Adrift (13 page)

There was a debris field between here and there. That was new. Probably meant some miners had a bad day. It was at the very edge of the sensors, almost directly opposite the ship behind them.
The more he saw of these sensors, the more he was certain they were going to lead directly to his death. They couldn’t make out the full scope of the debris, which meant he had no idea what course corrections were necessary. He’d have to wait until they were closer, when anything he did would have to be far more drastic.

Such a nice deity, that god.

There weren’t any internal sensors. That one wasn’t just because of the ship’s age. He’d seen older ships with them. They were handy things. They sent out alerts when people who weren’t supposed to be there were sneaking up on places like navigation. If whomever had built this colony ship weren’t a bunch of cheap bastards, it might be more than Whitman and the kids now. But they were, so he was left with no idea where the kids were. He’d figured out the code on the cheap-as-hell intercom that usually got the girl. He’d dubbed that code the ‘sick kid’ code. He didn’t have anything else to check, not that he could actually look at with his current limitations anyway. With that ship behind them and his looming health concerns, it seemed about time to reevaluate the arrangement.

“Hey kid.”

He didn’t get the immediate response Whitman had come to expect. He worried that meant the big kid was dead. Or, worse, they both were. How long ago had he last asked how she was doing? Would she tell him if she got sick? He hadn’t been precisely helpful when she told him about Tron.

It wasn’t that he’d wanted to be mean. There just wasn’t anything he could do. He wasn’t a medic. He’d picked up a trick or two hanging around Sophie Anne, but all of that was for broken bones or cuts or burns. The kinds of things you’d actually run into on a salvage ship. If someone broke quarantine, like him, they never came back aboard the ship. They all felt bad about it, and he was sure Big Benny and the rest felt bad for him, but it happened sometimes. One of the risks of the job. Better one guy than the whole ship. Besides, it wasn’t exactly a death sentence. If he got a clean bill of health from Vah, he’d send out a line to the Free Ride and hitch a ride to
Aros. They’d be waiting for him at the docks, just like if he’d been taking some time off.

None of that would happen if the kids were both dead. He couldn’t run the whole ship himself. Most of it, sure. The biggest part of keeping an ancient wreck like this going was just keeping the engine on. It took the engineers a real long time to figure out the flaw in that design, but the engines in them were always powerhouses. Once they started putting in back-up power supplies they just didn’t feel the need to make them quite as
tough as they used to. It was one of the great tragedies of the universe, second only to the devastating scarcity of proper chefs.

But keeping this ship running wasn’t just a push-button kind of adventure. The second things started going wrong, like that alarm
, Whitman needed someone else. He kept the ship from locking down, the way it desperately wanted to, so that the kids could fix the issue. If he hadn’t been up here, battling all the ship’s programing and venting the room when it was time, there was no way they could’ve done a damn thing. And he certainly couldn’t fix it from his seat. It needed to be a partnership.

“Kid!”

Whitman was just about to give up when he heard the crackle of the intercom. “Her name is Kivi.”

It wasn’t the girl’s voice. That was good. That was damn good. “
Deepest apologies. Manners never did stick with me.” He paused, running through the arguments one last time. No matter which way he went, he was taking a huge risk that he couldn’t come back from. If only the sensors worked! Then he’d know if it was necessary and wouldn’t have to second guess himself. That was how people got themselves killed. That, and lack of information. “I’m opening the doors. Why don’t the two of you come on up so we can chat?”

He waited in silence, wondering about the conversation going on between them. Was there a conversation at all? Maybe they were just not answering. He hadn’t gone out of his way to win their trust, after all. Maybe he should’ve played the nice grown-up and made them feel safe with him. But it would’ve been a lie, and not the kind Whitman could sit well with. If they did manage to get out of this mess, it would only hurt the kids. They’d go out into the universe thinking there were nice people out there who would take care of them. But there weren’t any of those, not that he’d seen. Best to hope for were people like his crew, ones who weren’t looking to stab anyone in the back.

