Zero (12 page)

Closing his eyes, he tried to bring the maps of the area into his mind's eye. They were stubborn and refused to complete themselves in any detail. All he could remember was that down the mountain led towards the airfield, the town and the AI Command Centre. So up the mountain it was.

It was easy when he looked at it that way. He shuffled back to the other side of the road so he had the cliff face to lean on and began following it uphill. Slowly. He stared straight ahead, concentrated on each breath, each step, each foot of progress gained. There was little traffic but he was glad that night was drawing in again, letting him see the headlights of any vehicle long before they came in sight. The sheer rock face on his right gave way to scrubby woodland and he was able to stumble into the shadows of the trees whenever anything passed.

He carried on, not knowing how long he moved for, just occasionally noticing the view around him changing and night setting in. The clouds hid the stars and he was grateful for the cover but couldn't ignore the pang of isolation he felt with
out them. He'd also hoped he might have been able to see one bright speck creeping across the sky and fancy it the
Zero
, drifting dutifully, waiting for his call.

He finally had to stop and lean against a tree, close his eye and will his lungs to keep breathing and his heart to keep beating. It would be so easy to just lie down in the soft leaf litter and let it all go. The world would carry on. The
Zero
would carry on. They could get another commander. It wouldn't be hard to find some other nameless colony orphan who knew how to sneak and steal and lie. Any one of them would put their necks on the line in exchange for regular meals. A couple of years training on the
Endeavour
training station
and they could be shoved onto the
Zero
to pick up where Webb had left off. It would be like he'd never been.

But if he lay down and gave up, that would prove Hugo right.

“Well, we can't have that.”

He wasn't sure if he'd said it out loud or just in his head, but the thought brought him swimming back to the surface and he pulled himself back up off the tree and kept moving. Almost as if he were being rewarded for his tenacity, light showed up ahead. Stationary light, not headlights. He moved off the road and approached from the shelter of the trees. His working eye screwed up as the light grew stronger and he felt his head begin to pound but he ignored it and stumbled on.

It was a fuelling station. An honest-to-God, open and working civilian fuelling station, complete with public comm booth. A single car was just pulling away and he stepped back into the shadows until it was out of sight. Peering back round he saw the clerk in the store had his back to the window and was watching sport on a wall display. He waited ten heartbeats to make sure the clerk was thoroughly engrossed and then stepped out onto the tarmac and dragged himself into the comm booth.

The blue screen flashed the minimum credit fee. He blinked a few times to try and stop his vision swimming and started typing in commands. Normally he could hack a civilian comm station blindfolded and it alarmed him how long it took him to get past its protocols. He was aware of the time with every beat of blood in his head and the fact that the comm booth was in full view of the public highway as well as the store.

Finally the machine let him in but he didn't let himself pause, willing his focus not to waver, and pulled up a map of the area. The civilian net maps didn't quite have the same amount of detail as his wrist panel would have, but he saw enough to satisfy him that he had made the right decision. There was nothing this far up the mountain apart from hiking tracks and some more battle-scarred landscape. It bugged him that he couldn't be sure, but from the looks of things he'd left most of the heavy-duty monitoring and scanning ranges behind. He cast about for somewhere suitable to select for a pick-up point that was within staggering distance of the fuelling station. His heart sank when he saw there was nowhere near that had the space to let the
Zero
come herself and none of it was as remote as he would have liked.

He settled for a spot further up the mountain and off the main road that would at least let a fighter land, took a note of the co-ordinates and then set about attempting to get them coded and sent
to the ship. It wasn't his best encryption. Rami would have tutted and shook her head. But it was all he could manage. Even if he was capable of coding a secure visual link to the
Zero
, he was afraid how whoever answered might react when they saw the state of him.

With one last push he wiped the memory on the comm unit and pushed the doors back open, wincing
at the smears of blood he left on the glass, then dragged himself over the forecourt. The sight of the goods in the store made him realise how thirsty and hungry he was. But he was way beyond any stealth or slight of hand so he shuffled back into the trees and kept moving, putting his hunger and thirst back in his mental box with the pain.

It could have been an hour later or it could have been ten minutes when it started to rain. He paused his uphill shuffle and
laughed, tilting his head back. He revelled in the feel of the cool water rinsing the dried blood and muck from his face, revelled in the stinging feel of it getting into his wounds. He heaved a great sigh and took a moment just to feel it soak into his hair and the tatters of his clothes. The colonies' artificial weather never came close to that of the Earth and he knew as long as he lived he would never tire of the feel of being in amongst something so real and wild.

But it wasn't long before the pleasantness of the rain wore off and he began to shiver. His boiler suit was soaked and clung like dead skin. His legs seemed to be getting heavier. For a while he knew nothing except the cold making everything shudder and sting
and the drag of his feet through the mud.

It took a long time to pull himself back together and when he did he
realised with a start that he was no longer on the main road but shambling up an overgrown dirt track. The rain had stopped at some point and the sky was pinpricked with stars. The sight of them made his heart lift and he kept moving forward, hoping that his autopilot had taken him down the right track.

Some indefinable time later he saw a tall, dark shape blotting out some of the stars ahead. He ignored the pain in his jaw and lips and let himself grin when he saw it was a church spire. He had made it. Even if there was no one there, even if no one came, he had made it.

The concrete steps that led up to the front door seemed like a cruel obstacle after everything else but he delved down deep and found the last shreds of his strength. It took him a moment to realise that the door stood ajar and there was the sound of familiar voices arguing within. Even if he'd wanted to stop his tattered smile he couldn't. He shouldered the door open and staggered in. Two figures were hunched in the shadowy pews and they fell silent when he entered.

