After Moses: Wormwood

by Michael F Kane

  YVONNE LOOKED AT THE display showing their course vs. the incoming ship. She made a slight adjustment to their heading, dipping the Sparrow’s nose a couple of degrees toward the horizon and watched as the computer updated predicted paths. This put them further from frameshift but gave the other ship less time inside firing range. At least until they adjusted their own heading.

  Benny stumbled into the cockpit. “What’s going on?”

  “Someone is still trying to kill us, and it seems they have a ship.”

  He stood unmoving in the doorway mouth agape.

  She recognized that expression. “Sorry, your first-time off planet is going to be a rough ride. This isn’t the safest bird to fly on.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  Yvonne looked down at the rust-red world, patched by occasional cities and spots of green life. “It is,” she agreed.

  Abigail and Grace crowded into the cockpit, the latter worming her way into the co-pilot’s chair. She fiddled with the scopes. “Three minutes to contact. I’m guessing they don’t want coffee.”

  “Not likely,” Abigail said. “Freeport 2 is out. What’s plan B?”

  Yvonne had been trying not to think about that. “It’ll have to be the Jupiter neighborhood,” she said after a long pause. Venus and Ceres are farther with their current alignments.”

  “There are other places in the asteroid belt that might be closer,” Benny suggested.

  “I would consider going to Vesta, but right now, that’s farther as well. The Freeports I know of in that orbit are lawless warzones. I can do better than any doctor we find there.” She shook her head. “We’ll go to Jupiter.”

  Davey’s voice crackled over the speakers. “So what’s the plan here? Am I shooting at something?”

  “Probably,” Yvonne said. “Single target coming from a higher altitude orbit. Two minutes to contact.”

  “Fifteen-hundred-klick range,” Grace said. “They just shifted course. New contact time in one thirty.”

  Benny started to say something but only stammered before shutting his mouth. “I know,” Abigail said. “The space stuff is the worst. You spend your time waiting for something you’ll never see to blow you apart.”

  “Then do something useful,” Yvonne bit out. “Take Benny and make sure everyone on board has oxygen masks in case we lose pressurization.” As soon as they left, the cockpit started feeling better, less like a cage, and more like a place to work.

  “Target has launched two torpedoes,” Grace said. “Marking them for you, Davey.”

  “I see them... What the...? Why are they moving like that? Some sort of death spiral?”

  Yvonne leaned over to look at Grace’s display. “They’re called corkscrews. And that spiral is to throw your aim off.”

  “I can tell,” Davey said. “They’re entering range. Aiming for the first one.”

  “Twenty seconds to impact,” Grace said. “Fast little thruster nozzles, aren’t they?”

  “I can see that!”

  Yvonne and Grace watched on the rear camera as he tried to track the spiral of the first corkscrew. “Try leading your shots more,” Grace offered.

  “He knows,” Yvonne whispered.

  “I know!” Davey shouted.

  “Six seconds.”

  Yvonne gripped the controls.

  The first corkscrew blossomed into fire.

  “Eight seconds to second impact,” Grace said.

  “I can’t... Yvonne!”

  She fired maneuvering thrusters and spun them ninety degrees, keeping the main engines at full burn. In theory, a corkscrew gave up maneuverability for its spiral. Just how much was the subject of the current experiment.

  “Three, two, one.” Grace gripped the chair.

  “Sweet mother of Moses, that was close!” Davey shouted. “Less than ten meters. I saw it right outside the turret.”

  “Then why didn’t you shoot it?” Yvonne asked, killing the engines and spinning the Sparrow to give him a shot at the torpedo, trying desperately to correct its overshoot.

  “This is hard,” he said, sullen. To his credit, he landed the fourth shot, disposing of the threat once and for all.

  Yvonne put them back on course. “The ship is almost in range,” she said. “Davey, start firing in its direction and let’s hope it gets the memo.”

