Alder's World Part One: Mass 17 (7 page)

He
didn
’
t mind being in command,
but after being so close to Gabba Rehans as her life ended and
having found a fair number of her fingers on his side of the
bulkhead when the lights came on, Alder found himself trying to
hide in the quiet of one of the remaining rooms.

“Dr. Alder just called in.
She
’
s in Med bay two.”
She reports seventeen injuries, none of them life
threatening.”
Amazingly, none of the
survivors in the dome seemed to be badly hurt. Elana herself had
about the worst injury with a fractured forearm.
She
’
d struck something during
the impact. Alder suspected it was Wen
Ye
’
s face. He dove into the
compartment with her a few seconds ahead of the blast and had an
inexplicably broken cheek bone and bloody lip.

“That
’
s fine. Thank
you. Do we have a full count yet?”
Until
the computers came back on there was no way to know how many people
had been sucked into the void or were lying frozen in depressurized
cabins but they should at least know how many survivors they had
when command finally got through to them.

“Yes Sir. Crews have been
through all the pressurized areas between levels two and fourteen.
There are eighty-six survivors.
”

Alder rubbed his chin with
the back of his hand. His crew needed him to be on his game.
“
All right. Eighty-six survivors and
only seventeen injuries. Not bad. Do we have any idea of what sort
of talents we
’
ve got? Who was
here when the blast hit?
”

“It
’
s a pretty mixed
lot. My full third shift second cycle crew was on duty so
you
’
ve got a full complement
for the gardens and equipment,
that
’
s twenty-six counting
me. The rest were off duty from all over the ship; mostly first
shift and some second.
”

“Okay. Talk to me about
resources.
”

At twenty-three when
they
’
d launched, Allayah was
one of the youngest on board. Elana had commented several times on
how well she had developed in the rigors of space. She was tall and
athletic, with skin darker than chocolate. She looked more like an
Olympic Athlete than the officer in charge of half of the high tech
ranch that kept the ship fed. While the social engineering behind
the ship allowed crews to cross train and move task to task,
Allayah had stayed steadfastly beside her crew and
livestock.
“
We
’
re in pretty good
shape. Preliminary reports show that air, thermal and water are all
running on main or backup power.
We
’
ve got local systems
running with a few small exceptions. We
haven
’
t been able to link
back to the main computer. It looks like the blast took out most of
the linkages running parallel to the tubes. We know the emergency
system is transmitting. We don
’
t know if anyone is listening.
”

“Oh
they
’
re listening.”
Alder reassured her.
“
The little flickers of light out
there,
”
He gestured at the
window,
“
are dust particles
hitting the mobius shields and frying themselves.”
They
’
ve got power over there.
We
’
re probably just waiting
for a reboot.”
Optical computers were
frighteningly fast but a little twitchy. If you got them out of
sync somehow, it was virtually impossible to get them back into
line. The only real solution was to turn systems off and let the
main system turn them back on one at a time.

With a gesture, Alder
steered them away from the cloud of dust and into the
hallway.
“
We need to run on
the assumption that the rest of the ship is intact and will need
food and water to be running at full steam when contact gets made.
I don
’
t have to tell you how
fast seven hundred people can get hungry.
”

“Yes,
sir.
”

“We
’
ll also want to
keep everyone busy. It
’
s
maybe more important than actually making food. I want you to take
what crew you can as alternates for your staff. Their normal
rotation will be over in an hour. See if you can scrounge a second
shift environment crew out of the extras
we
’
ve got.
Let
’
s also get an engineering
crew together, anyone that can hold a welder. I want all the
exterior breaches examined. I don
’
t really care what. Just make sure everyone has a task.
We
’
ll
…”

The main lights went out and were
replaced a half second later by the low, blue tinted emergency
lights.

“...and get someone to
look at the lights.”
Strips of yellow
warning lights flared along the baseboards of the wall.

“Gravity failure.” Harshaw
hissed. She twisted quickly and launched herself at a table and
chair set against the outside wall. Alder
wasn
’
t as quick to respond.
His next step launched him awkwardly into the air in a roughly
right foot over left shoulder turn. He squawked loudly.

“Commander!
”
Harshaw
called, her arms wrapped firmly around the back of the chair which
itself was anchored to the floor.
“
Grab my feet.”
She stuck her legs
straight out at Alder.

“Umm. No good.”
Alder knew better than to kick and flail against
the unsupporting air but several billion years of evolution beat
out twenty years of training and he found himself pitching over and
over against his will.

Harshaw, seeing his
dilemma, pulled her feet under her against the back of the chair
and launched back at Alder. They met, her midriff to his thighs and
his spin reversed so that his feet were pitched back over her back.
He grabbed two handfuls of her shirt and together they pinwheeled
into a set of potted plants that shattered off their anchored bases
and ricocheted off in a cloud of broken masonry and dirt. Alder and
Harshaw rebounded hard off the wall behind the plants and headed
back across the hallway on a new but slower trajectory. They were
both yelling,
“
Hold still!
Hold Still!
”

With thumps of dirt and a
clattering of broken ceramics, they arrived at the junction between
the outside wall and the ceiling. Harshaw managed to grab hold of
the molding and top of the door frame that led out from there.
Alder chuckled in spite of himself. He had both arms wrapped around
Harshaw
’
s waist, her head was
hooked under one of his knees, and his face was planted firmly in
her right ass cheek. He chuckled again.

