Adrift (21 page)

“To med bay. You’re not just tired. I don’t know the drugs there, but you’re a
Scav, right? You should know what pills do what. Besides, Kivi and I don’t want to listen to you moaning and complaining while we’re trying to fly the ship.”

“Such a kind boy,”
Whit said in the most sugary-sweet tone Tron could imagine coming out of a sore throat. “Always thinking about what’s best for me.”

“Well I thought about shoving you out of your chair, nudging you out into the corridor with my foot, then closing the door on you. But there’s a com right there, and I figure you’d use the mistreatment as an excuse to be especially annoying. This seemed best for everyone.”

“Plus Kivi’d be mad at you.”

“Well, yeah. That too.” Tron wasn’t sure if Whitman understood he was joking. The old man seemed half convinced, and that bothered him. Even at his most furious, Tron didn’t think he’d be quite that heartless. He made a show of rolling his eyes to Kivi, who was following along behind,
just in case she had any doubts.

Whit leaned close as they shuffled down the corridor, so close Tron could feel the man’s breath on his neck. “You’d best lock it down soon, son,” he whispered. “
She’s not so far from legal age. You’re liable to miss your chance, you wait too long.”

“What?”

Whitman answered with a wink. Tron shook his head. He didn’t say anything after that, outside of a few curses when Tron accidently bumped his foot against the med bay’s doorframe. That was alright with Tron. He didn’t need any more of that particular kind of crazy.

He set Whit up on the bed. A quick inspection of the thing revealed locks on the legs that helped to keep the whole thing from sliding around. They were just metal pins held in place by round brackets that were soldered on to the legs, with rubber feet and a small flat pedal-like surface at the top of the pin to push them into place. There was a second, smaller pedal underneath the first one, positioned at a slight angle, that he assumed was to release the lock. Tron pressed his foot against the top pedal, clicking each lock into place. He noticed several straps hanging from underneath as he went,
but decided against belting Whitman into place. He didn’t think the old man would appreciate it any. But it was good to know they were there. Much as Tron disliked the idea, there was a good chance Whitman was going to get worse before they got to Vah, and there might come a time when they needed those straps.

Once he was done, Kivi draped two of the blankets, which Tron had not thought to grab, over the shivering man. Tron moved to the cupboard where he’d moved what was left of their drugs, intending to bring them over for Whitman to examine. But when he turned around to ask a question about one of the labels, he found that Whit was already asleep. That might be good. Certainly, sleep had helped him with the flu that had almost killed him. Sleep and Kivi’s care. But Tron didn’t think either one was going to be enough to get the old man through. He’d felt so tiny, like the disease had eaten away all the parts inside that were supposed to keep Whitman alive.

“I’ll stay with him.”

Tron stared at Kivi in surprise. “You sure?”

It was weird, this offer. Since the attack, Kivi had never volunteered to be away from him. Just like Tron hadn’t chosen to be away from her except when there weren’t any alternatives. Especially not since the debris field. It wasn’t that he needed her there. Not exactly. He just didn’t like the idea of being somewhere she wasn’t, where doors could slam shut and lock her somewhere he couldn’t protect her. They’d both almost died that way last time.

“Yes. You have to fly the Lucy. Whitman needs someone to take care of him. I know how to do that now.”

“This isn’t the flu, Kiv.” It bothered him, this idea. More than a little. He couldn’t shake the certainty that something was going to go wrong, that he would lose her this time. “He doesn’t need you making tea.”

“He might.” From another girl, it would’ve probably been a petulant declaration. Even knowing Kivi as well as he did, and knowing she didn’t have it in her to be petulant, it took Tron a moment to realize that it wasn’t. She really believed there was a chance that she’d find some tea that would fix Whitman the same way she’d stumbled on ones that helped him. It had been luck that first time. Tron wasn’t sure what it would be if she did it again.
He wanted to tell her so, but he knew that this wasn’t just about tea.

She was right of course. Kivi was almost always right, so it was no great surprise. Even if there was no tea to find, even if all she could do was sit and watch while Whitman slowly died, one of them should be there. Someone would need to bring the pills over to him, when he did wake up. And he’d need water, and probably food. He might need help going to the bathroom. One of them had to stay, and Tron had spent the last couple of weeks making sure that he was the invaluable one at the helm.

He let out a slow sigh. They couldn’t stay together all the time. “Alright. You’ll call me right? If you need anything?”

She reached out to take his hand and gave it a quick squeeze. “I won’t die. Promise.”

It wasn’t a promise she could keep. Not if Lucy had another disaster in store for them. He squeezed back. “Me neither.”

