Adrift (17 page)

She noticed before he did that his breathing was getting shallow. Opening the doors in the corridor, like Whitman had suggested, helped for a while. The old man hadn’t pumped any extra air into them, the way he had in
navigation and, to a lesser degree, the corridor. Tron left the door leading to the stairway closed. There was no help there, only a larger space that might have more leaks like food storage. He would last longer with it closed, even if only a few minutes.

With the
extra time from the airlock and the med bay, he thought he was ok to sleep. He needed it, even if he wasn’t. Tron could barely keep his eyes open. Kivi was tired too, he could hear it in her voice. He wandered into med bay with some vague notion of seeping on the bed there. It was only when he was looking at the bed that he realized the problem with his plan. It was bolted into the floor, but it was just his boots holding him there. If he didn’t want to sleep standing or floating, he needed to find another solution. He noticed a strap hanging off the bottom of the bed. He felt around the underside numbly, trying not to think of Dr. Geddes floating around where he was touching. There was more than just one strap. Rather than worry about what they might mean, he just belted himself onto the soft mattress and positioned the helmet close enough that he could still hear Kivi breathing. He was asleep in minutes.

“Tron, you have to wake up. Please, please, wake up.”

He groaned. His body didn’t want to move. Not even his eyes. Everything in him just wanted to stay in the warm, comfortable place he’d been.

“Tron! Are you awake?”

No. He didn’t want to be. Awake was cold and made his head hurt. Asleep was better. But Kivi was calling for him. She might need him. “Yeah,” he muttered, realizing with a start that he was gasping.

Tron rolled off the bed,
the magnets on his feet hitting the ground hard. He was running out of air. His lungs were straining and his whole body was shaking, and he’d almost slept through his own death. He wasn’t going to sleep now. Adrenaline surged through him, pushing him to a panic he knew he couldn’t afford.

“You’re almost out of air! You have to get in your suit!”

He knew that. Why did she think he wouldn’t know that? Where was his suit? He’d been so tired when he’d come in here. Had he brought it with him? He had the helmet, but that wasn’t enough. The air supply was in the suit itself, held in compressed pockets throughout the material. It was released from one at a time in a controlled stream until the pocket was depleted. Each suit could last for six hours before it was out of oxygen. Tron had learned that somewhere, but he didn’t remember where. Had it been a lesson? Had Sonja told him that?

Not important. Finding the suit was important. He’d kept it close while he was opening all the doors. Tron remembered that. The med bay was the last one he’d opened, so it had to be close. Where? By the door. He’d dropped it by the door. There! Next to the cabinet where he’d put all the supplies he thought they’d need.

It was harder getting it on than it should be. His hands were clumsy and unresponsive. His whole body was. It wanted to go back to sleep. Only his mind was fighting to survive, forcing the rest of it to sluggishly respond to commands. Finally, he had the belts buckled and slammed the helmet in place. Tron heard the snap of the seal closing, then felt the whoosh of air flutter his hair. He sucked in a deep breath and slumped against the wall in relief.

“Tron?”

“I’m here Kivi,” he said softly. His chest ached as it heaved in every beautiful breath. He’d never realized how amazing air was. Even the stale stuff filling his mouth and nose now. If there had ever been proof of the god Father Andrei was always telling them about, it was air. “Still breathing.”

The sound came again, the one that was too much like a sob and a laugh for him to tell the difference. “I almost lost you.”

It wasn’t a question. He answered anyway. “Not yet.”

Kivi let out a slow breath. He forced himself to do the same, though for him it was more an effort to get his breathing under control and less the relieved sigh he heard in the mic.

“There’s a problem.”

Not a relieved sigh than. Tron didn’t yet have the energy to be surprised.
He wasn’t sure he would be anyway. There was always some problem waiting for them.

“I told Whitman you were out of air. He tried to turn the ship back on early.”

“Did he now?”

“Yes. I don’t think he’s a bad guy after all.”

“Don’t get your hopes up on that one.” Tron didn’t have any desire to repeat this argument. His victory would come when he was dead and the old man still had the door closed, and Tron wasn’t looking forward to that at all. So he let it go. “What’s the problem?”

“The engine.” There was a quiver to Kivi’s voice. If he hadn’t spent so many hours with nothing but the sound of it to keep him company Tron probably wouldn’t have noticed. It was a slight thing, barely there at all. It scared him.

