“Beast-skin rope,” Tarn hums. “Unlike your tethers, it will not respond to the lieutenant’s command codes.”
“Kind of overkill,” Jay says. “She’s in bad shape. Tarn healed her stomach wound, but her left arm is still pretty much useless. I think she might lose it.”
“Dr. Brown’s remains have also been secured,” Beth says, as she and Chris enter the tiny dome of a room. The two of them volunteered to get the body into 3212’s cargo hold. It’s too dangerous to go back into the swamp looking for the others. We don’t know how much is left of them to find, anyway.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take Dr. Brown’s flyer back to the Solace?” I ask Tarn.
“I told you, Joanna. If your grandfather is still the human Followed when I return, I will be challenged,” he says. “I’m going to see this through, wherever it leads.” Then he switches to Sorrow, rumbling something to Nor that makes my stomach clench.
She shoots him a look I can tell is a glare even through her blindfold. “I Follow,” she snips back at him in a buzzing minor key, “even if your path takes us beyond the sky.”
“Well, nobody’s going beyond the sky just yet,” Leela says. “We don’t have a clean launch window for another forty-three minutes.”
Beth checks her flex. “That leaves us with less than five hours to get into orbit, intercept the Vulcan, and run simulation twelve.”
“If you can make the planet rotate faster, I’m happy to take off sooner,” Leela fires back.
“Hey, hey,” Jay says. “This is no time to lose our chill.”
Leela rolls her eyes. “Since when have any of us had any chill?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She waves his point off like a gnat. “Beth, check my trajectory, will you?”
“I could—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“No. You are going to go take a shower. Right now.”
“Seriously, Joey,” Chris says. “You stink.”
“Go, Hotshot,” Jay says. “You’ll feel better clean. And dressed in something that hasn’t been . . .”
“Ant-birded,” I supply, suddenly acutely aware that the thermal undershirt and shorts I’m wearing are sticking to my skin and the seat under me.
“That’s one way of putting it.” Leela makes a face. “Go. Now.”
“Okay, okay,” I say. “You only have to tell me I’m disgusting once.”
“It was three times,” Beth responds.
“Do you have to count everything?” I grumble, heading for the door.
Thankfully, tactical shuttles are designed to be temporary base camp for a squadron, if necessary. A narrow ladder leads me down into the galley, which is flanked by two doors. The one on the right has a toilet icon on it, the other a bed. That’s where they have Shelby tied up.
The bathroom is tiny. The toilet is in the single shower stall, so you have to fold it up to have room to bathe. The rest—a stool, a recycler, and a storage cabinet that holds towels and extra clothes—is crammed into less than a square meter.
Forty-three minutes before our last-ditch effort to save our loved ones is a stupid time to take a shower, but when the hot water starts flowing over my tormented skin, I’m glad my friends shooed me down here.
It takes a long time to get clean. There are long streaks of red on my legs and chest and belly from the few seconds the ant-bird’s blood had to seep through my flight suit. Chunks of my hair come free as I struggle to get the sticky, acidic stuff out of it, but there’s still enough to pull the uneven, wet mass back into a tight ponytail. If I don’t accidentally crash 3212 into the Vulcan and kill us all, I’ll have to cut most of it off.
If I can’t outmaneuver Grandpa and get us on board the Vulcan, I might have to ram the ship on purpose. There’s no guarantee we could do enough damage to stop the scrubbers, but if it’s our only chance to save our families . . .
I push the thought out of my head and towel off. There’s no point in dwelling on all the ways this could go spectacularly wrong.
I put on a clean bra and shorts. I have to dig through the cabinets a bit to find pants and a thermal that will fit. Most of the marines are taller and bigger than I am, so it takes a while to find something that will work. I’m still in my underwear when Jay walks in with a bag of drinking water and a first-aid kit.
“Oh, sorry! I . . .” He spins, ready to bolt out again.
But I say, “Don’t go.”
He stops. I am pretty sure every inch of me is blushing.