“Tomorrow.” It was the girl who answered this time. “Tron needs rest.”

Whitman smiled as he heard the boy protesting in the background. He couldn’t make out the words, the noise filter was just good enough for that, but he didn’t need to. The girl might just be a kid, but every female he’d ever met came wired with that ‘mommy’ instinct. Once that kicked in, no amount of protesting
did a damn bit of good, but he’d yet to meet the guy who didn’t try anyway.

He glanced at the clock in the console. “
Four hours?”

“
Six,” she countered.

“
See you then.”

He didn’t have anything else to do for the next
six hours, so he napped. Every forty-five minutes or so he’d wake up and check the sensors, then drift off again. Nothing changed. They weren’t moving anywhere near light speed, and it seemed the debris was moving too, so he still wasn’t getting a clear picture.

The ship behind them was moving as well, at exactly the same speed they were. It never got any closer, but that was no comfort at all. The sky was a big place, but ships tended to gravitate towards each other like magnets. It was an odd phenomenon that he’d always wondered about. Stuff like this happened, and the proper way of dealing with it was for both ships to shift course. Even a fraction was enough to get out of each other’s wake.
He’d done that. The ship behind them had too, in the same direction. Which meant it wasn’t an accident they were following.

The time passed. It didn’t go quickly. It dragged, just like every bit of the time leading up to his invitation. Whitman was so sick of sitting around doing nothing. He’d had lots of practice at it. Most of space travel was doing nothing. But on the Free Ride he had his crew to pass the time with, playing cards or watching vids or arguing. It wasn’t great, but it was something. Here, it was just him. Him and his thoughts. He was starting to think he wasn’t very good company.

When the time finally came, and they told him they were coming up, he was so glad to have someone else to talk to that he considered trying to make a meal out of the salted meat paste and canned mini corn still left from his trip to the mess hall. He didn’t have much to spare, though, and didn’t really want to explain where he’d gotten it. Besides, the kids had to know where all the food was kept. No doubt they were eating a hell of a lot better than he was. Once they hammered out this problem, he would get to rectifying that.

The big kid was the first one through the door.
He was going to be massive when he finished growing. Almost a size with Big Benny. The kid had a way of filling up a space. It was more than his physical presence, though. There was something about the boy that Whitman had seen a couple of times before, a way of being the center of a room without having to do or say a damn thing. It was what Sophie Anne would call Leadership Potential. Ruben called it trouble. Getting attention was always trouble. The kid was in for a hard life, no doubt about it. Assuming they lived through this.

The girl wasn’t far behind. She was surprising. Whitman had thought her just a child of
ten or eleven, but on closer inspection he realized she had the start of some woman-shaped curves. He’d seen this before too, though far less often. Kids on ships didn’t grow the same as ones who had actual gravity working on them.

They both scanned the room as though they expected to see something he’d changed. The big one seemed disappointed when they didn’t find anything, and kept glaring as though he just knew Whitman had left a whole mess of demon worshiping supplies on the Free Ride. Whitman found himself a little offended. He might not have grown up with a bona fide priest like the two of them, but his parents raised him right. God might not like him much, but he’d always taken care to catch a service in any church he came across. Which, admittedly, wasn’t often. But it wasn’t like anyone came out to the edge here and set up a ministry.

“You shouldn’t have locked us out,” the big kid growled.

Whitman shrugged. He had learned to deal with the brute act.
Lots of folks in his circles liked to play at it. He’d never been much of a fan. “You shouldn’t have broken my breather. Shit happens. Wanna pout or do you want the bad news?”

“The water?” Kivi asked, with a look that said she was expecting disaster. She wasn’t wrong about the second part, but the first confused him. Hadn’t they fixed the water?

“That’s better than ever.” He paused and glanced at the console, wishing that he had better than the murky black and white shapes to show them. “This here’s the problem. We have company.”

