by T. M. Catron
“I said—oh never mind.”
Solaris smirked. Despite Rance shooting annoyed looks at them all the way, James and Solaris insisted on accompanying her to the med bay. Once there, Rance stared at the small, enclosed emergency hospital pod with dread. She hated tight spaces. The cramped ship was fine, but something about laying down inside the chamber and having it close over her sent a nasty shiver down her spine.
“I wonder if I can just stick my foot in without having to lock my whole body into it,” she said after a moment.
“It might mistake your foot for a foreign body,” James said, “instead of the human appendage that it is. With that bruising and swelling, I wouldn’t blame it.”
“It’s smarter than that,” Rance said. “Deliverance, how do I fix a broken toe without getting into the emergency surgery pod?”
Text shot across Rance’s ZOD, her optic lens.
Get Harper.
“Oh. Great. The smartest AI in the empire has learned sarcasm.”
“I wonder where she got it from?” Solaris said with another smirk, reading Deliverance’s answer on the screen.
“It’s not sarcasm, Cap,” James said. “She’s telling us to get Harper.”
“What?”
Forgetting the pain it would cause in her toe, Rance spun around to look at the screen. Another line of code was sitting on it, one that hadn’t shown up on her ZOD. “What does it say?”
“It’s jumbled up. Harper will know.” James strode out of the med bay, presumably to get Harper.
Rance hobbled over to look at the screen, wincing as each step caused pain to shoot up her foot. The top of her toe had turned a nice, nasty shade of black. Along with the swelling, James had been correct—it didn’t look much like a toe at all.
Solaris studied the code a minute. “Harper won’t know, either. It’s a bunch of gobbledygook—doesn’t make sense.”
“Is that the official diagnosis? Gobbledygook?”
“Best way to describe it.”
“So now you know code from a Tritonian sync?”
“I know a lot of things.”
“Hmph.”
Solaris turned to her. “Just because I don’t tell you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you know about Deliverance?”
“I don’t know about Deliverance. But I know code. And this is nonsense.”
“Let’s just wait for Harper, shall we?” Rance said irritably.
When Harper entered the med bay, her hair spiky as always, she tried to examine Rance’s foot.
“Look at the code first,” Rance said.
Harper studied it a minute, her frown deepening. She moved her head from side to side, reading it from different angles, and then shook her head. “Looks like gobbledygook to me.”
Solaris shot Rance a smug look.
“Well, let’s figure it out,” Rance said. “I don’t want any hiccups on this tr—”
The ship made an odd humming noise, changing pitch from a gentle resonance to a harsh vibrato. The floor shook, and Rance gripped the table next to her for support, anticipating something worse.
When nothing else happened, they breathed a sigh of relief.
“What in Triton’s fuzzy beard was that?” James asked.
And then the lights went out, clicking off all at once like someone had flipped a master switch. Screens blipped and went dark. Button lights faded black. The darkness in the med bay was complete.
No one moved.
“That wasn’t a hiccup,” James said. “That was a belch.”
“We’re not weightless,” Harper remarked, a disembodied voice in the dark. “Gravity control is still working.”
“What about atmosphere?” Rance asked. “Are life support systems still working?”
“We’ll have to go to engineering to check,” Solaris said. “James, go get Tally.”
“Yeah, sure, no problem. Just need to find—” James groped his way through the med bay and stumbled over Rance’s broken toe.
“OW!” More tears streamed down her face. At least no one could see them.
“Sorry, Captain, looking for the door.”
“Oh for the Founders’ sake!” Harper said, borrowing one of Rance’s phrases. They heard her rummage around. And then a light flashed on. She handed it to Solaris, who pointed it at the drawer Harper had been in.
“I keep these glow-lights stored all over the ship,” Harper said. “Although I never thought you all would lose your heads if we went dark. The battery will last forever. Longer than any of us if the carbon dioxide levels shoot up.”
They passed lights around. Rance felt foolish about her lapse of common sense. She blamed it on the toe.
“We’ve got to check everything,” she said. “Ventilation, hydration, coolant, engines, refrigeration, hyperdrive.”
James left to get Tally and Abel, muttering about how they could sleep through anything. Harper climbed into the control room in the nose of the ship.
“The hyperdrive’s still working, Captain,” Solaris said. “We haven’t stopped.”
As if on cue, the humming changed again. This time the ship vibrated until Rance’s teeth rattled. When it stopped, they were in complete silence.
“Well,” she said. She had decided to counter her recent foray into panic with practicality. “Glad to know not much else can go wrong. Power, hyperdrive—”
“Don’t say anything else,” Solaris warned. “You’ll jinx us. There’s a whole host of other problems we can’t deal with right now. If the life support systems go, we’re done.”
Despite the situation, Rance laughed. “I don’t believe in jinxes. There’s something wrong with the ship, nothing that can’t be explained. And the life support systems are separate from the main power. Solaris, you act like you’ve never been on a spaceship before.”
“No need to be condescending. I didn’t know.”
Rance pulled a mock face. “You mean no one told you? We knew something you didn’t? How terrible for you. Deliverance!” she said hotly. “What’s the status of the life support systems?”
