Chasing the Stars (31 page)

And with that, I left Aidan’s room.

There was a time when Aidan wouldn’t have hesitated to confide in me. How had things changed so much between us over the course of a few weeks? He was still my brother and I loved him but there was something going on in his head that had me worried.

I was three minutes late for my shift. Count them. Three minutes. But the moment I set foot on the bridge, Mum started.

‘Good of you to grace us with your presence, Nathan.’

Knowing when to keep my mouth shut, I headed for my station, which was Aidan’s usual seat at the navigation panel.

‘No, Nathan,’ Mum said as I sat down. ‘Your services will not be required on this bridge until you learn to turn up on time. You will report to Darren in the engine room and spend this shift down there. Dismissed.’

I leaped to my feet and scowled at Mum. ‘Yes, Commander.’

Furious, I headed for the door. If Mum wanted to get pissy because I was three minutes late, then two could play that game. From now on she was Commander Linedecker first and my mum second.

The first thing that hit me when I entered the engine room on the lower deck was the intense heat, followed swiftly by the raucous noise. I’d have to endure eight hours of this when I should be on the bridge. Thanks, Mum! Anjuli was the first to see me when I entered the room. She was just climbing out of a plasma conduit on the port side. And she was filthy.

She waved at me but I didn’t acknowledge her as I needed to report to Darren first. I couldn’t afford to annoy any more people this morning. I saw him over by one of the flow panels, scrutinizing the screen before him. I sighed inwardly. I wasn’t Darren’s favourite person to begin with, and though there’d been no further hostilities since we’d escaped the ion storm God only knew what task he would find for me to do. I walked over to him.

‘Nathan Linedecker, reporting for duty, sir.’

‘Are you now?’ said Darren, a slow smile of satisfaction creeping over his face.

Yeah, I was in trouble.

‘Right, Nathan, you can take my place and join Corbyn over there in conduit S3. There’s cabling in there that needs re-shielding. The plasma arcs have been switched off. You’ve got two hours.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Well, I could’ve predicted that. He was giving me one of the filthiest, most back-breaking jobs on board to do. And too bloody right the plasma arcs had been switched off. If they weren’t, the plasma energy in each conduit would fry anyone unlucky enough to be caught in there in less than a second. And to top it all off, I wouldn’t even be working with Anjuli on the port side. I was on the starboard side with that arsehat Corbyn who got on my nerves and then stomped on them some more. If he knew what was good for him, he’d keep any comments about Vee to himself. Darren started to input my assignment into the computer, effectively dismissing me.

‘Harrison, you moron. Don’t put that there,’ Darren called out in a temper. He headed over to Harrison who was looking sheepish.

I turned and gave Anjuli a discreet wave. She smiled at me sympathetically, retrieved a sonic calibrator from the floor and headed back into her tunnel.

‘Hurry up, Anjuli.’ That sounded like Ian in the conduit with her. He was never happy unless he had something to complain about, but then if I’d been born on Callisto and had seen half the stuff he had, I wouldn’t find much to smile about either. He’d outlived his wife and his three children who’d all died back on that moon.

I headed over to conduit S-3 and peered inside. Corbyn was some ten or twelve metres up ahead, and to get to him I’d have to crawl through a conduit barely fifty centimetres high.

This sucked mightily.

‘Well, look who’ll be joining me in here. Is this your wife’s way of asking for a divorce?’ Corbyn called out.

Arsehat!

Not bothering to answer, I got down on my hands and knees ready to crawl through what looked like years of dust and dirt with a trail cut through the grime where Corbyn had entered the conduit before me. Just then the engine’s coolant alarm sounded.

‘Damn and blast!’ I heard Darren exclaim. ‘Nathan, get your butt over here.’

With pleasure.

‘Recalibrate the coolant ratios. That alarm has been sounding all morning.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Fine with me! Darren reassigned himself to the conduits whilst I headed for the control boards. Once at the appropriate panel, I called up the data on the current levels of coolant in the appropriate parts of the ship’s engine. I needed to come up with the optimum level of coolant for each fuel cell relay. I was barely five minutes into the task when another alarm sounded, far more serious this time. The open conduit portals were beginning to close. The trouble was that Anjuli and Ian were still in one and Corbyn was in another. The portals were never supposed to close when people were in there, but something had obviously gone very wrong. Once the portals shut, the conduits would be flooded with plasma energy and the ones still inside them wouldn’t stand a chance.

I ran to the conduit where Anjuli and Ian were working. Anjuli was frantically crawling towards me. In her panic she kept trying to rise to her feet and run but the tunnel was too low and she kept hitting her head and back against the roof of it.

‘Abort the resetting of the plasma arcs!’ Darren shouted.

‘I can’t, sir. The computer has locked me out,’ Maria replied, panic in her voice.

‘For God’s sake.’ Darren ran over to the control panel and shoved Maria out of the way to try and stop the plasma arcs from resetting. From his expression he was having either bad luck or no luck at all. I jammed my back against the closing portal door, pushing upwards to try and stop it from sliding down any further. The metal of the closing door cut through my jacket and shirt and into my skin.

‘Nathan, move away from there,’ Darren yelled at me. ‘If those doors are open when the arcs reset, you’ll flood the whole engine room with plasma energy. You’ll kill us all.’