Both kids hovered over the panel and stared, neither of them saying much. When Whitman realized that they didn’t know what they were seeing, he explained. Then he told them about the debris field coming up in their near future. He only coughed once in the whole explanation, so he felt he was alright in leaving out the sick
and maybe dying part.

He expected some whining. Maybe a tear or two. Not from these kids. They were tough as steel. He should’ve known better. These were the ones who set up those nasty traps. And they were the last ones standing after a
Gray attack. That was saying a hell of a lot. Six years picking the scraps in their territory and he had never seen any before them. Not to mention they survived seeing what was left in the mess hall. Bad as it was for Whitman, it had to be a hell of a lot worse for the two of them. Colonies were always tight-knit bunches. Creepy tight.

“We’ve got to shake our fans back there,” Whitman finished. “If they’re the ones who attacked you before, we need to do it fast. I’m a decent pilot and all, but this ship’s not exactly the kind of bird I’m used to steering. She won’t be threading any needles in the near future.”

“So you can’t outmaneuver,” the big guy said with a scowl. “How about outrunning?”

Whitman couldn’t help laughing. The idea was insane. Clearly the kid realized that? Whether Tron did or didn’t, the laugh was a bad idea. It led to another coughing fit. If he let that happen too much they’d figure out the sick and maybe dying part all on their own. Ruben knew what came after that. So long as they thought there was a chance he was taking them somewhere safe, they needed him. The second they decided he wasn’t going to, no matter if it was because he was dying or because he
decided not to cooperate, he was back to being their enemy. Not figuring that out was why he got pinched. He wasn’t about to repeat old mistakes. He needed to stay useful.

“Son, unless you’ve got a brand new engine you’ve been hiding in this dump, there’s no way in hell we can run.”

“Lucy isn’t a dump and I’m not your son,” Tron grumbled. “So you want us to hide in the debris field. How long is it going to take to get there?”

Whitman lifted an eyebrow. He’d expected to have to lead them all the way to the answer, but the big one had jumped right ahead to the ending. He really shouldn’t be
surprised. These weren’t kids he was dealing with, after all. Not really. They were survivors. Also, Lucy? Who the hell named their ship Lucy? This colony had a serious problem with naming things. “At this speed, I’d guess around twenty-seven hours. I’ll be able to nail it down once we’re close enough for the sensors to get a proper read on it. Hopefully I’ll be able to find us something big enough to hide behind.”

“Can you go faster?”

Whitman shook his head. “With a hole in the hull? We’d have to be stupid to try. The structure’s been weakened. We’re pushing it pretty hard now, but if we dial the engine up to full speed we’re liable to rip the ship apart. Call me crazy, but I prefer to keep it intact.”

Tron grimaced.
“Do you think the other ship’s going to wait that long?”

“Hell if I know,” Whitman answered with a shrug. “I don’t have a line on ‘
em. Sent out a few hails, but those folks aren’t looking to chat. They’ve let us alone this long though, so what’s a day and a half? We’ll just have to watch and see.”

Tron considered this for a moment, glancing at Kivi. Whitman wondered if they were having a conversation with meaningful looks. The way their brows twitched, he could almost believe it. It was damn creepy.

“Alright. We’ll follow your lead. But you’re going to teach us how to work things in here.”

“I’ll do what now?” Whitman was genuinely shocked. He hadn’t expected any kind of negotiation. This was a fuck or be fucked kind of scenario, not a hold out for the best offer. He couldn’t decide if Tron just didn’t understand or if the guy was so determined to get rid of Ruben he didn’t care. “I’m not going to play schoolmarm
.”

Tron made a big show of looking around the room, especially the small blanket he’d set up in the corner furthest from the bathroom. “What’s the matter Witty? No time to spare? Busy throwing too many parties for all your friends and allies?
You know, the ones who are going to put out fires and fix your water?”