No answer.
“She’s not responding, Captain,” Harper called from the control room. “Not to voice commands or commands from my handset.”
Rance peeked her head up into the tiny control room. Harper sat in the middle of a room jammed with screens, buttons, and levers.
“The network is down too, then,” Rance said. “I can’t access anything through my implant.”
James returned with Tally and Abel. Abel wasn’t wearing a shirt, revealing his bulging muscles and blue, body-covering tattoos that depicted everything from an old girlfriend to a Triton security stamp to a rampaging, fire-breathing dragon.
He carried Henry in his arms.
“What’s the dragon for?” Rance asked, trying not to laugh at him holding the furry creature.
Abel shrugged. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to see one. Then I found out they were myths. It was worse than finding out there isn’t a Santa Kringle.”
“What’s Santa Kringle?” James asked.
Abel gaped at him. “You don’t know?” He looked at Rance as if expecting her to confirm something.
She shrugged and said, “James grew up poor in the Outer Colonies. They don’t know about Santa Kringle there. Santa Kringle takes gifts to children.”
James looked offended. “He didn’t bring me gifts.”
Solaris cleared his throat. The three turned to him.
“Right,” Rance said, returning to the present. “Solaris, stay here and help Harper. James, go with Tally and see if he needs help. Abel, I want a thorough check of every physical space on this ship you can get into. Make a list of everywhere you can’t squeeze, and James or Harper will follow up with those in a bit.”
“Yes, Captain,” they all said.
Rance headed up to the cockpit, limping along like a giant sea turtle swimming through molasses. The swelling had spread to her foot, but she didn’t have time to
fix it now. They were drifting out in empty space and still didn’t know where.
In the cockpit, faraway stars shone through the windows like tiny pinpricks of light. Rance sank into the pilot’s chair and turned off her light. The room became immediately dark, with no starlight close enough to illuminate their situation.
That wasn’t a bad thing. If they’d sputtered out of hyperspace close to a star system, it could mean they were in hostile territory. Pirates were notorious for staking claims to barren rocks orbiting lone stars.
Rance had no way of checking their location. They were blind. She flipped a few switches, desperately wishing one of them would jump-start everything. But she knew better than to waste much time. Nothing would be fixed from up here until they got power back to the consoles.
She pulled out her handset. “Anything yet, Harper?”
“Not yet, Captain.”
“Where are we?” James asked.
“Nowhere specific. Somewhere in the DEEP.”
The DEEP stood for Deep Exploration Extraction Point. Originally, colonization crews and explorers used it as a stopping point on their way to distant star systems. Because it lay in neutral territory, with no government claiming it, human or otherwise, the expanse of emptiness was perfect for scientists who wanted to study the stars in peace. However, due to increased pirate activity in recent years, the stations had been emptied, and colonization bases relocated.
Now, Rance liked to say DEEP stood for Deplorably Empty for the Expansion of Pirates.
“Find anything?” she asked nervously. She didn’t like to think of pirates just now when the Streaker was stranded without the possibility of help if they needed it.
“The emergency lights in engineering work. So, there’s that. Tally’s still running checks. Life support is going strong.”
Rance sighed in relief as she limped back to the ladder, sliding down it and landing on her good foot. On her way back downstairs, she stopped and grabbed her helmet from her room. The comm there would work. She put it on and lifted the visor. At least she wouldn’t have to carry it in her hand now.
In the engine room, James held a bright light while Tally dove between the hyperdrive core and secondary engines. As always, engineering was spotless. Barely a speck of grease was on the floor. The room smelled of it though.
Tally sat amongst the disassembled pieces of the hyperdrive coils’ casing, another tiny light between his teeth, shining onto intricate wiring. His eyes glowed green, but his dark body blended into his surroundings, leaving the strange illusion of disembodied eyes floating in the dark.
“Find anything?” Rance asked.
“So far, nothing,” he mumbled with the light. “I thought something here might have shorted during the outage and caused a chain reaction. But everything here looks in perfect order.” He moved away. “See where that line of wires connects to the main power feed?”
Rance looked, but most of it looked the same to her. Then, she saw where he pointed—a tiny bundle of wires snaking their way toward the casing.
“Yes.”
“If the drive had shorted out, you would see scorch marks on these wires, possibly even some broken ones. But they are intact. No burning smell, either. Of course, the Streaker has fail-safes to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I’ve seen it on other ships before. It’s not entirely unheard of, if the power surge is catastrophic enough.”
“Where’d you learn all this, Tally?” James asked.
Tally looked affronted. “You’ve known me for five years, James, and you’re just now asking?”
“I’ve wondered before, but you don’t like questions.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Tally snapped.
“Well, excuse me for caring.”
“You don’t care, James. You are simply curious. I am old enough to know the difference.”
Annoyed, Rance rolled her eyes. The two of them always found something to argue about. In truth, she didn’t know much about Tally’s past beyond the years he’d worked for her father. She didn’t even know how old he was. Graekens lived longer than humans, and she’d often wondered if he weren’t hundreds of years old.
