Black Sheep

by Rachel Aukes

  Eddy rushed over and grabbed Nolin’s tool bag.

  “Hey, those are mine,” Nolin exclaimed.

  Eddy ignored the other man as he sifted through the bag’s contents. He picked out one tool at a time, said, “No,” dropped it to the floor, and picked out the next tool.

  Nolin snatched the bag back from Eddy and bent to pick up the discarded tools.

  Eddy reached for the bag again. “What are you doing? I need to patch the water line.”

  Nolin pulled the bag away from Eddy’s reach. “Not with my tools if you keep disrespecting them like that.”

  Eddy glowered at the ship’s navigator, who stood six inches taller and weighed eighty pounds more than the scrawny hardware tech.

  Nolin ignored Eddy and stepped over to examine the water line. A moment later, he rustled through his bag and pulled out a tube of sealant. He handed the tube to Eddy. “How about this?”

  Eddy grabbed it and held it up, shaking his head. “This is A-tect Plus. This is for minor plumbing repairs. Magtriptic is for any break over three inches in diameter. Haven’t you learned anything from my tutelage?”

  Nolin shrugged. “But I don’t have any Magtriptic.”

  “I have some in my tool bag,” Eddy said as a matter of fact.

  “Okay. Then go get it,” Nolin said.

  Eddy pursed his lips before waving his hands with a sudden expression of hopelessness. “I don’t know where it is.”

  Throttle stepped in. “Eddy, go put some clothes on before you catch pneumonia. Nolin can patch the break.”

  Eddy looked from her to Nolin and finally to the tube. “Well, it’s not ideal, but I suppose it’ll hold until I can seal it properly.” He gave Nolin another long look. “You’d better not screw it up. A-tect Plus is a mess to scrub off things.”

  “Go, Eddy,” Throttle said before Nolin could snap a retort.

  “Fine. But don’t turn on the water on this level until I reset the warning system,” Eddy said.

  “We won’t,” Throttle said with an edge to her voice. When he left, she turned back to find Nolin already working on the water line. “Don’t let him get to you.”

  “That’s easier said than done,” he said glumly.

  She chuckled. “He can be difficult, but he’s also the best hardware tech around, not to mention the only hardware tech on the ship. Without you pulling extra duties, we’d be in for some trouble with only Eddy around.”

  Nolin didn’t look away from his work. “I’ve learned that being on a flight crew isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Try being the only medic to eight hundred and sixty-three people,” Aubree said as she approached. She sobered as she looked to the open cryopod. “Eight hundred and sixty-two. We lost Gretchen Eiland.”

  “I saw,” Throttle said. “There was nothing anyone could’ve done.”

  Aubree gave a small smile. “She would’ve made a great colonist. So much potential lost.”

  “We should wake her family to let them see her before we send her off,” Throttle said.

  Aubree shook her head. “Gretchen lost her family back in the war. She’d signed up for the trip to start a new life.”

  The medic frowned and looked down at Throttle’s leg. “You’re bleeding.”

  Throttle glanced down to see a stream of blood running down her pant leg. “It’s nothing. The water makes it look worse than it is. I’ll glue it up when I get back to my quarters.”

  Aubree stepped forward. “Let me see.”

  Throttle held up her hand, blocking the medic. “It’s just a scratch. Look after the sleepers first.” Another shiver racked Throttle’s body and she added, “I’m heading upstairs to get out of these wet clothes and grab some hoses and pumps. We’ll reclaim as much water as we can.”

  “Should I wake the rest of the crew to help?” Aubree asked.

  “Nah. The four of us can handle a little water.”

  Sixteen hours later.

  “Who would’ve thought muscles could hurt so much from working in low grav?” Nolin mused.

  “Imagine how badly they’d hurt if we’d been working in full one g,” Throttle said as she locked her wheelchair at her station on the Gabriela’s bridge. She’d left her braces in her quarters to give her leg a chance to heal. She’d been surprised when she stripped off her gear to find that the gash had gone down to the bone. Medical glue sealed the wound, but it would still take a few days for a scar to form.

