Adrift (9 page)

The captain was not one for idle conversation, any more than Tron
was. After all the years on Lucy, the only person Jay ever socialized with was first mate Constance and one or two of the crew. He didn’t open up to Tron, or encourage any kind of relationship between them. What he did do, however, was respond to every one of Tron’s intentionally bratty and petulant accusations with a calm and deliberate explanation. He answered every question asked of him without a trace of impatience or distraction. It was a new experience for Tron, whose parents had always been too busy or too disappointed to talk with him.

Hector was different. The chief engineer was just barely able to meet the minimum age requirement for acting crew on any space-bound vehicle. Earth Gov didn’t care if people were geniuses, like Hector and probably Kivi. They expected everyone to get no less than four years of training at one of their many space flight facilities, and none of those facilities were allowed to take anyone under the age of sixteen. Still, the mechanic did seem to have a better understanding of how isolated he felt than anyone Tron had ever known. And he said he liked talking with Tron while he worked. They chatted
at least once a week, in the months leading up to the attack. They were still fourteen years apart, and that was a gulf that Tron didn’t think could ever really be bridged, but it helped stave off some of the loneliness that had been with him so long that Tron thought it a natural part of life. Between Hector and Jay, he felt like he had a vague notion of what life might have been with if he’d had an older brother. For the first time since boarding Lucy, Tron had started to get a sense of the great family the others all talked about.

Which made what the attackers did so much worse.

“What if it’s not a solid seal?”

Tron blinked, feeling the burning anger and overwhelming grief slide back to the box in his mind that would never really be big enough to hold them. He’d lost track of the present for a moment, but time hadn’t moved much. Kivi was still standing in front of the intercom, hand hovering over the keypad.

He smiled bitterly. “Then maybe someday we learn what happens to a leaking ship when it hits atmo. Assuming we’re producing enough oxygen now to compensate for whatever is slipping out.”

“We should be.
Do you want me to calculate?”

Tron almost laughed.
It was a shame the girl didn’t tell jokes. She was funny, in a dark kind of way. It definitely worked for her. He wiped the sweat from his brow, only then realizing how warm he was. The torch must put out an insane amount of heat. “I think we’re going to have to risk it. Make the call, Kivi.”

She didn’t hesitate a second time. She punched in the code and
gave the go-ahead moment later, they both heard the low hum of the engine warming up. Tron grinned and pressed his hand against the wall. He could feel the vibrations as Lucy got moving again. It was a hell of a thing.

“What now?”

He was surprised at how small Kivi’s voice was. He’d expected her to be just as excited as he was. Maybe she was, it was damn near impossible to tell with her, but she sure didn’t sound like it. It was the exact same tone of voice he’d heard in his helmet back when he spotted the scavenger ship on the other side of the door they’d just sealed.

He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but it was a hard thing to be comforting that close to the
mess. Even in his relieved joy, the dread of that room hung around him like a weight. Tron wanted to tell her that now all their problems were done and they could go relax until they got… somewhere… and then everyone in the mess would wake up and it would all be some horrible nightmare.

He rubbed his forehead again, and the sweat came away pink. He wondered how bad his face was. He couldn’t feel it. At some point while he worked, it had gone numb. Tron was grateful for that, and he didn’t really want to encourage the pain to return, but he had to get cleaned up. The dried blood was itchy. And even though he’d been in the suit, he was certain he could smell the death of Dr. Geddes clinging to his clothing. That was as good an answer as any he could give, he supposed, and better than some. “Now I take a shower. Then we go deal with that hopper in
navigation.”

Where
There’s Smoke

Tron had expected Kivi to go back to her family’s room while he showered, but she situated herself on his bed and waited. It was bizarre, having her in his storage. No one ever came down there but him. Not since he’d been exiled, and all the equipment that used to be kept there was hauled out by maintenance. It would’ve been even stranger to have a girl sitting on his bed, if Kivi seemed to have any concept of the impropriety associated with it.

Lucy was a small ship, and quarters were tight, which made the family even tighter. Feelings tended to be more intense, as a whole, than they might be back on Earth. That was what Jay told him. The captain meant it to mean that he understood why Tron inevitably reacted poorly to every st
ressful situation, but Tron knew it extended further than himself. Without any friends or his family around to distract him, he filled his meal and rec times by watching all the people around him. He saw romantic relationships bloom and die, almost all of them inappropriate. By the time he was twelve, he’d read enough to know about adultery and saw enough signals to know it was a real risk. Lucy was a colony ship, which meant families. The only singles allowed were a few of the core crew like Jay and Hector, and the religious leader of their particular expedition, Father Andrei. But that didn’t mean that the married couples didn’t notice other people. Not in a space like this. He wondered why no one seemed to act on it, and why no one ever talked about divorce for a long time.