  He opened fire. The space-time shockwaves faded before reaching the approaching adversary, but that must have been enough for them. “They just fired retro-rockets,” Grace said. “They’re disengaging.”

  “They probably don’t have a thumper of their own,” Yvonne said. “They can’t risk approaching into canon range now that they know we have a good gunner.”

  “Damn right, we do,” Davey muttered.

  Grace tsked, “Just because Matthew’s in for repairs doesn’t mean he’s okay with you cursing over comms.”

  And there was the sobering reminder, the inexorable tug of gravity pulling their feet back to the real world. It took Yvonne another few minutes to frameshift them away from Mars, drop out, and then set a course for Jupiter. She joined the others in the common room. Elizabeth still hadn’t emerged from Matthew’s quarters. Yvonne would need to check in on him soon. She had a feeling she would be redoing his sutures the way they’d dragged him around all afternoon.

  “Alright, everyone,” she said, getting their attention. Five pairs of eyes pointed her way. “We’re three days out from Jupiter. The good news is we’re safely away. The bad news is, we’re not stocked for eight people. It’s going to be thin rice and bean soups, but no one is going to starve. I’m going to offer Elizabeth the extra room. Candace, Benny, you’re welcome to sleep in the common room. We have extra bedding from the last time we had extras onboard. If you want more privacy, you can take the hold, but it won’t be as comfortable. Your choice.” No one looked pleased, but she wasn’t half done yet. “I wasn’t expecting to be spaceborne yet, so we’ll have a long maintenance list tomorrow.” That set Abigail and Grace grumbling at the least.

  She heard a sound behind her. Elizabeth walked into the common room as if in a daze.

  Davey was by her side in an instant and took her gently by the arm. “Is Matthew alright? Are you okay?”

  “He’s fine,” she said. “It’s not that. It’s... I talked to one of my workers shortly after leaving Arizona, and he visited the farm with the police.” She trailed off and looked away, obviously fighting off tears. “They torched the house and fields. It’s gone. The house my husband grew up in. The house where Matthew was born.”

  There was no stopping the torrent of tears now as she slumped against Davey. Grace ran to her and embraced them both in a hug. Yvonne just turned away, retreating to Matthew’s room, a dark fire burning in her heart.

  There was no justice in the universe. Moses wasn’t the only one that had abandoned them. God himself had to have turned his back on their miserable race.

  “YOU’RE NOT IN TOO MUCH pain?” Abigail asked, pushing a strand of her hair back behind her ear. She sat in her wheelchair by Matthew’s bed, too tired to stay awake, but too stressed for sleep. Yvonne had awakened the patient to get his vitals, and Abigail had jumped on the chance to talk to him until she was chased away again. They’d made the collective decision not to tell him about the farm yet. Better to leave that tragedy for another day.

  “No more than the last two times you asked,” he said. His voice was thinner than usual and she didn’t like it. “It’s only going to get worse for a day or two.” He shifted back against the pillow propping him up and winced.

  She did her best to ignore his discomfort, but she itched to fix it. Somehow. “Why’s that?” she asked instead.

  “Serious injuries always hurt more a couple days in,” he said.

  “Oh. I guess I haven’t had a lot of injuries in my career so far.” She picked at a thread on her sleeve.

  Matthew started to laugh, at least until his face screwed up with pain.

  “Sorry!” she
said, rolling forward a little.

  “It’s fine, I promise. A little laughter won’t kill me.”

  “What won’t kill you?” Yvonne asked, entering the room.

  Abigail rolled her chair away from his bed. “I made him laugh. It was an accident.”

  Yvonne hummed an unintelligible response as she hung an IV bag on the tower beside him. Abigail looked away as she fiddled with the lines. She could handle broken bones and gunshot wounds, but needles gave her the creeps.

  “What’s on the menu?” Matthew asked.

  “An antibiotic,” Yvonne said. “Just in case. I’ll be back to check on you in a few hours.”

  “Can’t just let me sleep, huh?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll be losing sleep too, so at least you have that to comfort you.”

