Adrift (12 page)

He had to put it out of mind as they walked into the room for the water processing. As soon as they were inside, he knew they were in trouble. Just like they’d been every second since Lucy was attacked. This time was a slower kind of trouble, though. Instead of a quick death, now they were wading through the kind of trouble that would have them wasting away. The floor was a lake. A pipe that was supposed to be connected to the secondary pump was nothing but
fragments and open space. Water was spilling out in a slow trickle. There was no fixing it; the pipe was gone and the space where it would attach to the second pump was ruined. With the leak, the most of the other pipes attached weren’t able to get any pressure, which was why the fire in hydroponics had been able to get so out of control. There was a finite amount of water on Lucy. Her systems were designed to recycle as much as possible, and the calculations all showed them getting to through their twenty year journey with more than enough to spare. But that was assuming they didn’t let a whole bunch of it pool on the floor.

There was a drain here, to collect what was spilled and filter it back through, but clearly the amount was more than the pumps could handle at once. Maybe enough would get back into the secondary pump to make it operational again, but Tron suspected the damage was too severe, and that the pump was a lost cause.

“Why would it break like that?”

He frowned at Kivi’s question. Tron had been wondering the same thing. Maybe the attackers did it, but why would they do that? The destruction in
med bay made sense; drugs were valuable and probably hard to come by. Even murdering everyone on the ship made sense. If no one was alive to fight them or break free the way he and Kivi did, there wasn’t anyone to dispute their taking everything they wanted from Lucy. But this didn’t fit. It was pointless destruction and, if they were really looking to take the ship for themselves, would probably hinder their plans. Who would want a flooded ship? Tron suspected that whatever had caused the pipe to burst had started before the attack. Maybe someone was even planning on getting to it after dinner. He and Kivi were just fortunate to inherit the problem after it was past the point of fixing.

“Doesn’t matter. We need to get the other pipes attached to the primary pump.”

Kivi blinked at him. “We can’t do that. The primary pump is for habitat deck only.”

Tron resisted the urge to snap at her. It wasn’t her fault things were this bad, he reminded himself. He was the one who had gotten sick. And she might be brilliant, but that didn’t mean she thought of everything. “So you think our families are going to be needing the water then, do you?”

Realization flashed on her face. “You want to disconnect all the habitat deck’s water and feed it to the stuff attached to the secondary. That makes sense. But that’d mean we wouldn’t have any more water unless we went to the mess hall or navigation.”

He grimaced. He hadn’t thought of that. Medical and a few other places would have some too. The one thing all of those places shared was that they weren’t designed for human habitation. Th
ere were toilets in some and sinks in most, but no showers. They could go without bathing, but sickness was already a problem. They might be able to modify the ship, the way his room had been. But Tron doubted it. Unless Whitman was trained for such in-space construction projects and could be coaxed out of navigation, they were once again limited by their experience. The adults did them one hell of a disservice when they decided the kids didn’t need to know how to operate the workings of Lucy.

The solution was obvious and almost made him laugh. His room had been modified for habitation. It was one of those places designed with nothing but a toilet before his mother and her team went in and expanded the bathroom. Now it was downright spacious, and it was still hooked up to the pump it was originally designed for. He remembered his mother talking about how they tapped into the plumbing already present. She’d been discussing it with Jay, not him, but he was no less grateful for it.

“We’re just going to have to be bunkmates for a while longer. I must be one of the lower pipes. Check the labels for anything about storage. Let’s get that one switched first, eh?”

It wasn’t as simple as unplugging one and plugging on another. Tron hadn’t really thought it would be. Their luck simply didn’t run in that direction. But he wasn’t ready for quite the level of effort the process required. Kivi figured out how to disconnect and reconnect the flexible plastic pipes right off, but it took them a while to sort out how to shut off the water. They were both completely soaked before they even had the first one moved.

