“Don’t make me slap you!” Kira growled. “I don’t mean just now; I mean when it happened.”
Tarn shrugged. “That was weeks ago!”
Kira closed her eyes and thought back. She’d found the enemy ship but it was at extreme range still. Sharp was worried what kind of weapons the pirates had… She gasped. Suddenly it flashed into her head as clear as if she had just heard it. “This is a transport! No sensors worth a damn on here. Mining rig’s got better eyesight than this thing does.” She even did a poor job of imitating Tarn’s gruff and surly voice.
“Yeah, sounds right,” Tarn agreed.
“It is right; it’s exactly right!” Kira said, turning back to study the inventory list again. “Captain, we can float blind forever or you can break into our cargo and rig up some eyes for us out of the mining gear we’ve got. There’s some small scout craft we’re carrying that have them on them. Perhaps even hook them up in an array for greater detail.”
She looked up at the open-mouthed faces of the rest of the crew. “That’s brilliant!” Eric said in awe. Sharp slapped his chair and laughed, and then he hopped up and went over to Kira’s station, giving her a resounding smack right on her lips. She let out a surprised yelp and pushed him back but he just gave her a wink. “Captain’s prerogative. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Eric.”
“What?” Tarn blurted out.
“Tarn, suit up; you and Eric got some work to do. Jeff, start clearing off the old sensors.” Sharp gave Kira another thumbs-up. “We may be limping and we may not have much hope, but by the stars out there, we’re going to know where we are!”
Chapter 11
Close to thirty hours later, Eric’s disembodied voice came across the ship’s speakers. “We’ve made the last connections. Some calibration may be necessary since we’re running in tandem, but we’ll deal with that when it’s needed. Energizing the array in three…two….one…”
Kira slipped in streams of commands into her station. Text scrolled across her screen, and then blinked out for half a second. When it returned it was sectioned off into windows, one containing her text stream while two others had graphical displays. Kira hissed triumphantly, and then continued to instruct the computer to bring the new sensor arrays on line. Within moments the main display came back to life, rendering a simulated image rather than the direct optical feed of the space outside of the Rented Mule.
Captain Sharp threw his fist in the air and let loose a whoop. “Keep your hands to yourself!” Eric warned over the speakers. Sharp and Kira both laughed, remembering the last time Kira did something Sharp was pleased with.
“All right, so where are we?” the Captain asked.
Kira focused on her display as she worked the controls and tried to zero in on their location. She frowned, not making sense of what her system told her. “I’m not sure. We’re travelling just under half the speed of light.”
“What!”
“Yes, sir, point four five of C,” Kira confirmed. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense. I can’t even figure out our course or where we came from. Something must have happened during the fi—”
“What’s wrong?” Sharp demanded as Kira fell silent.
She held up a finger on her free hand, which only served Sharp to hop out of his chair and come and lean over her shoulder. She glanced up at him, conveying her annoyance with her pinched eyebrows. “The Mule doesn’t have any inertial compensators.”
Sharp snorted. “It’s a damned old transport. We’re lucky it’s got engines!”
“Yeah, well without those and with inertial suppression on the inside of the ship, we’ve got no idea when our course is altered without active sensors. The first battle, with all of those impacts from the raider, must have skewed our heading — probably our pitch as well if not the other axis.”
“So what? We’re lost in space?”
Kira sighed. “No— well, yes, but only until I have time to figure things out. We’re going faster than we thought. We didn’t expect to hit anything over .15 C. I bet nobody bothered checking either, because of that, but now that I’m looking at it… yes, see, our fuel reserves for the pushers are at ten percent. We were supposed to make the run to the mining station and back and still have forty percent left!”
Sharp swore and turned to stomp back to his seat.
“Captain,” Eric said over the speakers, “it doesn’t really matter how much fuel we have for the pushers. We’ve only got one that I can squeak anything out of and it would take close to sixty years to slow down, turn around, or do anything else.”
