Days Until Home

by Mark Gardner

  “Is he gonna be all right?”

  Adelaide returned her attention to the newest addition to the Kerwood. “He’s got some sort of weird capillary thing in his nose or something. He gets nosebleeds all the time.” Adelaide pointed at Rebecca and jerked her hand toward the cargo bay.

  “Why me?” came Rebecca’s voice over the speaker in Adelaide’s helmet.

  Adelaide sighed. “Because,” she replied, keeping her voice steady, “if they shoot me, then we’re dead in the water. This boat don’t float. You do know what happens to mutineers in the black, right?”

  Rebecca’s lips moved in a silent curse, and she raised her helmeted head over the crates.

  “Slag it, woman, hurry up! I could give a slagging slag about those two clowns in the cargo bay, but we need to get the O2 back up so DeJoseph doesn’t asphyxiate.”

  Rebecca turned to her taskmaster, and Adelaide pointed toward the cargo bay again.

  Rebecca flinched. She looked down at Jimmy’s helmeted form and stepped into the gap between the safety of the crates and the edge of the hatch. When she didn’t fall back, Adelaide peered around the bulkhead. The Matsue crew were slumped over, a long metal tube on the deck between them. A crate of minerals from Egeria-13 lay on its side with fist-sized chunks of its bounty strewn about.

  Adelaide nodded to Rebecca, who then walked up to the Matsue pair and gingerly pushed the metal tube out of their reach with her foot. An atmospheric control panel just beyond them blinked red and shrilled an alarm as it tried in vain to pump O2 into the entire deck of the Kerwood.

  Satisfied that the Matsue crew in the cargo bay was no longer a threat, Adelaide returned to the panel outside the cargo bay and typed in a sequence into the illuminated keypad. The X’d doors along the passageway slid shut.

  Rebecca got to work binding the Matsue crewmen with a length of cargo strap. She looked up from her task and said to Adelaide over the comms, “How did you know that would work?”

  Adelaide checked a reading on her forearm cluster and compared it to the display on the panel before she replied, “Why spend the resources to keep atmosphere in every ship space if you’re just going to lose it when you cut the dead weight loose?”

  Rebecca looked at Adelaide. There’s that flinch again, thought Adelaide as she motioned for Rebecca to bind her own hands. When Rebecca refused, Adelaide reached down and rotated Rebecca’s collar. When the collar seal broke, Rebecca gasped and clawed at the breach in her suit.

  Adelaide grabbed Rebecca’s hands and pressed them together. “Knock it off,” Adelaide commanded. “There’s enough O2 in here that you’ll only feel funny for a few minutes.” Adelaide wrapped the strap three times around Rebecca’s wrists, and then around the length of strap between those wrists. She finalized her securing of Rebecca by knotting the strap onto the unconscious Matsue crewmen.

  When Rebecca finally had control of herself, she sputtered, “No wonder they call you Crazy Ade.”

  Adelaide smiled, nodded, and walked into the passageway to check on Jimmy and DeJoseph. She walked to the airlock at the end of the passageway and slapped DeJoseph’s cheek a few times to rouse him. “Clean up on aisle four,” she whispered to DeJoseph before she stepped into the now-open airlock and hurried back to main engineering.

  Days Until Home: 81

  “How is she?”

  Female voice. Femke? No, it’s Jessica.

  “She took a heavy dose of radiation, but next to Lady Marmalade, I think she’s the toughest chick aboard this tin can. Well, maybe you and she are tied for second place.”

  Male voice. Gauge?

  “To be honest, I’m astonished we didn’t lose her to the black,” the male voice continued.

  “Why’s the monitor freaking out, Gauge?”

  “Alpha waves,” Gauge replied. “She can hear us.”

  “Your machine can tell you that?”

  “It detects the modulation of the alpha waves in the brain. Alpha waves influence speech comprehension in everyday hearing situations,” replied Gauge. “That means she hears us and her brain is comprehending what we’re saying.”

  A machine somewhere beeped.

  “Erika, it’s Jessica, can you hear me?” Erika felt Jessica squeeze her hand. She squeezed back. “Gauge! She squeezed my hand!”