The comm turned on with a click.
“Captain,” Harper said. “We found something.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the ship,” Harper said. “There’s something wrong with Deliverance.”
“How do you know?” Rance asked. She squeezed in beside Solaris, who was holding onto the ladder and looking up into the control room.
“The Caducean Drive she’s installed on is silent. I should be able to link to it from my handset even without main power, but the drive is dead.”
“Couldn’t it have been from the power surge?”
“I don’t think so. This is an expensive, extravagant piece of equipment, even if it doesn’t look like that from the outside. It has its own surge protectors built in. It won’t go dark from a simple power hiccup. I think it went dark and caused the hiccup. And something is preventing me from restarting all the systems.”
“You think Deliverance is stopping you.”
“Yes, and I can’t figure out why.”
“Maybe there’s some danger we don’t know about?”
Solaris shook his head. “It’s dangerous for us to drift about like this in deep space. We could starve to death, or freeze, or get picked up by pirates. Deliverance must think that rebooting the main power is more dangerous than any of those things.”
Rance shuddered. “None of those are good options. All of them are certain death. If we need to take a chance, I’d rather take it trying to fix the ship. Any chance of Deliverance fixing it herself?”
“Not if the drive is malfunctioning.”
“Then unplug it.”
Harper raised her eyebrows. “Captain? We’re not sure what will happen.”
A sinking feeling settled into Rance’s stomach. Apparently having an AI onboard the Streaker was not in her stars after all. She fumed at the amount of trouble it had caused. “We know what will happen if we don’t do anything. Pull it.”
Harper grabbed the drive, took one last look at Rance, and then pulled. It slid out of its slot with ease. Rance breathed a sigh of relief. She had half-expected it to be stuck in there.
They waited, expecting something bad to happen, anything, really.
“How long will it take to reboot, Harper?”
“A couple of hours. I’ll bring everything back online one system at a time, to check for anomalies.”
“Can we get lights first? I need to fix my toe.”
“Lights aren’t a problem.”
Harper pressed a few buttons, and a flashing cursor came up on the screen in front of her. It was reassuring to know they would be up and running soon. After a few more lines of command, lights came on throughout the ship.
Rance switched off her glow-light. “I want to check and double-check every system before we jump into hyperspace. Take as much time as you need, Harper.”
“Yes, Captain.”
The order was unnecessary. Harper wouldn’t let anything slip by her. She’d triple check everything, and then check it again, before allowing any attempt to restart the engines.
Solaris followed Rance back into the med bay. Since Harper was busy, she found a medical manual on her handset and looked up how to set her toe without putting it in the emergency pod. Then, she hopped up onto the other table.
“I think Harper has some injectable stuff stored in one of these refrigerators, to help with the swelling,” Rance said. “Get it, will you?”
Solaris obeyed, pulling supplies from the storage unit and spreading them out on the table next to Rance. An x-ray scanner revealed her toe was fractured in two places. He injected a local anesthetic into it, bringing her immediate relief. Rance held the portable scanner over it while Solaris set the bone back into place.
Then, more injections for swelling and infection.
“We have a healing compound in there,”
Harper called down. “Inject her bone with that. It will burn like heck but the fractures will heal within a few hours.”
“How long will it take if I don’t?” Rance asked.
“Two weeks, maybe three before you’d notice a difference, and you’d have stay off of it.”
“That’s not going to work. I need to walk around. We’ll be on Prometheus in a few days.”
Rance hated the idea of using valuable medical supplies, but she needed the use of her feet. There wasn’t an option.
Solaris found the injectable, carefully packaged in a bubble-like bag. When he inserted the needle into her bone, it burned like he’d injected liquid fire into her body. Rance gritted her teeth and closed her eyes.
“On Triton,” he said, “they have nanobots that will repair broken bones.”
“And that emergency pod over there is calibrated to use them if necessary. But we don’t keep them stocked. They are ridiculously expensive.”
“All done,” Solaris said, releasing her foot.
The pain had subsided. Rance hopped off the table, careful not to put weight on her foot.
“Where are you going?” Solaris asked.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, we have work to do.”
“We can’t do much until Harper gets the power back on. Why don’t you rest and reset yourself?”
“Why do you think I need resetting?”
Solaris sighed in frustration. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Thanks, but I’ll go up to the cockpit and wait.”
He shrugged. “Yes, Captain.”
Rance would have stormed out, but her numb toe prevented her from doing more than a hurried wobble out the door.
She didn’t know why she’d become angry with him. Solaris was inherently helpful, a part of his character she rather liked. But Rance didn’t like feeling helpless or showing real weakness in front of anybody.
Especially Solaris.
Why she felt that way, she couldn’t say exactly. She’d always been competitive. Maybe it had something do with the fact that she always had the sense he could beat her at just about anything, even when he wasn’t trying.
Rance climbed into the cockpit and sat in her customary chair. She leaned back, looking up at the stars that dotted the blackness around them. Gazing up at them reminded her of home on Xanthes. She always watched the stars as a child, falling asleep in the solarium as the wind and dust swirled around outside, blocking them out.