“
Hey guys,” he croaked in a voice he didn't recognise. “Good of you to come.”

He let go the death-grip he had on his last threads of awareness and slipped into blessed darkness.

ɵ

“
Kinjo? Come in, Kinjo.”

Hugo jerked, blinking through the fog. Rami's voice was tinny and distant and sounded strained.

“I'm here, Anita,” Kinjo replied and Hugo heaved himself up onto his elbow, pulling off the oxygen mask and taking great gulps of real air in an attempt to heave himself back to reality. Rami's face on the wall display was pale and he felt his blood run cold.

“
Get the surgical bay ready. Now,” she barked. “I need all X-rays and scanners online. And get scrubbed up. I'm going to need you.”

“
Is he -?”

“
Now, Kinjo. We're almost with you. Out.”

Kinjo cast one pained look over her shoulder at Hugo before rushing into the surgical bay. He pulled himself up to sit on the edge of the bunk and
watched her boot up all the scanners and screens. The next thing he was aware of was the ship shuddering under him as the cargo bay doors closed and pressurised.

He barely had time to gather his thoughts when Rami burst through the medbay doors, dishevelled and grimy, followed closely by Bolt who appeared to be carrying a vaguely human-shaped bundle of rags. Hugo only just had time to make out that it was Webb before Bolt was following Rami through the glass doors into the surgical bay.

He got to his feet and padded over like he was in a dream. Bolt laid the limp figure down on the table and retreated. If it hadn't been for the height of the frame and the boots, about the only bit of his clothing left intact, Hugo wouldn't have recognised his commander. Every bit of exposed skin was a ripped and bloody mess. One eye was completely obscured by blood and swelling and the rest of his face was just blood, cuts and burns. His mouth hung open in an alarming way and some teeth were missing. None of his limbs seemed to be lying at normal angles and he didn’t seem to be breathing.

The sudden feel of a calloused but gentle hand on his bare shoulder made him jump.

“If he can be saved, sir,” Bolt's voice was low. “Rami will save him.”

Hugo leant against the bulkhead as Rami took a pair of shears to the remains of Webb's clothing. Kinjo was already
starting the scanners and part of Hugo felt pride spark as he watched the women work. He stayed just long enough to see Rami peel away some of the boiler suit to reveal bone protruding from Webb's torso and then turned away.

He grabbed a white t-shirt from the stack of medbay
supplies and left. He was relieved to realise that he didn't feel like was going to pass out with every step any more, though the sharper aches of healing tissue were now setting in. He paused as he pulled the shirt on, and took a minute to breathe in the quiet of the corridor. He'd seen injuries and worse before. But this was different. This was his fault.

He took himself onto the bridge. More was at the controls and Spinn was at one of the workstations. After
a closer look Hugo saw that the researcher was bent over the shattered remains of Webb's wrist panel. He felt a stab of anger that the man could sit there and work when his commander lay below clinging to life. But it was mitigated by a wash of jealousy at not having any task of his own to distract him.

He lowered himself into the copilot seat and glanced over the control
panel. There was no destination set but they were moving away from Earth.

“
Any particular heading, Captain?” More asked.

Hugo blinked out at the vastness beyond the screen without really seeing anything.
“Where's the nearest colony?” he found himself asking.

More tapped a few commands into the control panel.
“Lunar 5, Captain.”

“
How are its medical facilities?”

“
Service-grade. But, sir, I believe -”

“
I know,” Hugo cut him off. “He stands a better chance with Rami than with any overrun colony medic. Set a course, but keep the engines in economy mode. That'll buy us some time. Request docking but don't tell them anything and don't let anyone leave or enter the ship when we arrive.”

More looked at him. His dark eyes were clear and Hugo thought he could read understanding in them.

“Doctor,” Hugo called without turning round. “When will your reports on the mission be ready?”

“
I can have them done in a couple of hours, Captain.”

“
Good. Do so. But don't send them to Luscombe. Not yet.”

“
Yes, sir.”

Hugo thought he heard understanding in the doctor's voice too. “How long until Lunar 5?”

“Eight hours at present speed, Captain.”

He scrubbed his good hand over his face, knew he was going to have to think long and hard about what to do next but his head, arm and muscles all pounded dully, making it impossible to focus. He wished he could ask Webb's opinion.

ɵ

“
Rami to bridge. Come in, bridge.”

Hugo jerked awake, back and neck stiff from nodding off in the copilot chair.

“Hugo here, Lieutenant,” he croaked, attempting to keep his voice steady. The chrono on the screen told him it had been several hours. Rami's face appeared on the viewscreen display. She was just pulling off her surgical mask. Her jaw muscles were tight and her dark hair was plastered to her forehead. “How is he?”

“
Stable, captain. Just. I've cleaned and stitched everything up and set all the bones. He seems to have somehow managed to avoid any serious internal injury but the external trauma is extensive. We've done all we can. It's up to him now.”

Hugo nodded, swallowing against a nasty taste in his mouth.

“What happened to him, can you tell?”

Rami shook her head.
“Jumped off a cliff? Run over by a truck? It's impossible to tell, Captain. Something hit back hard, I'd say. But Webb never does anything by half. We'll know more in the next twenty-four hours.”

“
Thank you, Lieutenant. You and Kinjo...” His voice faltered. “Thank you. You should both get some rest now.”