Adrift (16 page)

The Plan

The more Ruben saw of the field, the less he liked it. Which was about proportional to his growing dislike of the other ship. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t playing fair.
Grays were supposed to hit fast and end things quick. They didn’t play with their food. Especially not clunkers like this one. No one out in the black wasted time with pointless games when there was hard money to be made. But that was most definitely what the folks on their tail were doing, and it just wasn’t right.

It wasn’t that Whitman was in a hurry to die. If he’d wanted to end it, he would’ve taken a step toward Big Benny and found out if the man was actually willing to shoot. The aching throat and growing fog he had to think through weren’t improving his outlook on life, but they sure as hell weren’t enough to
make him rethink his commitment to clinging on as long as he possibly could. Much as his mother thought different, Whitman was pretty damn sure it beat the alternative. But still, if they were going to kill him, he’d rather they just get it over with.

He was going to have to call up the kids soon. Not kids, he reminded himself. Thinking of them like kids wasn’t healthy. That way was too easy to discount them as threats, and the more he saw of them the more he realized how stupid that would be. Tron was quick, picking up in a few hours what took Whitman more than a year to get down solid. And Kivi? He didn’t know anything about her. Not really. Girl didn’t say hardly anything. But she was always watching. Those bright blue eyes of hers didn’t miss a damn thing, of that he was sure. And he caught the way Tron kept glancing at her after he told them something, like the guy was checking to see if she thought it was right. Like she was some kind of lie detector or something. Maybe that was just his own paranoia, but Ruben didn’t think so. He was convinced that she was smart. Really smart. The kind
of smart that made a quick guy like Tron think he needed to check in with a tiny, silent girl.

Whitman wasn’t worried about them killing him. Not yet, at any rate. Maybe not ever.
Tron wanted him gone, and made no secret about it. Kivi seemed pretty content with letting him dish out his knowledge in bit-sized pieces, though. He was still here, so that meant it was her call. Still, he wasn’t about to test out his theory about the power structure, or give her any reason to think he was less than helpful. Either way seemed like a sure-fire way to get tossed out an airlock while he slept. He could keep the peace. No, his big concern was with them figuring out more than he wanted to, and losing the one bit of control he had over them. Once that happened, he’d go from being necessary to their survival to a drain on their resources. He didn’t want to find out what happened then. Maybe not death, but there were plenty of other things he wasn’t especially keen on experiencing either.

But he was going to have to bring them back to
navigation. They were in need of a chat, the three of them. Now that they were just half an hour out from the debris, decisions had to be made. Like how long they could power down the ship. They’d been out exploring, he hadn’t. Whitman didn’t think a power-down would hurt too much, but he’d never gone through one himself. He’d only dealt with ships after anyone who could complain about the lack of power was long gone. They’d survived one, and would have a better idea what kind of damage it would do. If it was going to mean his water went away, Whitman might have to come up with a better plan.

He turned to the com and was about to dial – what the hell were these people thinking, installing a com that was ancient
even a hundred years ago? – the code Kivi had taught him when he heard the clomp of boots coming up the corridor behind him. Whitman didn’t bother turning the chair to watch them come in. That was the benefit of sharing a ship with only two other people: you always knew who was coming. It helped that the two of them seemed to be attached at the hip.

“Time’s almost up,” Tron announced as he dropped down in the chair across
from him. “When exactly were you planning on inviting us back?” It was almost time. He should’ve known they’d be keeping track. He’d put off this particular conversation as long as possible, and now they were likely both going to see the wrong reasons for that.

“Now.
That work for you?”

Before Tron could snap back, as Ruben was sure he intended to, Kivi poked her head up beside him and pointed to the screen where he had a section of the debris displayed. “Is that it?”

Whitman shifted so that she could get a closer look, but Kivi seemed content to stay where she was. He could see Tron shifting in his seat, and was certain the guy wanted to come over and take a peek too. He stayed where he was though, and Whitman was glad for that.

“
A part of it,” he answered. “Biggest hunk I could find. It’ll hide us from sight just fine.”

“So what’s wrong with it?” Tron asked.