It was exhausting, cold, miserable work. Tron figured out pretty quickly that he wasn’t actually healthy enough to be doing it yet. He was shaking and struggling to stay awake after only a couple of the moves. He worried that he was going to give himself another fever or, even worse, pass out again. Kivi kept shooting him looks out of the corner of her eyes that made her think she was worried about the same. But he refused to be useless. He’d spent nine and a half days on his back, and he would
not
leave Kivi to fix this problem on her own as well. It was his job to look after her, and he would be damned before he failed it again.

Whitman’s News

Ru
ben Whitman had never thought of himself as a bad man. He would never claim to be a good one, but he figured he was alright, in the scheme of things. He’d done right by his parents and sent Jemma as much money for her and the baby as he could spare. He’d never killed anyone and only been in lockup that one time. No one was writing home about what a great guy he was, but his shipmates always seemed to like him well enough. He kept his nose clean, aside from that one time, and tried not to make anyone pay too much attention to good ol’ Rue, good or bad. It wasn’t an easy life but it was firmly his own and he was, over all, okay with it.

He was
a nobody, and intentionally so. Getting attention meant that, sooner or later, you’d get the attention from the wrong sort of people. Law men, or the real criminals. Or even the Grays, if you were real unlucky. He’d gotten that attention once before, and learned the lesson well. Living outside everyone’s scanner  was more work than it seemed, but the pay-off was that nothing of great interest, good or bad, every happened to him. Which was why his current situation was so perplexing. If there was some benevolent god out there, and Whitman had been raised to believe there was, then surely the man had better things to do than mess with him.

But if he wasn’t on god’s crap list, how else was he supposed to explain why he was locked up in some backwater colony ship that was falling apart with nothing but two brats for crew? The ship had been dead. He’d run the check himself. Twice, just like always. No response to the hails, no heat sources big enough to count, and no indication of life. They were clean for a salvage. Yet here he was, contaminated and locked in with walking, breathing proof that the scans for life were wrong. Shit like that didn’t just happen.

Whitman didn’t blame Big Benny for making him stay. Well, maybe he did a little. There was no call to draw the gun. He knew the rules as good as anyone. Hell, he believed in the rules. He was always the first to put the breather on, before a job, and the last out of decontamination after. He didn’t want no dirt-muncher virus, and he sure as hell didn’t intend to share the misery with everyone on the Free Ride. Those guys were as close to friends as he could claim. And if Big Benny didn’t know that, he should at least know good enough to sort out that Whitman would never expose Sophie Anne. Not even if he had it in writing that she’d never take him back.

He needed a drink. Something so hard it burned the cough right out of him. A jar of Sophie Anne’s
homemade brew, if he had a say in the matter. But anything more fire than taste would do the trick.

A green light on the console he was sitting at started blinking. He’d been expecting it for a while. He tapped the flat panel twice, right over the light, and the screen above it came to life. In the display was a distorted black and white image, the sensor’s visual interpretation of the data it was receiving. The equipment on this ship was crap. They barely deserved to be called sensors, and the idiots who had been running the place before hadn’t even had them pointed right. All six of them were pointed more or less forward, instead of doing sweeps all around. It didn’t take too much smarts to sort out
what happened. The people here were so busy looking for their new home they never noticed another ship sneaking up behind.

There was no question the ship was attacked. Even before he got things turned on, Whitman had seen the bloody handprint. That, along with the shit the kid in the corridor had shouted, made things pretty clear.
He had a pretty good guess as to who had done the attacking, too. There was a reason he and the rest of the Free Riders did so many of their jobs out in this part of the sky. This was the Grays’ hunting grounds.

He wasn’t going to make the same mistake
as the people of the colony ship. A second after he got the garbage heap moving, he started the sensors on a proper sweep. If this was a Grays hit, and the kids were still alive, it meant that the ship was cut loose before the Grays were done with it. They always finished a hunt with a run through an electric field. It was what made their scraps worthwhile. All the drugs and best tech was gone, but there were no hungry pets or electric booby traps left behind by the previous residents.

