by Rob Boffard
Hannah puts a finger to her neck. “Got a pulse,” she says, her voice shaking. “I’ve got a pulse!”
It’s like someone nailed Corey in the chest with a spiralling football. He collapses to the floor with a thump, arms resting on his knees, almost gasping with relief. Behind him, Malik and Jack are pulling off the helmet belonging to the other spaceman. Woman. Whatever. It’s a different mechanism from the one on Lorinda’s suit, and they’re struggling to get it off.
Lorinda’s eyes open. The old woman stares into the distance, pupils unfocused. She blinks – once, twice – then looks at Corey.
The corner of her lips tug upwards. Corey puts a hand on her shoulder, even though he knows she won’t be able to feel it through the suit.
“You’re … all right,” Lorinda says, forcing the upturned corners of her lips into a smile.
Corey wipes his face, surprised to find it wet. “Yeah. We’re OK.”
Behind him, Malik grunts as the helmet finally comes loose. Hannah glances over, and Corey turns to look for himself.
The head inside the helmet belongs to a man. Light-skinned, with a thin mouth and a prominent, hooked nose. The buzz cut is military, and there’s a coating of stubble across his chin. He’s unconscious, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. Corey notices something he missed before: a patch, sewn onto the arm of the man’s spacesuit. Two crossed daggers in front of a shield, black and red. There’s no writing on the patch, no motto or anything.
Hannah puts a hand on Corey’s arm. “Hey. Can you get her some water? Lorinda?”
“Huh? Oh. Sure.” He gets to his feet, unsteady, then makes his way over to the bar. There are still plenty of full glasses and containers, although several of them got knocked over while the captain was trying to outrun the spheres. In a bigger ship, it probably wouldn’t have happened, but the Panda’s inertial dampeners weren’t enough to keep everything steady, and there are puddles of slushy water spread across the bar.
Behind it is his dad’s abandoned science project – the heating thing he was making from the remains of the bar fridge. They never got around to sticking it in the gap they made in the ice. The fridge itself has been yanked out of its place by the wall, turned on its end so its underside can be scavenged for parts.
The second fridge is still in its place, but the glass on its open door is shattered. The floor is littered with shards, and tiny chunks of dirty ice. The first aid kit – the one his dad borrowed the medical tape from to use on his device – nudges up against a sodden cardboard box, looking strangely forlorn.
“How’d he even get here?” Malik is saying.
“Beats me, mate.” Brendan says, staring down at the unconscious man as he helps Jack to his feet.
Corey grabs one of the glasses, then heads back, dropping to one knee beside Lorinda. She sips carefully, Hannah supporting her head, but Corey pours too fast and some runs down her chin.
“Sorry,” he says, pulling back.
“S’alright,” she says.
There are only a few more sips left in the glass. “I’ll get you some more,” Corey says, getting to his feet. As he does so, he glances over to the man with the buzz cut.
The man is awake. And looking right at him. His eyes are a deep blue, cool and clear.
Nobody but Corey has noticed that the man is no longer unconscious. Jack, Brendan and Seema are talking in a huddle, and Malik is fiddling with his holocam.
Corey manages to get out a startled “Hey—” and then the man explodes upwards.
Chapter 29
Brendan is closest. At the movement, he half turns, and then the man’s fist crashes into his jaw.
Brendan is big, larger than anyone else on the Panda, even his attacker. But the punch is solid, the man’s fist blurring through the air. Brendan goes down, a look of stunned incomprehension on his face. Seema reacts. She lunges forward, reaching for the man’s throat, only to be thrown aside as if she’s made of cardboard.
Corey’s dad is standing a little further away from the man than Brendan was. He has just enough time to dodge, to yank his head backwards as the man throws another punch. He gets out a startled “Jesus!” as the fist slashes the air in front of him. Jack takes a stumbling step backwards, arms up to protect himself.
Do something. Corey finds he can’t move, can’t even breathe.
