Days Until Home

by Mark Gardner

  “Captain, we have restraints,” Gauge said from behind him, and Femke floated up and handed him a fistful of straps. Wrapping the straps around in a circular motion and twisting Jimmy’s body in an unnatural way to bind the straps to his feet, Winchester Hayes bound him up like a baby calf at a rodeo. When he was finished, he pushed the struggling cow out toward Gauge and Femke, then did the exact same thing to the woman with the bullet wound in her shoulder.

  Gauge made a call to Adelaide to release the locks then took Telly inside of the sickbay to see about his wound.

  Days Until Home: 16

  Hours of planning and coordinated communication led to the assembly of a mock court inside of the Kerwood’s cargo bay. Viktor, Jessica, Siebert and Erika had managed to summon the remaining miners to plead their case with Hayes.

  The engineers and members of the bridge assembled in bunches near the inner bulkhead of the Kerwood. The Matsue guests were placed against the blast doors, and Gauge Schneider and Femke Gerhardt stood as bailiffs to the court. Winchester Hayes, dressed in black for the event, stood above them all on an arrangement of crates. His eyes looked heavy, and there were dark circles around them, revealing the lack of sleep that had plagued him since the explosion.

  “With respect to fairness, I will not judge you lot from assumption and what seems to me to be straightforward evidence of your guilt,” Winchester said. “In your defense will be Marisol Vega, who has been a friend to many of you in the past. Her role will be to hear you out and to help convince me of your innocence. On the other side will be the chief engineer. He, too, has been a friend to many of you. He will play the prosecution, representing the Kerwood, and will convince me of which, if not all of you, should be exposed to the black.

  “I will hear your testimonies, and try my best to be neutral in my judgment. But I got to be honest, this ain’t gon’ be good for a number of you. This was the worst kind of betrayal what was done to this ship, and spacing you is too good a punishment for all of the great lives lost to that explosion. You’ve ruined all of our lives. Blinded,” he glanced at Erika,” maimed, and traumatized this once happy crew. Why’d you do it? Why’d you do it, huh? Money?” He shook his head. “You killed us for money? Well, come clean and I promise you I won’t do what I want to do, which is choke you to death with my bare hands.”

  He lodged himself between two secured crates and made himself comfortable. The entire scene before him reminded him of just how low they had sunk. But justice had to be won for the survivors of the Kerwood’s explosion. Femke was right about this like she was about most things. They had to try and find suitable punishment for those who caused them harm, and it needed to be a punishment that they all could live with.

  Viktor Sharapov was the first to be called forward to explain himself. He had been the first accused and had not done much to dispel their beliefs, the worst offense being his trip to the bridge with a number of other armed miners.

  “I love my wife,” was his strongest defense, “I would do anything, give anything to get home to be with her. Anything, Captain Hayes, do you understand? How does this help me get that goal accomplished? Why would I let someone bloody my face like this, and why would I sacrifice all that we worked for on Egeria-13?”

  “We don’t know your wife, Vicky,” Marisol said softly, “and you’ve been more of a grump than a doting husband yearning for his wife. These miners look up to you as a sort of leader. We need more to be convinced that the crew’s well-being has always been your concern.”

  “I-I’ve always put others before me on this ship,” Viktor said, “It is how I was raised, how we operate as brothers and sisters out in the black. That is the sort of man that I am. I value human life. I really hope that you all feel the same way.” He shut up then, and hung his head as if he had failed at defending himself.

  Jeremy moved in and Marisol retreated with a reassuring smile at Viktor. She glided over to a far crate,and gripped a strap to hold herself there.

  Jeremy said, “Old Vicky, we know your heart. At least we thought we knew your heart until that explosion killed so many of our crew. In one breath, you say you care for your crew and human life, yet when we were about to space you, you gave us a story about Jimmy being guilty. How is it that you’re willing to die on an asteroid for this man, yet when it comes to justice here, you’re willing to throw him out of the airlock? You’re contradicting yourself, old man, and that makes you even guiltier.”