He climbed back to his feet, struggling with the bulk of the suit, heart hammering in his ears. “What about the engine?”

“It won’t start.”

“Ok.” It wasn’t ok. Not at all. He didn’t have six hours. He could see in the readout at in the lower left corner of his helmet that it wasn’t just the asphyxiation that had made him so cold. The temperature was dropping fast. He didn’t know how long it had been since Whitman had last kicked the engine on for one of their quick looks at their pursuers, but those minutes of power were important. Instead of filling his corridor with air, Whitman had been using the time to heat the ship a few degrees, just enough to maintain livable temps. Without that, all the heat was being drained away by the black outside. It wouldn’t take long to make it completely inhospitable. The suit would protect him to a point, but it was meant to be worn with a very heavy lining that would help insulate it. He’d feel it soon, and the longer he was exposed the worse it would be. He needed air. Air and warmth.

And Kivi.
Kivi would know how to fix things. She was amazing at fixing things.

Even if Whitman was really trying to turn things on again, he wouldn’t have any idea what was wrong without power running to the sensors in the engine. Tron had sorted
out at least that much from his lessons in navigation. There was a chance it was something simple, something he could do. Unlikely, especially given their luck, but it was better than sitting around and waiting to freeze to death or run out of air again.

“I’m
on my way,” he announced. “We’re going to fix this.”

“I know.” She said it with such certainty in her voice that Tron almost found himself believing it. It was a mistake, her having such faith in him. He knew that the temperature in
navigation had to be dropping too. Maybe Whitman was hoping to last longer than him. But he thought chances were high that there was a real problem. Which meant that if he failed, she would die. Kivi thought that he’d protect her, the way he’d been trying to do since this had all started, but she didn’t see the problem with that even, after everything they’d gone through. Tron would fail her. He always failed. He couldn’t make friends or control his temper or focus on his studies. He’d done nothing but let people down his whole life, and now he was going to do it to her too.

He could feel the loss of every second it took him to get to the engine room. It was on the opposite end of the deck, past the mess hall. For once, as he passed that horrible room, he was too busy to think about what was on the other side of the doors. He was too worried about how slow his legs were moving and how cold it would be for Kivi inside
navigation. She didn’t have the mass for subzero temps. She’d freeze a lot faster than Tron would. If he took too long, she might be too cold to think straight. If that happened, and she couldn’t talk him through what needed to be done, they’d all die. He had no illusions about sorting things out himself.

The blue strips in the engine room were especially concentrated over the engine block. Tron leaned over and sought out the paneling Kivi had told him she’d pulled up. His gloved fingers couldn’t fit in the tiny gap. He looked around the rest of the room with desperate hope for something that could help, and was greatly rewarded for his efforts when he came across a tool kit. Like the first aid kits that were positioned at a couple locations on each deck, this was attached to the wall. It was for power-outages like this, he realized, when seeking out a tool kit could mean the difference between life and death.

Tron used a flat-head screwdriver to pry up the panel. Kivi’d told him that there was supposed to be a yellow glow inside. There was nothing but darkness now. He dug around in the tool kit for a minute and found a light stick. He cracked it and clipped it to a hook on the chest of his suit. The stick took a second to work, but once it started the light grew until half the room was illuminated in its soft yellow glow.

“What do you see?”

He could tell she’d been waiting to ask him that as long as she could stand. Knowing Kivi, she’d probably been counting the seconds and figuring out how long each of his steps would take to get there.

“A lot parts. I don’t know.” He stared at the mystery of mechanics in front of him and tried to imagine what Kivi would see. “Directly in front of me is a big metal box. It’s almost as big as my hand.”

“That’s the catalyzer. Do you see the connections coming out of it?”

“Yeah.” Tron leaned in closer, shifting so that the light stick would drape in the opening. “There are three metal tubes that are about as thick as my thumb. Two on my right side and one leading toward me.”

“Tubes?” She was silent a moment. “Oh. That’s just plating. Those are actually wires. If you follow the ones on the right?”

“Umm…” He reached his hand into th
e opening and traced them both. “One links up at either end to this weird thing. I’m not really sure how to describe it. There’s these two spring looking things encased in a discolored glass pipe. The pipes kind of recessed into this housing that… well, there are lots of other tubes or wires or whatever coming off it.”