Kivi’s smile lit up her face. “Good. I’ll bring you dinner.”

And that was it. His dismissal. Tron knew it was stupid, that she wasn’t really getting rid him. He had work to do. Important work. But it felt like she was choosing Whitman over him, and it stung in an irrational, primitive sort of way. He wanted to shout or fight or do something colossally stupid. Instead he forced himself to smile and left.

His walk back to
navigation was the loneliest one of his life. Tron was used to being alone. He’d spent most of his life that way, even with a ship packed full of other people. But even when his parents forgot him, he’d never felt this rejected, this isolated. He shook it off. He wasn’t a little kid. He couldn’t go crying back to the med bay and cling to Kivi until she promised him that she’d still be his friend no matter what. It was stupid. He knew that she wasn’t going to forget about him just because he wasn’t standing in front of her. That might be how his family had worked, but it wasn’t how hers did. And now he was part of her family, so he had to trust that she’d still care about him even when he was gone. He had to.

He settled down into the seat at his console. When they’d first come into
navigation, Tron had thought the two were separate, but that wasn’t right. Not exactly. Each one was designed to handle the same information, to varying degrees. Control over ship functions could be shifted to either, though only one at a time to prevent sending conflicting commands. One console was slave and the other master, but which was which could be changed at any time, from either terminal. He’d thought this redundancy was stupid, when Whit first explained it to him. Surely it would be more efficient to divide the tasks up between the consoles permanently, or at least until a specific set of commands was entered to switch things around in case of an emergency. But it wasn’t efficiency that had inspired this design. It was meant to create an oversight of Lucy’s sensors and movements that was as near to perfect as was humanly possible. This way there could be a pilot and co-pilot watching out for each other and making sure that nothing was missed. It also provided an excellent method of training new students, which was a real boon on a colony ship with a long trip before it like theirs. If one of the pilots took ill or even died, they’d need a replacement.

So, with just a few commands punched into his console, he took complete control of Lucy away from Whitman’s terminal and assumed his position as her only surviving pilot. It didn’t feel right, though. It was supposed to be a big deal, the day he was finally ready to take back the ship. He’d meant there to be a sense of satisfaction and some kind of
recognition from Kivi. Tron wasn’t supposed to be sitting here all by himself, worrying about the invader that had intended to rob their dead relatives and neighbors. It wasn’t supposed to feel so empty.

She was going to bring him dinner. That was only a few hours from now. He could manage to hold himself together for a few hours. He had a ship to fly, after all, and enemies to watch for. And if being alone meant the memory of sightless, dead eyes crept back into his thoughts then he would just have to find another way to shut those out.

New Friends

“God dammit!” Whit scrambled away the instant he came awake. “Christ, girl, you’re going to give me a heart attack, doing that!”

Kivi tilted her head and considered the shrunken scavenger perched on the edge of the bed. She’d found a stool tucked in one of the cabinets. It wasn’t very tall, and sitting on it put her face on a level with Whitman’s
. But it was a lot more comfortable than standing or sitting on the floor while she waited for him to wake up. “Doing what?”

“Staring at me like some kind of creeper!” He rasped. “Cut that shit out, will you?”

Her brows knit. Creeper? She didn’t know what that meant. She had just been sitting and watching, not creeping around. It was important to watch. If you didn’t watch, sometimes sick people threw up when you weren’t ready and it got all over the floor. Then you had to clean it up and that was awful. Plus, they might decide to get up and go wondering around. Tron had tried to do that sometimes, and it was always really hard to get him back in bed once he was on his feet. No, watching was better. Then you could be ready for whatever strange sick thing they were going to do. “Are you going to throw up?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Whitman said. “Why? You place a bet or something?”

“Place a bet?”

He shook his head. “Never mind. Where’s the hulk?”

“Tron?” She glanced at the door to the med bay without even thinking about it, as if she expected to find him standing there waiting for her. It felt weird, him being so far away and not even talking to her. Kivi knew it was the right decision, sending him back to navigation, and that it was also right for her to stay here and make sure Whitman didn’t die. Whitman wasn’t a bad guy. Only bad guys were supposed to die when they weren’t old.

She didn’t like thinking about people dying.

“He is in navigation.”

“Good.” Whitman laid back on the bed like that information made everything better. “Good.”

She pursed her lips. Kivi wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to that. She was pretty sure he expected her to agree with him, but she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to lie. Even though it was the right decision, she didn’t like it. She didn’t like being alone anymore, when all the bad things could slip back into her head and make everything horrible and broken. Without Tron she felt very alone. It was better now, with the older man awake, but he was sick. He was going to have to sleep again.

