A Brother's Debt (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

When his alarm woke him Step reached out a hand to shut it off and then lay there for a few moments while he came to. Once he felt a little more with it he threw back the covers and got to his feet, stretching to relieve the stiffness in his muscles before he dressed and left the cabin.

His first stop was the galley, where he made himself a mug of strong and sweet coffee, and then he went back down the passage to bang on the door of the cabin Jay had taken.

The door opened after only a short delay. “Are we there?” Jay asked.

“We’ve got about twenty minutes before we arrive. Time enough for you to get dressed and sort yourself out,” Step told him before leaving him to it.

On the bridge he took a long sip of his coffee and then put the cup down so he could check the computer. The readout told him the escape pod was less than one hundred thousand kilometres away, which was about fifteen minutes flying time as Gambler’s Luck slowed, so Step turned off the autopilot. With the state of the equipment on Gambler’s Luck he didn’t entirely trust the autopilot to bring them in close enough to the small escape pod.

It required some tricky manoeuvring but Step eventually moved his ship into position not far from the pod, their velocities matched, at which point he surrendered the controls to Jay. It would have been better for him to remain at the controls, in case any adjustments were required, while Jay secured the escape pod, but since Jay couldn’t fit into the one spacesuit they had that wasn’t possible.

While Jay settled behind the controls, his hands away from them to ensure he didn’t mess up their position, Step made his way down to the cargo bay, where he pulled on his spacesuit.

From the window in the outer door of the airlock Step could see the escape pod, its bright white shell clearly visible against the darkness of space. It floated a little more than five hundred yards from the ship, drifting in perfect synchronisation; a testament to his skill as a pilot. He watched the pod for a few moments, just to satisfy himself that he had been successful in matching velocities.

When it was clear the pod wasn’t moving away from Gambler’s Luck, Step cycled the airlock and pushed himself away from the ship. In one hand he held the end of a carbon filament tether, which served as a safety line, and the means for him to retrieve the pod. It was not a procedure he was experienced with, never having had cause to do it while in the Navy, but he knew the principle.

He discovered the hardest part of the procedure came from making sure he didn’t float past the pod, which he almost missed when he grabbed for it too soon. His fingers grazed the shell, and he was relieved when they caught on one of the mounts that had secured the pod to the ship it came from.

Tightening his grip on the mount he pulled himself into a better position while he considered the best place to secure the tether. After giving it some thought, though not much, since his position didn’t allow for extensive thinking, he wrapped the tether around the pod, under the mounts where it wouldn’t slip off. He made it safe, locking the catch securely, and then pulled himself hand over hand back to the ship.

The tether ran from a winch and Step made his way over to it. Like everything else on Gambler’s Luck the winch was greatly underpowered by comparison with what he was used to, but by his reckoning it had enough power to retrieve the pod. At least it should have done. When he tried to start the winch nothing happened, and since he was in the airlock with his spacesuit on he couldn’t hear the winch motor to know if it was actually trying to turn over.

“Dammit, Andrei,” Step swore as he tried the power button again and again. “Couldn’t you maintain anything on this bloody ship!” After half a dozen tries, and a few more expletives, he gave up. “We’ve got a problem, Jay,” he told his friend over the coms line, which they had kept open since he pulled the suit on.

“What sort of problem?”

“The winch doesn’t want to work.” He gave the winch a kick to relieve his frustration. “Any suggestions?”

The reply from Jay wasn’t too promising. “Give it a kick,” he said. “It’s an old navy trick, when things don’t want to work the first thing to try is kicking it, or whacking it one with a hammer, if you have one to hand.”

“Already tried that,” Step said, kicking the winch a second time. He was glad his brother’s spacesuit had magnetic boots so he didn’t have to worry about floating off into space in reaction to his kick. “I’ve known enough engineers to know that is usually their first recommendation. The problem is, in vacuum with zero g it’s a bit difficult to put much effort into a kick. I’d have the same problem if I tried using a hammer, not that I have one to hand.”

There was a brief period of silence and then Jay spoke again. “I’m on my way down. You might need to release the pod and close the airlock so I can get in there.”

Step nodded, though he immediately realised it was a stupid and pointless thing to do. He went back to kicking the winch while he waited for his friend to join him, and was surprised when it began working after the third or fourth kick. He couldn’t hear it, but he did see the winch motor start vibrating, soon after that the pod slowly began moving closer to the ship.

“You got it working.”

Turning away from watching the pod Step saw Jay looking at him through the window in the inner door of the airlock. “It just needed a few more kicks.”

With the winch working it took only a couple of minutes to haul in the pod and, closing the outer doors, Step cycled the airlock and opened the inner doors. He then stripped off the suit and tossed it to one side, out of the way.

His movements no longer restricted by the bulky suit, Step helped Jay manoeuvre the pod onto the hover dolly. It wasn’t an easy task, even with the winch taking the weight, and only emphasised the difficulty they would have had without it and the hover dolly.

Step undid the tether when the pod was safely on the dolly, and wound it back onto the winch, where he secured it out of the way. He then followed his friend as he pushed the dolly, and its burden, out of the airlock and into the cargo bay, closing the airlock’s inner doors as he went.

Jay stopped the dolly when he reached a spot that provided them with clear access to the pod on all sides. “It’s from a commercial freighter, The Green Star,” he remarked to Step, not that Step needed to be told. Like all escape pods, the name of the ship it came from was emblazoned on both sides and across the front to ensure no-one could miss it.

“Well it’s definitely occupied,” Step said. “One person, small to judge by this readout; I’m initiating the wakeup procedure.” His fingers danced over the control panel, ordering the pod to wake the occupant. It didn’t take long to enter those instructions, but he knew it would be a while before whoever had made use of the escape pod woke, and the pod wouldn’t open until they did.

