Fatal Boarding (12 page)

So in a matter of one week, Crystal's
obscure space station lease agreement went from worthless to
priceless, and in her eyes I did just the opposite.

Sometimes dreams can turn out to be
premonitions. I once had a dream that I was back on the ranch where
I grew up, building an antique airplane in the family garage. It
was the propeller driven type with stretched canvas over wooden
ribs. The bird was complete except that I hadn't finished covering
it with canvas. Half of the ribs on the wings and body were still
visible.

Suddenly Crystal emerged from the sun. She
was very interested in what I was doing. Though the bird was not
ready to fly, I wanted to impress her. I repeatedly insisted that
it was. I tried to take her for a ride. At 80 feet the nose pitched
over and we slammed into the ground headfirst.

Crystal was killed. I found myself
recovering in the home of some strangers who really didn't care. I
had a scar running down my chest from my throat to my navel, as
thick as rope. I woke up that night in a cold sweat, Crystal awake
beside me, asking me what was wrong.

Three months later, Crystal was history. My
lease had run out as fast as hers had become activated. She took up
with another pilot, someone I did not know. The last time I spoke
to her I made the stupid mistake of asking what he had that I did
not. She said he owned his own four seat surface-to-orbit shuttle,
for one thing.

It had been a long day aboard the Electra. I
stretched out on the flattened sofa, pounded the soft white pillow
for effect, and laid back into an uneasy slumber.

I dreamed new dreams, fragments shaped from
engine failures, ghost ships, and intelligent men locked in
primitive combat. Slowly the carnival of neural confusion faded
down into a vast, empty, loneliness. I was floating alone in a Bell
Standard in high orbit above the Earth. No spacecraft or satellites
were anywhere in sight. Traveling with me, caught in my bodies own
gravity field, were dozens of frozen, dark blood-red-purple chunks
and bits of a dead and fractured heart. I looked down at the torso
of my spacesuit, and saw right through it into my chest, where a
new, cherry-red heart the size of a plum had grown in place of the
old one. But it was too fragile a replacement for a major organ,
unable to endure any level of emotional stress. I looked down at
the Big Blue and let myself float along in her gravity stream, not
struggling, not searching, and not feeling.

Chapter 13

An irritating ‘be-deep, be-deep’ awakened me
from a deep, golden sleep. My body tingled with pleasure and
refused to move.

The be-deeping persisted.

It felt like I had only slept a few hours.
My eyelids felt too heavy to open. Through narrow slits I could
make out only a gray blur. The room lights had automatically been
brought up to dim. With a low moan, I wiped one hand across my face
and tried to focus.

Gray blur.

After a slow wince, my vision finally
switched in. Gray wall, six inches from my face, gray conduit
running across it.

But there were no conduit attached to the
wall near my bed. Slowly I looked left and right, and realized it
was the ceiling. I held to a section of conduit, rolled myself over
and found my stateroom below. My blanket was lingering in mid-air
in one corner, like a ghost in the low light. Several cushions
hovered around it. A stack of plastics cups floated in the door to
the bath. As consciousness crept in, I laughed at the absurdity of
it. My body had become so accustomed to weightlessness it had not
bothered to alert me when ship's gravity had failed. Once you have
adapted to weightlessness, it ceases to be a burden. In fact, it
becomes a pleasure. But, for most of the crew on board Electra, a
loss of gravity was certain to be hell.

I pushed gently off the ceiling and grabbed
the edge of my desk. On my terminal a security message window had
been opened:

‘Tarn, report to the bridge conference room.
Code 10.’

Code 10 meant emergency. The timer on the
screen read 03:17. I fumbled through my drawer, found clean, tan
coveralls, and with a graceful backwards somersault squeezed into
them, then pulled on black deck shoes. People typically forget to
put on shoes in unexpected zero-G. Then when the gravity returns,
you see ship-board ice capades as they slip and slid their way home
to get them.

