Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (15 page)

“I don’t know!” Red shouted back.
“We’ll watch the tape later.”

“Where is Z?”

“Keeping the door open to a new
chamber. That room we couldn’t access in the bathroom level? It’s open now.
There’s a gel bed inside, and the gold-paper sign says ‘emergency stasis.’”

The astronauts looked at each
other. Mercy said, “Yuki was an acrobat, a performer. I say we save her arm if
we can.”

Red threw her support behind the snap
decision, “Sensei hasn’t steered us wrong yet. All in favor?”

Zeiss voted yes by radio. Everyone else
raised a hand except the doctor, who agonized over the risks.

Sojiro tipped the scales when he
announced, “The shuttle is moving closer. We have to accelerate now, or they
might catch us.”

Auckland conceded. “Mercy and Park,
help me move her to the stasis chamber. The others have more immediate
problems.”

Lou, reluctant to leave his newest
girl, ignored the order and carried Yuki to the cleansing tube. Park remained
behind to help squeeze out a little more speed from
Sanctuary
.

The men wrestled the injured woman
into the gel outline.

The stasis chamber felt cold and
dampened sound. “We’ll rescue you as soon as we can,” Mercy promised.

Auckland pulled Mercy back into the
main tube. “The tourniquet causes more damage the longer it’s on. If we’re Han
Soloing her, it should be as soon as possible. How do we close the chamber?”

The question had been to Zeiss, but
Mercy answered. “Snowflake, close stasis and activate.” A panel slid up from
the floor and snapped seamlessly into the gap. The moon symbol overhead turned
silver. She stared at the wall for several moments until the doctor pulled on
her bare shoulder.

“We should clean the blood up
before it lands on an instrument panel.”

After everything that happened in
the war—moon base, her parents, and her best friend exploding in front of
her—the thought of cleaning up after it all finally made her cry. Since Lou was
fairly useless from shock as well, Auckland left Red to comfort the sobbing
woman and cleaned the debris on his own.

Red labeled the emergency suspended-animation room ‘stasis.’
Then Mercy added a second piece of tape with the name ‘Yuki.’ While others
rushed about in the race to beat the shuttle to the nexus point, Mercy spent
her two penalty days building a medical lab in her former bedroom. Lou doubled
up rooms with Park so she’d have sleeping space. Mercy felt nearly naked without
her lab coat for protection. The flight suit reminded her of Yuki’s accident,
so she compromised with an unzipped jacket instead. Whenever there was a man
nearby, she wrapped her arms around herself self-consciously to hide her chest.

Leaving the common dining area, she
spotted Lou moving her way. She tried to avoid him, but he put his arm in front
of her so she couldn’t leave. Eyes flaring, she snapped, “What?”

Eyes downcast, Lou said, “I’m sorry
I didn’t show respect before. Yuki was right—we can trust you with our lives,
all of us.” He swallowed. “Thank you for what you’re doing for her, trying to
save her. You’re a quality person.”

This Lou, vulnerable and sweet,
could sweep almost any girl off her feet. Boxed in by his body, Mercy had
trouble forming words. “You’re . . . welcome.” The pilot was using charm on her
like a weapon. She vowed to resist and make him suffer. Instead, all that came
out was, “Get us into subspace, and you’re forgiven.”

His smile reached his eyes.
“Aye-aye, sir.” He unbarred her path and stood back.

She floated into the control room,
not sure where she was heading.
This is bad. He’s Yuki’s guy and has a hundred
notches on his belt. He’s not going to suck me in. This is probably just his
way of accepting me onto the team . . . like a handshake.
Fortunately, he
hadn’t opted for the old-fashioned gesture because her palms were sweating. She
had to put some distance between herself and the man.

Mercy almost bumped into Commander
Zeiss, who was exiting his quarters. She strap-anchored to the wall to avoid
collision, and her momentum jerked her leash taut. She muttered an apology, and
he replied, “It’s okay. We should put bicycle bells on every door to this room.
Red slams into people whenever she’s got a new idea.”

“I heard that,” Red said from their
room.

He smiled. “What’s your new, big
plan, Mercy?”

“Um . . . just wondering how long
the initial test run is going to take.”

Zeiss waggled his hand. “The hop
will take us to a position just outside the last known dwarf planet in the
solar system, 5.3 light days out.”

“Sedna, out past the Oort cloud. If
we’re bound to light speed, then that trip could take a week Earth time.”

“Theoretically, it could take an
instant for us, or anything in between. We don’t
know
, which is why I’m
insisting on this test. It’s the shortest branch I could find. At the exit,
while we brake and turn around for sixteen days, we’ll take several measurements.
I need to know how much fuel each hop consumes and how fast the temperature
drops in here without sunlight. We’ll be pretty far from the sun. I don’t think
our biosphere could survive a prolonged winter. All that information will
affect the course we pick. I haven’t ruled out pulling the plug and heading home
the slow way at that point.”