“What happened?” Sharp spouted. “Why the extra speed? Why the extra fuel?”
“Does it matter?”
Kira turned to look at Tarn. He held up his hands, showing that her glare was similar to the Captain’s. “Hey, don’t be looking at me like that. It don’t matter what happened — it happened. Now we got to figure out what we’re going to do about it. More time we waste not doing that, the more fucked we are.”
Kira felt her eyes narrow as she eyed him suspiciously. He was right, but why draw attention away from figuring out what happened if not to hide something? She turned back to her station, suddenly taken with an idea prompted by Tarn’s suggestion.
“Got it!” Kira cried out a minute later. “I couldn’t pinpoint us because I wasn’t using the right dimensions!”
“Dimensions? We hit a natural jump station or a wormhole or something?” Sharp asked bitterly.
Kira shook her head. “No, sorry, I meant x, y, z, and time. I hadn’t factored in that we might not be in the time we think we should be.”
“I’m waiting for this to make sense and I have to say, I’m not in the mood for being played with.”
“Yes, Captain, no games, sir. When the sensors were hit, it sent all sorts of feedback into our system that messed with the ship’s core computers. Our four-week sleep was closer to twelve months.”
Sharp groaned and slumped in his chair after a long moment of staring at Kira with an open mouth. Tarn was quicker to react, blurting out, “Them pirates followed us for a year?”
Kira shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. I think they were probably somebody else though.”
“Who would be this far out?” Sharp perked up.
“No idea, sir, but more importantly we missed the asteroid belt by about eleven months. It’s damn near a light year away from us, but we didn’t just shoot past it; we also were pitched up about five degrees. Although the recent fight skewed us some more.”
“So where are we headed?”
“Out there…sir,” Kira said. “Deep space. Deeper; we’re already outside the Rim.”
The silence on the bridge was agonizing until, after a pregnant pause, Captain Sharp exhaled softly. “How are our maneuvering reserves?”
Kira called up another display on the main screen. “Seventy percent, sir.” She turned to look at him, not sure what else she could or should do. He nodded as he looked at it, and then stood up slowly. “Do we have broadcast ability?”
“Yes, Captain,” Eric said over the speakers. Kira noted his voice sounded subdued, and then again she supposed not a one of them sounded the best. Their situation had passed desperate a while ago; now even bleak was an optimistic description. “Radio signal or direct transmission.”
“I’ll be in my room,” Sharp announced abruptly. He paused, looking at both Kira and Tarn alternately. “If either of you have anything you want to say to anyone left behind, I suggest you figure it out now.”
Sharp left the two of them with that somber thought. Kira looked at Tarn and found her vision skewed by unshed tears. She blinked them away and took a deep breath that had potential to turn into a sob. She kept it controlled and offered the ex-Marine a faint smile. “Ex-Marine?”
He nodded. “Discharged for a little misunderstanding with some terrorists that took over a space station.”
Kira felt the muscles in her back stiffen even as the new memories flooded through her mind. “Blue
Vistas space station?” He nodded. “You used a particle accelerator cannon to blow a hole through the hull! You killed nearly two hundred people, most of them civilians!”
Tarn shrugged. “Got the job done.”
“You’re a cold-blooded son of a bitch!” she hissed.
Tarn chuckled. The chuckle turned deeper as it went on, until he was laughing at her. Kira glared at him, ready to rise out of her seat and shut him up forcefully. She refrained, either from a sense of curiosity or futility. They were all doomed, she figured; why not get her questions answered instead of just putting her foot through his teeth?
“Wasn’t no warm and fuzzy girl that put down seven pirates,” he finally said. “Don’t know what you done, girl, but I reckon you and I got something in common. And I’m not talking about lusting for that engineer’s horse-dick neither!”