“Passengers!” says the Panda, as the man puts his hands on Everett’s shoulders, grapples with him. “Thank you for choosing Sigma D-D-D-Destination Tours for your wedding reception. Please enjoy this specially curated playlist, and sumagalī bhava to the happy couple!”
Loud, screechy bhangra music blurts out of the speakers, bouncy and upbeat, thumping drums crashing. Malik hurls himself onto the man’s back, arms wrapped around his throat. The man reacts immediately, grunting as he throws Malik in a massive somersault over his head, knocking Everett to one side. Malik howls as he thuds onto the deck, hitting so hard that he actually bounces.
Hannah is darting forward, back, looking for an opening. “Turn off music!” she shouts. The ship’s computer ignores her.
Throwing Malik has left the man doubled over. If he wasn’t wearing a spacesuit, it’d be easy for him to spring upright, but the fabric has crimped at his torso, and it takes him an extra split second to pull through it. Just enough time for Anita Livingstone to kick him so hard in the stomach that she, too, falls over.
The spacesuit protects him from some of the impact, but not all of it. The man teeters, and then Jack and Everett are on top of him, pinning him to the ground. Corey finally moves, hurling himself on the man’s flailing legs. It’s like trying to stay on a bucking horse. But then Seema is there, and Hannah, all of them sitting on top of him. Brendan, an ugly bruise already blooming on his jaw, jams his metal arm into the man’s throat. The soldier – if that’s what he is – makes the only sound Corey has heard him make so far, an annoyed, choked grunt. But he’s still going. He tries to get up, only stopping when Seema sticks a knee on his collarbone and flicks open her penknife, holding the tiny blade to his throat.
“You don’t want to move right now, mate,” she says, her voice ragged. The man goes still, staring up at her.
“Jesus,” Everett says again. He looks for his family, eyes flicking between Corey, Anita and Malik. His eldest son is blinking in surprise, up on his elbows, like he’s just woken from a nap. That stupid music is still playing – an even faster track now, Indian strings set to a humming bassline.
“Shit,” says Jack. An odd thought pops into Corey’s head: people always talk in single swear words after something bad happens. He doesn’t get it. If you’re going to swear, you might as well get as many in as you can.
The thought is followed by another, more practical one. “We gotta tie him up,” he says.
“With what?” Brendan is rolling his jaw, massaging it.
They all look at each other, nobody saying anything. Now that he’s suggested it, Corey’s mind goes blank. What do they have to tie someone up with? They could cut strips from someone’s shirt, but …
Hannah snaps her fingers. “Tape.” She glances at Seema and Corey. “Don’t get off him ’til I get back.”
“Uh … yeah.” Seema looks at her like she’s insane. They’re all breathing hard, with the flushed faces of people who just walked out of a car wreck unscathed.
“Will there even be any left?” Anita says. She’s on her feet, shaking, unbalanced.
Hannah doesn’t answer. She darts around to the fridges, grabbing the first aid kit and lifting it onto the bar. As she rummages through it, her movements get increasingly frantic.
“Quickly,” Jack growls.
“It’s not here,” she says. “Did someone take it?”
“It should be in the kit,” Everett shouts back.
“Fuck the tape,” Seema hasn’t moved the knife from the man’s throat. “Get some zip ties. Something.”
Corey happens to be looking at his mom as Seema speaks, and she does the od
dest thing. Her eyes go wide, like she’s had a brilliant idea. A second later, she’s squeezing them shut, wincing, like someone punched her in the stomach.
“Mom?” Corey says.
“Hang on.” Anita Livingstone sprints towards the stairs, taking them two at a time. “I’ll be back in a second.”
“Anita?” Everett says. He’s stopped when the man once again tries to twist away, still moving in silence, nearly bucking Jack off. Seema has to dig the point of the knife into his neck, hard enough to draw a dot of blood, to get him to stop.
Anita comes sprinting back. In one hand she’s carrying a pair of metal handcuffs.
Corey is so astonished that he forgets what they’re doing. Where the hell did his mom find handcuffs?