  The perpetually tan-skinned navigator cracked his back. “I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t have to be a gymnast working in one g. Only my normal muscles would be tired. I have aches in places I’ve never had aches before.”

  “You should spend more time in low g, then,” she said. “It’s good for flexibility.”

  “If you say so.” His back went straight. “Whoa, that’s weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “Did you change our flight path?” Nolin asked.

  “Of course not,” she replied, frowning. “Why do you ask?”

  His fingers flew over his panel as he ran through screens. “The angle of the solar sails has changed. Our flight path is two-six-four-two point zero-eight-six-one.”

  She cocked her head. “That sounds about right.”

  “It’s not right. Our flight path’s off by two degrees. We were on a two-six-four-two point zero-eight-five-nine heading. I remember because 859 was the year I graduated from the Academy.”

  “Check the nav history,” she said.

  He didn’t respond for several long moments. “I don’t get it. The history shows no changes since we had to adjust for that one asteroid.”

  “You just woke from your cryosleep cycle a couple of days ago. Are you sure you’re not confused?”

  “No way. I don’t have sleeper’s fog. I clearly remember our flight path. It’s not something I’d forget,” he said.

  “I believe you,” she said before thinking for several seconds. “If you’re sure our course has changed, correct it back to the original, and we’ll run checks on our flight plan.”

  “I’m sure,” he said without a hint of doubt. He took a deep breath. “Readjusting our course now.”

  Throttle watched the numbers change on her screen.

  “Okay. We’re back on course. Chalk another one up to the ghost.”

  Her screen flashed and the bridge alarm sounded. She ran her hands over the screen, but it was unresponsive. Her breath caught. “I’ve lost control over here. You?”

  “Same!”

  Throttle unlocked her chair and wheeled over to a tech station to find the screen locked there as well. She entered her override code. Nothing happened. She returned to her screen and tried various commands, including hitting the screen with her fist. Even that didn’t work.

  “What’s happening up there? I just got locked out of all my systems.” Eddy’s voice came through her wrist-comm.

  “We’re having the same problem up here,” Throttle replied and then opened the comm channel to include Aubree. “I’m going to try a reboot. Get ready to go dark.”

  Throttle returned to her station, reached under her panel, and opened a small compartment to reveal a keypad. She entered her six-digit command code. The screens blinked but remained on. The frozen systems failed to reboot.

  “It’s not working,” Nolin said.

  Throttle’s jaw tightened. “I know, I know.”

  The screens went blank before a message displayed:

  CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT.

  ESTIMATED TIME BEFORE COMPLETE SYSTEM SHUTDOWN: 47 MINUTES.

  INITIATE EVACUATION PROCEDURES.

  Throttle’s jaw slackened, and her breath left her lungs.

  “Is that what I think it is?” he asked quietly.

  She swallowed back the tar-like pitch forming in her gut. “Yeah. It’s a cat fail.” A catastrophic failure was the event every captain most feared. If a ship had a cat fail, that meant critical systems had failed, and there was no fix, no
reboot, no coming back. Remaining systems would inevitably shut down—it was just a matter of time. The electromagnetic system would no longer generate artificial gravity. The air-filtration system would no longer process breathable air.

  But everyone on board the Gabriela wouldn’t suffocate. They’d freeze to death long before that.

  Throttle knew the Gabriela had never been built for a twenty-year mission when she signed on as its captain. The cargo hauler was designed for supply runs across a single star system, skipping dock service for a year at most. She supposed she should’ve been impressed that the ship had made it through three-quarters of its mission before giving out.

  She inhaled deeply before tapping her wrist-comm. “Aubree, wake the rest of the crew. Let them know we have to abandon ship.”

  Chapter Two

  The Gabriela’s systems shut down forty-four minutes later.

