Vitalis Omnibus (10 page)

Sharp left the two of them with that somber thought. Kira looked at Tarn and found her vision skewed by unshed tears. She blinked them away and took a deep breath that had potential to turn into a sob. She kept it controlled and offered the ex-Marine a faint smile. “Ex-Marine?”

He nodded. “Discharged for a little misunderstanding with some terrorists that took over a space station.”

Kira felt the muscles in her back stiffen even as the new memories flooded through her mind. “Blue Vistas space station?” He nodded. “You used a particle accelerator cannon to blow a hole through the hull! You killed nearly two hundred people, most of them civilians!”

Tarn shrugged. “Got the job done.”

“You’re a cold
-blooded son of a bitch!” she hissed.

Tarn chuckled. The chuckle turned deeper as it went on, until he was laughing at her. Kira glared at him, ready to rise out of her seat and shut him up forcefully. She refrained
, either from a sense of curiosity or futility. They were all doomed, she figured; why not get her questions answered instead of just putting her foot through his teeth?

“
Wasn’t no warm and fuzzy girl that put down seven pirates,” he finally said. “Don’t know what you done, girl, but I reckon you and I got something in common. And I’m not talking about lusting for that engineer’s horse-dick neither!”

“I lost a friend on Blue Vistas. A civilian that got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and you spaced her.” Kira stared at him, feeling a sense of calm that scared her. It came from deep within her and, she suspected, it was a leftover from Emily. The friend she mentioned was a friend of Emily’s. Or at least as close to a friend as her alter-ego had ever had. Kira had never known her or known of her, but now she could see her faintly freckled pale face with a startling clarity. Her name had been Angela, but Emily had called her Angel. Especially when—

Kira’s hand went to her mouth to hide her gasp. Tarn frowned. “What? You was looking like you was about to shoot me; now this?”

“She was more than a friend,” Kira whispered. She was shocked. She’d never known. Another woman? She wondered if there had been any others.

“Sorry,” Tarn shrugged, clearly anything but sorry. “Older I get, smaller the universe ends up being. You want some payback, you come and get it. Maybe I’m old and fat and out of shape, but I still got what they put in me. Might be a good way to go – better than waiting for us to run out of food or die in my sleep.”

“I’m not going to kill you.” Kira put the memories of Emily’s long
-lost friend away. That had been over sixteen years ago, she realized. Seventeen now, considering their prolonged sleep. “I think you’re kind of a loser, but my social options are limited.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Tarn said.

Kira spared him a withering glare and turned back to her station. With nothing else to do but wait for the end to come, she decided she might as well figure out what their future held.

Chapter 12

Each member of the
Rented Mule’s
crew recorded their messages privately. When it came Kira’s turn, she realized she had no one left behind her. No family and no friends. She’d only had herself and, though she’d searched her memory long and hard, she could only find one resemblance of a relationship and that had been to Angela. Emily had enjoyed a few trysts here and there — with men, Kira was happy to remember — but that was the end of it. Instead she rattled off instructions to have her various accounts, over a dozen of them, donated to charitable organizations that specialized in helping to provide aid and assistance to troubled children.

With that finished, the crew gathered on the bridge to plan what would become of the rest of their lives. It was a somber meeting, with none of them saying much. Eric stood next to her station but they did not reach for one another. Kira longed for the comfort of human touch but she thought it would be cruel to the rest of the crew. They had no one to turn to for solace.

“All right, with any luck our messages will be received in a year or so. We’re broadcasting a distress signal, but we’re also stuck travelling away from help faster than most ships would risk going. A military vessel is our only hope for a quick recovery, and by quick I mean about three years.” Sharp looked around the bridge at his crew. He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a sorry lot of castoffs from society, but I guess I can’t think of anyone better to fly into the great unknown with. Well, that’s not true; maybe some gene-bred triplets trained by a courtesan service might be a little more enjoyable…”

“Sir,” Kira spoke up after giving everyone a chance to pretend they were amused by the Captain’s joke. “I’ve been studying the new readings our sensors are pulling in. It’s light years away still, but there’s a star close by. The other charts don’t make mention of it but that could be because of the angle we’re at
. It looks like there’s a particularly dense asteroid belt ringing the system.”

“Close by and light years away?” Sharp asked, pointing out her contradictory terms.

“Sorry,” she said, seeing his point, “but yes, it’s less than four light years from us. That’s a little under eight years.”

“Then what?” Tarn snorted.

Kira refused to favor him with even a glance. “Then we see what they’ve got there. Maybe we can find a planet big enough to hook us in orbit and sling us back around. We might even pick up some speed so that we head back Core-ward at a faster speed.”

Tarn grunted derisively. Sharp stared at the display and then at her, nodding his head as his eyes lost focus. She glanced up at Eric and saw him staring at her with a hint of a smile on his face. “Eight years?” Sharp muttered. “Another eight years back…”

“It’s a long shot, sir,” Kira reminded them all.

“But it’s better than anything else we got,” Sharp finished for her. “All right, do what you have to so we can get there. It’s not like we’re using our fuel for anything else. Then we’ll get the ship ready for a deep sleep and go for it. Our engines will run for a couple
of hundred years, but that’s just energy. We’ve got the chemicals on hand for a couple of months of food and water, more if we go sparingly, and probably twenty years’ worth of cold sleep chemicals and nutrients.”

“You’re talking about a deep sleep, not just a few months at a time?” Eric asked. Kira glanced up at him and, in spite of her earlier concerns, reached out to take his hand in hers.

“Yeah, and it won’t be easy coming out with all of us down but as long as nothing messes up our computers again we should be able to do it.”