“Compression coil.” Kivi didn’t sound nearly as certain as she had on the other parts. “That’s got to be the compression coil. Two inside the glass? You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Is there supposed to be two?”

“No.” The mic went silent. Not just quiet, when neither one of them was speaking. Tron couldn’t hear her breathing, which meant she’d shut it off completely. Or switched channels. Or something else had gone wrong. But he refused to consider that. 

He pursed his lips and shifted, hoping that a different angle would fix whatever was wrong. No matter how he turned, though, it was always two springs inside, with a break between them big enough to put his fist through.

The mic clicked back on with two quick beeps, then the sounds of Kivi’s breath returned.

“The coil’s broken.”

“I’ve figured that much out on my own. Got anything else?”

“Whitman doesn’t know how to fix it.”

Tron grimaced. He wanted to argue that the old man wasn’t likely to tell them if he did, but that wasn’t fair. If Kivi said it was broken, Tron had no doubt it was. And that wasn’t just bad for the two of them. It was death for Whitman too. Unless the ship following them was his Free Ride, waiting for him to finish off Lucy’s two survivors. But Tron couldn’t really make himself believe that. If it was really Whitman’s ship,
this whole cat and mouse game in the debris didn’t make sense.

“Whitman doesn’t. Do you?”

She was quiet too long. Tron didn’t need to be a genius to know what that means.

“No.” Kivi paused. “Not yet.”

Quick Fix

The gloves were a problem. They were big and unwieldy. Too big for her hands. She couldn’t get her fingers to work on the pad properly. She needed the pad, to make a model. It wouldn’t be as good as touching. Touching was the best way to sort out how things worked together. But if she couldn’t have that, she could make do with a model. One she’d make from her memories of the glimpse she’d gotten of the engine, and whatever data she could find floating around in the pad’s memory. There wasn’t much. She’d tried to find information on their engine before. But Kivi would make it work. Then she’d have something she could trace with her fingers and sort out how to fit it together. Except she couldn’t do even the first step of that with the big, clunky gloves. They had to go. It took a few minutes to unbuckle all the buckles. Long enough for Whitman to see what she was doing.

Kivi had come out of the bathroom
while Tron slept. She had to. It got so cold that her shaking had made her slip from her perch on the toilet lid. There would be a really ugly bruise on her shoulder from it. But it had woken her up and she’d gotten into her suit on before she could freeze to death. Whitman helped her with that. He’d even complimented her on how they’d modified the suit to fit her better. He didn’t compliment her now. From across the room, he tapped the side of his helmet where the mic was.

When he’d first closed the door, she’d been certain that Tron was right about Whitman the whole time. It was a bad thing. The reasons he said he had for it were good. Kivi had to admit that. They even made sense. But
it left Tron out there all alone. For her, that was enough proof. Except that he seemed to think so too. He kept looking at the door like he wanted to open it. Every time their paths crossed, after he used the bathroom but before she went back in, he asked how Tron was breathing and if he needed to try to run yet. Kivi had almost said yes each time, but while he was in the bathroom she’d peek at the sensor screen and she always saw a shape moving around in the black and white image that she figured must be the other ship. Since she knew Tron would be really upset if they’d done all this just to get killed by bad guys anyway, she always said no. But it didn’t seem like the sort of question one of the bad guys would ask.

And he was the one who told her to wake up Tron and get him in his suit.
When she’d needed to ask him about the coil he’d answered right away. It wasn’t a good answer, not a helpful one, but he tried. What little he knew just didn’t apply to their engine. Kivi had known that the second he said he remembered something about exhaust ports. There weren’t any exhaust ports near the coil. All of that seemed like stuff a good guy would do.

Kivi wished people would just make up their minds, whether they were good or bad. All the switching back and forth
was confusing.

She didn’t want to turn
the channel to 5, where she could talk to Whitman. She wanted to keep her mic on 2, so that she could hear Tron breathing. It was a good sound. It meant he was still alive. She could concentrate on things better so long as she knew that. But Whitman might have something important to say, so she did it.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Nothing important then. She reached up to change the channel back.

“You’re going to get yourself dead!” He shouted before she could hit it.