  Throttle floated near the conference table, holding the edge to keep from drifting away. All six crew members were in the room with her. All wore the black chime suits like the one Throttle now wore. Chime suits, nicknamed that because of their variety of warning alarms that tended to go off at random intervals, were advanced spacesuits. They could provide full life-support features through batteries that recharged from kinetic energy as well as from power stations. Newer suits also had solar absorbers in the fabric to recharge the batteries, but none of Throttle’s crew had those.

  Most of her crew currently had their magnetized gravity boots on and “stood” on the floor or walls—or in Eddy’s case, the ceiling. Throttle found herself as comfortable, if not more so, in zero g. There, her useless legs weren’t nearly as much of a detriment as they were in gravity.

  Portable lanterns, clipped on the walls, cast shadows over the crew’s faces. They all had the good sense to know what they faced, and therefore, all bore the same expression she felt within herself.

  Dread.

  Over the past fifteen years, she’d played out this scenario a thousand times in her head, with a thousand different ways of dealing with it, but every time had led to the same outcome. There was no way to save the eight hundred and sixty-two colonists in cryosleep on board her ship without outside help.

  “Usually something big, like space debris or solar flares, causes cat fails. Any idea what caused this one?” Birk, Throttle’s right hand and co-leader of the mission, asked while he slowly treaded air.

  “I readjusted course, and then the systems failed,” Nolin said. “But I don’t think the two are related. The system had already accepted the change, no problem.”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say the systems crashed after going so many years without regular upgrades,” Sylvian, the crew’s software tech, said.

  “We’ll have plenty of time to talk about why the systems crashed later,” Throttle said. “What matters right now is that we tried every kind of reboot available to us and nothing worked. That means we have a verified cat fail, and you know that a cat fail, by definition, means that the ship’s a lost cause. We’ve covered this scenario plenty of times. If no one answers our distress call by the time we move the sleepers into a single cargo hold, we have to abandon ship in search of help. Eddy, what’s the timetable we’re looking at?”

  The hardware tech spoke as he hung from the ceiling like a bat. “With only seven of us breathing on a ship this size, air’s not a problem. This ship will have breathable air for months, if not years. Our problem is the dropping temperatures, and they’re dropping fast. I’ve been crunching numbers on my wrist-comm, but I’ve had to make some pretty big assumptions. For example, the Gabriela is a cargo hauler, so she was built for carrying maximum loads. That means she doesn’t have much insulation to hold in the heat. I also assumed that—”

  “How much time do we have?” Throttle cut in. A shiver ran over her skin, as much from foreshadowing what was to come as from the already noticeable chill in the air.

  Eddy blew out a breath before speaking. “My estimate is that we’ll drop eighteen degrees per hour. That gives us roughly six hours to get the pods moved into the most insulated cargo hold—that’s fourteen-D—and get it sealed before we run the risk of losing pods to the cold. The faster we can consolidate the sleepers into a single cargo hold, the more heat we can preserve in there.”

  “Six hours. We’ll work from that,” Throttle said as she looked across her crew’s faces. It was time to implement the plan that the crew had all agreed to during their first month on the mission. No one had talked about the plan after they’d agreed to it, though Throttle knew no one had forgotten. “Keep your chime suits on and keep an eye on your battery packs. The suits will insulate you against the cold. Our first priority is moving the pods into fourteen-D as quickly as possible.” She turned back to the ship’s mechanic. “Eddy, you need to get the battery-powered heaters up and running around the pods. Can you do that with the rest of the crew moving the pods in around you?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Okay. As soon as the pods are secure and the heaters are up and running, we can get ourselves loaded onto the Scorpia. It’s charged and ready to fly, and it holds enough supplies to last the seven of us nearly two years. That’s two years if we all stay awake. If we rotate sleepers with only one crew member awake at a time to operate the ship, that gives us over thirteen years. With that said, the batteries in fourteen-D will only last about two years, so we need to work from that number.” Throttle didn’t voice what would happen after twenty-four months because everyone knew. If they didn’t find help in that time, there would be no reason to return to the Gabriela because there would be nothing that could be done for the sleepers by then.