“I lost a friend on Blue Vistas. A civilian that got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and you spaced her.” Kira stared at him, feeling a sense of calm that scared her. It came from deep within her and, she suspected, it was a leftover from Emily. The friend she mentioned was a friend of Emily’s. Or at least as close to a friend as her alter-ego had ever had. Kira had never known her or known of her, but now she could see her faintly freckled pale face with a startling clarity. Her name had been Angela, but Emily had called her Angel. Especially when—
Kira’s hand went to her mouth to hide her gasp. Tarn frowned. “What? You was looking like you was about to shoot me; now this?”
“She was more than a friend,” Kira whispered. She was shocked. She’d never known. Another woman? She wondered if there had been any others.
“Sorry,” Tarn shrugged, clearly anything but sorry. “Older I get, smaller the universe ends up being. You want some payback, you come and get it. Maybe I’m old and fat and out of shape, but I still got what they put in me. Might be a good way to go – better than waiting for us to run out of food or die in my sleep.”
“I’m not going to kill you.” Kira put the memories of Emily’s long-lost friend away. That had been over sixteen years ago, she realized. Seventeen now, considering their prolonged sleep. “I think you’re kind of a loser, but my social options are limited.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Tarn said.
Kira spared him a withering glare and turned back to her station. With nothing else to do but wait for the end to come, she decided she might as well figure out what their future held.
Chapter 12
Each member of the Rented Mule’s crew recorded their messages privately. When it came Kira’s turn, she realized she had no one left behind her. No family and no friends. She’d only had herself and, though she’d searched her memory long and hard, she could only find one resemblance of a relationship and that had been to Angela. Emily had enjoyed a few trysts here and there — with men, Kira was happy to remember — but that was the end of it. Instead she rattled off instructions to have her various accounts, over a dozen of them, donated to charitable organizations that specialized in helping to provide aid and assistance to troubled children.
With that finished, the crew gathered on the bridge to plan what would become of the rest of their lives. It was a somber meeting, with none of them saying much. Eric stood next to her station but they did not reach for one another. Kira longed for the comfort of human touch but she thought it would be cruel to the rest of the crew. They had no one to turn to for solace.
“All right, with any luck our messages will be received in a year or so. We’re broadcasting a distress signal, but we’re also stuck travelling away from help faster than most ships would risk going. A military vessel is our only hope for a quick recovery, and by quick I mean about three years.” Sharp looked around the bridge at his crew. He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a sorry lot of castoffs from society, but I guess I can’t think of anyone better to fly into the great unknown with. Well, that’s not true; maybe some gene-bred triplets trained by a courtesan service might be a little more enjoyable…”
“Sir,” Kira spoke up after giving everyone a chance to pretend they were amused by the Captain’s joke. “I’ve been studying the new readings our sensors are pulling in. It’s light years away still, but there’s a star close by. The other charts don’t make mention of it but that could be because of the angle we’re at. It looks like there’s a particularly dense asteroid belt ringing the system.”
“Close by and light years away?” Sharp asked, pointing out her contradictory terms.
“Sorry,” she said, seeing his point, “but yes, it’s less than four light years from us. That’s a little under eight years.”
“Then what?” Tarn snorted.
Kira refused to favor him with even a glance. “Then we see what they’ve got there. Maybe we can find a planet big enough to hook us in orbit and sling us back around. We might even pick up some speed so that we head back Core-ward at a faster speed.”
Tarn grunted derisively. Sharp stared at the display and then at her, nodding his head as his eyes lost focus. She glanced up at Eric and saw him staring at her with a hint of a smile on his face. “Eight years?” Sharp muttered. “Another eight years back…”
“It’s a long shot, sir,” Kira reminded them all.
“But it’s better than anything else we got,” Sharp finished for her. “All right, do what you have to so we can get there. It’s not like we’re using our fuel for anything else. Then we’ll get the ship ready for a deep sleep and go for it. Our engines will run for a couple of hundred years, but that’s just energy. We’ve got the chemicals on hand for a couple of months of food and water, more if we go sparingly, and probably twenty years’ worth of cold sleep chemicals and nutrients.”