Whitman frowned. He wished he didn’t have to answer that. “It’s just a hunk of hull plating. Won’t protect us from any scanners. We’ll be sitting there lit up like a flare, which kind of ruins the whole hiding idea.”

“You want us to power down the ship again?” The boy sounded pretty pissed off. Whitman figured he had a right to be, out there fixing problems and all, but that didn’t do them any good now. “We’re still dealing with the fallout from the last time our engine went dead!”

Kivi shifted closer again, not looking up at them but staring at the screen as she spoke. “How long?”

“Depends on our friends out there.”

“Guess?”

“
A day? Honest, kid, I’ve got no idea. Those folks out there aren’t playing any game I know. Damned if I have the rules for it. If it were me over there, I’d move on after a few hours of looking, but I wouldn’t be over there. I wouldn’t give chase like this. No one I’ve ever heard of would give chase like this. So what do I know? We might be down for several days.”

She shook her head. “Can’t be days. No air.”

“You’ve got pressure suits, right? You must have. We had to pump oxygen in here before the system cleared us to come over, but you two were still breathing just fine. So we pump this room full of air, lock ourselves in with some suits, and wait it out. With just the three of us, that’ll last a while. When it runs out, we’ll have whatever’s stored in the suits to keep us going.” Whitman ran his hand through his greasy hair. He needed a shower. A hard drink and a long, hot shower. “Look, it goes too long, I’ll power up and we’ll try something else.”

“What else could we try?” Tron asked.

Ruben shook his head. He wasn’t going to lie to them. Not about this. “Nothing I can think of. This here seems like the best bet from where I’m sitting. But if it doesn’t work, I’ll try that running thing you had in mind.”

It wouldn’t work. There were ships out in the black slower than the Lucy, but not many. Most of those were scrapped by teams like his long ago. And the one behind them wasn’t in that category.
They weren’t having a bit of trouble drifting along in their wake. That meant they were, at the least, able to match the Lucy’s speed exactly. Sure, he hadn’t pushed this baby hard as she could go, but no one kept top speeds for as long as their friends had been following. Besides, with the great gaping hole he’d seen in the Lucy on his way in, there was no way this ship wouldn’t rip itself apart if he pushed it more than a few minutes. Might not even make it that long. Freezing was a bit better. No gasping. Just kinda go to sleep while your lips turned blue and your eyes went dead. But Whitman wasn’t keen on that method, either. He’d never been a fan of the cold. Not at all.

There wasn’t a need to say any of that to the others, though. It was their home, after all, and people got funny about those. Besides, he wasn’t lying. If it came down to it, he wasn’t going to suffocate. He’d seen folks go that way and it wasn’t pretty. Death never was, but he could pick a few that were better than gasping and clawing. And he’d keep trying to find a way to wiggle out of this snare as long as he could. Even if he knew it was pointless.

“We need the plants.” Kivi said. “They need oxygen.”

Colony ships and their damn hydroponics. Like they thought there wasn’t any vegetation
on the planets they were heading to or something. There wasn’t nothing wrong with freeze-dried goods and vitamins, like the rest of them had to make do with, and those never led to problems like this.

“Different room,” Tron answered before he could. “
We can’t lug them all up here in time. We’ll push them back into Hydroponics and seal it.”

“What if the fire damaged it?”

Tron shrugged. “No helping that. We don’t have time to rig a way to get them up here, and there’s nowhere else around there that we know for sure the seals work.”

“But we don’t know,” she insisted.

“We know as best we can. It’ll have to do. There’s no time to get the suits and go moving them across the ship.”

That was interesting. Maybe the girl wasn’t the boss of things after all.
It wasn’t usually so hard to get a read on a situation. These two were just full of surprises. He wished they’d stop. Whitman wasn’t a fan of surprises. They inevitably led to attention, which led to getting pinched. Or worse. Probably worse. He was, however, a big fan of knowing the lay of things. He liked knowing who was in control of the situation so that he could stay in control of his life.

She didn’t like it. It didn’t take a study of the human face to see that she didn’t like it.
But she nodded.

“Can you get the suits?” Tron asked her. Again, she didn’t seem to like this, but again Kivi nodded. “Then I’ll move the plants.” Now he looked to Whitman. “You get us in position.”

