by A. B. Keuser
He turned back to Yella and mouthed “Sorry.” She waved him ahead, her arm crossed over her chest, her jaw set stiffly.
He’d apologize for that later, when he wasn’t trying to keep the day’s death toll from rising.
Quince was on her stomach, a ratchet in her hand. She pressed the button and the small tool went to work, pulling the rivets from the bottom of the panel.
“Put the ratchet down, Quince. You got what you wanted. Richter’s dead, but now you’re going to have to pay for it.”
“Suck an egg, Osiris. I know your type. You’re not going to kill me. Hell, you’re not even going to shoot me.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you think you’re a hero. And if you think about it long enough, you’ll see I’m not the bad guy here.”
“That’s not true. I don’t shoot innocent people. You’re far from that. Getting Gill to open the door for you was clever. The flash-bang was another good call. Kiori didn’t like you very much, did she?”
“Goo? Goo doesn’t like anyone, except maybe Dani and Gill. It’s why I picked him, you know. That and he’ll do anything if you tell him his sister’s the one that needs it done.”
“I will shoot you, Quince. Put the ratchet down and let’s get you moved in to your new private suite.”
“I’d rather die than let some coward abolitionist ghost lock me up. Did you think that running away, hiding yourself in cryo would make your life easier?”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
He saw her reach for her gun in a flash of metallic glare and moved his own to fire, but he was too slow.
Obie beat him too it.
The panel to her left exploded in a haze of sparks and smoke as Si dove back toward Dani, curling away from the blast and wrapping himself around her as a chorus of steam valves released.
A long scream faded to the screech and whine of the pipes.
TEN
Three hours later, Dani sat in the CMO’s office with her side on fire. Studying five med charts on the screen in front of her, she had to struggle to keep herself focused.
Her mind wandered back to the engine room, to Si, his body caged over hers… Protecting her like he had before.
She shook the thought away. The only thing she would take from him was comfort and release—if he offered it. Love was a memory of the past. Even if he wanted it, she’d left it in a Pääom sanitarium and she wasn’t about to go back and get it.
Her re-soldered side flared at the movement. She turned back to the vitals displays, wincing through the pain. Four heart patterns wove their way across the screen, two seemingly normal, three a little sluggish. The latter was expected. Dani had dosed Adilyn with a hefty amount of sedatives, and Mari was sleeping off the pain meds.
Kiori and Gill had both been miffed when she told them they couldn’t leave upon waking. Another time, she might have been swayed, but she’d worked for the Mandalls for too long. Quince had limited resources and if the flash-bang she used to incapacitate them belonged to her erstwhile employer… they were the most insidious version of the weapon on the market. Danielle knew all too personally the chemicals the brothers put in their grenades… and what they could do to a body if untreated.
She looked to the empty chair behind her. Si had volunteered to help Stugg get the engine room back into some semblance of order. It was a gesture she hadn’t understood and hadn’t had the time to think about.
Quince’s burns would heal. But she didn’t trust Obie to keep the woman alive, so she did what she needed to to get Quince off anything Obie could control. She only hoped Mari was safe.
Gill’s diagnostic flashed red and let out an incessant beep, and Dani knew the engineer was getting restless again. She stood, stretching her stiff legs and returned to the med bay proper.
Her senior engineer sat crosslegged on his bed, monitoring wires tossed aside on his pillow.
“I’m telling you, we’re fine. Why are we still in here?” Gill asked the moment he caught sight of her.
“Because I know the Mandalls a little better than you do. And, since no flash-bangs are missing from the ship’s armory, we have to assume the one Quince used on you was one of their manufacture.” She picked up the tags he’d torn from his skin and turned to him, feeling very much like his mother—a difficult thing to manage with a man five years her senior.
“What’s the big deal then? I mean, the Mandalls haven’t done anything to make us think they’d sabotage.”
“That’s not what I was getting at.”
“Cyanogen Chloride.” Kiori said the words flatly, but Dani knew they were a question. The compact weapons officer conserved her words in a way she never would ammo.