“You don’t seem very confident.”

“We didn’t trigger any safety
warnings from Snowflake, but the aliens let through an exploding camera. I have
no idea what the other side of Einstein’s sheet will be like.”

“You make it sound like dying,”
Mercy joked. When Zeiss opened his mouth to amend the statement, she held up
her hand. “Don’t worry; I’ve been prepared for that possibility since I flipped
the ‘On’ switch for my engines.”

“Then what’s wrong? Red says you’ve
been . . . depressed lately.”

She looked over her head to make
sure none of the other crew members were eavesdropping and glided into his
doorway. Red would hear, but Zeiss told her everything anyway. “I’m not going
to be any use here after the first transition. I was hoping to rotate to the
campsite.”

“You’ve proven incredibly useful,
Mercy. If you let Mira give you the Collective Unconscious page, you might
sense how we all care about and believe in you.”

The soft words threatened to open
her up and release all the poison. Mercy wanted to keep her grief to herself,
so she focused on the round door jamb, willing her voice to stay level. “In the
simulations, we only had to stay cooped up two weeks. A potential twenty-eight
days are a lot more than I bargained for, especially when I can see a green
wonderland out the windows. I’m thinking of changing my name to Persephone.”

He nodded. “I suppose as long as we
keep one planner and a couple of monitors up here for safety, we could all
rotate out—maybe seven-day shifts. We should keep one of the medical personnel
on board at all times. That means that each camper should get a turn up here,
too. Then, I want the original planning crew back for the final jump.”

Red said, “I’ll tell Herk to plan
more beds at Garden Hollow. They’ve reinvented the straw mattress. I’m told it’s
much more comfortable than hanging on the wall like a bat.”

****

At T plus 120 hours, the entire
planning crew was glued to the telescope image. Sojiro said, “If nuclear
weapons are going to hit, it’ll be soon.”

Red complained, “The moon’s out of
sight from this angle. Do you have some kind of magic strontium-neutrino filter
to watch?”

Mercy sighed at the impatience. “No.
Sorry. We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way—wait eight hours for the moon
to swing into view and then look for new craters.”

As they waited, Park was the first
to bring sleeping gear out to the central room. Sojiro shouted, “Pajama party!”

“I don’t remember people
duct-taping me to walls at parties I went to,” Mercy commented.

“You don’t go to the right
parties,” Lou bragged.

“Ha, wrong again,” Sojiro crowed. “This
girl has been a guest of honor at Carnival in Rio. She went to four days of
parties that put your frat keggers to shame.”

Mercy blinked. “Um . . . how did
you know that?”

“I watch
The Rich Cry, Too
with Risa. It’s a soap opera on Telemundo late night. We caught footage of Mercy
on some of the news coverage. This girl can dance!”

It seemed in poor taste for her to
say, “That was my dead sister. Thanks for the painful reminder.” Instead, she
gave a crooked grin. “Mom forced us all to take ballroom dancing for state
dinners and stuff.”

Lou blinked. “How bloody rich are
you?”

Red cleared her throat. “That’s not
a question you ask a lady.”

“Come on,” urged Sojiro. “It’s not
like
Downton Abbey,
where he’s a landed noble looking for a rich,
American heiress to save the family estate.”

“I don’t have that much, really. Even
with my stock options, I control less than half a percent of what Mira does,”
Mercy explained.

As eyes rotated toward Red, she
complained, “Way to throw me under the bus. I’d trade my money for two living parents
like you had. You got to
go
places. Hell, you had
breasts
when
you went to college.” At this, Lou’s eyes shifted toward the assets in question,
and Mercy had to step behind Sojiro to hide. “Boys asked you out, and you could
date
.”

“I only went out four times,
nothing serious. None of the boys who asked me measured up to Dad.”

Lou rolled his eyes. “Any more of
this, and I’m going to start menstruating. She never even answered the
question. She needs to trust her mates more. Z, help me out here. Why are you
so distracted?”

Zeiss stared at the screen. “I’ve
been worrying about the people on that shuttle. They’ll have spent most of
their fuel to catch us. The pilot might be able to follow Saturn’s orbit around
the sun, but they can’t return to Earth. Corporate may rescue the ship when
they send a scientific expedition to study the jump point, but the crew will be
long dead by then.”

“We certainly don’t want them on
Sanctuary
,”
Lou reasoned.

“No,” Zeiss agreed glumly. “But I
don’t want them to die, either.”

Red gazed at him lovingly. “Did you
want to drop out some of our spare water?”

The commander shook his head. “I
doubt they could catch it unless
Ascension
carried it over to them. Then
we
couldn’t leave
Sanctuary
to land at our destination. We’d be
imprisoned for life.” His wife held him as he struggled with the guilt.

Mercy said softly, “What if . . .
no, it’s crazy.”