Not traps like the kids set. That mouse-trap thing hurt like hell. He could still feel the ache of it in line of severe bruising on his right foot. He had to give it to the brats, they did it smart. No electrical parts meant they could survive an EM pulse. Whitman’s crew had used them once or twice – no need for it when they were trailing a
Gray ship – and it was amazing how few people thought to design traps that could make it through one. But, smart as they were, those traps weren’t going to do a bit of good for what came next. Because, just like he expected, there was a ship coming up from behind them.

It was at the very edge of sensor range, so there wasn’t much data to see about it yet. The crap quality of the sensors meant that he couldn’t even make out the exact shape, which would tell him if it was a
Gray or the Free Ride trailing. Of course, Whitman knew the Free Ride wouldn’t be following. It was a tempting game of pretend, but he’d always prided himself on being a practical man. That was part of his problem with Sophie Anne; she wanted to pretend she’d start living a fully legal life, with all the fancy trappings that entailed. Whitman knew he was disreputable. He’d found a way to go about it that didn’t hurt anyone at all, and he considered that as legal as a guy like him was ever going to get. No, it wasn’t the Free Ride that was drifting in their wake. And if the sensors would just find some way to not be quite so awful, he’d see the shape and probably even the markings of a Gray ship. Of that he was sure.

Of course all that meant was that he saw death coming. Ship like this against even the
least of the Grays? That wasn’t even a sporting chance. That barely constituted a hunt. Same kind of hunting as shooting a rifle into a barrel of fish. A colony ship like this, one from Earth a hundred years ago or so, it didn’t even have guns on it. Back when this heap launched, there weren’t no such thing as the Grays. It probably never occurred to those dirt-munchers that anyone would have a disagreement over who got settled where. Back then, Earthies thought they were running things. Well, they still thought they were. They just sent out their ships with weapons and soldiers now. To keep the peace, they said. Whitman had a thought or two on that subject.

There was a soft rattling on the lower left of
navigation. Whitman’s eyes darted over to the general spot it was coming from and followed the line over to the tiny bathroom. He held his breath, hardly daring to hope. Slowly, he stood and shuffled over to the door. He hated the hydraulics. Damn things were always opening and closing when they had no right to. He’d take a good old fashioned door every day. But if the water was working in the toilet again, he’d kiss the thing. The smell of it filled the whole place and made his head light.

Sure enough, when he pressed the button on the side of the toilet, his waste disappeared down the hole. Whitman whooped. Before god could change his mind and t
ake the small blessing away, Ruben turned to the sink and stuck his hands beneath it. A blast of warm water shot out. He would’ve whooped again, but he opted to drink his fill instead.

He’d been surviving mostly off the supplies they always carried in their packs when they were on a job. A couple of times, a guy had gotten caught in wreckage and had to wait for the rest of them to dig him out. It had never happened to Whitman before, he was careful, but the threat was real enough that everyone kept enough for at least a week. Better safe than dead.
His supply of meal bars and canisters of water ran out some three days ago.

The colony ship didn’t have much by way of computer. Not that the Free Ride was much better, but at least there you could pull up a schematic of the ship if you knew what you were doing. Whitman did, mostly, but this one was a stubborn bitch and wouldn’t even give up her name.
He’d had to go exploring to see what else he could come up with. He’d stumbled on the mess hall quickly enough. Every ship designer from Earth thought the place for that was near the center of the ship, so it wasn’t a challenge to track down.

Of course, he hadn’t been expecting a room of corpses piled one on top of the other. That was something. He had seen bodies before. Plenty of them. The
Grays weren’t shy about leaving the leftovers of their hunts lying out in the open. But this was a different sort of thing. They went all out this time, had fun. This one would be haunting Whitman’s nightmares for a long time. Maybe forever. If he hadn’t turned the power back on, it might’ve been better. It had been cold then. Since he’d started up the engine, the temps had gone back up and the bodies were starting to rot. Not bad enough that he couldn’t see what had been done to them. Just enough that the smell was enough to make him throw up one of those much-needed meal bars and had the corpses bulging in some truly grotesque ways. He’d wanted to turn around and run, but Whitman wasn’t built that way. Not since he got pinched. He was the thief among murderers there, and he learned what survival really meant. That day, it meant walking into hell.