“No, you’d be a lot worse off if that was the case. I would, too. But they have been known to use phosgene. It’s archaic, I think that’s why they like it.”
Kiori shook her head, chin bobbling, and leaned back on the reclined bed. “Explains the ammonia.”
“It’s been hours, I feel fine.” Gill’s eyes darted from Dani’s face to the tags in her hand.
“And if I let you go, how am I supposed to know you’re not fine when you’re on the engine room floor suffocating because the phosgene has started reacting with the amines in your pulmonary alveoli? Give it a few more hours. Then you can go.”
He sat back in the bed with a low huff, his legs still crossed, and chewed on the inside of his cheek as she reconnected the wires. “So what am I going to feel if this phoso stuff was in the flash bang?”
“It will get hard to breathe.”
He chuckled lowly, “It’s always hard to breathe around Goo.”
Dani didn’t fight the smile that came to her lips, and a quick glance showed Kiori didn’t seem to mind the inference either. “I think that’s something you and she will have to work out without me. It doesn’t sound strictly medical.”
She looked up as the hatch opened. Si stepped inside, his gaze flickering from her to Quince. “Thank God, no one deserves to go like that.”
Dani glanced to the second bed, thankful that Mari was fast asleep. “No. No one does.”
None of those who’d died on this ship deserved the way they went. Si’s crew, Jarrod, her uncle… Richter. Obie was more of a curse than a blessing. Somehow, she knew the longer her boots stayed on the deck plating, the worse it would get.
She left Kiori and Gill to each other. Like his little sister, Gill was ever a fan of the opposite sex and they didn’t seem to mind him terribly either. She had a feeling Adilyn wouldn’t be so disappointed when she awoke the next time if Gill was a few beds away.
“How’s the panel looking?” She asked, her eyes meeting Si’s briefly before they moved to her gangly, frazzled second engineer.
“I had to loop the system. All the cables are fu—nky. It’ll take me a little while to get them sorted. This system is weird.”
She helped them move Quince’s remains onto the tray that slid from one of the two remaining cold lockers.
“I’m going to have Adi look at it when she’s back up and running. She was on the team that designed Obie’s bowels, so she’s probably the one who’ll be able to help us fix this.”
Stugg coughed violently. “Feels like something’s stuck in my throat!”
“Go get some water before you choke to death.” Dani pointed him toward the door.
“Wonder if Mari brought any gingers?” Stugg continued to cough as he pushed his way out of the morgue and left them in the silence, watching the door swing back on itself.
Si shook his head, turning back to her. “I have no idea how anything gets done with him around… he won’t shut up.”
“It might be stress over Quince. He knew her a little better than the rest of my crew, I lent him out to the Mandall’s for a year, so she wasn’t just an auxiliary crew member to him. There is also the small matter of Obie trying to steam him… yesterday? Sorry, it feels like I’ve been on this ship a month.” She stripped off
her gloves and rubbed the bridge of her nose before wiping a hand down her face. “As for your engineering problem, I can wake Adilyn up anytime. She’s over the worst of it.
Si looked toward the door tentatively, “We’ve got some time. Obie’s going through all of her systems, just to make sure she wasn’t napping while Quince did something else. I don’t think she’s going to find anything. Better to be safe than sorry.”
“I need to do some record keeping, we need to figure out what to do with the bodies,” Dani said. “I couldn’t find anything on Richter’s wishes in his file.”
“That’s because he swore he wasn’t going to die in space. He was damn adamant that he’d die dirt side.” He laughed, a pained, hollow sound.
“Then we’ll keep him on ice until we get somewhere you think he’d want to be buried.”
“Definitely not on Kosz,” Si said.
“No one wants to be buried on Kosz. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.” She looked to the metal square. “Besides, I don’t have a jack-hammer for the ‘crete.”
She pulled out the tablet and moved back to the CMO’s office, “I’ll need your help with this.”