Since that was the case Step returned his attention to the control panel. “According to this, the pod was ejected just over thirteen hours ago.” Step looked up from the control panel’s display, consternation on his face. “If the ship this pod came from is only thirteen hours away we should have picked up a distress call by now. The systems on this junker,” he waved a hand around him to show he meant Gambler’s Luck, and not the pod in front of him, “are all pretty crap, but they should still detect a distress call from that kind of distance.”

“That depends on whether the freighter managed to get off a distress call.”

“They managed to release at least one escape pod. Whatever the emergency that resulted in the need for the pod someone on board should have been able to send a distress call, even if it was an automated one.”

All Jay could do was shrug. “We’ll have to detour and check the ship out, perhaps we’ll find out why we didn’t pick up a distress call when we get there. Assuming we can find the ship.”

Step nodded, the pod had automatically recorded the position of the ship it belonged to when it was launched. Whether the ship would still be there when they reached that location was a different matter however.

“It’s a girl!” Step blurted in surprise when the pod opened, sooner than he expected, and he saw the figure strapped into the padded couch that took up almost all of the pod’s interior. Though she should have been awake her eyes were still closed and she showed no sign of movement.

“I guess it was keen observations like that that got you promoted to Chamri,” Jay remarked with a grin. “What gave it away, the skirt or the tits?”

“Jay! She can’t be much more than twelve or thirteen, she’s a child,” Step reproached his friend. “I wasn’t expecting to see a girl, not in an escape pod from a freighter,” he explained his reaction.

“Out here twelve or thirteen doesn’t always mean you’re a child. Here you go, she’s stirring. You can ask her what she was doing on a freighter.”

The young girl’s eyelids fluttered as consciousness returned to her and she sat up abruptly when she saw Jay, a startled look on her face. At least she tried to. The safety straps that had kept her in place, and prevented her becoming injured as the escape pod hurtled through space, stopped her.

Step couldn’t help but give a quick laugh at the girl’s reaction to seeing Jay, which he cut off when he saw her look change to one of panic as she struggled against the safety straps. Hurriedly he reached into the pod to release the straps, not wanting her to hurt herself, but before he could hit the release catch he found himself under attack as the girl flailed her arms in a desperate effort to keep him away from her.

Step tried to calm the girl, speaking in as soothing a voice as he could manage, only to have his words cut off by a glancing blow that struck him on the jaw. The blow stunned him and he stepped back from the pod to avoid getting hit again. “Do you want to give a hand here?” he asked of Jay, spitting blood from where the blow had caused him to bite his tongue. “She’s going to hurt herself if she keeps on like this.”

Jay nodded, edging forward warily. “You grab her arms, I’ll get the release catch,” he said.

Before they could get close enough to even try and release the girl she managed to free herself from the safety straps. One moment she was struggling against the straps, the next they had retracted and she was falling out of the pod in her haste to escape it, landing on the floor of the cargo bay with a thud.

“Calm down, we’re not going to hurt you,” Step said, speaking in a low and, he hoped, comforting voice, his hands held out to show they were empty. “We picked up the signal from your escape pod and rescued you.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

Jay’s voice, coming from the side of her made her spin towards him. The sight of him, looming over her like a giant, which his extra foot and a half of height made him seem, startled her. She had only just got to her feet and promptly fell in her haste to get away from him, landing on her butt. “Stay away from me!” She yelled, scrambling backwards, never once taking her eyes off the huge figure before her, until she was stopped by one of the crates of cargo Step had loaded on Barth.

“I think you’re scaring her, Jay,” Step remarked. “It’s alright, Miss, you don’t have to be scared.” He moved closer, squatting to bring himself down to her level, keeping his movements slow and careful. “We’re not going to hurt you. I know he’s big and ugly, and scary-looking, but he’s alright really, he won’t hurt you, any more than I will. You’re disorientated by the drugs the pod gave you, that’s all.”

Still doing his best to look, sound and act reassuring Step moved a little closer. All of a sudden he found himself on his back, then everything went black and he neither heard nor saw anything else.

Jay moved forward the moment he saw his friend struck, more than a little concerned by the sight of blood running down the side of his head. Unlike Step, he wasn’t caught by surprise when the girl swung the length of chain she had found, he simply reached out and caught the chain as it came at him, casually pulling it from her grasp despite her efforts to keep hold of it. He then dropped it and placed a foot on it so she couldn’t get it back, while he turned his attention to Step, leaving her to scurry fearfully away from him.

Step’s chest rose and fell in a slow and steady fashion, reassuring Jay his friend still breathed. The gash on the side of his head, where he had been caught by the chain, was long and deep, and blood flowed freely from it; that worried the ex-navy engineer. Despite his experience with the kind of injuries that resulted from brawling, his medical expertise was limited; he was far more used to inflicting such injuries, than patching them up.

Deciding there was nothing else for it Jay picked his friend up, lifting him as easily as he would have a child, though not before he grabbed the chain and stuffed the end of it in a pocket so it couldn’t be taken and used as a weapon again. With his friend in his arms he made his way over to the stairs and ascended to the med unit.

Oblivious to where the girl was, or what she might be doing, Jay did his best to staunch the flow of blood from Step’s head. By the time he succeeded there was a puddle on the med unit’s couch, and a smaller one on the floor below it.

With his friend no longer bleeding he set about patching up the wound, glad that Step remained out of it while he worked on him, since he had no idea if the med unit’s limited supplies included anything in the way of pain relief. If it did he had no idea what it was, where to find it, or how much to use, so he figured it was better for Step to remain unconscious than to tempt fate with a painkiller, especially given how old and unused most of what he could find in the med unit appeared to be.