Then he realized that the ship had its own culture, one every bit as influential as the ones they’d left behind if not more, and that it didn’t allow for such things.
Jay was right, the feelings on Lucy were always high. Even when everyone was falling in line and acting perfectly pleasant, there were undercurrents of emotions constantly for anyone paying attention. It was a pot at a rolling boil, mere seconds away from spilling over. But it never did. Plenty of people got more attached than they were supposed to. Even the incorruptible Father Andrei gave Constance the same love-struck looks Tron had seen between the other kids. None of them ever seemed to act on it, though. He’d seen it done twice, and had puzzled over the hypocrisy for months after the second time before he put the last pieces together. There was nowhere to go on the ship. If a marriage fell apart, if improper relationships were ever allowed to really take root, all the people involved would be trapped together for decades. All it would take was one cuckolded husband to take objection and react violently, the way Tron had seen happen in all kinds of vids from Earth, to set the water boiling over and end their colony in a spectacularly unpredictable storm. It was survival that made them all hypocrites.

As the children started getting older, the same sentiments were applied to their inevitable mating
games. There was no stopping it, of course. Hormones always found a way. But the adults went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that it was never more than holding hands and maybe a few secret kisses. Tron was never included. He was simply too far ahead of their curve to be a prospective partner in the dance. There were a couple girls who chased him for a day or two, but he could never bring himself to see them as anything more than kids, no matter how badly his lusts insisted he do otherwise. Not that his, or anyone else’s, lusts were ever given a chance to be acted on. They couldn’t afford the fallout of a teenaged relationship gone bad; the results of the controlled ones were difficult enough. He’d seen all kinds of drama unfold between fourteen year olds who thought they’d get married one day realize they didn’t actually like each other all that much.

The single most important rule abou
t interactions on Lucy was that no two singles could ever be alone together. Especially not in a bedroom.
Especially
especially not sitting on a bed. Tron knew what a scandal it would be, having her here. He even thought there was a point to it. Kivi was closest to his age. In another life, a life before the attackers, having her here would’ve probably been the tipping point his hormones had been waiting for. Alone as he always was, it wouldn’t matter how much he wanted to think of her as a kid. It wouldn’t even matter how weird she was. He could’ve tried to talk her into things that would’ve ruined both their lives.

It was different now. Everything in this new world was different. Having her here wasn’t romantic, and it only occurred to him that it might’ve been because of the oddity of it.
He kept expecting her to leave, and she kept staying. He understood it perfectly. She was just like him, incapable of walking through this new world on her own. This place, which was supposed to be so full of life that it was overwhelming, stood too empty. It demanded thoughts about everything that was missing. She was here because if she was somewhere else then they would both be alone. Tron wasn’t ready for that any more than she was. They were the last foothold of life in this ship of the dead. They were clinging to each other to keep from being swallowed up. Still, he
did
think of it. And for that, Tron felt a twinge of shame. If there was any way to apologize without making everything a thousand times more awkward than he could stand, he probably would’ve.

Luckily Kivi was as oblivious about that as she seemed to be about sarcasm. She had the torch and some of the tools from the pack he’d snagged with the pressure suits, and was taking it apart. He’d nearly screamed at her when he first realized what she was doing. But when he thought about the machines she’d built, the ones that had helped him, he bit his tongue. She’d obviously handled a torch before, and had probably taken one apart plenty of times. He’d heard how she hummed while she was working on the hook. If playing with a machine’s insides was what gave her
peace, he wasn’t about to take it away by acting like an idiot. So he let her to her task while he handled the shower.

Tron sagged against the wall as the warm water hit his sore back. It felt amazing, and he could feel the knots there starting to loosen. Soon the small bathroom was filled with steam and he was so relaxed that it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. Then the water began to heat up.

He couldn’t figure out what was happening. He hadn’t bumped the buttons that controlled the temperature. Tron had barely moved in the last five minutes, so there was no chance he’d caught one with his elbow. So far as he knew, there was no other way to change the temp of anyone’s shower. If there were, one of the kids would’ve figured it out during one of the many prank wars, surely.

He’d spent hours looking at the coding for the sensors
himself, and had even snuck a trip down to Port Storage to poke at the water pump when he couldn’t find another way in. He’d had some great idea about paying back the kids who called him ‘the giant’ and liked to joke about how he must’ve been let on Lucy out of pity for some mental disorder. It was before Tron had realized just how much an advantage the height, which had come on him suddenly when he turned sixteen, was when it came to correcting such teasing with violence. He’d also decided to include his dad in the prank, just to see if it changed the man’s morning rituals. Tron might not be as brilliant as some of the others on the ship, but he’d learned fast that stubbornness got you pretty damn far with machines and programs. He’d spent months trying to get his own showers to change without the buttons, but nothing he’d done had ever managed had raised it by even one degree.

Confused, wondering what Whitman had done to screw up something as solid as water temps, Tron hit the cool twice to get it back where it was supposed to be. After another minute, he had to hit it three more. Finally, he gave up and shut down the water altogether. He was startled to find himself shivering.
Hadn’t he just been hot? The man in nav had to be messing with climate controls as a whole, and that was dangerous in the extreme.