  “Of course, she squeezed your hand, she’s not in a coma or anything. She’s just exhausted from exposure and the rigors of spending a Terran day stuck to the hull without food and water. You smelled her when they brought her in here…”

  Erika heard the rush of breath across Jessica’s lips. “Not something to discuss at this moment, Gauge.”

  Erika felt the corner of her mouth quirk up. She didn’t know the female miner very well, but their paths crossed again and again on the small ship. It was nice that the solidarity of women went beyond the division of labor aboard the Kerwood.

  “Gauge! She smiled!”

  “She’s probably laughing at your incessant clucking over her. I’m gonna start calling you Mother Hen.”

  “Head wound or no head wound, you start that slag up, you won’t be able to stop me from spacing your ass.” Erika could hear the smile in Jessica’s voice.

  Slag it, my shoulder hurts.

  “You got tangled up in the end of the umbilicus. Skipper said a partition bolt got wedged between your cluster and arm. It kept you with us, but you dislocated your shoulder and elbow when you collided with the hull,” Gauge replied to what Erika thought was an unasked question.

  Did I say that out loud?

  “Yeah, hon, you said that out loud too,” Jessica replied.

  Erika tried to smile, but her lips felt chapped. She could feel them cracking and bleeding.

  “As much as we want to see your smiling face, try to contain yourself,” Gauge commented dryly. “Your lips, nose, and half your face are burnt from ionizing radiation.”

  Jessica took over. “A deck plate was caught in the umbilicus with you and lodged against some sort of antenna thingy—”

  “The aft telemetry array,” Gauge corrected her.

  “Yeah,” Jessica continued, “the aft Teletubby array.”

  “You said that wrong just to annoy me, didn’t you?” Gauge demanded.

  Jessica’s voice raised an octave to a shrill falsetto. “But Doctor Gauge,” Jessica mocked, “I’m only a space chick, how could I know any better?”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Gauge replied.

  “Ain’t that the truth!” Jessica retorted in the same falsetto as before. Her nervous laughter betrayed the levity she tried to inject into the situation. “Anyway,” she continued, “the shadow from the array and the deck plate caught in the umbilicus shielded you from most of the radiation, but not all of it.”

  Erika coughed and winced. “Why can’t I open my eyes?” she croaked. She could hear shuffling and assumed that Jessica and Gauge were looking at each other. In her mind’s eye, Erika imagined a lot of eye movement and aborted gestures. Each of them probably demanded in unspoken pleas that the other break the bad news to her.

  “Just tell me,” Erika growled.

  “Your eyes are open, Erika.”

  Gauge must’ve lost the battle of wills to be the one to break the news to me, Erika thought.

  “I think—” Gauge started to say but aborted it with a thick swallow.

  Jessica cleared her throat loudly, so Gauge continued. “I believe that, when you hit the hull, you walloped your head hard enough to force your eyes open.” Gauge paused, and it sounded as if he were licking his lips. “I had to look it up in the medical database. It’s called lagophthalmos.”

  “I’m blind?”

  “We don’t know that, hon,” Jessica replied. “If we were still on the Matsue, we would have a better idea.”

  “If we had stayed on the Matsue, she wouldn’t be in her current predicament,” a familiar voice intoned from somewhere beyond the swirling blacks and grays. The sound of the door to the medical bay closing reassured her. She
may be a blind gimp, but slag it, her engineer hearing was alive and well.

  “Hey, uh,” Gauge began a greeting, but Jessica interrupted him.

  “Jay Dee Jay!” Jessica squealed her pet name for Josh DeJoseph, the Kerwood quartermaster. Only a few people aboard, Erika included, knew DeJoseph’s Christian name. Most referred to him as simply DeJoseph. Jessica continued her greeting of the second person that entered the medical bay with noticeable less exuberance. “Uh, and Mister Thompkin,” she amended when Jeremy apparently followed DeJoseph through the airlock.

  “Jeremy,” intoned Jeremy in his gravely voice. “Go ahead and finish with my engineer, we can wait.”

  “Hey, ChEng,” Erika croaked and coughed. The coughing led to more pain. The pain caused a machine nearby to beep loudly. Her voice sounded just as gravely as the ChEng’s.

  She felt warm breath next to her ear. She didn’t tell Jeremy that his breath caused her pain. “I’d hold your other hand, but you seem to be missing it,” he whispered. Despite the pain and fresh bleeding, Erika smiled at the chief engineer of the Kerwood.