“Good...um...catch
Harshaw.
”

Harshaw, who clearly saw
the humor of the situation, unhooked her head from his leg.
“
Don
’
t worry sir. I
won
’
t tell the crew about the
flailing.
”

“Yes.” Alder laughed more
loudly.
“
It was a bit
awkward.”

“It was a personal moment
sir. I feel very close to you right now.
”

They hung side by side, clinging to
the rail as laughter mixed with tears overtook Alder. Harshaw, who
was chuckling also, hung beside him quietly.

Alder understood that he
was in shock and his body was trying to let out the stress. He let
it go, his sides aching as laughter and tears rolled out of him.
After a few minutes, pain sensors around his body began to
register, calming him down. He had several scratches and bruises
and his right thigh had taken a hard shot, probably from
Harshaw
’
s hip.

“Thank you.” He said
quietly.

She nodded.

He looked up and down the long,
curving hallway. In the dim emergency lights he could see a loose
constellation of potted plant parts bumping its way along to their
left otherwise they were alone, sticking incongruously out of the
wall.

He signed heavily.
“
Well, here we are.”

Captain
Pilton had to be very careful with the word mutiny. Once someone
was found guilty of mutiny, there
wasn
’
t a lot you could do
with them. They were well past the age where you could kill
mutineers or just abandon them on some passing planet, although the
second was sometimes tempting. Leaving a crew member in lockup was
not terribly effective either. For one thing the ships
“
detention
center
”
was really just a
locking room in medical bay. More importantly, mutinies
didn
’
t happen in isolation
and locking up the leader or leaders was more likely than not to
excite loyalty for the prisoner out of the remaining crew members.
No the word mutiny was just not usable, even if it was a very
exciting and dramatic word.

Pilton glanced over at
Tallen where he floated between two guards. The fact that the
guards were clearly listening to Pilton and not Tallen probably
meant that this whole incident could be explained away later as
stress. The med tech beside Pilton poked something painful into the
bleeding temple wound Tallen had given him with an elbow. He
winced.
‘
It
’
s a
shame about mutiny.
’
he thought.

Pilton waved the tech away and pulled
himself upright against the back of his command chair. With the
power out, the screens and overhead lights were all dark. What
light there was came from flashlights and a few blue alarm lights
that stubbornly refused to stop doing their jobs. He felt a little
woozy but not, in his opinion, concussed. His breath mushroomed in
the frigid air. Without the air handlers on, the moisture from
their breath was trapped in the room with them, forming spiderwebs
of frost across the monitors as the temperatures
plummeted.

His crew was nervous,
riding on a razor
’
s edge.
Seven hours after the explosion no one knew how badly damaged the
ship was nor could they go about finding out until the power was
back on. By now, every minute that they spent looking for Alder had
a body count attached to it. He
’
d had Dr. Thomas
’
radio
silenced, not because Dr. Thomas was wrong to be shrieking about
the people dying from the lack of electricity, but because he
needed the bridge crew to worry about other things. Now, after the
moment of violence, he was in danger of losing control.

He
didn
’
t have much of a chin,
more of a small cuplike indentation under his lips, but he pulled
himself upright as best he could in zero-g and surveyed his
frightened and freezing crew.

“It has been an amazing
honor to lead this crew.”
He said loudly
enough to be heard by all.
“
Most of the time, I have hardly felt like I was leading at
all. You all work together so well, support each other so well,
that I often feel I could stay in my bath for a week and nothing
would go amiss.” He paused.

“I have to admit that
there is nothing in the manual about how to deal with miniature
robots that eat through anything. I also have no more idea than any
of you do about how badly the ship is damaged.”
He paused again and nodded slightly as if in answer to a
question only he had heard.

“Maybe our journey is at
an end. That would be very sad. I will tell you this though; if
this is to be our end, we will meet our end as a crew; as the crew
who have served each other so well all these years. We all have
loved ones and friends in the dark and the cold. We owe it to them
to work this problem together or to go down together trying.
We
’
ll have no more shouting.
We
’
ll have no more violence.
We will have scientific inquiry and we will have answers.”
He nodded one by one to several of the nearer
faces mooning at him over their darkened consoles.

He turned to the guards
holding Tallen.
“
Commander
Tallen is relieved of duty until further notice. Please escort him
to the Primary Medical Bay. Tell Dr. Thomas...

The memory of
Thomas
’
shrieking came back
to him. Maybe Tallen and Thomas
shouldn
’
t be spending time
together just now.
“
Umm.
Let
’
s just keep him in the
conference room for now.
”