  “How is that a contradiction?” Viktor snapped, “They are two completely different things. I saved his life down there because he was a friend of mine, a mischievous kid just starting out in a career I’ve been in forever. When I learned what he did, he was no longer my friend. He became an enemy to me and the Kerwood. A selfish enemy who caused the death of Connor and many of my other friends. How could you even compare the two situations?” Jeremy had nothing else to say.

  Marisol and Jeremy questioned all of the miners, a process that took literally hours to get through. Their final cross-examination was that of Jimmy who seemed to have been broken by everything that had been going on.

  Marisol Vega approached him, and he could barely make eye contact with her. “Look, this has gone on long enough, man,” he said, flashing a glance at Winchester Hayes. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to go down the way it did, and I feel terrible for everybody that died.”

  A woman from engineering screamed out an expletive and tried in vain to get to him. The miners reacted even worse, and it took several other Kerwood crew members to pull him out from the punching and kicking mob. By the time he was safely away from them, he had tears floating away from his eyes.

  “This really sucks, y’know? But it don’t matter. You all just want to see me bleed to make up for what I did to those people. But killing me will not bring them back, and I am so sorry for what I did. Vicky, I-I didn’t mean to hurt you, you were…” he choked up and Viktor Sharapov look pained.

  Winchester Hayes held up his hand for order and glanced at Adelaide out of the corner of his eye. She was bugging her eyes and motioning toward Erika since she believed Jimmy had not done it alone.

  “Jimmy, you’re a real piece of slag.” Winchester said, “You have some nerve, sitting here crying, as if sympathy is owed to you. Your little stunt killed my first mate and the best pilot I have ever known in my career. It killed mothers and fathers, children whose parents saw them off on their first expedition into space. Sharapov said he valued human life, and believe it or not, so do I. They used to string up people like you. Hang them in a cage for the victim’s families to see them slowly die from exposure. You deserve the same thing.”

  Rebecca laughed hysterically, and Winchester switched his focus to where she stood.

  “Bring his Matsue accomplice forward,” he commanded, and they pushed Rebecca forward, where she floated for a time before Gauge grabbed her by her lapel and held her next to him. “You love this girl?” he asked Jimmy, and the young man tried his best to put on a look of defiance. The woman cursed at him, but Winchester looked past her to Jimmy and read into his mannerisms.

  “Name all of your accomplices and I will lock you up to await a true trial when we dock. Lie to me, or keep your mouth shut on some foolish notion of honor, and I will send this woman out of an airlock at the end of this trial. I don’t bluff Jimmy so come clean, who all helped you to sabotage my ship.”

  “Come on, Jimmy, you can still have a life,” Siebert offered, and Jessica joined in with appealing to him. After a while, Jimmy held up his hand to tell them to stop, and his body convulsed as he became overcome with guilt. “It was just me, Hayes, nobody else. I just wanted a fair cut—”

  “No help from engineering, just you, Jimmy?” Winchester asked in disbelief. “B-but, how? How in the hell does a miner have the means to do this much damage to my ship?”

  “Drilling candles.” That was all Jimmy said before hanging his head and staying silent. The entire space grew silent with him, and Winchester ex
changed glances with Gauge.

  Adelaide went nuclear, “What?” she exclaimed. “You blew us to bits with a magnesium drilling fuse? ChEng, how in the world did we allow that to happen?”

  Both she and Jeremy looked beside themselves with surprise at what they heard from Jimmy. They had expected the explosion to be the result of something elaborate and high-tech, a well-orchestrated plan that set chemical off on chemical at the right time. But what they learned was that it was unsophisticated, an explosion that went off at the right time while the xenon gas leaked.

  “Oh, you have to go,” Adelaide said to Jimmy, her face a red mask of anger.

  “Leave him alone, Bähr, he’s to be our prisoner. When we touch down in a few days, he will have to deal with the actual law. As to Ms. Matsue here, she’s an outsider. She helped this man so lock her up too.”