He tried to think of a solution as he dried off and dressed, poking at the bruises
on his face as he glared at them in the mirror. They weren’t too bad, all things considered, but he didn’t like them. They were like testaments to how Whitman’s people had beaten him. It wasn’t a fair fight, but that didn’t make him feel a lot better about it. That wasn’t nearly as important as figuring out how to stop the madman now, though. By the time he returned to his room, all he had by way of a plan was to get on the com and plead with the man like a couple of desperate children. Which, Tron supposed, was pretty much exactly what they were.

He never got the chance to share this grand scheme with Kivi. Almost the same moment Tron opened his mouth, the room switched to a flashing red and the alarm started blari
ng. Their eyes locked, and he knew she was thinking of food storage. He slapped the code for nav into the intercom. “What’s going on?”

There was a delay in response that seemed to stretch on forever. The alarm was giving him a migraine, and any second he fully expected to be sucked out into space or have the invaders return with whatever horrible weapons had killed everyone so quickly. Tron wanted to reach through the coms and shake Whitman for making them wait so long for the answer.

Finally, the man spoke. “Not sure. It’s second deck, larboard.”

Tron blinked. Not
food storage. That was habitation deck. The only thing there were living quarters and hydroponics. He and Kivi were both up and running in an instant.

Hydroponics was, debatably, the most important part of the ship. It didn’t
just help Lucy filter out the carbon monoxide from all the breathing they did, but it provided a source of the fresh produce that kept them healthy. With only the two of them – three, Tron amended – the first function wasn’t so important. There was no way they made enough CO
2
that Lucy’s scrubbers couldn’t handle it on their own. The fruit and vegetables were another matter. With food storage gone, all they had left were cold storage and what they could pick out of hydroponics.

It had taken a long time to perfect the art of growing plants in space. Tron’s father had gone on about it all the time, even before they left Earth. The old man was always fascinated by the idea of creating life in a vacuum, and Tron always figured that was why they signed up for colonization in the first place. His mom never spoke much about her job, but his dad would drone on for hours about how challenging it was to keep all the plants thriving. It always sounded like, to Tron at least, the slightest thing could kill every one of the green things that had monopolized his father’s attention. They’d been without gravity or oxygen flow for at least twenty minutes. Maybe longer. He fully expected to find the place filled with dead plants.

It was worse. Much worse. He should’ve known. Dead plants wouldn’t cause the alarm. Fire did.

Hydroponics was the exception to th
e windows rule. There were large ones on either wall, and if it weren’t the same size as the mess hall and filled with plants it would be easy to see through to the corridor on the other side. Normally he thought it was stupid, but today it proved its worth. Without the clear plastic, they wouldn’t have been able to see a plant that had fallen onto a broken lamp burning high and hot. As he watched, the flames leapt to two other plants before the first one was ash.

Tron didn’t hesitate. That was their food in there, their life. Even with Cold Storage, they needed the vitamins that that they could only get here. He’d read about Ancient Earth. He’d learned about scurvy and a myriad of other diseases that were prevalent amo
ng sea-farers with poor diets. But none of that was why he charged in the second the hydraulics slid the door open. In that moment, all he was thinking about was his father, and how broken hearted the old man would be if Tron let his life’s work burn up.

He headed straight back. There was no putting out the fire. He knew that. On Lucy, fire containment was taken very seriously. Standard operating procedure was to lock down the room and vent the oxygen. That killed fire instantly, but wasn’t an option in a place like Hydroponics, where even a few minutes without air would be catastrophic. That meant that there was a secondary fire containment system in place. They’d all been taught about those, shown how to use them and where to find them.
He pressed in to the far portside wall, where the container of fire-suppressing foam would be located.

As though it read his mind, the fire moved to block him. Sparks flew from the cord of the lamp, where it was closest to the heat, and those landed on the line of trees directly between him and his destination. Under normal circumstances, this room was always manned and, like the
mess, had doors on either side. The foam was kept near the lab equipment where those who worked in hydroponics would be spending most of their time. If he’d come in the other door, it would’ve been almost at his fingertips. As usual, Tron had made the wrong choice. Now he couldn’t reach the one thing he needed to save this place.

“Tron!” Kivi’s voice reached to him as if out of a dream. She’d been screaming for him since he’d charged in, he realized belatedly, but he’d tuned her out. Now that the flames were kissing the ceiling in front of him and thick black smoke was beginning to fill the space, he’d stopped long enough to process her voice. He turned back, coughing as the acrid stuff burned down his throat.

There wasn’t much smoke where she was standing, not yet, and he could just make out the dial she was pointing to. It was too high for her to reach herself, but she kept bouncing on the balls of her feet and gesturing as though it were the most important thing in the universe. Understanding hit him hard, as he realized just how stupid he was. Lucy was built with two controls for the sprinkler system in the room. They were as stationary as the coms. He scooped up a small tree near him and carried it back as quickly as he could, hoping that getting it out of the worst of the smoke would at least do something to minimize the waste of his headlong charge.