“I’m not even sure why you’re doing it… we’re not under any regulations.”
“Old habits,” She said as she set the tablet on the desk. “And a bit of closure. Besides, I’d want some record if I was in those lockers.”
He sat quietly behind her as she finished up the files she’d started earlier. She slowly stretched her side when she was done and turned to find him asleep, head leaned against the bulkhead, hands folded in his lap. She left him where he was and decided she needed to run another panel on him to make sure he wasn’t getting any after effects from his exit from cryo.
Adilyn snored gently as Dani moved to the diagnostic hooked up to her. Her vitals had stabilized an hour or so ago.
She pulled the hypo from her pocket, removing the plastic protector from the needle, and slowly depressed the plunger into the IV. “Wakey wake, eggs and bakey,” she said quietly, smiling at the thought of her father running her around the kitchen with a spatula, swatting her behind if she yawned.
Adilyn’s eyes slowly opened, as her system caught on to the stimulant’s effects. “What’s—”
“You’re coming out of a sedative haze. Don’t worry, the effects will pass rather quickly, and once they do, you’ll be done with this bed for a long while, hopefully.”
Staring—eyes unfocusing and focusing—Adilyn reached up and touched Dani’s cheek, confusion writ across her face.
“Danielle Cholla?” She snorted. “I thought I’d dreamed that.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
Adi scrubbed a hand down her own face. “I always hate this part… when I feel like I need to jump out of bed and crawl up the walls, but I can barely keep my eyes open.”
Dani watched as her eyes did in fact begin to wiggle in and out of focus. One eyelid drooped, followed quickly by the other before Adilyn forced them open once more.
“This too shall pass.” Dani said it quietly—it was a saying José said constantly to himself, and it had bugged the crap out of her.
“Just like the last fifteen years.” Adi glared at her own clenched fists.
“Think of it this way, you’ve beat the aging gene… in a sense.”
Adi rolled her eyes and turned away. “It’s not very comforting….”
“Little in this life is.” Dani tabbed through Adi’s readouts to keep her mind from wandering to all the disturbing events that had befallen her crew since they stepped on board.
“You’re depressing.” Adilyn said, blinking her eyes furiously to try to stay open. “Oddly enough, that doesn’t surprise me.”
Dani pulled a tag from Adilyn’s neck and tried not to think about the myriad of reasons she could have had to make that statement. “I’m going to suggest you stay away from anything caffeinated for the next four hours, the stimulant in your system is going to have you jumpy enough. I don’t want you tearing off your own skin because you think mites have crawled under it.”
“I don’t even want to ask why that sounds like something you’ve had experience with.” Adilyn sat up and plucked at the gauze wrap around her elbow, mouth contorting into a disgusted frown. “Cryo track marks are so unattractive.”
Danielle flinched and tried to make sense of her…. she didn’t understand the priorities. “You only have to deal with them for a few months.”
“I’ve seen people use a skin welder on them.”
Dani felt herself shiver at the thought, her stomach clenching. “That would be a stupid thing to do. For one, the nerve endings in your ditch are ridiculously sensitive. For another, you’d only end up with worse tracks if you ever had to go back into cryo.”
“I didn’t say I wanted it. Besides, I’m never going back into a cryo unit. Ever.” Dani noticed her eyes travel over to where Gill and Kiori sat. “I guess you do have male crew. Thank Goddess, I thought Si might have an aneurism if he had to put up with an all-female crew. Especially since you’re all so young.”
“According to your readout, you’re actually younger than any of my female crew,” Dani said, watching her response.
“Seriously?” There was a plain look of disgust on Adi’s face as she said it.
“Yep, you skipped fifteen years remember, you’re still a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed thirty-four.”
“And you’re…?” Adilyn’s eyes narrowed at her as she fished for the answer.
“Done checking you out. You’re no longer required to stay in the medbay. You may want to go wake up your captain to find out where he wants you. I hope you’re not too disappointed.” She held her hand out toward the CMO’s office, where Si was barely visible in his chair.