  The room took on a loud commotion as people began to talk, apologize, and speculate with one another. There were hugs, fist bumps, and numerous handshakes, as the once accused miners made friendly with the engineers and bridge crew. Winchester could even make out Marisol Vega giving old Vicky a hug. Adelaide, on the other hand, pulled a screaming Rebecca from the room, joined by Gauge, Siebert, and several other members of the crew. Jimmy tried to protest but could only watch them leave and, once they were gone, he seemed to weaken physically.

  Winchester Hayes got up from the crate and his eyes found Femke Gerhardt’s. She smiled at him, her eyes more mischief than happy. He wondered how long he’d be in court before they relieved him back on Earth. The prospect used to be pretty daunting, but now as he swam in those large blue eyes, it was no longer a finality.

  Retirement would mean a new life with her, another chance. It was almost too good to be true, but first he needed to deal with the saboteur, and then get his ship back home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Days Until Home: 6

  “A lot of comms traffic now,” Jeremy said looking at a display. His eyes followed the bundle of cables that snaked around equipment and covered most of the deck. They were getting more and more communication from outside the ship as the Kerwood thundered toward Earth orbit. There was increasing concern that the Kerwood was still at maximum cruising speed. The decision was made a few days after the trial to burn hot and hard and request assistance once they reached the Earth.

  That was the plan until our comms array was struck by space junk, Jeremy thought bitterly. They were only a few days away, and their rescuers should’ve been days into preparation, but with no way to ask for help, humanity was left to watch the crippled silent ship head straight for them.

  It didn’t help that the Matsue broadcast stories of mutiny, treachery, sabotage, piracy, and kidnapping. The Matsue captain and crew set the narrative, and without Captain Hayes and the rest of the Kerwood crew to set the record straight, public opinion was solidly against them.

  “It won’t help us, so we ignore it,” Adelaide declared from under a console.

  She was trying to create a communications array by linking a series of forearm clusters together and trying to patch the signal through the telemetry array or some other such nonsense. Adelaide seemed to have one crazy plan after another. In the last two weeks, Captain Hayes was seen less and less. He appeared to throw himself into the work required, and it fell to Adelaide and Jeremy to get them home. Even with the trial uncovering the saboteurs, the captain seemed resigned to the fate that awaited him if they made it home. Each new problem with his ship led to him being more and more focused on their salvation. He and Femke holed up together. He became a living ghost wandering the ship fixing this and that. He spoke to no one and had decreed that his portion of the dwindling foodstuffs be split among the rest of the crew. Femke, Marisol, and Gauge followed his lead and did the same. They were thinning now, and the captain was now a skeleton of a man. But then again, they all were. Jeremy ate his last piece of food the previous morning.

  “Can you get this working?” Jeremy asked of his Main Propulsion Assistant.

  “I’ll get it working or die trying,” Adelaide’s voice sounded out from under the console.

  “Not slagging funny, Bähr,” Jeremy retorted, the ire he felt evident in his voice.

  “Look, ChEng,” Adelaide said with a heavy sigh, “you hovering and interrogating me won’t get this done any sooner.” She pushed her way out from under the console and locked her eyes on his. “In fact,” she continued, “It might even make me screw something up.”

  Their eyes were locked for a moment. “I read you five by five,” Jeremy hissed.

  Adelaide shrugged and scooted back under the console. Jeremy knew he had been summarily dismissed. As he walked through the airlock to main engineering, he didn’t even have the energy to be offended by the behavior of his subordinate. He stumbled over a piece of equipment, made brief contact with the bulkhead, and staggered down the passageway. It could very well be the last opportunity he’d ever have to see the engineering marvel that was the Kerwood.

  Days Until Home: 5

  “Go on, take it,” the heavily accented voice demanded. Old Vicky squeezed Erika’s hand around the protein bar fragment. The piece couldn’t have been more than an inch long and a quarter of that thick.

  “Our supplies were evenly distributed among the crew,” Erika insisted. “I would never dream of taking someone else’s food. Especially now that I’m some sort of slagging tourist,” she snapped and slammed the meager sustenance down on the plastic table. She shifted uncomfortably in her metal chair. The padding had been stripped from all the chairs and affixed to the bulkheads in the cargo bay.