  Aubree winced. “No one should remain in cryosleep longer than three months. Any human left in cryosleep too long runs the risk of muscle and extremity atrophy.”

  “They can deal with a little freezer burn if it means they have a chance at surviving,” Garrett said.

  “Freezer burn?” Eddy guffawed. “Being asleep that long means that if we woke them after two years, their noses, fingers, and toes will likely have shriveled and fallen off, assuming they wake at all.”

  “Then they’ll be ugly colonists,” Birk countered.

  “What if I stay behind?” Aubree said. “I can wake them on delayed wake cycles.”

  Throttle shook her head. “Impossible. Everything outside that cargo hold will be near absolute zero within a few days’ time. There’s simply not enough battery power and space for you to cycle through waking up passengers.”

  “You stay on this ship, out of a pod, you die,” Eddy said. “That’s suicide. There’s no way I’d stay in this floating tomb.”

  Aubree frowned and pursed her lips. “I’ve spent fifteen years with the sleepers, watching over them, waking them every month and helping them return to cryosleep. I can’t leave them.”

  Throttle’s throat tightened. As captain of the Gabriela, Throttle was responsible for the sleepers’ lives, more so than any other crew member. The thought of leaving behind eight hundred and sixty-two people to likely death shattered her heart. Her jaw clenched as she bit back her emotions. She noticed Birk watching her, his gaze seeing more than she wanted him to see. Concern tightened his brows.

  “I know, Aubree. It’s a bad situation,” Throttle said finally. “But we’re playing the only card we have in our hand to help them. I’ve turned on the emergency beacon, so if someone comes within six sectors of the Gabriela while we’re out searching for help, then maybe they’ll be able to do something before we get back with help.”

  “Uh, I guess it falls on me to bring up the elephant in the room,” Nolin said. “We all know that there’s nothing habitable for another six light-years, which would take us three times that in the Scorpia, assuming we stay in jump speed as much as possible. The chances of coming across another ship over that distance—”

  “Is low. We all know that, but it’s our only option,” Throttle said. She turned and took in a deep breath. “Go. Get t
he sleepers moved and set up for long-term storage. Then pull together your belongings and get your pods moved onto the Scorpia.”

  Five of the crew members departed, their bootsteps awkward from walking in zero g. Birk pushed off from the wall and floated over to her. He placed his hand on the back of her neck and pulled her to him, pressing their foreheads together as they drifted in the room.

  “We’re doing everything we can do to save them,” he said softly, still holding her forehead to his.

  She took a deep breath before pulling away. “I know, but it doesn’t make it any easier.” She mused for a moment. “A part of me wants to give up my place on the Scorpia to a sleeper. That way, at least one colonist would have better odds of survival.”

  He shook his head and his features tightened. “You and I both know that there’s nothing except the cold abyss waiting for us out there. We’re heading out on the Scorpia because that’s what humans do. We scramble to cling to hope even when there’s nothing left to cling to.”

  She cocked her head. “Don’t tell me you’ve been having philosophy lessons piped into your pod during cryosleep.”

  “Maybe a little Sun Tzu.”

  “The Art of War?” She rolled her eyes. “I thought your pirating days were behind you.”

  “Once a pirate, always a pirate.” He gave her a crooked grin. “I remember that it was because I was a dashing outlaw that attracted you to me in the first place.”

  She chuckled. “Dashing?”

  “And dapper.” Birk was tall and lanky and his freckled narrow face bore few features a woman would call attractive. But he always did the right thing, making him a poor pirate; a conscience was inconvenient in a pirate’s life. He was smart and witty and would do anything for those he cared about. It was those traits that had drawn her to him, and she never wanted for another man.

  “I liked the Scorpia,” she said. “You had a nice ship and needed a pilot, and I’m the best pilot around.” She grabbed him and gave him a quick kiss. “And I knew you were a pushover.”

  His gaze moved across the room as he thought before turning his gaze back to her. “I’m good with that.” He reached out to her.