He wasn’t above taking orders from a boy. Not when it was what he was going to do anyway, and playing along meant smoothing some ruffled feathers. Whitman nodded as well. “You’ve got twenty minutes. After that, things are gonna move real fast. You’ll want to be back here when that happens.”

Air

Kivi hadn’t been wrong about the state of
hydroponics. There wasn’t a trace of the beautiful jungle his father had loved so much. All that was left were the charred husks of the plants, littered about the room like a mass grave. The walls were a mass of black streaks, and the ceiling was dark as pitch. Not a single table was standing, and there was dirt everywhere. It Tron him a while to move the living plants back inside, and once they were there he desperately wanted to pull them back out. It was wrong, on some fundamental level, to leave the tiny islands of green among so much burnt death. It was like the thought of being locked in the mess hall.

Every day seemed to add another layer of death to Lucy. Soon, there would be nothing else left. He didn’t know how he was supposed to go on staying hopeful and determined when every time he turned around there was more of this.

There wasn’t time to stand there and stare into the room, just like there wasn’t time to pull the plants back out. Tron believed Whitman’s warning and had no intention of being stuck outside when the twenty minutes were up. He pulled himself away from the devastating scene and ran back the way he’d come. His feet, clad now in the heavy boots his parents had been saving for him, pounded down the corridors with so much noise he could imagine the sounds were echoing through the whole ship. He could almost picture everyone shouting at him for the din, and for a second he got a twinge of satisfaction. He’d never managed a scene that would definitely upset so many people at once. He should’ve thought of the boots before. Then the image of his mother’s face frozen in that horrible, twisted expression overtook the scene in his mind and all amusement vanished.

He needed to get back to the others. When he was around Kivi, there wasn’t any time to think about this stuff. It was all about figuring out how to keep her alive one more day, or trying to sort out what she was thinking, or being annoyed by her for one reason or another. Tron knew he was using her as a shield against all the grief. They all sat through endless lessons on mental health, like dealing with anxiety or grief. He’d made a habit of doing miserably in those lessons, though, and he wasn’t about to change the system now. Kivi was enough to keep him moving, and that seemed good enough for now. He could talk out his feelings with someone trained to coach him through them later. When they were safe.

As he climbed the steps up to the first deck, his foot slipped out from underneath him. Just like Kivi had done, when they’d found each other, he tumbled back down. Tron caught himself before he could plummet to the bottom, but the impact was hard enough that it knocked the breath out of him. For a moment, he could do nothing but cling to the opening for the circular stairs. His mouth worked, his throat strained, but no air would come back in. He knew he wasn’t going to die, but he couldn’t convince his body of the fact. Panic twisted in him and he would’ve screamed if he could only get a breath to do it.

Finally, the air rushed back in. Tron gasped and choked on it, each breath feeling like an agonizing gift. He pulled himself back up slowly, his limbs shaking. It was another
few minutes before he was able to get back to his feet and start moving again, longer before he got back up to speed.

Too long. He knew even before he got to the top deck. There wasn’t going to be enough time.

“Tron!” Kivi’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Tron hurry! He’s closing the door! He won’t wait! You’re right, you’re right, he’s a bad guy! Tron! Hurry!”

The com clicked off. He turned the corner and saw the doors to
navigation closed. There was no way in. He was trapped.

Tears burned his eyes as he slammed his fists against the metal. He screamed. Tron was picturing all the ways Whitman might’ve gotten her off the com. It would be so easy to hurt her, to break her in half. He should be there, protecting her. That was his job. His one job. And he’d known better than to trust Whitman! He should’ve forced the old man to get the suits. What was a few more minutes? Then he and Kivi would be together, and the treacherous bastard would be the one
on the outside.

Lucy lurched and Tron flew to the left, slamming into the wall. Another lurch and
he hit the ceiling, then smashed on the floor. A swirl of black and red tugged at him, threating to swallow him up. He fought against it, clinging to consciousness as hard as he could. The lights clicked off. The blue flickered on. Tron started floating.

The com crackled.

“There’s a suit.” It wasn’t Kivi. It was Whitman. “She left it out there for you. We couldn’t wait. Needed the time to get the air.”