There wasn’t much to find. They’d been eating. He could still see the food that was set out. It was rotted through and useless. But when he pushed past a man in a priest’s get-up, and wandered into the kitchen, he found a small cache of canned goods. He brought them out with him, then came back and
filled up three big buckets he found with water from the sink, which worked just fine.

All of that had taken the better part of an hour, and he spent every bit of it expecting the little girl to pounce on him. He wasn’t afraid of her. Not since she’d told him that it was just her and the big kid. But he was absolutely worried about all the germs she was spitting out with each breath.
He was already exposed, he was the second the big kid ripped off his breather. But Whitman figured the less he was bombarded with those germs the better. Bad enough that he’d gone poking around corpses. He didn’t need to make it worse.

Disease was always a problem in the black. For a long while, it was the part that made scavenging among the most dangerous professions. There was never any telling what bugs people from other worlds carried. Every ship was like a mini ecosystem, and
when someone breathed in some of that ecosystem that wasn’t their own, they were exposed to things that their poor bodies had never seen before. Of course, it cut both ways. More than a few people were walking, talking Typhoid Marys in the early days. Then some smart soul got around to inventing the breathers and everything changed. So long as you kept your breather on, there were no germs around that could crawl up in you. And none crept out either. Add that to a halfway decent decon room right at the airlock and the risks for people like him were minimal.

Of course, that was all figured out after this particular ship left orbit.
If it was as old as he thought it was, no one even realized how bad the contamination could be yet. Sure, scientists and doctors all shouted about doom and the apocalypse, but that was typical for the science types. The folks who made decisions just ignored them, the way they always did, and it was the spacers like Whitman’s ancestors who had to pay the price for no one listening to the smart people.

A deep, ragged cough interrupted his otherwise wonderful drink and dark introspection. That was happening more and more lately. Whitman tried to convince himself that it was the same flu that took down the big kid, but that whole practicality thing kept getting in the way. He knew that flu. It went around the whole ship, himself included. It took people down fast and hard, it didn’t sit around waiting for a week and a half while guys sorted out whether they were really sick or just dealing with the usual aches and pains that came with recirculated air. Not as fast as the kid, but that boy – Tron, she called him Tron – had no immunity to it whatsoever. He was like a cute little bunny hopping into the jaws of a wolf.

It was different for Whitman. His body didn’t have to deal with new super bugs. It had to deal with ones so old no one bothered to vaccinate against them anymore. Whatever was sneaking around in his lungs was something positively ancient. It’d be like catching smallpox or, hell, typhoid fever. People just didn’t do that anymore. Those things were deader than the folks in the mess hall. Except, of course, in a ship that couldn’t even reach a quarter light speed and so took a hundred years or so to get to where it’s supposed to land.

Once he had his cough properly managed and his thirst properly quenched, Whitman returned to his seat at the console. First thing he checked was the ship behind them. It was still drifting along at the very edges of sensor range. It wasn’t comforting, but at least it gave him a little bit of time before he had to panic.

Second thing was to check the course. They were still on track for the medical base on Vah. It was a tiny little moon that orbited a world some Earthian business mined to death. No one even went into atmo anymore. The gases that company released were toxic enough to melt through hulls. But they did set up one of the finest medical stations in the quarter to deal with all the side effects their laborers suffered. It was over sixty years ago, and Vah Base was still the best of the best. Plus, and more importantly, it was the closest. Whitman would prefer to go to a place a little friendlier to people in his line of work, but he knew that wasn’t the smart move. He was sick, no dancing around it, and he needed to get medical attention before the smallpox had the chance to take him out.