’m not popping the ramp,” she insisted.
“We can’t get to the atmospheric controls,” DeJoseph replied.
She tapped a few more commands into the panel. “We have access to the atmospheric controls for this passageway,” Adelaide offered.
She looked DeJoseph in the eyes, and he flinched. It wasn’t the first time in Adelaide’s life she received that kind of reaction from someone who told her something couldn’t be done or that she wasn’t good enough at something. The list went on and on.
“What’re you thinking?” Dejoseph asked.
“Sorry, man,” Adelaide replied and placed her own helmet on her head. She tapped a sequence into the panel, rotated her collar, and ignored the suitless DeJoseph as he ran down the passageway away from the cargo bay airlock. He staggered as all the doors in the passageway opened simultaneously. Atmosphere washed into each room like she was Poseidon and had unleashed her oceanic might. Each time he passed a doorway, he staggered first into that space, and then back on his path to the hatch at the end of the passageway. Beyond it was the escape trunk and the passageway to main engineering.
“Is he gonna screw this up?” asked Rebecca over the comms. She crouched down low as the rush of atmosphere pushed against the top two crates.
Adelaide gripped a recessed handle under the panel. She shook her head in response, realized that Rebecca probably couldn’t see her, and replied over the comms, “No, I locked the rest of the doors and hatches in this area.”
“You could’ve let him get into the airlock before you pushed atmo around, ya know,” Rebecca said as she struggled to maintain her grip on a strap that joined the crates together.
Adelaide shrugged and turned to see DeJoseph tapping on a panel at the end of the passageway in vain. His actions slowed, and he tried to punch the panel in a last desperate attempt to override Adelaide. His swing was wide, and he slumped face first against the door. He slid down the smooth metal and left a trail of blood on it.