“I just didn’t want to—”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I don’t, I mean, you don’t have to . . .”
“Oh,” he says.
“Yeah.”
The look on Jay’s face is somewhere between amusement and awe and anxiety. It’s more awkward than sexy, but that’s . . . perfect.
It makes me want to kiss him. A lot.
I want to feel his hands on my aching, burned skin.
I also want to tell him to turn around so I can yank my clothes on.
I don’t do either. I just stand there. Staring.
He stares back.
This goes on for a long time.
Then he hands me the water and fishes in the first-aid kit for a tube of burn cream.
“Your burns,” he says. “I, I mean, they, ah, need ointment.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Probably.”
“Just . . . sit down, okay?” he says. Is he blushing? Yeah. He’s definitely blushing.
I sit on the stool.
Jay kneels in front of me and squeezes out a pool of the yellowish stuff into his palm. He starts with the burns at my ankles. His fingers are so gentle, I can hardly feel them brushing the thick ointment over my skin. I’m surprised how much it helps. Or maybe I’m just distracted from the pain by the sparkling electricity of his touch.
That’s gentle, too, and overwhelming. Not in a bad way. The glowing static washes over the pain and the grief and the anger, drowning them out with the simple heat of his hands. Of his breath on my belly as he massages ointment into the curve of my hip.
He sits back.
I start to protest, but I don’t get the chance because his lips are on mine. The kiss is deep and hungry and singular. He doesn’t touch me anywhere else.
I pull the tube of ointment from his hand and toss it to the floor. I want to forget everything else. Just for a little while. But he catches my hands before I can touch him, pulling back so he can bring them to his lips.
“What if there is no better time?” I demand.
He squeezes my fingers. “I need . . . a future. Whether this works or not, we’re going to have to deal with your grandfather. The things he did. The things he convinced the rest of us to do. . . .” Jay shakes his head. “I need something on the other side of that.”
Our faces are still centimeters apart. I could lean forward and kiss him again. It would be so easy. It would be easy for him to pull away, too.
He doesn’t.
Before I can do anything about it, both of our flexes buzz an alert and T – 15:00 fades up on the wall screens around us.
Jay quirks a wry smile. “Guess that’s our cue.”
“If we die, I’m going to be really pissed off,” I say, trying to make it come out like a joke.
He laughs, so it must have worked.
“Guess we’d better not die, then,” he says.
I start for the door.
“Um, Hotshot,” Jay says, still laughing.
“What?”
“I think you might want some pants. And shirt.”
I blush all over. Again.
I grab the thermal and drag it over my head. “Go!” I tell him. “I’m right behind you.”
“But will you be wearing pants?”
I throw the water bag at his head as he flees.
I yank on the pants and reach for my boots, but they’re sticky with ant-bird gore. I can’t stand the thought of putting them on, so I don’t. I don�
�t need them to pilot 3212.
My stomach grumbles loudly as I step out of the bathroom into the galley, reminding me that I haven’t eaten more than a few bites of ration bar in the last twenty-two hours. I open a cabinet and find it stocked with bags of freeze-dried chickpeas. I snag a bag and pour a handful of peas into my mouth. The salt-crusted nuttiness is almost enough to make me cry. Real food. Earth food. How long until this stash is gone and it’s just one more thing I might never taste again?
A thread of sound winds through my self-pity. A human voice, humming. The melody is familiar, but I can’t place it until the humming drops into a raspy whisper of lyrics.
I once was lost . . . but now I’m found. Was blind . . . but now . . . I see.
Goose bumps prickle all over my body. “Amazing Grace.” When I was really tiny, Grandpa used to sing that song to me while he walked me around the house at night when I couldn’t sleep.
Now Shelby is singing it to herself, in the bunks. Grieving. I can hear the sadness there, underneath the cracked and broken words.
I should leave her alone.
Instead, I push the narrow door open and slide in between the two racks of cramped bunk beds.
“Howdy, Junior,” Shelby says, dropping seamlessly from the whispered prayer of a song into sarcasm. “Come to mock your prisoner?”
