According to Harlan’s report on the Crucible, two days ago the freighter was carrying out routine maintenance on a misaligned cargo linkage. Misaligned linkages were about as mild as problems got in the freight business. Most crews would be more worried about a blown lamp in the cabin.
Rose broke the mood.
“I want to come out with you on the sweep.”
Mira stopped what she was doing. She realized she had been fitting the handgun to her suit and finished its last clasp. She turned to Rose slowly.
Rose was fully suited, helmet on. Her expression behind the cleared visor was hard, pained.
“That’s out of the question.”
“I don’t want to be afraid any longer. I want to be there. If there’s nothing wrong, I can start repairs immediately.”
The shuttle’s maneuvering alarm sounded and the sharp loss of gravity launched Rose into the open space of the hold. Mira tensed her foot to remain in her habitual position by the weapons locker.
“Just do the job, Rose,” Mira said, watching Rose catch on a handhold and spin to hang upside down in front of her. “The job isn’t to get the Crucible fixed quickly; it’s to protect company interests. That means fewer resources lost, which means you stay here until I say it’s safe.”
“Company, company, job, job, company.” Rose’s head wagged side to side inside her helmet as she spoke. “That’s not living.”
“If that’s your best argument, then I think the point is settled.”
“Don’t you even care, Mira?”
“Just do your job,” Mira said, punching the air lock panel and pulling herself through. “Five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” came Rose’s disembodied voice in the headset as the hatch closed. “I don’t have to like it though.”
“Most people don’t. That’s the whole attraction.” Mira felt her suit pull tight, countering the sudden drop in pressure as the air lock cycled.
Mira’s headlamp illuminated the opening door, revealing a light spray of gleaming particles erupting from the gap. She had seen this before, a signal of what remained on board the damaged freighter.
“This isn’t going to be pretty, Rose.”
As the stream of particles slowly ebbed, Mira spun the manual air lock release as fast as she could. For all her effort, the unpowered hatch slid aside with agonizing slowness.
“I’m not sure I want to know,” Rose said, her voice quiet in the earpiece.
Ochre dust fogged the hold, glinting silver where it crossed the suit’s lamplight. Equipment racks ringing it were in various states of access, some locked closed and others open with tools splayed about. On the other side of the hold Mira made out a rack of suits.
“Only two suits are in the hold, Rose, but the job data said there were three crew. There are several crew modules here; I’m going to have a look through them.”
“Hart, Remington and Kendrick,” Rose said, her tinny voice seeming somehow thinner, isolated. “Good luck.”
The living space held two bodies in regular transit jumpsuits. One was strapped to the navigation console seat, the other tangled in exercise webbing. Mira tried not to look at the frozen gore beneath the suits, the mangled, gray-blue human shapes. The navigation computer and other potentially valuable equipment were all present and accounted for.
The cramped sleeping quarters on the other side of the craft held no third crewman. A circular portal cut into the hull revealed the dark, featureless cylinder of the Nyx outside.
Mira tethered to the cabin’s entry and gently launched out of the Crucible.
The Crucible’s massive ore load, a huge mineral sphere which dwarfed the craft, appeared as a dim disk blocking the sun and swallowing a hemisphere of stars. In its shadow, the only light was a starry ambience reflected where distant cranes and tensors holding the cargo extended out and caught a few rays of light. The dimness rendered the two craft colorless, gray shadows floating silently among the stars, one whole and the other maimed.
Mira looked the Crucible over. A higher-capacity ship than the Lumen, her reactors and engine cluster were both significantly more substantial. Both modules also now had nonstandard dark circular patches on their hulls.
Mira keyed her intercom. “The damage is the same as the Lumen, Rose, but it’s on the same side as the Nyx. Go ahead and separate and set the shuttle to a station-keeping position.”
Mira retracted her tether and drew herself back into the Crucible’s cabin. She felt the nudge of the shuttle’s separation through her handholds in the freighter’s living space. The bodies of the two crewmen bounced elastically in their restraints.
Kendrick and Remington, their badges read. Frozen into awkward poses, she wasn’t going to be able to bag them as they were. Forcing herself to look away, she removed the utility knife and body bags from her suit. She closed her eyes and sought focus.
She had to get it done.
A cut here, another there. Sawing, the snap of bone. Mira planned each separation, dispassionately watching the first crewman come apart. In her eyes, in the cold darkness, he became a blue-gray papier-mâché mannequin, brittle and fragile, jarring involuntarily beneath her manipulation.
It was disconcerting how little time passed before she bagged the last of the remains.
Sealing the bag, Mira looked about the cabin. Absent the bodies, it appeared truly lifeless now. The room flickered silver.
“How could you?” asked Rose, her voice hollow in Mira’s earpiece. Mira turned to see Rose anchored outside the cabin’s gaping opening, her face silhouetted by her suit lights, hidden beneath the reflections in her visor. Reflections of Mira holding a knife and two body bags.
“It’s what has to be done,” Mira said, her voice cracking. Rose pushed off and floated out of view, leaving a panorama of stars and the now-distant Nyx.
There was no reply.