  Abigail rotated her chair toward the door. “I guess that’s my cue.” She faced Matthew one last time. “People are in the habit of getting shot around here, and I’d appreciate it if they wouldn’t.”

  He smiled, but Yvonne stiffened. “What are you talking about?”

  Abigail raised an eyebrow. “Ceres. You know.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Matthew took a grazing shot at Bennet Tower, remember?”

  Yvonne’s face drained of color. “Of course. Goodnight.” She practically ran from the room.

  Abigail stared at her retreat. “What was that about?”

  Matthew shifted again and she turned back to him. “Whatever it is has been eating at her for months. Something happened on Ceres. And no, she won’t talk about it. I’ve tried.”

  “Well don’t worry about it,” Abigail said. “Get some sleep before the doctor comes back to prod you some more.”

  “You too,” he said and closed his eyes.

  She rolled out of his room and reached for the door to her own cabin before pausing. On an impulse, she went to the cockpit instead and closed the door behind her. The room was a pain for her to get around, suited or wheelchaired. She managed to wedge in between the chairs, and if she leaned forward over the console, she could just reach the displays.

  She tabbed through several screens before pulling up the security archives. She moved back through the files until she got to Ceres. Hmm. Where to start? Yvonne had only left the Sparrow twice, both times related to the opera job, and Abigail couldn’t see any link between that night and the previous conversation. Her bounty had kept her pretty well isolated from the outside world.

  Now that was a bit of a mystery. Yvonne had been evasive about the details of the bounty’s lifting, and Matthew hadn’t even believed it until he’d looked it up on the syndicate boards himself. That had been three days after the Prodigal’s detonation. She pulled up all the cams for that day and played it in reverse at high speed.

  This was stupid. What was she even expecting to see? People came and went from the Sparrow in a blur of movement. There probably wasn’t even anything to see in the first place. Yvonne may have had a private comm conversation. In fact, that was probably it. Whatever drama had occurred would remain a secret until the woman would just fess up and be out with it. She was about to clear the display when the screen showed an error message.

  “File missing,” she read aloud. She backed up to a date-by-date view of the archives. The entire day was gone. The day they’d stolen back the Prodigal and saved Ceres. She stared at the screen in disbelief. Whatever had happened, Yvonne had gone to the trouble to make sure no one would find out.

  Abigail shut down the display and turned out the lights. “We’ll see about that,” she muttered.

  THE NEXT MORNING, LONG before the others were up, Yvonne woke Matthew to check his wounds and vitals.

  “Couldn’t have waited another hour, huh?” he asked.

  “No. Hold still.”

  He grunted as she peeled back the bandaging and inspected it. Only a few spots of dried blood. Her eyes fell on the wound itself. The sutures, the ones she had redone after they had nearly been tugged out by the action yesterday, were holding nicely. However...

  She ran a gloved finger lightly over the faint red streaks emanating from the area. They were warm to the touch. She replaced the bandage with a fresh one. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  “Something wrong?”

  “It’s nothing to worry about yet.”

  She left his room and returned to her own. Her small case of pharmaceuticals was open on the floor beside her bed. She dug out two small vials and returned to Matthew.

  “It appears,” she said, as she began to work on the IV tower, “that your exit wound is infected. There’s some reddening of the skin in the area. You aren’t feverish, so it’s likely localized for now. I’m going to hit you with all three antibiotics in my pharmacy and hope to put a stop to it.”

  He frowned. “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “It most likely will,” she said, putting on a mask of confidence. It wasn’t that she thought she was lying. She believed it too. It was more that he didn’t need to worry about it right now. “My medical stores are rather limited by necessity, so I’ve been very picky about my selection of drugs. These three antibiotics are quite capable of dealing with a broad spectrum of bacterial infections.”

  “Great,” he said. “Well as long as you let me eat today, I think I’ll live. I’m starving.”

  She smiled as she started the new IV drip, trying to put the infection out of her mind for now. “I think that can be arranged.”