  Gauge cleared his throat and paused for a moment. “You could have retina damage, or nerve damage, or—”

  Jessica cut Gauge off. “Or you could just have really dry eyes!” Erika could tell that the resulting giggle was a forced one.

  “Missing hand, dislocated shoulder and elbow, and I’m blind. Am I missing anything else?” Erika wheezed.

  “I’m afraid in addition to the burns on your face, your throat is in pretty bad shape,” Gauge replied.

  Gauge, Captain Hayes’ voice sounded out from a speaker in the overhead. Or is it in the bulkhead, Erika thought. “Gauge, I need my navigator on the bridge. The Matsue is pissed, and she’s hot to trot.”

  “Go ahead, Mister Schneider,” Jeremy ordered Gauge. “I can handle this lot of malingerers.”

  Erika heard movement but still only saw splotches of blacks and grays.

  “I’m on my way, Skip,” Gauge said in a raised voice. Erika knew it was unnecessary, but no one paid any attention to the lowly engineer who made all the tech on this forsaken tub work. Before the disaster, she was just one of many engineers on the Kerwood. Now that number was three.

  I just hope we’re enough to get us all home, Erika thought with a level of pessimism that felt oddly comforting with everything that had already happened on the doomed contract.

  Days Until Home: 81

  “I’m on my way, Skip,” Gauge said. He took another look around the medical bay and walked briskly to the airlock.

  “Let Captain Hayes know I’ll sit with these guys for a bit before relieving Adelaide in main engineering,” Jeremy called out to Gauge.

  Gauge nodded curtly before the hatch closed.

  Jeremy heard a moan and moved to reassure Erika, but it wasn’t her making the noise. Jimmy stirred in the bed adjacent to hers.

  “What happened?” Jimmy asked to no one in particular. He rubbed his chest where a chunk of Egeria-13 hit him when the Matsue crew in the cargo bay tried to stop the mutiny.

  Jeremy cleared his throat but didn’t respond to the troublesome miner.

  Jimmy pushed himself up on his elbows and surveyed the walking wounded congregated in the medical bay. “Slagging slaggity slag,” he declared in reverent tones. He met Jeremy’s eyes. “Uh, sorry, Mister Thompkin.”

  Jeremy waved his hand, dismissing Jimmy’s nervous apology. “No worries, Jimmy. Slag about sums it up for us.”

  Jimmy’s eyes went wide. “That ain’t good.”

  DeJoseph muttered something under his breath and helped Jimmy to his feet.

  “Where’s Rebecca?” Jimmy asked.

  “That’s what I came to talk to the chief engineer about,” declared DeJoseph. He eyed Erika’s vacant stare. “Is she—?”

  “I’m alive and well, DeJoseph,” Erika announced.

  DeJoseph nodded and continued, “Chief, can I talk to you in private?”

  “You can say what you need to say, DeJoseph,” Jeremy replied. “We’re all on the same team here.”

  DeJoseph looked around the medical bay. Jessica met his eyes. It was as if he expected someone to challenge him.

  “What is it, Mister DeJoseph?”

  “It’s that Bähr woman, Chief,” DeJoseph said. “She’s got the Matsue crew locked down in one of the stripped rooms along the cargo bay passageway.” He looked to Jimmy. “Including your Rebecca.”

  Jimmy stepped away from the medical bed, staggered over to Erika and waved his hand over her face. Jessica slapped his hand away and hissed something. It sounded like “Rude, dude!”

  Jimmy stood beside DeJoseph and said, “What’re we gonna do about that, Chief?”

  “Right now, nothing.”

  “But, Chief—” Jimmy protested at the same time that DeJoseph said, “Surely, we can’t—”

  “Look, men,” Jeremy started. It occurred to him that out of all the survivors of the Kerwood disaster, only he and Captain Hayes had any military training. He sighed. “We’re still not away from the Matsue. This beautiful hunk of junk should get us home, but we all need to be on the same page. In case you all forgot, the Matsue morgue has quite a few of our comrades on ice for the return home.”

  DeJoseph nodded. “Those who stayed with the Kerwood,” he declared in a solemn voice. He made the sign of the cross, pulled a medallion out from his undershirt, kissed it and returned it to its hiding place.