“Here,” she says, tossing them to Hannah. The tour guide catches them instinctively. She looks at Anita, then down at the cuffs, then back at Anita.
“What are these?” she says, her voice stunned. Everett is staring wide-eyed at his wife.
“What do you think?” Corey’s mom looks like she wants a hole to open up in the floor and swallow her. “Quick. I’ve already unlocked them.”
The man is moving again, but there are just too many people on top of him now, and his predicament gets worse when Hannah has them flip him over. She kneels on his back, like she’s pinning him to a wrestling mat.
“Get his hands,” she says, still sounding as if she thinks this is all a dream.
Malik moves first. He’s still dazed, but he’s got enough in him to pull the man’s arms behind him. Corey and his dad help pull his gloves off, holding down the man’s arms as he tries to fight back.
“Are they going to be strong enough?” Seema asks.
Anita closes her eyes before answering. “Oh, trust me. They’ll do the job.”
“Anita,” Everett says. “Tell me those aren’t what we—”
“I put them in my bag when we were packing for the trip,” Anita says. “They’ve been there the whole time. I thought … I mean I figured we could …”
“But we haven’t used them in years! And the kids! What were you thinking?”
“Well, maybe if you were paying attention to me, you would have known what I was thinking!”
Corey looks between them, completely confused. What are they talking about? Why were there handcuffs in his mom’s bag?
“Oh my God,” Malik says, putting a hand over his face. “Oh my God, no. Mom. That is so gak.”
“I’m …” Anita says. She clears her throat. “Well, you know, when two adults—”
“Stop,” Malik says. “Just … no. I don’t want to know.”
Corey opens his mouth, closes it again. Is this a thing about s-e-x? But why would you need handcuffs? Probably not the best time to ask. And wherever the cuffs came from, they’re working OK.
His dad spots something, walking over to the bar and bending down. “I found the tape,” he says, straightening up. The music is still playing.
The prisoner’s blue eyes find Corey again, fixing on him. Like he’s being marked. He shivers, but doesn’t look away.
Seema wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. It’s a long, slow, deliberate movement, and above her palm her eyes are filled with emotional, agonised fury.
“So,” she says, standing over the man, speaking over the bhangra, which is still playing. “How about you tell us what the fuck is going on?”
Chapter 30
It takes a while for them to decide where to put the man.
Brendan and Jack – and, surprisingly, Everett – want to keep him in the bar, start questioning him right then and there. Hannah and Volkova argue that he needs to be kept somewhere they can lock down if they need to. Anita assures them that the cuffs are police-grade steel, a phrase which causes Malik to put his hands over his face with a groan of disgust, and which makes Jack snort. Even Hannah finds herself smiling a little. All the same, they can’t take any chances.
In the end, they manoeuvre him upstairs, and – somehow – get him down the ladder into astronautics. There, with Seema once again holding a knife to his throat, they uncuff him – very carefully – and recuff him to an empty equipment rack, the metal embedded in the wall at knee level. It’s an uncomfortable position, his arms bent behind him, but Hannah is too tired to care. And the man gives no sign that it bothers him.
He hasn’t said a word.
They head back to the main deck, leaving Everett to watch the prisoner. Volkova finally manages to shut the Panda’s voice off, along with the music. It gives an ear-piercing yelp as it dies – Hannah can’t help but picture the captain ripping off the control panel, tearing out wires in a rage.
Jack’s puke still isn’t cleaned up. Hannah catches herself staring at it, amazed at how annoying it is. It’s stopped smelling as bad, the chunks now crusted and dry, but she can’t understand why he hasn’t bothered to clean it up. Then she wonders why she’s obsessing about it, after what just happened.
Her left hand hurts – a solid, throbbing ache. She doesn’t know where it came from. And she’s not the only one hurt: she’s got a passenger with a bruised jaw, another almost passed out from exhaustion, and –
Exhaustion. Lorinda. Hannah whirls around, looking for her. She’s wrapped in the foil blanket on one of the seats, eyes closed. A glass of water pushes up from the blanket folds like the tip of an iceberg. As Hannah watches, she jerks awake, looking around her as if she’s still unsure where she is. She’s still wearing her thick spacesuit.