I reluctantly moved. ‘Anjuli, move your arse,’ I urged, reaching out for her. The moment her fingers touched mine, I hauled her out of there with the help of Harrison who’d run over to help. Darren was still trying to stop the arcs from resetting. Metres away I could see Maria, urging Corbyn to hurry up and get out of his tunnel. With Anjuli out, I ducked down to help pull Ian to safety. Even though the portal door was moving slowly, it wasn’t slow enough and Ian was a good three metres away.

‘Ian, hurry,’ I called out.

He carried on crawling for a moment, then he shook his head and turned to sit with his back against the wall of the tunnel, his legs drawn up.

‘Ian, what’re you doing?’ I yelled.

He turned to me and smiled. ‘I’m going to see my wife and children.’

‘Ian . . .’ I tried to crawl into the conduit to get him but Harrison grabbed hold of me and pulled me back just as the conduit door closed completely. There was a whooshing sound as the plasma arcs ignited. I half sat, half collapsed against the wall next to the closed conduit door. Even through the shielded and tempered bulkhead I could feel the heat of the arcs in the conduit almost scorching my back.

For the second time since coming aboard this ship, I’d had to watch people die. And once again, there was nothing I could do about it. Across the floor, Maria was banging her fists against the conduit door. I stood up slowly.

‘Corbyn?’ I asked.

Harrison shook his head. ‘He didn’t make it.’

The atmosphere on board the
Aidan
was poisonous after the second incident with Ian and Corbyn. I didn’t know either of them very well but it didn’t matter. It felt like I’d lost members of my own family. And where the colonists had begun to stop and chat to me in the corridors, now they kept walking and some actually turned round and went back the way they came when they saw me heading towards them.

The accident in the airlock was bad luck.

But two accidents? That had to be by design.

I began to realize that some of the crew seriously believed that I had something to do with the loss of their friends. After all, they had all lived together on Callisto, had escaped together and tried to settle together on Barros 5. I was the unknown entity, the outsider.

When my shift was over I made my bone-weary way back to my quarters. I expected Nathan to already be there but he wasn’t. A shower, a sandwich and a change of clothing later and Nathan still hadn’t come back to our quarters. I paced up and down wondering and worrying about where he was.

‘Aidan, where is Nathan Linedecker?’ I finally gave in and asked the computer.

‘Nathan Linedecker is in his assigned quarters U-08,’ Aidan’s voice played back to me.

I half sat, half fell onto the bed. Did that mean what I suspected? Did Nathan, like the rest of the colonists, suspect that I had something to do with the deaths of his friends? Surely if he had doubts, he would come and at least talk to me first? Or maybe he had no doubts.

Should I go to see him? Try to reason with him? Or would it be better to leave him alone for a while?

God! My thoughts were driving me crazy.

Over the next hour, my doubts wouldn’t leave me alone. They writhed and grew, fed by fear. The door to my quarters hissed open. I jumped to my feet as Nathan entered, looking as tired as I felt. He stopped just inside the room and we both stood like living statues, watching each other.

‘Have you come for the rest of your stuff?’ I asked at last.

Nathan looked shocked, but only for a moment. Then the shutters came down and his expression set, mask-like and unreadable.

‘Are you kicking me out?’

Now it was my turn to be shocked. ‘No! Of course not,’ I denied. ‘But our shift finished hours ago and the computer said you were in your old quarters. I thought . . . does that mean you’re moving out?’

Slowly Nathan shook his head. I still couldn’t read his expression. For the first time I wasn’t sure what he was thinking.

‘Nate, tell me honestly, d’you think I had something to do with the death of your friends?’

He walked over and wrapped his arms around me, hugging me to him, his embrace almost too tight but I didn’t care. The relief I felt then made tears spring to my eyes which I tried to blink away. I didn’t want Nate to think I was weak.

‘Nate, I need to hear you say the words,’ I whispered.

‘Vee, I know you had nothing to do with their deaths,’ Nathan drew back slightly so I could properly see his face. The mask was gone. ‘I’ve just spent the last few hours telling that to anyone who’d listen.’

‘But you were in your old room,’ I said, confused.

‘Only for the last couple of hours. Anjuli and I were going through all the engine room and bridge logs and footage to try and find out what happened.’

‘You and Anjuli?’ I said sharply. ‘You could’ve asked me, Nate. I would’ve helped.’

‘I didn’t want to risk anyone accusing either of us of a cover-up. That’s why it was better if Anjuli and I investigated without you.’

Nathan had been alone in his old room with Anjuli for a couple of hours . . .

No! I wasn’t going to travel down that path. As King Lear said, ‘O, that way madness lies.’ I had to decide whether or not I trusted Nathan and what it boiled down to was that I did, and I would until it was proved beyond all doubt that I shouldn’t.

‘So what did you find?’

‘Nothing. At least nothing out of the ordinary.’ Nathan dragged a weary hand through his unruly hair. I could feel his frustration at his lack of progress. ‘Everything points to it just being an accident.’

‘But you don’t think it was, do you?’

‘Darren tried to shut down the arc reset from a panel in the engine room. He was locked out whilst there were people inside the conduits. After the accident happened, the control panel worked just fine,’ said Nathan.

‘If it’d been a true malfunction, it still wouldn’t have worked after the accident,’ I realized.

‘Exactly,’ said Nathan grimly. ‘Which means someone took control of the ship’s computer, using the nanites to deliberately cause their deaths.’

‘But why would anyone do that?’ I asked, bewildered.

When Mum and Dad and the original crew had started dying, that had been because of a mystery virus which no one had been able to do anything about. That was a savage twist of fate. This was different. This was someone deliberately picking off crew members for no apparent motive.