The corridor was deserted. Just outside my
door, a black brassiere drifted by at eye level, followed by an
empty cardboard box. At the end of the hall, a brown, stuffed bear
was plastered to the ventilation intake. On my way to the elevator,
I passed an open stateroom door. A sick ensign in pajamas clung to
his bathroom door, bent over. He gave me a pitiful look and kept
one hand clamped over his mouth.

I pushed along the walls to the elevator and
tapped at the open key. When the doors finally parted, there was a
body floating inside. Blood and vomit were drifting around the
compartment, and splattered on the walls and ceiling. I braced
against the door and grabbed him. Nasty head wound. Six inch
laceration across the crown. A small stream of blood from it was
forming globs in the air. He had completely forgotten the safety
briefing given before the mission. He had tried to use the elevator
in zero G without bracing himself. He had pressed the down button
and the car had shot down and slammed him in the head.

There was a good pulse in his neck. I
carefully let go and tapped at my watch. "Tarn to sick bay."

No answer.

"Tarn to sick bay. I have a medical
emergency!"

A good half minute passed before a shaky
female voice came back. "This is Ensign Moore. Go ahead."

"I have someone in the midship elevator on
level five with a serious head wound. He needs a med team right
away."

Again the pause was unusually long. "Mr.
Tarn, can you bring the patient to us?" Now the voice sounded
afraid and uncertain.

"Yes, but he should have medical attention,
immediately!"

"Sir, we don't have anyone to send! We're
swamped down here. If you could bring him in, it would be the
fastest way."

I shook my head in disbelief. "Okay, we're
on our way." An elevator filled with floating puddles of blood and
vomit was not my idea of the best way to travel, but it happened to
be the fastest route. I clamped my bare hand over the laceration
and eased in, trying not to create air currents that would further
disturb the pollution. I hugged him and braced against the
ceiling.

With one foot, I tapped the down key. The
vomit and blood rained upward as we lurched down. As the car began
to slow, we glided down to the floor and stood in the momentary
gravity of deceleration.

The doors opened to another corridor
littered with floating debris. Around the first corner, a floating
drove of ill people waited to get into sickbay. They stared at
their wounded comrade with little compassion. I had to work my way
around and over them, dragging the limp form behind me. Near the
entrance, someone with a fat vacuum hose was cleaning contaminants
from the air. An ensign with an exasperated look on her face came
and gently hauled my patient away. Not the usual treatment for
seriously injured friends.

When I was finally clear of the sick zone, I
stopped at the first restroom and for the second time washed
someone else’s drying blood from my hands. I switched on my watch
communicator. "Tarn to Main Engineering."

"This is Derns, go ahead."

"Have someone go to the main electrical
section and shut down power to all the elevators until further
notice. People are getting hurt."

"I'll need orders posted to do that, sir.
But I'll do it on your verbal if you promise to get it posted as
soon as possible."

"Agreed. Make sure you secure them at a deck
level, with the doors open."

"Roger."

Before I could thank him, a priority call
overrode our connection. "Grey to Tarn. Report!"

"Tarn here, Captain."

"You were due up here twenty minutes ago.
What's the problem?"

"Medical emergency, Captain. I'm on level
three. Be there in a few minutes."

He clicked off without acknowledgement. It
was the Captain’s way of expressing displeasure. Ironically, in
zero G I could reach the upper decks faster than if there had been
gravity. I made my way to the level three cable access hatch at the
intersection of the North-South, East-West corridors and opened the
access door to the forward vertical cable shaft. The tunnels are
just big enough to allow technicians and engineers inside. They run
straight up. Generally, ascending a cable duct in zero gravity is
not recommended. If ship's gravity is suddenly restored, you can
find yourself bouncing off walls as you plummet through seven
floors. I edged myself inside and looked up to be sure the way was
clear. Bundles of dingy black cable bundles, secured by hangers,
flowed upward. Using the hand and foot holds embedded in the walls,
I pulled myself up.