Mira sat facing the console again, alone in the hold. The majority of the report was complete, a count of the deceased, state of the freighter, resources used. Now, the same bothersome question begged for a response.
Cause:
The answer should be the same, but she couldn’t bring herself to type it. Piracy was just another predictable element to life in space. On reflection, the unexpected had always become understandable. But the Lumen had gone off the grid sixteen days ago, the Crucible only two. And they were practically on the same city block of the solar system. If they were attacked by pirates, where had they been hiding these last two weeks?
She keyed in her answer. The insurance guys were going to have a field day.
Unknown.
The intercom crackled to life with Rose’s voice. “Mira, I may need your help out here.”
Mira sent the report. Harlan could chew over the Crucible’s story while she dealt with whatever trouble Rose had found for herself. At least she’d remained suited.
“Go ahead.”
“You only found two bodies in the cabin, right?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a tether anchored off the Crucible’s crew module. I can’t quite make it out with my lamps, but it looks like there’s a suit at the end of it, wedged high up in the cargo frame.”
Mira pushed away from the console, retrieved her helmet and headed over to the supply cabinet.
“I’ll be out in a moment,” she said. A fresh body bag rustled cleanly in her gloves. Hopefully this would be an easier job.
“Can you believe we found a survivor, Mira?”
“It’s not possible.” The air lock finished its cycle and Mira launched out on the station-keeping guy wires toward the Crucible. Perhaps she had been an optimist too, once, but life in space had delivered a colder reality.
“I got him loose,” said Rose.
The suit was faintly visible during th
e crossing to the Crucible, a gray shape descending toward the freighter from a distant edge of the cargo’s visible disk. Rose appeared to have anchored to the cylindrical hull and tried to haul the crewman in by hand. She was pulling far too hard, accelerating the corpse even now. If it hit Rose and the hull at that speed, Mira would never be able to recover the pieces.
“Rose, stop.”
Even as she said it, Mira was already in motion, heading toward where Rose was tethered. She wasn’t ready to lose another engineer.
Rose was standing on the skin of the freighter, braced against her tether. In her hands, she held the slackening cable of the descending crewman. Mira caught hold of the anchor loop, quickly clasped her tether alongside the other two and spun around to brace her legs against the hull.
“Give me the tether,” Mira said. Rose handed her the crewman’s limp cable. Slapping her own tether’s limiter to full length, Mira looked up toward the descending suit.
The crewman was clearly visible now, his blanked visor reflecting Mira and Rose’s suit lights. Rose had managed to keep his tether from slackening completely. It made a lazy arc toward his approaching form. Mira took aim just off-side him and jumped as hard as she could.
The loose tether fed through a loop she made with her right arm, its low mass and substantial free length keeping her on course. It took mere seconds to reach and then pass the crewman. As he passed through her lamplight she saw his suit clearly for the first time, the usual engineer’s orange, but fitted with a substantial harness for long-distance tether work.
As the tether tightened and shifted in Mira’s arm, she abruptly snaked her arm around it, creating a brake. Locked, she was ready for the moment when both bodies, moving in opposite directions, snapped tight.
It came with a pop and an intense flare of pain, Mira’s body swinging out against her arm. She let out an involuntary yelp.
Rose’s voice was strained. “Mira?”
The wrapped arm was pulled out at an awkward angle from her shoulder. Mira tried twisting around to release the tether from her arm, but she was locked in place. She tried flexing the fingers on her right hand, but they stayed closed, a painful cramp spreading in her hand.
“Rose,” she said, “pull us in. Very slowly this time.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll both need help getting back to the Nyx.”
Rose removed her helmet after the air lock door sealed and let it float away. “What can I do?” she asked.
Mira saw her arm brush against the interior wall of the hull, devoid of sensation. The Crucible’s crewman spun slowly on the other side of the hold. Mira shuddered. He’d go into the freezer later. Removing her helmet with her free hand, she tried to move her head.
“I think it’s a dislocated shoulder. You need to pop it back into place.”
Rose looked horrified. She didn’t move.
“Do it, Rose. Now. It’s numb, so I won’t be able to feel anything.”
“I can’t. Are you sure?”
“If you don’t do anything, I’ll be worse off. Grab my wrist. Good. Now brace yourself around my shoulder with your knees.”
Mira shut her eyes as the cabin spun around, her body reorienting with Rose’s manipulations.
“Good. Now pull the arm out.”
“Mira, no.”
“Do it, Rose. Pull.”
“Please.”
“Pull, damn you. What the hell are you doing? Don’t let go. Do you know how many engineers survive this job? Precious few, because when the going gets tough, they curl up and suck their thumbs.”
“But I can’t do it.”
“Do you know why they send you out here before you can graduate? To learn the reality of what you build. This is it. Time to face reality, princess.” Mira heard a grunt of protest, felt the pressure against her side increase as Rose shifted position. “That’s better, get a good grip. Now pull.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
The hold’s console chimed to announce a new comms message. Mira ignored it. “Pull it. Harder. Damn it, try and pull it out.”
Accompanying Rose’s rising scream, a sucking, tearing sound marked the realignment of Mira’s shoulder. A flare of pain announced circulation and nerves coming back to life, offset by the relieved pressure on Mira’s collarbone.