“No,” I say.
I’m not sure why I’m here, so I don’t elaborate. She doesn’t ask.
Shelby is stretched out on a lower bunk with her harness tethered to the wall. Her ruined shoulder is swathed in a pressure bandage and a sling. Her good arm is lashed against her side with black-green cord. Her ankles are bound the same way.
“Guess I should take it as a compliment that your glow-in-the-dark buddy thinks I’m dangerous enough to tie up.” She sneers.
“His name is Tarn,” I say.
“Yeah.” She sighs. “I know it.”
Then she kicks at the bunk a little with her bound feet, like she’s trying to get comfortable and can’t.
On impulse, I reach out and pick the knot at her ankles loose. The green-black cord falls away in my hands. It’s smooth and cool, almost like a braid of rubber, though I know it’s raptor hide.
“Why did you do that?” Shelby demands.
“I don’t know,” I snap, sudden embarrassment crackling in my belly. “I don’t know why I’m here, talking to someone who hates everything I have ever believed in.”
I reach for the door to leave, but Shelby calls after me, “That’s not true at all.”
I really don’t want to care, but I stop and look back at her anyway.
“My parents were both born in Mississippi, just like me,” she says. “Even before the flu, it was a mess down there, but they got out. They were missionaries when I was young. And doctors. We traveled all over the world with a group of like-minded medical types, helping folks and praying with them. Us kids were tight. We all wanted to be doctors just like our parents, when we grew up.”
Recognition flares.
She could be describing the Galactic Frontier Project. My childhood. My friends.
She sucks in a little breath. “Then the flu came to Mississippi. My parents went back. Moved into my grandparents’ house. The tire swing was still there, in a big ol’ tree with these thick low branches. Looked like some kind of giant, just about ready to give you a hug. Or smack you upside the head. That tree would have fit right in on this planet.”
“How long before the quarantine was that?”
The corners of her mouth lift in wry grin. “Not long enough.” The expression fades immediately, leaving behind naked grief. She flops back on the bed and looks up at the ceiling. “People got sick fast. Dropped like flies. My parents stayed to treat the infected. They shouldn’t have. They should have locked them in a room to die. That’s what the IntGov Marines did in the end.” She swears. “Either you’re gonna have to untie my arm, too, or I’m gonna have to wipe my nose on this sling, and I don’t think that’s gonna turn out well.”
I untie her arm. She sits up, fishes a handkerchief from a pocket in her utility harness, and blows her nose. She studies the contents and shudders. “Rainbow snot. This planet just has no end of gross.”
She stuffs the handkerchief back in her harness pocket and looks up at me. “I wouldn’t have cut you loose, if our positions were reversed.”
Fear shoots through me. Even with only one hand, I’m sure she can hurt me faster than I can get out of here.
But she doesn’t.
“You learn a lotta stuff when your parents lock you in the school cafeteria with twenty other kids while they’re all busy dying outside,” she says. “You figure out how to take care of you and yours, and not give a damn about anything or anyone else. So if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t care if some crazy asshole who just tried to kill me had rainbow boogers dripping down her throat. Or that her feet were falling asleep. And for sure I’d never have made an alliance with an alien freak who attacked my own people.” She runs her good hand over her her ruined shoulder. “Which means, if it’d been up to me, I’d have bled out a couple of minutes ago.”
“Oh.” I’m slowly understanding what she’s saying. She’s right. She’d be dead if not for Tarn.
“Yeah,” Shelby says. “It’s damn disconcerting, realizing you may have been playing the game by the wrong set of rules your whole life.”
“I’m not sure there are any rules left,” I say.
“Speaking of,” Shelby says, pointing to the countdown clock on the wall screens, “I assume the fact that we’re launching means you have some kind of heroic plan to stop Grandpa Dearest from scrubbing us off the face of the universe?”
“Not so much heroic as desperate,” I say.
“Same difference,” Shelby says, settling back against the pillow again. “Wake me when it’s over. Unless we’re all dead.”