Lou laughed. “That’s Red’s middle
name. Out with it.”

“What if they passed inside Saturn’s
orbit and just grazed the planet, or one of the gassier moons? Wouldn’t the ammonia
or methane atmosphere have enough hydrogen in it to bounce them back toward Earth?”

“If they hit at just the right
angle, perhaps,” Zeiss said, already calculating.

“It could be a huge explosion,” Red
warned. “They might not survive the acceleration.”

“If they climbed into their
super-goo cocoons and we gave them the best combination of homeward direction
and g-force, would that satisfy your conscience?” Lou asked.

“It will have to do,” Zeiss
admitted.

Lou walked toward the storage room.
“Then I’ll climb out the tunnel from luggage claim to our shuttle area; there
has to be a way through. I can radio the pursuit from
Ascension
.”

Red stopped him. “No. You’re too
valuable. Pick someone from the Hollow.”

“We can’t use Oleander unless her
brother is on board to see her. None of the Chinese agents are likely to be
Actives,” Lou reasoned. “Besides, she might not be able to run up here in time
to reach them. It has to be one of us, a planner.”

Sojiro was already feeling the
walls inside the storage area with his eyes closed. “You’re right. We can crawl
through the access hatch in the ceiling, as long as we seal it off and fumigate
the passage once the volunteer is in the decontamination zone. The bad news is
that passage is one-way. People need to reenter through another sterilization
pod.”

Mercy raised her hand. “Send me.”

Auckland interrupted. “Negative.
You’ve almost passed out several times from Snowflake abuse. If you have an
aneurism out there, we won’t be able to save you in time. Besides, you were one
of the chosen six. If we lose you, we might not be able to jump. I have to make
the long crawl.”

Lou gloated in an effeminate voice,
“You’re too valuable. Ha. How does that feel?”

Sighing, Mercy said, “Like I’m
living back at home again.” Toward the overhead dome, she said, “Snowflake,
split the screen. On the left, show a schematic with Auckland’s current
position.” Nothing happened. She had to duck under the hood to give a detailed
new command. By the time she finished, the Zeisses had computed a likely path
for the shuttle, and Sojiro had mapped it into a storage device for transmission.

As Auckland climbed into his
spacesuit in the storage room, Sojiro explained, “Put this card into the
navigation station and hit the button for automated Mayday transmission. If
they receive the message, they’ll respond on channel two.”

“There are three messages in the
packet,” the doctor noted.

“The second bundle is a
quantum-encrypted update with our maps and plans. Only Mori will be able to
read it. The third packet asks the shuttle crew whether our friends on moon
base and L1 lived,” Sojiro said. “Consider it a trade of information: they get
a chance at life and we get peace of mind. Snap that helmet on and give me a
comm check.”

Auckland obeyed. “Tasting one, two,
three, tasting.”

Sojiro held a thumb of approval up
after verifying the seals.

The doctor lumbered toward the
access hatch, stacking crates like a monkey attempting to reach a banana. “What
if they won’t listen to me, won’t veer off?”

Over her headset, Mercy said, “Tell
them I’ll trigger the remote separation protocol for their engines.”

“They’ll never believe that,” Auckland said.

Straight-faced, Lou said, “It’s
standard for every shuttle in case it falls into the wrong hands or the pilot
dies. The UN made us install the feature so no one could go kamikaze on Earth.
Tell them to bring up section nine of the manuals—emergency reentry.”

“But Mercy would never actually do
that,” the doctor argued.

“
I
would,” Lou asserted.
“Their missiles killed Vanessa and blew off Yuki’s arm. I’d have no qualms
erasing a billion of their murdering asses for that.”

“I’ll try to be a little more
diplomatic,” Auckland promised. “Close the door to the control room. I’m
ready.”

Once he crawled into the tunnel, the
doctor vanished from radio because of the heavy shielding between the ship’s
sections. Monitoring his progress with Snowflake, his trip toward the lens took
less than half an hour. The
Sanctuary
crew couldn’t hear the exchange
between ships; however, the Chinese-controlled shuttle eventually veered off.

Mercy paced in the showers, waiting
for Auckland to return. The second decontamination took an hour longer than the
first. When she heard the flop of a wet human body, she entered the room
instantly. Over the radio, everyone could hear her gasp. “Oh my gosh.”

They heard her close the door and
the steady sound of the shower mist as she counted out thrusts in CPR. Being
lifeguard trained, she soon had him coughing up fluids. “He’s really pale,
almost blue.”

The men hauled him to the medical
bay, and over the headset, Toby walked them through the basics of triage.
Wearing an oxygen mask, Auckland was finally able to speak. “It was really cold
in the pod room, and the pressure was low. I had to turn face down to suck the
oxygen fluid into my lungs quicker. It was so thick I felt like I was drowning
in Jell-O.”