  Adelaide’s plan to flood the cargo bay with water was well underway, and after all the cargo crates had been relocated along the bulkheads in the hallway, they started to make the cargo bay into a cocoon of padding and flex material.

  Moving the mineral crates out of the cargo bay served a dual purpose. There were fewer things to cover with padding, and although the crates were supposed to be airtight and watertight, no one wanted to risk water mixing with the exotic ores. Gauge couldn’t tell them what that mixture might do to the water.

  “No one blames you,” Old Vicky insisted.

  “Blames me for what?” Erika shrieked. Even blind, she could feel his eyes locked on hers. “For saving the crew when we escaped the Matsue?” She sighed and lowered her voice. “We’d be better off on the Matsue.”

  “That’s not what you were saying three weeks ago,” a surprisingly cheery voice declared.

  Erika couldn’t keep the corners of her mouth from rising. “I wasn’t blind, useless, and puking every hour on the hour, Josh.”

  DeJoseph squeezed her shoulder and leaned close to her ear. “You aren’t getting your fair share of the food with the radiation sickness making it impossible to keep food in your belly.”

  A grunt from Old Vicky indicated that he agreed with DeJoseph’s sentiment.

  “Besides,” the Baltic accent continued, “we all seek out your advice for our parts of Crazy Ade’s plan.”

  Erika felt DeJoseph nod through his lingering contact on her shoulder. “I can’t see you nod, Josh.”

  “Yeah, but you know that I did,” came his reply. He cleared his throat and continued, “The reason I came to find you is that we’re worried about the panels in the cargo bay frying with all the water in there.”

  “How high is the water now?” she asked as DeJoseph rested on a stripped chair next to her.

  “Waist deep,” DeJoseph replied, the hiss of breath from across the table indicated Old Vicky’s displeasure with her. “In less than two hours, it’ll be high enough to make contact with the electronics.”

  “Can we melt plastic to make a sealant?” she asked.

  “He’s not answering any of your questions until you’ve eaten,” Old Vicky declared.

  Erika scowled. Or at least she tried to scowl. She had control over the part of her face that wasn’t burnt. The other was a mask of flesh that, after she had harassed Gauge
for an answer, he confided that by the time they got to Earth, and assuming they somehow survived, there was nothing that could be done for her. Even skin grafts and surgery was a crap shoot with the amount of radiation that had seeped into her bones.

  “Eat the slagging protein bar, Erika,” DeJoseph insisted.

  Erika felt around the table for the protein bar, her half scowl daring either of the men to help her in any way. Her fingers touched the smooth top of the bar, and she popped it into her mouth. After a moment of malevolent mastication, she swallowed the lumpy paste and pushed herself away from the table with her remaining hand. “Take me to the cargo bay,” she insisted and shook off DeJoseph’s hand at her elbow. She walked with confidence to the galley door and punched in her key code to allow egress. She looked over her shoulder and declared, “Well, Josh, you coming or what?”

  Days Until Home: 4

  “We are so slagging screwed,” Adelaide muttered under her breath.

  Femke and Gauge looked up at Adelaide, who poured over an engineering console. Gauge sported a crooked grin and replied, “Call no man happy until he is dead.”

  “Herodotus,” declared Femke. She smiled and touched Gauge on the elbow. “It’s about time you learned your history.” She glanced at Adelaide. “Now that we don’t have much left…” she let her voice fade, the connotation left unspoken.

  “We’re fine,” Adelaide retorted. She said it with her jaw clenched and eyes averted. She tried to keep her tone light, but her sharp, clipped tongue betrayed her. As with time immortal, those two words clearly meant something else entirely.

  The brief utterance of those two simple words had doomed dialogue for untold generations. Had the two-word phrase ever been more than a lie? They obviously meant so much more and concealed a thousand unspoken truths. Adelaide knew they were anything but fine.

  Adelaide kept those truths to herself and, instead, swiped diagonally across the face of her console. Her audience only briefly caught the score of red readings displayed before they followed the course of her finger. She sighed. “Who the slag’s Herodotus?” she asked.