“Kivi.” His voice was too weak. The coms filtered out noise. It would filter out his whisper. He fought for the strength that was trying to slip away. “Kivi!”

“I’m ok.” Her voice was quiet too. “I’m sorry. He’s a bad guy. I’m sorry.”

“
I didn’t want this. I’m sorry son.” Whitman muttered.

“You’re going to kill me.” It made sense. Whitman couldn’t keep Lucy flying by himself. He’d need help. Kivi was small, she’d be easy to force into it. Tron was a threat. So long as he was alive, Whitman couldn’t take control of the ship.
“You were always going to kill me.”

“Don’t be stupid.” The response was quick. Too quick. It was part of the plan. He wasn’t sure why the act, but Tron was certain it was one. Maybe it was meant to convince Kivi that Whitman had done all he could. She’d be easier to control if she wasn’t fighting him. Whitman didn’t know how stubborn or smart she was. She’d see through it. She’d never trust him. “I filled up the corridor with as much air as
I could manage. If you need to, pull open the other doors along the way for more. That should keep you for a while, so long as you quit with the screaming. Once you start getting lightheaded, put on the suit. You tell me when that starts getting low.”

“Because then you’ll tell me
again how sorry you are?” Tron hissed.

“Because then I’ll kick the engine back on.
The plan doesn’t include sacrificing anyone. You say you’re running low, we move.”

He didn’t believe it. He knew better now. But what could he do? The doors to
navigation couldn’t be forced open. Whitman was safely locked away. Nothing he could do or say was going to change that. He didn’t feel like talking anymore. He didn’t want to hear Whitman’s lies. All the fighting he’d done, all the struggling, it all got him here. Alone.

He wedged himself into a corner on the ceiling and dropped his head into his hands, trying not to think about what came next.

“Tron?”

It was Kivi’s voice again, but it wasn’t coming from the com. He shifted, looking around for the source of the noise. It was the suit,
floating just to the left of the door. He pushed himself down to and shifted through it until he found the helmet, buried beneath the rest of it. He tilted it until he could talk into the mic inside. “Hey Kivi.”

She made a sound. He couldn’t tell if it was a sob or a laugh.
“You were late.”

He smiled bitterly. “I fell down some stairs.”

“You too?”

“Yeah. They’re a real safety hazard. I think we need to put up a sign or something.”

It was definitely a laugh this time. Not a hearty one. Even through the mic it sounded nervous and a little hysterical. Tron knew the feeling.

She was quiet for a while, and Tron was afraid that Whitman had stopped her from talking to him.
He used the time to shove his feet into the suit boots. It wasn’t easy. Once they were on, he clicked on the magnetics. When she finally spoke again it was more quietly. Not a whisper, exactly, but something close to that. “I’m in the bathroom.”

“Gross.”

“No,” she giggled again. It made him feel a little better, knowing he could finally get her laughing. It would count for more if he suspect know it was at least as much because of her fear as his efforts. “So he won’t hear me.”

“Good thinking. Kivi, you’ve got to be careful. I can’t… You’re not weak, ok? You don’t need me to protect you, so long as you remember you’re not weak and remember to think.”

“Shut up.”

“Hey now, you’re the one who came up with this conversation
idea. I don’t think you get to yell at me.”

“I mean it.” He was surprised at how clearly he could hear her glowering without actually seeing
it. “You don’t get to die. I told you. I’m not going to let you. So if you’re going to start saying good bye then you shut up and listen to me yell at you.”

Tron wished he could chuckle. It was funny. And he knew that she would feel better if he laughed. But all he could think about was the freezer. When he died, she would be alone and he would have broken the only promise he’d ever made that mattered. He didn’t want to die. Thinking it was so terrifying he could hardly hold back the screams.
But, terrifying as it was, it wasn’t his death that bothered him nearly as much as that promise.

“Kiv
i…”

“No!” She wasn’t being quiet anymore. She was yelling for real. “You are not dying, Tron. You understand me?”

He could hear Whitman telling her to stop. It was using up the air. Tron wondered if he’d opened the door or if he was shouting it too. It didn’t really matter. But somehow it made him feel a little better, picturing what was happening inside. Even if it was Whitman yelling at her. It made him feel like he was a part of it, still connected to the life that was waiting on just the other side. The one he might still be in, if he had managed to get up the stairs he’d used almost every day of his life.