With no truth she felt like revealing to Whitman, who she still wasn’t sure was a good guy, Kivi got up off her stool and went to the pile of pill bottles Tron had left down
on the counter for her. She scooped up the two handfuls and brought them over to the bed. Whitman jumped and made a startled noise when she dropped them on his stomach.

That probably wasn’t nice of her, and she hadn’t needed to do it, but she found she was suddenly very upset with Whitman. If he hadn’t gotten sick, she could be in
navigation where she belonged. Then she could be helping Tron, making sure that he didn’t make any mistakes and listening to the happy noises he made when he figured out solutions to the quizzes Whitman liked to give him. That was what she was supposed to be doing, and she wasn’t because of Whit.

“What’s all this?”

“Medicine.”

“You don’t say? Never would’ve guessed. What’s it doing on top of me?”

Tron would’ve had something smart and kind of funny to say, but Kivi wasn’t good at thinking quickly. She just gave a normal answer. “I put it there. So you could see what would make you better and quit being sick.”

He gave her a weird look, one with an eyebrow lifting up almost into his thin brown hair, but he didn’t say anything. Not then. First he went through the bottles. He studied the label on each one, then set it on the stool. Finally, he only had one left. This one he popped open and shook until two fat blue pills tumbled into his creased hand.

“That’ll make you better?”

Whitman looked up at her, and Kivi knew that he was sad even without a list. “No, kitten. This is just a painkiller. Not even a good one. This is the sludge of the painkiller world, barely enough to take the edge off the nail boring its way through my skull.”

She frowned and carefully returned each of the other bottles to the counter, thinking about this information. “You should take more.”

“Not a bad idea, except that I don’t know what it’ll do to me.”

“You said it would kill your pain.”

“I said it would barely kill some of my pain,” Whitman corrected. “But that
means it’s doing something inside my body, changing things around. I don’t know much about the arts of healing, but I know self-medicating is best saved for people who know what the hell they’re doing. This shit could make the bugs inside me go bonkers and I’ll be hurting worse than I am now. No, best to take it slow for now.”

That made sense. Kind of. She didn’t like it though. “You’re supposed to find something to make you better.”

He shrugged and dumped the pills into his mouth, swallowing them before she could fetch a cup of water for him. “Sure would’ve been nice, huh? Wasn’t too hopeful on that point, though. If it was the Grays who hit you, they’d never leave anything that could knock these pernicious little buggies on their asses. Anti-bacs and anti-virals are better than foodstuffs these days.”

Her frown deepened. She didn’t like to think about this. She wanted to think about something else. Luckily, she knew how now. So Kivi started thinking about Tron, up in
navigation. That made her think of something else entirely.

“Did you go to a school? One called a university?”

Whitman let out a barking laugh, and Kivi was pretty sure he was laughing at her. “Do I look like a doctor to you?”

Her brows knit. “Universities are for everyone.” Her teachers had told her so. It was like that in the vids too. Well, not exactly like that. Some of the vids made it seem like universities were hard to get into. But anyone could go, not just doctors.

“Maybe back on Earth,” Whitman explained, though it still seemed like he was laughing. “Out here, things work a little different. Doctors, nurses, scientists, proper business folk, they go get some of that ‘advanced learning’. They’ve got the credits, see? Us regular folks, we aren’t quite so special. We do our learning while we’re doing. Just like you and Tron.”

“I had classes,” Kivi insisted. This wasn’t right. Universities held all the knowledge in the world, and that was supposed to be for everyone. She understood the difference between rich and poor. There was plenty of that in the stories and the vids and even her studies. But understanding that rich people had lots of things and poor people didn’t couldn’t make sense of why learning would be impacted by money. Knowledge didn’t cost anything.

Whitman waved his hand like he was dismissing that. She didn’t like it. She was good at her classes, and she didn’t like someone acting like that didn’t matter. “Not that stuff. I’m talking about what you two have been doing these past few weeks, here with me. You find a problem that needs solving, and you piece together the how of it as you go. Sometimes you get people to help you, like I did for Tron, and sometimes it’s just your own smarts that teach you. Like how you did when the engine was down. That’s how the rest of us learn.”

She shook her head. He was ruining everything. Now Kivi knew she wanted to go to a universi
ty. But she knew she was poor because she didn’t have lots of things. And Whitman was making it sound like it wasn’t even something she should want, like there was something wrong with people who went to those places.

“I wanted to go to one,” she whispered. She hadn’t meant to say it. It just sort of slipped out.

Whitman made a face. He started to say something, and got as far as her name before his words were lost amid a coughing fit that made his whole body shake. Kivi was worried that he was going to throw up, so she grabbed one of the bags from the roll she’d used while Tron was sick. But Whitman didn’t cough up his lunch, only blood.