Adilyn stood, watching her as though she expected Dani to attack her the moment her back was turned. Dani smiled, dropping her hand and turning back to the computer, hoping the dismissal would hold some weight this time.
“Fucking hell!” Stugg’s voice pitched over the hatch tread a brief minute before he came tumbling in.
His hands were lobster red as he moved drunkenly toward her. She flinched and grimaced at the pain that shot up her side.
“Stugg, what happened? Deep breath first, though.” She moved him to the cot behind her, pulling on a new pair of gloves and looking at his blistering fingers with dismay.
“She steamed me,” Stugg said, his eyes flashing a glare to the ceiling as he wiggled on the bed, holding his hands out to Dani.
“Did she give you fair warning?”
Stugg shook his head yes even as he defended himself. “I was only doing what needed to be done!”
“Dear God, your hands!” Adi moved to Dani’s side as she stared down at the bubbling fissures on the outside of his left palm.
Dani ignored her, focusing on the quickly forming welts on his once pasty skin. “Why were you working alone? I told you to make sure you weren’t the only one down there… in case something like this happened.”
“Willy’s been drinking. Wouldn’t be surprised if Lyz is keeping him company along with that bottle. Best not barge in on them.”
“I take it you don’t drink?” Adi leaned in closer, her eyes fixed on his hand in morbid fascination.
Stugg didn’t answer, an unfortunate admission.
“He’s barely sixteen, so he knows what I’ll do if I catch him.” Dani said as she pulled a vial from cold storage and injected it into the one clear patch of skin on his right hand. The numbing agent would also help to stem the swelling. “Well, it looks like you’re not going to be doing much work down there now. Losing a pair of hands was the last thing I needed right now, Stugg. What were you thinking?”
“This is nothing, worked with worse in the mines, I’ll be back below in a shake and see what I can do. If this cow will let me.” He gestured to the ceiling with the hand she’d bandaged, shaking the one still being wrapped.
“I thought the Kelebek miners were o
n the Pääom’s side.” Adi asked as Si stepped from the office, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“Loads of people switched sides since the war turned to the worst.” Stugg said, his eyes falling back into that faraway look Dani knew too well.
Osiris pulled Adilyn away from Stugg, forcing her to look at him, “Adi, when he goes back down to engineering go with him and see if you can’t figure out what Obie did to keep our mechanic from messing with her system. A panel blew and right now you’re the only one who can take care of it with any certainty.” Dani cast an apologetic glance at Gill, he didn’t seem to notice anything outside his card game with Kiori.
“Nice to feel needed again.” Adi shot a condescending glower at Dani and turned for the door.
Si threw a hand dismissively. “Well, don’t get too excited.”
“I’m sure I’ll manage, Sir.” She turned back to Stugg, looking past Dani as though she didn’t exist. “Ready to get back to work, Stugg?” She said his name uncertainly.
“I’ll manage,” he said, sliding off the bed. He winced as his bandaged hands touched the side of the cot, but forced his face into a stoic frown, puffed up his chest and started after her.
Dani bit her tongue. Stopping him would only leave her with one more annoyance, and he’d be more likely to hurt himself in the medbay where he was uncomfortable, than in the bowels of the ship where he felt at home.
“You don’t like my ship I take it.” Adi said as Stugg followed her out the hatch.
“She’s gorgeous, but she’s an idiot.”
Dani let out a long breath, closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose.
“Obie,” Si said, seemingly having read her thoughts. “Let Adi and Stugg fix what’s wrong this time.”
“I have every faith that the lieutenant will be able to rectify the situation. Stugg was meddling in parts of my system that did not need to be accessed at the time.”
“Can we go?” Gill said from behind her and she turned to see both pairs of eyes watching her intently.
“Yeah,” she said. She’d forgotten about them. “But I want you both to take it easy. Don’t do anything to exert yourselves for a few hours. And the second you feel something wrong, you call me.”