  “DINNER’S READY!” GRACE called.

  Davey set the thick book he’d borrowed from Elizabeth by his bed and went to the common room. In the couple of weeks since he’d borrowed it, he’d struggled through the opening pages. Hard stuff. The whole crew, minus Matthew, plus the added three passengers, were already congregating. “What’s cooking?” he asked.

  “Rice and bean soup,” Grace said, shoving a bowl into his hands. “Just like yesterday. Just like it will be tomorrow.”

  “I was hoping you’d figured out a way to get creative with it.”

  “Yeah let me go through the cupboards and find something else. Oh wait. There’s nothing else.”

  Davey took the bowl and went to the table, but then decided against it. There were too many of them to sit together anyway. May as well let the women have it. He slid down against a wall a meter or so from Benny. He took the first mouthful of the soup. It wasn’t actually bad, despite his earlier complaints. Sometimes simple food could satisfy in a way that the fancy stuff could only dream of.

  Once everyone had their bowl, Yvonne cleared her throat. “I need to talk to everyone now that we’re all together.”

  Davey looked up. She looked calm as ever, but Elizabeth was pale and haggard. He frowned.

  “Matthew’s infection has progressed rapidly since this morning,” Yvonne continued. “It hasn’t responded to any of the antibiotics I have on board, and he has begun to run a fever.” She paused. “We’re still two days out from Ganymede. Matthew’s life is now in serious danger, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  The room went deathly silent, save for a clatter as a couple people set down their spoons.

  “Elizabeth and I spoke with him a few minutes ago about the possibility of returning to Mars. Such a trip would only take a single day and give Matthew a better shot at survival. However... He has refused, as that would likely put the entire ship in danger.”

  “Screw that,” Abigail growled. “We can handle a little danger.”

  “It’s his ship. He’s the captain,” Yvonne said. “He’s made the decision for the good of everyone, not himself.”

  “What are his chances?” Candace asked quietly. Davey knew she and Benny felt some responsibility for this mess. It was foolish, because Matthew had probably been the target all along, and if they hadn’t found him then, they would have another time. But then he knew the feeling. He’d been wondering what would have been different if he and Grace hadn’t botched the first stakeout and had finished their
job soon enough to be home when Benny called.

  “I don’t know,” Yvonne said. “Either he lives or he dies, and I won’t know until you do.”

  Davey set his bowl aside. “And there’s nowhere closer? Not even one of those freeports?”

  “I’ve checked,” Yvonne said. “From our current position, we could be at Freeport 30 in a day, but the latest information says that it’s a barely habitable, gang-infested wasteland. That report is almost two years old.”

  Right. So it was worse by now. That was definitely out.

  “And there’s no way we can go any faster?” Candace asked.

  “I’ve set the frameshift to as high a speed as I can without risking repeated dropouts.”

  “Can’t you just keep restarting it?” Abigail asked.

  “You risk extreme damage to the whole system like that,” Yvonne said. “We’re going as fast as we can. I promise.”

  Benny waved his hand to get everyone’s attention. “We could go faster if we frame-skipped.”

  “Frame-what?” Grace asked.

  “Frame-skipping,” he repeated. “Doesn’t anyone else follow the racing circuits out of Venus?” He looked at Davey as if he of all people should know.

  “Don’t look at me.” Davey responded with a shrug.

  “What’s frame-skipping,” Elizabeth interrupted. “And is it a practical solution for us?”

  “It’s a technique the racers use to push the boundaries of what frameshifting is capable of. See, we all know you can only go so fast with a frameshift. The faster you go, the shorter the bubble lasts, and you get kicked out to normal speed. The strain of maintaining the high-speed bubble builds up massive heat in the system too. Burns everything out. Frame-skipping is using a team to water cool the heatsinks to keep the temperatures manageable.”

  “Which lets you risk higher speeds,” Yvonne said. Davey could see her wheels were already turning.