Kira nodded. She felt her heart beat faster in her chest. It excited her to have a plan. To have hope. It was a slim chance but it was a chance and that’s what mattered. “So what are we waiting for? I’m looking forward to putting another eight years under my belt!”

“Can we wait a few hours, at least?” Eric said. He squeezed Kira’s hand and then admitted, “Risky stuff, going in deep like that. Just in case anything goes wrong, I’d like to get under her belt, too, if you don’t mind?”

The others all laughed, causing Kira to blush. Most had the good grace to let it alone but Tarn added to it, “Sounds good to me
. You starting the line?”

Kira displayed a small but very wicked
=looking knife and said, “Tarn, you can touch me with anything you want, as long as you can get it passed this first.”

Sharp whistled while
Jeff chuckled. Tarn stared at the knife with wide eyes and then grinned. She squeezed Eric’s hand to reassure him and then fed the necessary commands into the nav station to steer the ship towards the unnamed system. That finished, she stood up and then gasped as Eric picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder. Catcalls from the rest of the crew made her face burn but at no point was there any way she could deny the grin that split her lips.

Chapter 13

The display blinked, shifting from an unpowered darkness to a black non-light that nevertheless revealed shapes in the room. A moment later colors and lines sprang into existence, casting shadows from the dust
-covered stations, chairs, and other objects on the bridge of the
Rented Mule
. The display quickly coalesced into lines of text. A window displayed the sensor readings collected automatically, indicating the layout of the solar system the
Rented Mule
was entering.

Colored lights sent shadows fleeing their prismatic brilliance in the cold sleep chamber. Chemicals released into controlled intravenous lines, introducing countering agents to the stasis
-inducing drugs in their systems. With heartbeats reduced to single digits in the span of a minute, the absorption took the better part of two hours before the lights changed again and announced the next stage of the process.

Electrodes activated, triggering stimulus to the atrophied muscles of the nearly flat
-lined sleepers. As the heart rates began to climb into the double digits, basic nutrients and simple sugars filled the IV lines, restoring glucose and energizing the depleted muscles. Once the changes were made the system resumed a standby state, administering the new changes over a span of several days.

When next the lights changed
, it was not only to signal the introduction of a gas into the enclosed chambers, but also to engage the overhead lights and raise them to a low level. Intubation tubes, filled with fluids siphoned as the bodies warmed and returned to life, retracted. A final injection, this one purely synthetic adrenaline, was delivered before the electrodes were triggered with a powerful jolt. Each body convulsed, breath exploding from dry mouths as eyelids opened. The cover of the chambers popped open, hissing as the low pressure maintained internally was equalized.

Kira lay in the chamber, unable to see through the blurriness in her aching eyes. Her throat was dry and her chest felt heavy; each breath was an experience in swallowing razorblades. Kira tried to speak but barely managed a moan. It evolved into a weak attempt at coughing, and that upset her stomach and made her attempt to vomit. With nothing in her stomach, the dry heaves only left her aching and breathless. The only benefit from the process was that the tears watered her eyes enough to make her eyelids feel less like sandpaper.

Fighting the agony of muscles long gone unused, Kira forced one arm across, pulling the IV out of one arm and then repeating the action with her other arm. The other necessary connections were removed, albeit slowly, before Kira faced the daunting task of needing to climb out of her chamber.

“I can do this,” Kira whispered with a voice that was so weak that the pulse pounding in her ears nearly drowned it out. She reached up to the sides of the chamber and tried to pull herself up. She collapsed, having hardly moved. Fresh tears ran from her eyes down the sides of her face. “I’m not weak!” The rasp in her voice claimed otherwise.

Gathering her legs slowly in the cocoon, she reached up and tried again. She managed to pull herself up enough to lean over the edge of the chamber, pinching the flesh in her armpit against the cool metal. The pain helped to focus her and distract her from the exhaustion that made colors dance in her vision. Kira gasped for breath, counting internally until more than a minute had passed, and then she pulled her legs beneath her again and used them to help boost her over the edge.

Kira crashed to the cold metal floor. She felt needles and daggers stabbing her body inside and out. The pain was so great she blacked out for a moment,
and then came around with a gasp of air as though she had been drowning. She managed to roll over and lay there, the cool floor stealing what little warmth her body had managed to reclaim. She felt herself shiver, and then she felt the hollow nausea she had come to associate with being so hungry her body was on the verge of malnutrition.

Still she lay on the floor, unable to comprehend the amount of effort it would take to move. Her breathing and heart eventually calmed to the point that she could hear little more than just herself. The faint background hum of the ship
’s air filtration and recycling service provided her only auditory companion. She steeled herself, feeling sorry for the men trapped still in their tomb-like bunks. They’d once been so strong and filled with life; now they were shadows of themselves that required machinery to exist. To be reduced to something so powerless was terrifying. She knew that Emily, if she was still around, would be terrified of being in a situation like the one Kira found herself in.

For Kira it was miserable, but she was accustomed to being disadvantaged and without resources. Now she clung to one thing and one thing only: hope. Kira knew now who she was and who she had been. She knew that she had done incredible things, even if she had not been aware of it at the time. Most importantly
, she knew that if she could bend her mind to it, she could survive this, too.

It was with that belief clutched desperately in her heart that Kira rolled on to her stomach and pulled her knees beneath her. She reached out, grabbing the hateful sleep chamber again,
and then managed to rise to one shaky leg and then the other. She bent over it, supporting herself with her arms and legs, and tried to will away the nausea and the shakes that threatened to pull her back to the metal floor.