“What happened out there?” Corey says, his eyes wide.
Lorinda can barely speak. “Hurts,” she says, her hands fluttering above her leg.
Hannah darts back into the bar, retrieves the first aid kit. It’s bare bones, like everything else on the Panda, so she almost punches the air when she finds a small box of nanomeds. The box holds three blister packs, each one containing four pills.
They’re SoftMed, a brand she hasn’t seen before – a cheap one, by the looks of it. But they’ll do. The tiny gel capsules will dial down Lorinda’s pain for a few hours, make her more comfortable and lucid while the bots go to work, delivering concentrated anti-inflammatories.
She grabs one of the blister packs, then dashes back up the stairs, already popping one of the squashy capsules out of the blister pack. Lorinda takes it dry, almost snatching it from her, then settles back, waiting for the bots to take effect.
Hannah shoves the pills into her pocket. If Lorinda’s injury is more serious than it looks – something they can’t see, a broken bone or a badly torn muscle – then the bots aren’t going to cut it. They’ll help with the pain, for a time, but they’ll be useless at fixing the problem. Doesn’t matter. There’s nothing they can do about that now.
The story comes in fits and starts. Lorinda tells them how she saw the ship coming up from below, how she couldn’t reach them through the comms no matter how hard she tried. When she gets to the part about using one of the ship’s own spheres against it, Corey and Malik exchange a startled glance.
“No way,” Malik says.
“That is crash,” says Corey.
“No, I mean, no way she did that.”
“You saw the ship, Mal, the whole thing was—”
“Guys.” Hannah gestures to Lorinda, who gives her a weak smile. Corey and Malik subside, although Malik still looks like he doesn’t believe a word he’s hearing.
After the Colony ship exploded, she tells them, she had to work quite hard to stop herself from spinning. There were bodies all around her – bodies and debris. She had just managed to bring herself to a halt when someone grabbed her.
“One of the … people in that ship,” she says, and takes another sip of water. “Must have … tried to come for me after … after I shut down the sphere bay.”
“You are crazy,” Volkova says. But she’s grinning. “Completely crazy.” She whirls a finger around her head.
Lorinda takes a deep breath, and her next words come out in a rush, like sh
e’s been holding them in for far too long. “We tangled – I couldn’t see inside his helmet but I knew he wasn’t messing around. So I got hold of … one of his oxygen hoses and gave it a good old yank. I didn’t think I could pull it out, thought I’d just kink it, maybe, but it popped right off. Basic … tech. They never upgraded that.”
Everyone, even Malik, is staring at her with something like awe. Lorinda turns her head to the side, clearing her throat with a noise like a chainsaw starting up, then continues. “By then, I saw that you were OK, so I wanted to get as far away from him as possible. He’d stopped moving, and I was going to … leave him there when I thought that we might be able to figure out who they were if I brought him in with me.”
She looks at Brendan. “I’m … sorry about that. I didn’t know he’d wake up so quickly.”
Anita Livingstone gets to her feet, walks over unsteadily and plants a kiss on Lorinda’s forehead.
“Thank you,” she says quietly. “For saving my boys.”
The boys in question give each other an embarrassed look, but they nod thanks, too. Lorinda leans her head back against the wall, eyes closed. Everyone is exhausted. Drained. The fight they’ve just been through would take it out of them on a good day, but it came after twenty-four hours of insanity that she still doesn’t know how they survived.
How long are they going to do this? Even Volkova – who has saved them now not once, but twice – can’t run at full go forever. No one can. Not to mention the fact that, pretty soon, they’re going to run out of food. They were stretched even before an extra passenger came on board – and, come to that, how are they going to feed him? Should they? No, they have to, but what if –
“OK,” Volkova says. “We try to talk to him. Find out what he knows.”
“Damn right.” Jack looks furious. He flicks a glance at Seema. “Bring your knife.”