  “You know it, boss,” Jimmy declared and gingerly placed a hand on the Kerwood quartermaster’s shoulder. Jimmy’s declaration was just as heartfelt as when DeJoseph kissed his Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers medallion.

  “Look, guys,” Jeremy declared after a short sigh, “after we deal with the Matsue, we’ll deal with our staffing situation.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  DeJoseph frowned. “Just keep that…woman away from me and mine.” It was evident that when DeJoseph said woman, he had entirely something else in mind.

  Jeremy noted and cataloged that. It was very much unlike the easy-going Kerwood quartermaster to have an issue with anyone. DeJoseph was known for going with the flow. The only person who could get past his bristly exterior was Old Vicky or the former operations manager, Conner. Well, thought Jeremy, Conner’s not with us anymore. He supposed that if it had to be someone DeJoseph would have an issue with, it would be Crazy Ade. She was not universally liked aboard the Kerwood. Damn fine engineer, but a poor people-person, he thought. Jeremy was glad to see the solidarity remain between DeJoseph and Jimmy, although it wasn’t really unexpected, especially after DeJoseph’s involvement with that prank Jimmy pulled on Old Vicky back on Egeria-13.

  “We’ll table the conversation about the Matsue crew for the time being.” He raised a hand when DeJoseph appeared to want to contradict him. “You both can drop in on our guests on your way to the cargo bay to get it in order. They stay confined for now, and make sure you’re both wearing launch suits with helmets. I want your collars locked at all times when you’re around the cargo bay. Is that understood?”

  Jimmy and DeJoseph shuffled their feet and looked at one another.

  Jeremy raised his voice, “I said, is that understood?”

  Both men mumbled something along the lines of Yes, Sir. Jeremy was only mildly surprised he could still muster the voice of authority he had mastered so many years ago. “Good, now get out of here, I have an engineer to talk to.”

  Both men meekly made their way to the same airlock Gauge retreated through earlier. When they were both gone, Jeremy turned back to Erika. The previous authoritarian attitude was replaced by what he expected a father concerned about a cherished daughter would act.

  “So you gonna tell me the sordid tale of my rescue, ChEng?”

  “Nothing to say, really,” Jeremy said. “Everyone else in the umbilicus decided to stick to the plan. They used the deck plates to create a tunnel and crawled their way back inside the Kerwood. Only Mister Bianconi suffered a minor inju
ry, and that was mostly to his pride.”

  “ChEng—” Erika began.

  “The real story is how Siebert and Bianconi donned magnetic boots to retrieve you from the hull. I had to order DeJoseph and the rest of the Kerwood crew to stay behind. They were raring to go after you, too. Apparently, they all thought the Matsue would give us a few moments to rescue you. As you know, the dorsal escape trunk hatch was attached to the umbilicus on our end, so the two of them exited the ventral escape trunk hatch and walked to you carrying deck plates to shield themselves when we rotated into the sun’s fiery embrace.” Jeremy paused for effect. “But even with the damage to our spine partially repaired courtesy of the Matsue Conglomerate, they couldn’t walk straight to you. No, they had to walk aft around the EXT. As an engineer, you already know that when they were by the ion stream, their suit electronics stopped working. Even the fancy magnetic boots we stole from the Matsue don’t work while ions were pissed out beside them. They used tethers and hand signals to get around the EXT dead zone. I’m not one to bandy about the word hero, but those two are most certainly of the hero designation. If we were in the ADF back in the day, they’d both receive commendations and some fancy aluminum to pin to their uniforms once we got home.”

  “If we make it back to Earth, Chief,” Erika rasped.

  Before he could properly chastise Erika for thinking negatively, the deck rumbled. That was something to behold since the medical bay sphere was isolated from the rest of the ship. He squeezed Erika’s leg. “I better see what we’ve gotten ourselves into now.”

  The Kerwood shuddered again, and the 1MC chirped. ChEng, Adelaide’s voice intoned, “I could use a hand in Engineering against those that wish to reacquire their men and matériel.”

  “Get better, Erika,” he said and tapped an icon on his forearm cluster. “I’m on my way, Adelaide.”

  Days Until Home: 81