Rose screamed hysterically and released Mira’s arm.
Mira clenched her teeth against the fire spreading from her shoulder and flexed her hand experimentally, giving Rose a thumbs-up with her good hand. Amid the sharp tingling of returning blood flow, it moved, but only a little. Rose would need to take over for a few hours.
Mira nodded at the console. Rose moved to it with a shudder and brought up the message with shaky hands. Harlan’s voice eventually buzzed out of the intercom speakers.
“Mira, I’ve passed your reports on, but don’t expect them to be popular. You’re clear for early return with the Crucible crew’s remains. Traffic control says your current return trajectory intersects with a United Mining support vessel in your area. It’ll add an extra day, but I’m giving you an alternate course to loop out and around them on your way back.”
Harlan paused, the white-noise background of his office continuing to play. “There’s a lot of space out there. The chances our unusual pirate friends are on an identical course is nearly zero. But if they are, this trajectory will avoid them as well.” The message cut out.
“What’s a support vessel?” asked Rose.
“It’s a frigate. United Mining uses a private military as insurance against piracy.”
She looked at Rose, who had turned to stare absently at the crewman. How pleasant it must be, she thought, to not have been exposed to the reality of business. Rose didn’t need to know. Perhaps in not telling her the full meaning of Harlan’s response, that the company would be secretly hoping a competitor’s frigate would come to grief, Rose could harbor a little innocence for the both of them.
Mira turned to follow Rose’s stare, to the engineering equipment and crewman’s suit bobbing about on the other side of the hold.
Mira jumped to his position, catching and anchoring herself with her good arm. She turned the suit around, wincing at her right shoulder as she pulled him to a halt. Its arm moved.
The suit’s visor was glossy black, perhaps the result of having been blanked while the crewman was welding the Crucible’s damaged cargo linkage. The suit’s badge, embroidered with the ship’s name and designation, showed the crewman’s name: Hart. Mira pressed a control on the chin of the helmet.
The visor flickered translucent, revealing a pale face, heavily bloodshot eyes blinking fiercely into the sudden light. Barely visible wisps of gray hair puffed forward across a male forehead, and a few days’ worth of white stubble had etched its way across his chin. His jaw was working, its chapped, broken lips forming silent words.
Swearing, Mira found the clasp for his helmet and reached around with her good arm to remove it gently.
“Is he . . . ?” Rose said. She moved to a position behind Mira.
“Get water,” Mira said.
A burp of foul air found its way around the seals of Hart’s suit and into the hold’s atmosphere. Mira gritted her teeth and tried to take shallow breaths.
Rose arrived and handed her a canteen. She appeared genuinely concerned, serious, transformed from her earlier hysteria into a regular Florence Nightingale. Mira handed the canteen back, shaking her head.
“No, you do it, Rose,” Mira said, releasing Hart. “Take him up to the shower, get him out of that suit and clean him up.” A look at Rose’s concerned expression helped make her decision. “I have something to do.”
As Rose gently tugged Hart and moved him up through the bulkhead door into the cabin, Mira found her way back to the navigation console. Ten days w
ould be too long. Even if she burned the Nyx’s remaining reaction mass, the shortest route back to the station would take several days. If Hart had been exposed to enough radiation while dangling on his tether, he wouldn’t last two.
Mira keyed up the communications system and started a new message.
The United frigate, fully equipped with a medical center, intersected somewhere along her shortest route. Harlan had wanted her to leave it alone and for good reason, besides the obvious business motivations. An old shipping code of ethics which once guaranteed aid regardless of corporate affiliation was ancient history, forever changed by the growing threat of piracy.
Mira hoped she would be able to pay whatever price they placed on their hospitality.
Mira sat in the pseudo-gravity of the shuttle’s thrust and watched silently for a moment as Hart snored in an elastic bunk.
“Do you think he’ll make it?” Rose asked. She’d become detached, Mira thought, much less the bright-eyed undergraduate that joined her two weeks ago. It was a change she had secretly longed for and now that it had arrived, regretted; innocence was lost to both of them.
“Yeah, about that. It’s not too late to change our minds, but I’ve set us a new course.” Mira looked at Rose and winced. “If you really want to, we can return to the station as Harlan instructed. But we can make a choice. To go home will take over a week even if we don’t avoid the United frigate. It will be several more days’ journey than this guy—” Mira nodded at Hart “—can survive.”
“Our alternative is not to go home at all. Protocol obliges United to render assistance. Their frigate will have medical facilities and will be the only vessel large enough to help between here and Earth.”
“What does Harlan say?”
Mira shrugged. “I didn’t ask him. I was planning on telling him once we had no way out.”
“That’s not like you,” Rose said, smiling. “What happened to company and job? It’s not going to go over well.”
“Hart’s here because of you, not him, so it’s not his decision.” Mira sat back and gave Rose what she hoped was a hard stare. “I want it to be yours. We’re early enough in the burn that the navigation computer can compensate and put us back on Harlan’s course to the station. What do you want to do?”
Writers of the Future, Volume 27 Page 31
