Adrift (5 page)

Her stomach clenched as it slid closed behind her. For a second, she was going to call out and ask him to let her back in. It wasn’t necessarily the same people that attacked who had them, after all. For all they knew, this was a rescue ship filled with nice people who were going to make everything okay again.

Then she saw the machine. Kivi smiled as she scooted forw
ard. She laid down the tool box Tron had found beside the contraption of red-painted metal plates and dark black wires and opened it almost reverantly. She couldn’t wait to run her hands over the insides and feel all the moving parts and how they fit together.

Kivi didn’t notice as she started humming.

Get It Done

Tron couldn’t help the smile as he heard the soft, tuneless melody coming through the speaker in the helmet. The girl was weird, there was no arguing that. He was glad for the sound, though. It kept the silence away.

He’d lied, when he said he would stay put. Well, he’d never actually said that. He promised to stay in ‘shouting distance’ which, with the mics in the helmets, meant within
fifty feet. So technically that was misleading, not lying. He felt like a jerk for doing it, but Tron was not going to talk to Kivi about what he was doing.

Med
bay was just barely within the range. He’d counted it out on his way to get the pressure suits. He’d also counted out the distance to the Mess Hall. That was more like twenty-five feet. Well within his range. Tron intended this even before she offered to go into the airlock on her own. He’d been trying to figure out how to suggest it when she did it for him. Weird, without doubt, but the girl was the best kind of weird. He could get his job done while Kivi worked on hers, and she would never need to know. It was better that way.

The boots of the pressure suit were too thick for the glass. He could hear it crunching beneath his feet, but the only pain was the stuff that was already there. It was a good change. He decided that once they were done here, he was going to dig his boots out of his trunk. He should’ve thought of it before.

Dr. Geddes was heavier than Tron expected. The man was so thin. It never occurred to him that it would be difficult to pull the body out of the corner, let alone across the room. He shifted the corpse around until he had locked his arms around Geddes’s chest, holding it against him like some kind of strange backward hug. Then he walked the body backward across the Med Bay and out the door.

The crunching glass followed them out into the corridor. Tron was nearly sick when he realized that it was ground into the dead man’s body. He didn’t let himself look down. He knew that if he saw the kind old man mutilated, he
wouldn’t be able to swallow down the bile burning the back of his throat. So he kept walking. Ten feet to the Mess Hall.

Getting Geddes inside was
n’t too hard. He’d pulled the door open a crack when he’d passed by before. He just unlocked his hands and used the left one to push it the rest of the way. Then he was inside. But he wouldn’t look, not this time. If he looked, he was going to cry again. He couldn’t do that. Kivi would hear, just like he heard her humming. So instead of thinking about what was all around him, or about his mother’s face, he closed his eyes and just listened to that melody. Twelve steps. That should be enough. That would be all the way inside.

He cracked his eyes again, just enough to see the way out. He hurried through, closing the door without ever looking in. He leaned against the door across from the Mess for a minute, sucking in several ragged breaths. Kivi’s humming faltered, then stopped. Tron pulled off his helmet, afraid that anything she heard over the radio would give him away. For a second, there was no sound at all. Just his own gasps for air and a faint,
almost inaudible hiss from the door behind him. Then the humming started again. Tron sagged with relief and put his helmet back on. He could hear her with it off, but it was easier to hear with it on. Besides, he liked the humming.

The next part was easier. It
took him a little while to find a broom, which was amusing since there always seemed to be one at hand when someone wanted to punish him with cleaning duty. Rags were in abundant supply. Those he could just pull off of any bed he wanted. Still, he searched until he found one that someone else had designated for cleaning. It didn’t seem right, taking sheets off of the beds that people he knew had slept in just the night before. Once he had both, he headed back to Med Bay.

Tron had always hated sweeping. It seemed so pointless. They lived in an enclosed space. Any dirt he swept up would just end up back there again a few days later. They were dirty creatures, people, and spending time pretending that was otherwise just seemed like a waste of time. But this was different. This time, he wasn’t cleaning. He was fixing.

They were going to need the med bay. Tron knew that as surely as he knew that his heart was beating. Lucy wasn’t designed to be taken care of by two people, and even if they figured out how to get it running again, they wouldn’t be able to follow proper safety procedures to keep it working. If they even knew those procedures. It wasn’t like either one of them was trained for something like this. If they didn’t turn the engine back on, they would need to find some kind of drug that would kill them fast. Or he would. Tron had no intention of dying gasping. Either way, it was only a matter of time before this room was needed. Tron wasn’t going to walk through glass again.

Once the floor was clean, he did a more
thorough search of every cabinet. It took a little work, getting them open, but he figured out the trick eventually. After that, the work went a lot quicker. There were more bottles with pills in them than he’d thought the first time. Tron didn’t know what any of them were, but it was a start. Maybe one of them would be useful, maybe even save one of their lives. It was worth looking. He just wished there were more of them. All of what was left fit into a single cabinet.