I pull the sliding door open, but then I turn back to Shelby.
“We’re going to intercept the Vulcan and board her.”
Shelby bursts out laughing. “You really do think highly of yourself, Junior, if you think you have a chance in hell of boarding a ship piloted by Eric Crane. Or anyone else, for that matter. You don’t have any combat experience at all, much less space combat experience. Hell, I don’t even have space combat experience.”
I know she’s right. It just doesn’t matter.
“I have to try,” I say.
“Why?” she demands. “If you somehow manage to pull off the impossible and board her, you really think he’ll just let you shut down the system?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t. But we aren’t going to try to access the computers. We’re just going to turn them off. Chris and Leela programmed a testing protocol into the Vulcan’s mainframe while they were rebuilding her. Simulation twelve. It kills power to the whole computer system. Including the planet scrubbers.”
Shelby sits up and stares at me.
“You sure it works?” she says, her voice suddenly intense.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve seen Chris do it.”
A predatory grin spreads over her face. “I can’t wait to see the old man’s face when we kill his ship right out from under him.”
“‘We’?” I say. She can barely stand.
“That’s right,” Shelby says, holding her good hand out to me. “Help me up, Junior. Unless you’d rather hold a grudge than save the world.”
Thirty
The wall screens read T – 03:53 as I help Shelby limp onto the bridge.
“What is she doing here?” Nor hisses.
“We can’t trust her, Jo,” Jay agrees.
“Probably not, Slow Hands,” Shelby says, easing herself into the nearest chair. “But you’re still gonna be happy Junior dragged my sorry butt up here, in a minute.”
“You have space combat experience?” Leela asks, dubious.
“No,” Shelby says. “And I don’t plan to. Two of my folks are on the Vulcan with the admiral, which means
all you gotta do is get me within radio range. If I tell them to initiate this simulation twelve thing, they will. No questions asked.”
“Are you sure?” Beth says. “Our grandfather was alone when he met Joanna in the desert.”
“He came to River Bend last night, ordered two of my people to come with him, and told me to find Dr. Brown and kill her. Told us she was a traitor. Giving technology and weapons to the enemy.” Her eyes dart to Tarn and Nor. “Of course, enemy seems to be a fluid term on this planet.”
“She could be lying,” Nor hums. Her hood is down. The artificial light from the wall screens is bright enough to wash out her internal glow. The muscles and bones and ligaments under her transparent skin are painted in vivid shades without the usual tint of her pale green light. It makes me kind of uncomfortable, for some reason. Like she’s naked and doesn’t know it. Vulnerable, I guess.
“Hate me all you want,” Shelby says. “But don’t let it make you stupid. A lot of people I love already died on this planet. I don’t want to lose the ones I’ve got left.”
None of us do, but the others are still dubious. I don’t blame them. The prospect of pinning our last hope on Emily Shelby’s word seems crazy.
“Working together is better,” Tarn says. The gentle harmony of the words is quietly inexorable. Undeniable.
“We’re T minus thirty-four seconds,” Leela says. “This is not one of those occasions where we want to be fashionably late.”
I drop into the pilot seat, shaking out my flex as I tether in. It snaps stiff into tablet mode. I press it against the arm of my chair, transforming it into a console for the nav app.
I take a deep breath. I put my fingers on the velvety screen.
“Engage thrusters in three . . . two . . . one.”
The engines fire below us, their vibration flooding upward through the floor and my chair, into my bones.
“Liftoff,” I breathe, pressing up on the nav app.
The charred and twisted swamp solace trees on either side of us burst into flames again as our engine backwash roars over them. Guilt twists up the back of my neck. Every move we make leaves a fresh scar on this world.
As we ascend into the darkening gray sky, gasps and whispers of Sorrow language brush over my skin. Tarn and Nor are talking quietly behind me. Some of the exclamations are sharp edged. Is that fear? Or pain? Abruptly I realize how bright it is, with the last light of the setting sun pouring through the three-sixty.
The Survivor Page 26