Kivi frowned. She didn’t like it when people yelled. It made her feel like she was doing something wrong, even when she knew she wasn’t. “No. I just need my fingers. There’s a rubber seal around my wrist that will keep the air in.”

Air was a problem. They were running low. Not low like Tron. There wasn’
t much of any left out there. But they were low. Low enough to make her lightheaded, which wouldn’t help anyone. She’d noticed it when they were putting on her suit.

“You need your fingers?” He wasn’t yelling anymore.
He sounded confused. “What for?”

She pointed to the pad. “I need to see it. To figure out how it fits.”

Whitman let out a slow breath. “Alright. I’ve got some better for the delicate work, but they’re never going to fit like they are. Let’s see what else we can do about that, huh?”

“Do?”

“To keep your fingers from freezing off. Unless you have a deep desire to go around with a couple fewer digits than you currently enjoy. If that’s the case, let me know now. Otherwise I’m going to ruin a very nice pair of small-work gloves for nothing.”

Kivi didn’t need to weigh those options. She could see in the readout how cold it was outside the suit. She hadn’t considered what that would do to her fingers, only that she needed them. She’d only even thought about the air when Whitman started questioning her actions. Consequences had never been factored in. “Ok.”

It wasn’t exactly simple, the solution Whitman came up with for the gloves he dug out of the pack he’d brought with him from the Free Ride. At first he was going to tie a knot in each one, but Kivi rejected that idea right away. She needed her hands to be able to move, and a big knot would only be a little better than the suit. He tried to shift it around to the back of her hand, but that wasn’t much better. So, as Kivi tucked her hand back into the suit’s heated glove, Whitman went to work on his really nice lined leather ones.

He dug in his pack and came up with a pair of scissors. The sheers were so small and sharp that Kivi suspected they were meant for snipping wires instead of cloth, but Whitman didn’t hesitate to cut into them. It took him only a few minutes, then he fished around the pack again and pulled out a thick white tube. “Glue,” he explained. “Sort of. It’s designed to plug holes in seals for little bits of time. Dries pretty much instant, with or without atmo.
Not really meant for seamstress stuff, but it should work for a while. We make do out here in the black.”

A few minutes later, Kivi was taking off her suit’s gloves for good.

The leather ones weren’t nearly as warm. They couldn’t be, of course. They didn’t link up with the suit’s temperature controls that so efficiently distributed the heat to her entire body. But Kivi hadn’t expected it to be so much of a difference. The leather was nice, nicer than anything she’d ever even seen, let alone had on her hands. And the lining was easily the softest thing she’d ever touched. But there weren’t any tips at all, and the cold seeped in so fast that she couldn’t imagine her hands would be any colder if she didn’t have gloves at all.

There wasn’t time to deal with it. Once Whitman checked the fit, tightening the holes around her fingers as best he could by tying strips of fabric around them, Kivi forced her mind away from the bite of the cold and back to the pad she’d left on the floor by the door.
She switched the channel on the mic back to 5, then settled into place with her back against the metal that kept her locked in. Somehow she got her fingers to start work on building the model on flat surface of the thin pad.

The trembling in her hands became a serious problem for a while, then Kivi figured out how to factor the movement into her gestures and it became just another part of the process. Soon she had the first 3D rendering floating above the pad. The holo was fairly translucent, which didn’t help her pretend it was the real thing. If there was power, she could hook the pad up to one of the power junctions. Then the holo would look utterly real, right down to shadowing and imperfections in the metals and glass.
But if there was power, she wouldn’t need it. Kivi made do.

After a few seconds of analysis, she waved her hand through the image, which returned to rendering to the flat surface. Kivi pursed her lips as she considered the problem.

“Not going well?”

She jumped at the voice. Kivi had forgotten Tron was on the other end of the mic. His breathing had become another part of her process, a white noise that helped her focus. Like her papa’s whistling or her momma’s laughter. “Um…”

“You hum,” he told her.

“No.”

“You sure do. You did it when you were working on the hook and you were doing it up until about a minute ago.”

She wasn’t humming. She would’ve noticed. But he wouldn’t lie to her. Not about that. It served no purpose. “I
didn’t mean to.”

“I believe that,” he said with a chuckle. “I like it. It sounds happy.”