I found the spot where the cables parted for
the access door with the big red ‘4’ imprinted on it, punched out
the access door and left it drift in mid air. In the corridor,
several pasty white crewmen stopped to stare as I emerged. The
conference room was just around the first corner.

Captain Grey had somehow fastened himself to
his chair, his arms floating free above the table. He ignored me as
I entered. Two engineering officers held to the conference table
nearby, trying to appear reassuring. Grey's tone was insistent.
"Any gravity is better than no gravity, damn it."

The engineer on his right answered. "We can
do it fairly quickly, Captain. It will be hit or miss, at first.
The amplitudes will probably be either excessive or attenuated. We
might start off with say, two Gs and then we'd have to tweak it
down slowly. Even after we got the gravity field generators stable,
there'd be lapse zones and heavy zones all over the ship. A team
would need to stay at the field interface controller constantly to
readjust it. And of course you already know we could not bring the
ship up to hyper speeds without the computer system to compensate
for the changes in acceleration."

"Well get on with it. We can do nothing
about getting out of here without some kind of gravity."

They nodded and pushed past me on their way
out. I grabbed one of the conference table chairs anchored to the
floor, and pulled myself down to the Captain's level.

"You don't get space sick, do you Tarn?”

"Too much time outside, Captain."

"I wish I didn't. But, at least I hide it
well."

"From what I can see, very well."

"The system that regulates the gravity field
generators has apparently been affected in the same way our other
systems have. That's what all this is about. We will now attempt to
bypass the controller and run power directly to the generators and
force them on. It should be an interesting experience. It's never
been done on a ship this size."

"The crew does not seem to be handling
weightlessness very well. I'd say it was worth a try."

"Please spare me your understatements, Mr.
Tarn. I did not call you here for advice. There is another problem
I require your assistance on, as if there aren't enough already."
Grey rubbed one sleeve against his forehead and exhaled. "We have
been unable to locate Commander Tolson for the past hour or so. A
security team has already been dispatched to look for him. Please
take charge of that operation and report to me on the hour, every
hour."

"When and where was he last seen?"

"I spoke to him over the net at 01:30. He
was in his quarters. No one has seen or heard from him since."

"I'll head down to the office immediately
and bring you up to date after I'm briefed. Is there anything
else?"

"Oh yes, there is one other thing. There
will be a ship-wide announcement just before they energize the
gravity field. I expect that period to be complete chaos. Please do
what you can to minimize it."

Grey remained seated, silently staring ahead
as I floated from the room. He left me with the impression of a
very orderly man whose life had suddenly become completely out of
control. He was in charge of our oasis. I wanted him to be content
and indifferent again. I did not like what he had become. For the
first time, our situation was testing me. My mind was telling me
that it was time to be afraid. I managed to put it aside, but it
continued to stare at me from the distance.

Chapter 14

The oval front office of security
headquarters is lined with rows of computer monitoring stations
that display ship data constantly, twenty-four hours a day. The low
ceiling provides just the right amount of soft white light to allow
easy readout of the data. It is the best possible sentry point for
an executive officer. Tolson’s quarters adjoined the front
office.

Ann-Marie Summers, Tolson's executive
secretary, hung behind her desk, chewing anti-space-sick gum and
trying to organize the items that kept floating away. Her long,
flaming red hair was suspended out over her shoulders in thick
strands, and her fluffy, white silk blouse kept billowing up around
her chin. She had found a pair of black stick-shoes that were
anchoring her to the dull orange carpet. As I entered, she pinched
at her button nose and puffed up her cheeks, trying to clear her
ears. She looked at me with pitiful dark brown eyes that had bags
under them.

I held to the side of her desk, "So, they
got you up, too!"

"They didn't need to get me up, Adrian. I
was in the bath puking my guts up when they called."

"Any better?"

"Uh-huh. There's nothing left. It's just
sort of stomach exercise now. Please, tell me they're near to
fixing the damned problem."