“Ok.” Tron agreed. She needed to be careful, and he wasn’t going to be the reason she was in danger. “Ok, you win. If not goodbyes, what did you have in mind?”

She was quiet again. This time he waited. “We’re going to talk. Like normal people. Until the door is open.”

He did laugh this time. Talk like normal people. He was the
closest out of the pair of them, and he had no idea how normal people talked. He wasn’t invited to any of those conversations. “Got any ideas on how that’s supposed to work.”

“Umm…”

The hours went by faster than Tron could’ve expected. He knew the time was passing. Whitman would flick the power on every hour or so, just long enough to get a sensor reading and pump a lot of heat into the hallway, then they’d go back to darkness. He wouldn’t open the doors. He said they couldn’t take enough time to replace the air that would be lost by doing that. Tron didn’t believe it, but he never argued. He was following her rules.

Talking to her filled the time in between. Tron told her things he’d never shared with anyone, some things he’d not even let himself think about. He shared his profound loneliness without flinching or covering it with jokes. She didn’t tease him for it or apologize. Kivi just listened. And when he was done, she shared a story her papa told her about a girl no one wanted who grew up to save the world and have everyone in it love her so much that she was never alone again. It was a silly story, one the man had probably made up on the spot to make his daughter feel better, but it was nice. In an odd way, it made Tron feel like he was part of that moment she’d shared with her father, part of their family.

Mostly it was him answering her questions, but Kivi opened up too. She shared more than stories. She talked about how people treated her differently than everyone else. People who saw her every day, who’d seen her test scores and what she could do, they acted like she was slow. They’d over explain things or talk to her like a baby. They wouldn’t let her read the things she wanted or go where she wanted to go. She told him how most of the time people were nice, but she knew that they didn’t want to talk to her. It was no wonder she was weird. She’d been even more alone than he was, and she hadn’t been stuck in storage. She’d been surrounded by people who didn’t understand her.

She told him about how her brother thought she was a freak. Tron felt
a stab of anger when she told him that. Her brother was dead. You weren’t supposed to want to hit dead people. But he did. She didn’t say that it hurt her, but Tron knew it did. He had a deep need to punish the boy who should’ve known better than anyone how amazing his sister was. For the first time, Tron was glad he’d always gone out of his way to torment Heath and the boy’s friends. Then, it had just been because their constant teasing. Now, in his mind, he changed it to the beating that someone cruel had coming.

She loved her brother, despite that. She never said so. Kivi never said how she felt about anyone. The more she talked, the more Tron got the sense she wasn’t really aware of how she felt. Sometimes she’d say things, imply that she was incapable of caring the way other people did, and he was sure she believed it. It was hard not to laugh, when those moments came. Kivi was so used to being right about everything that, even when he tried to explain why he was chuckling, she couldn’t comprehend just how astoundingly wrong she was. She cared. The things she said, the way she chose each word with such care, the fact that she was sitting in a bathroom and talking with him in hushed tones for hour after hour, there was no doubt in Tron’s mind that she was cared.

The way she cared made him feel important. When she talked about him, about the things they’d done together since the attack, it was the same way she talked about her brother or her parents. The realization came to him slowly and shook him so deep that, for a time, he couldn’t say anything; in her mind, he was family. Not family the way everyone on the ship was family. Not even the way he’d started building a shaky idea of one with the two people who talked to him on the coms when he was alone in his room. This was something deeper, some bond that came from years spent sharing the same life, the same problems, from ties of blood and tears and arguments and forgiveness. It was that thing he’d wanted, even before he realized it was missing. Somehow, she’d melded him into that unit that outsiders never really belonged to. He was so overwhelmed by this profound gift, and the knowledge of just how deeply she was going to be hurt when he died, that he couldn’t push his thoughts past it. He wanted to tell her he understood, to explain what it meant to her and tell her that she was the only family he’d ever really had. But he couldn’t do that. Kivi didn’t think she cared, and forcing her to admit it now, when he knew it was only a matter of time before he drew in his last breath, seemed just as cruel as Heath calling her a freak.