“You’re not supposed to die.” Again, the words were spilling out before Kivi realized she was saying them. This was wrong, all wrong. She didn’t talk. Not like this, not ever.
She was always in control over what she said. Words never just came out all on their own. It all started when she was talking to Tron on the mic. She could see that. She’d worked so hard to figure out things to say at first, but by the end she’d gotten used to saying whatever crossed her mind at that moment. Now she didn’t know how to turn it off, and it was awful. She hated feeling like she wasn’t in control, and hated that the others might think she was out of control even more.

Whitman gave her a wry grin. “You just keep saying that, kitten. Maybe
god’ll hear and realize he’s being a real dick.”

She pursed her lips in an attempt to hold in all the other things that ran through her mind, but one burst out anyway. “You’re not a bad guy.”

He eyed her for a long time, and Kivi knew she’d messed up. He thought she was smart before. He’d as good as said so. And maybe Whitman’s opinion didn’t matter as much to her as Tron’s did, but he knew about the world outside the Lucy and the vids and the stories, so it did matter some. He could measure her against people who would never set foot on a colony ship, so he would know if she was really smart or just smarter than most other people on the Lucy. And he’d thought so. Until now. Now he was going to think she was just another stupid little girl, who couldn’t even keep herself from saying stupid little girl things.

“It’s not just bad guys who die. You know that.”

Kivi bit her lower lip this time. She would not say that it didn’t count. That all the people in the mess hall were still people, and not dead. Because, if she said it, he would tell her she was wrong and then she would be. Then they would be dead, all of them. The ones in cold storage too. So long as she didn’t say it, though, he couldn’t say she was wrong and none of it was real. They would get to Vah and the doctors would put everything right again.

“The black’s no place to be foolish, Kivi.” His voice was soft and kind, but she knew what his words meant.
“Good folks die as easy as bad. Easier. You’re too smart to be that stupid.”

She was going to say no. She was going to tell him that he was wrong and that the good people didn’t die, not unless you let them. She was going to make him ruin everything, just like he ruined universities. Only this was going to be worse. So much worse. Kivi knew this was going to happen, could feel the words bubbling up inside her even before the first ones slipped out.

“They’re not gone!”

“Kivi?” The intercom stopped her before she could say anything else. More importantly, before Whitman could answer back.
“Need you up here.”

She didn’t wait. Not for a second. Even before Tron finished
the last word, she was hurrying out of the med bay and rushing up the corridor. She could hear Whitman calling for her, but she didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. He was not going to ruin it. They were not going to be dead.

Tron was hovering over his screen when she got to
navigation. She felt a surge of relief when she saw him sitting there. She’d missed him, even in the two hours they’d been apart. Kivi had gotten accustomed to his presence, the feel of him just across the room. It was more than just that, though. She hadn’t let herself think about it, but there was a part of her that had been terrified she wouldn’t see him again. Everything always went so wrong. But he was still alive, still ok, and she had made it back to him without anything bad happening to either one of them. This one small part of the universe was still the way it was supposed to be, and she could breathe.

He glanced up as she walked in. It would be hard for anyone not to; the huge boots clanked so loudly it had taken a long time for her to quit wincing with every step. Tron
didn’t return the smile she gave him. He just pointed to the screen, his face pale and his lips tight. Kivi peered around him to get a look, and the second she saw what he meant her stomach clenched so tight she was sure she would be sick. The image was grainy and hard to make out, but there was no doubt what it was. The other ship was back.

“But we lost them!” Her fingers flew over the console, tapping out the commands she’d heard Whitman giving Tron weeks ago. The sensors shifted and realigned, a
nd still the ship was there, the exact same bulbous hull floating along at the edges of the Lucy’s vision. “We lost them!”

Tron took her hands up in his, pulling them away from the flat black surface and trapping them. “Maybe,” he said softly. “They might have seen enough of our flight path to figure out our destination. Or they might have just been outside our sensor range. I don’t know. But our friends have found us, Kiv.”

She yanked her hands away and used them to grip her head. This was bad. It was so, so bad. They couldn’t do it again. Tron had almost died. She might not be fast enough this time. And Whitman was too sick to get them through. Tron had learned a lot, but he didn’t know how to hide. Not like that. Everything was so close to being ok again! The base was only a few days away. She’d seen the flight path, she did the math. It wasn’t far. If they’d just been left alone for three more days, everything would have gone back to being fine again. Instead it was all falling apart. They were going to come and get all the things Kivi couldn’t live without.