He collected more bandages and a salve that said it was for cuts and scrapes. He wasn’t sure that the deep cuts on his feet were exactly what the salve was designed for, but Tron figured it couldn’t hurt. Or rather, it could, but not much worse than it was already. These he tucked into a drawer near the door, so that he could find them later. He was sure he would want them before he slept, so he
made sure they were easy to find. Finally, he straightened the chairs, placing them back in the same spots Geddes always had them in, and put the padded table back in corner where the doctor had died. He wasn’t sure he wanted to lay over that spot, but he couldn’t imagine putting it somewhere else. This place wasn’t his to rearrange. Once he was sure he had the med bay looking as good as it ever would, he headed back to the hatch.

Almost the moment he made it, the humming stopped again. Kivi made an odd sort of squeak, and Tron’s heart missed a beat. He tensed, expecting a scream as she was sucked out into space. He was so ready for it, that when she whooped, it took him a moment to realize the sound was victory rather than her death.
It wasn’t until she started laughing that he recognized what he was really hearing.

“You got it?” He hoped he didn’t sound half as panicked as he felt.

“That was cool.”

Tron wondered if she’d ever sounded so much like a fifteen year old girl. Probably not. “Glad to hear you’re enjoying yourself. Does that mean you got it?”

“Yeah!” She sounded positively pleased. “I thought I needed to rewire the whole thing, but all I really had to cut the fuel line. I don’t know why the thing needed power. All it was doing was holding us. A rope does the same thing. But it needed power, and once all the fuel drained out it just kind of retracted. Then the outer door slammed shut and almost took off my hands. I wonder if it’s on a separate power circuit. Maybe I can tap into that and get us a little bit of atmo.”

It was, without a doubt, the most he’d ever heard her speak. Or heard of her speaking, for that matter. It might’ve been the door almost crushing her hands, and the adrenaline that was sure to produce, but Tron suspected it was her time fiddling with the machine that had her so excited.

“Well good for you, precious. Wanna come back in?”

She giggled, and he the sound almost struck him dead with shock. “Yes please.”

Tron jerked open the door the same small crack he had before, slamming it shut the instant she was back inside. There was another rush of air, but it didn’t seem as violent as the last time. He was glad for that, because he wasn’t sure the girl had the strength to walk against such a blast. He’d been prepared to go in and drag her out, but it wasn’t necessary at all. If she didn’t have the pressure suit on, he thought she might have skipped out of the airlock. Even with it, Kivi seemed to have a bounce to her step. “Have fun, did you?”

She tipped her head up, but she did it too quickly and the whole suit started toppling backward. Tron reached out and dropped a gloved hand on the top of her helmet before she could go crashing back. Kivi didn’t even seem to notice.

“Yes!” As soon as the word was out of her mouth, she seemed to remember where she was. He watched as the joy faded from her face, and the lines of worry reappeared on a face too young for such creases. “I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Don’t worry about it kid. You got the job done. That’s what we needed. Doesn’t matter if you loved every second or spent the whole time trying not to be sick all over yourself.”

She nodded gravely, as if it were the most profound thing she’d ever heard. Then she knocked his hand away and turned back to the door he’d just closed. She jerked off her helmet and leaned right up against the wall, her ear millimeters away from the metal.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Listening,” Kivi answered. “Quiet.”

Tron took off his own helmet,
unhooked his gloves, and started unbuckling the collar of the suit while he waited for Kivi to explain what she was listening for. He started to worry that she’d lost it – assuming she’d had it to begin with – and was about to say so, when she turned back to him with a smile. “No more hissing.”

“Huh?”

“There was hissing before. Air, leaking past the seal of the door. But now the outer door is closed and the seal there is good. So no more hissing.”

Tron felt the color drain from his face as he remembered the sound that had barely registered as he leaned against the wall outside the mess. Was it just his imagination? It could’ve been. He was upset and trying not to give himself away. It might even have been a noise he was making himself.
But he knew better. No amount of rationalizing was going to make it untrue.

“
Shit,” he muttered. “We’ve got another problem.”

The Leak

Kivi kept tripping and catching herself on
Tron as they went, which was doing horrible things to his balance. The suits were heavy. He almost dropped his gloves twice. Kivi slowed as they got close, until he was practically dragging her. He understood her reluctance. God, did he ever. But he didn’t want to leave her behind, only to find out that he needed her help. He also just didn’t want to leave her behind. Somehow, he managed to get them both to the mess and get himself put together.

Neither one of them had their helmets on as they leaned close to the door to
food storage. Tron had barely heard it before, and they needed to make sure it was real before they went charging in. If it had been his imagination, there was nothing to worry about. Not any more then when they opened every other door in Lucy. Which, now that he was thinking about it, suddenly seemed a lot more dangerous.