That startled her. Happy? Well. She wasn’t unhappy. Not when she was working. Every other time, but not then. She shouldn’t be. Kivi knew that. They were all about to die, and Tron was going to be first. It was colder where he was. Now that she was paying attention, the way she’d promised herself she’d always do, she could hear his teeth chattering. Kivi was cold, so cold her hands hurt worse than anything. Even worse than her head when she fell down the stairs. But her teeth weren’t chattering. Tron had all of himself inside a suit. That meant it was worse for him. Colder. She could imagine ice forming on the outside of his helmet and that made her stomach so tight she thought she might get sick. But he was right. When she’d been designing her model, she’d been happy. It only went away when she’d turned off the holo.

“I’m sorry.” She chewed her lip. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Didn’t mean to what?”

“Be happy. I’m sorry.”

“Oh Kivi,” Tron sounded sad. Sad that she didn’t care that he was going to die, probably. “Don’t apologize for that. Don’t ever.”

“But…”

“I told you I liked it, right?”

She sniffled. Was she about to cry? She thought she was. That wasn’t ok. She wasn’t going to cry anymore. She’d decided that already. “Yes.”

“I wasn’t lying Kivi. I like listening to you hum. I mean it. So. What’s going on with this solution you’re getting for me?”

“I don’t have it.” She took a deep breath. Kivi knew what he would say. She could hear his voice in her head almost as clearly as she could the one in her ear.

“Not yet.”

Kivi smiled at the echo. “Not yet,” she agreed. “Tell me when I hum?”

“Absolutely not. Then you’ll stop and ruin my fun.”

Her smile stayed in place as she flexed her aching fingers and started again. She worked backward from what she’d done before, trying to see
where things had fallen apart. She’d been at it a full ten minutes when another solution hit her like a jolt. Kivi rubbed her hands together until she could feel her fingers again, then hit the delete icon on her pad. All the labor of the past forty minutes disappeared in an instant. Good riddance.

The screen cleared, she started all over again.
Half an hour passed, she knew it did the way she always knew what time it was, but it didn’t actually feel like half an hour. It felt a lot faster than that. When she tapped the icon to do another rendering, she traced her fingers over the translucent lines, but Kivi already knew she’d found the right answer. It was so elegant she laughed out loud.

“Good news?”

The mic didn’t startle her this time, just like the happiness didn’t vanish. “It’s perfect! You’ll see.”

She started walking him through her process. It had gone so quickly for her, but all she had to do was tap the screen, and she knew what she was doing. Tron had to cut wires and undo bolts and all the other steps to realize her vision. Kivi had known it wouldn’t be as easy for him, and had known it would take him longer. She just never realized how much longer.

The chattering got worse as he worked. Kivi’s joy at her solution faded as she began to worry it had taken too long. How long ago had the chattering started? She should know. She always remembered, and she’d been so determined to pay attention to him. But there had been a machine to fix, and focusing on two things was hard. If he’d stopped breathing, she would’ve noticed. The same as she did when he started talking. But the teeth? That was different. It had taken her a while to even realize it wasn’t just some kind of odd feedback. She didn’t have any idea.

His breathing started slowing. Kivi knew what that meant. Whitman had warned her, when he told her to get Tron in his suit. When people got too cold, they just fell asleep and never woke up. A lot of times they thought they were just resting for a minute, and that it was their decision, but it was really their bodies shutting down.

“Hey!” She’d never shouted into the mic before. It echoed in both their helmets, and the feedback hurt her ear. Kivi didn’t mind, though. She heard him draw in a sharp breath. “You can’t go to sleep!”

“Huh?” He didn’t sound right. Almost like he did when he first woke up, only worse. Like maybe he wasn’t all the way awake.

“Stop going to sleep!”

“
I’m tired.”

She knew he was tired. That was a dumb thing to say. She’d just told him not to go to sleep. People didn’t go to sleep if they weren’t tired. Tron wasn’t dumb, so he clearly wasn’t thinking right yet. She had to fix that. Kivi thought really hard, and decided she would try to act like papa when he was getting Heath to do his class work.
She remembered exactly what he said, of course, but getting the tone of her voice right was harder. “Well that’s just too bad! You’re whining like a baby! How am I supposed to take you seriously when you act like a baby when it’s time to be a man? Is this what you do when people are counting on you?”

He drew in another sharp breath. “No.” He sounded mad. Growling, like he’d done at Whitman when they first argued.