“You’re talking about a deep sleep, not just a few months at a time?” Eric asked. Kira glanced up at him and, in spite of her earlier concerns, reached out to take his hand in hers.
“Yeah, and it won’t be easy coming out with all of us down but as long as nothing messes up our computers again we should be able to do it.”
Kira nodded. She felt her heart beat faster in her chest. It excited her to have a plan. To have hope. It was a slim chance but it was a chance and that’s what mattered. “So what are we waiting for? I’m looking forward to putting another eight years under my belt!”
“Can we wait a few hours, at least?” Eric said. He squeezed Kira’s hand and then admitted, “Risky stuff, going in deep like that. Just in case anything goes wrong, I’d like to get under her belt, too, if you don’t mind?”
The others all laughed, causing Kira to blush. Most had the good grace to let it alone but Tarn added to it, “Sounds good to me. You starting the line?”
Kira displayed a small but very wicked=looking knife and said, “Tarn, you can touch me with anything you want, as long as you can get it passed this first.”
Sharp whistled while Jeff chuckled. Tarn stared at the knife with wide eyes and then grinned. She squeezed Eric’s hand to reassure him and then fed the necessary commands into the nav station to steer the ship towards the unnamed system. That finished, she stood up and then gasped as Eric picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder. Catcalls from the rest of the crew made her face burn but at no point was there any way she could deny the grin that split her lips.
Chapter 13
The display blinked, shifting from an unpowered darkness to a black non-light that nevertheless revealed shapes in the room. A moment later colors and lines sprang into existence, casting shadows from the dust-covered stations, chairs, and other objects on the bridge of the Rented Mule. The display quickly coalesced into lines of text. A window displayed the sensor readings collected automatically, indicating the layout of the solar system the Rented Mule was entering.
Colored lights sent shadows fleeing their prismatic brilliance in the cold sleep chamber. Chemicals released into controlled intravenous lines, introducing countering agents to the stasis-inducing drugs in their systems. With heartbeats reduced to single digits in
the span of a minute, the absorption took the better part of two hours before the lights changed again and announced the next stage of the process.
Electrodes activated, triggering stimulus to the atrophied muscles of the nearly flat-lined sleepers. As the heart rates began to climb into the double digits, basic nutrients and simple sugars filled the IV lines, restoring glucose and energizing the depleted muscles. Once the changes were made the system resumed a standby state, administering the new changes over a span of several days.
When next the lights changed, it was not only to signal the introduction of a gas into the enclosed chambers, but also to engage the overhead lights and raise them to a low level. Intubation tubes, filled with fluids siphoned as the bodies warmed and returned to life, retracted. A final injection, this one purely synthetic adrenaline, was delivered before the electrodes were triggered with a powerful jolt. Each body convulsed, breath exploding from dry mouths as eyelids opened. The cover of the chambers popped open, hissing as the low pressure maintained internally was equalized.
Kira lay in the chamber, unable to see through the blurriness in her aching eyes. Her throat was dry and her chest felt heavy; each breath was an experience in swallowing razorblades. Kira tried to speak but barely managed a moan. It evolved into a weak attempt at coughing, and that upset her stomach and made her attempt to vomit. With nothing in her stomach, the dry heaves only left her aching and breathless. The only benefit from the process was that the tears watered her eyes enough to make her eyelids feel less like sandpaper.
Fighting the agony of muscles long gone unused, Kira forced one arm across, pulling the IV out of one arm and then repeating the action with her other arm. The other necessary connections were removed, albeit slowly, before Kira faced the daunting task of needing to climb out of her chamber.
“I can do this,” Kira whispered with a voice that was so weak that the pulse pounding in her ears nearly drowned it out. She reached up to the sides of the chamber and tried to pull herself up. She collapsed, having hardly moved. Fresh tears ran from her eyes down the sides of her face. “I’m not weak!” The rasp in her voice claimed otherwise.
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