It only took a few seconds to determine that it wasn’t all in his head. Tron swallowed most of the cursing, but a few words slipped out
. The seals were supposed to protect them from stuff like this. The people that had built this ship were long dead. At one fifth light speed travel, every year for Lucy and her passengers equated to some fists full of decades back on Earth. He’d read the math once, but math was never something he’d cared about and so the equation was lost from his memory. Regardless, long dead. But if he could, he would go back there and pound on their bones until they were dust for being so bad at their jobs.

He took up the same position he’d used at the hatch as they both locked their helmets into place. “Ready?”

Kivi took a slow breath. “Are you coming in?”

Tron didn’t need to consider the answer. If there was something broken inside the room, something that wasn’t just a machine waiting to be poked at, there was no way Kivi would be able to handle it on her own. The girl was barely strong enough to hold her suit up. It would mean more of their life slipping out into the black. “Yeah. Wouldn’t want to miss anything
cool this time.” She nodded.

Tron silently counted to three. Then he jerked the door open. Just like at the hatch, a blast of air shot past them. It pushed them both inside quickly. It seemed like more of a struggle to close it than the hatch had been, but Kivi didn’t waste any time adding her own weight to his efforts. With the suit on, that amounted to
something. Once the door was closed, he turned to look at the rest of the room.

In the place they’d once stored all their non-perishable food stores, there was now nothing but space. Almost without thinking about it, Tron
slowly walked to look out the gaping hole in Lucy’s hull.

The ship had always been so solid. For most of his life, she had contained his whole world. He’d hated it and felt trapped by it, but he’d never really thought of it as a container. Not until that moment, staring at the place where metal should be.

The hole was huge, nearly the size of the room itself. The edges were jagged and raw, like a tin can that someone opened with a knife. Most of them were twisted inward, like something had burst through. He couldn’t see any sign of what that might’ve been, but guessed that whatever it was had been the cause of the first jolt that had rocked Lucy before the attack.

There wasn’t much left in the room. A few things were caught, wedged against the shelves which were bolted into the floor, but most was gone. No doubt, it was sucked out into the black when the hole was punched. Or it simply drifted out as they moved. If it weren’t for the magnetics in the boots of their suits, he and Kivi would probably be drifting away too.

Tron couldn’t curse now. He could barely think. All that kept running through his head was how stupid he was. He’d always thought Lucy was keeping him inside, but that wasn’t true at all. She was keeping the outside away from them. And now it had found a way through, and was going to suck up all their air. They were going to die with blue lips and burning lungs.

“We’ll freeze first.”

Tron jumped at the sound of Kivi’s voice, only then realizing she was still standing beside him. “What?”

“We won’t have burning lungs. So long as we’re still, there’s no more heat. The black is sucking up our heat faster than it’s taking our air. We’ll freeze before we suffocate.”

He blinked. Had she read his mind? Had he said it out loud? Tron honestly couldn’t say, and didn’t know which would be more disturbing. “We have to fix this.”

“How?”

“Is there a torch in your tool kit?”

She bent down over it, rummaging through with clumsy fingers. When she came back up with a small stick, he almost sagged with relief.
It wasn’t life, not by a long shot, but it was a start. He was about to say so when the floor beneath his feet began to vibrate. It was an odd sensation, feeling it through the hard boot. After a life of soft shoes that did nothing to hinder his sensitivity, he felt almost numb in them. Aside from the cuts, of course.

“Why are we shaking?”

Tron shook his head, having no answer to give her. He shuffled closer to the hole, taking care not to touch any of the bits curling inward. There was no telling how sharp they were, and one cut on his suit would be the end of him. There was no chance he’d get back into the corridor before all the air was gone, but it would be the loss of pressure that would kill him. He remembered those lessons. They’d given him nightmares.

Seeing outside wasn’t like looking at the pictures on his reader. It was, he imagined, more like leaning out over the edge of a waterfall and hoping that gravity let you teeter. Tron was extremely aware of the fact that it was only the magnetics that held him to the world, and that these suits were just as old as the seals on the door that was leaking. That would be a death that took a long time to come, and
it would be without Kivi.

It took a while to orient himself to the space outside the hull. He looked to the left and right first, as though those were the only directions this new danger could be coming from.
He looked up at what he thought of as sky. Except it was all sky. He’d almost decided it must be something inside when it finally occurred to him that there could just as easily be something beneath as there could above. He should’ve let Kivi do this. She would’ve realized that even before she leaned out. Of course, she wouldn’t reach far enough to see past Lucy’s rolling curves.

As he stretched as far as he could, Tron finally found the source of the vibrations. “No.”

It was the same word Kivi had said right before he walked into hell. It was the only word for it. What else was there to say when you were seeing the world collapsing in around you? Again.

“What do you see?”

“Death,” he muttered. Then, as he pulled himself back into the ship and saw the confused look on her face, “they’re back.”