Читать книгу The Long Forever - Eugene Lambert - Страница 13

6

DIVERSIONS

‘Party’s over,’ Murdo growls. ‘Let’s get down to business.’

Rich, coming from a guy who’s only just got up from snoring his drunk head off. Meanwhile, Anuk has had the rest of us hard at it for hours, cleaning and tidying. Our cramped quarters are way more liveable now.

‘What d’you want us to do?’ I ask.

Red-eyed and clearly suffering from a head-banging hangover, Murdo flinches. ‘No need to shout, is there? We should have to space those bodies, and then I’ll alter course.’

This last bit he says with a glare at Sky. She meets it, eyes narrowed, face like stone.

It’s cool in the hold, but the stench of death is already nasty. Inside the cage we find more bodies than we’d expected. One of the two beaten-up crewmen is stiff and gone to the long forever. His gobby mate shouts threats at us until Cam sets his killstick to stun and shuts him up.

Skinny guy wisely keeps his mouth shut.

Murdo has him show us where the airlock is, in a small compartment beneath the hold. After he’s done taking Murdo through the lock’s controls, I sling the guy back inside the cage. Then three of us wrestle the pilot’s body down. He hasn’t got lighter by being dead and we’re blowing hard by the time we’ve shoved him into the airlock. Murdo taps at a grubby screen beside the inner airlock door. It closes, sucks inwards and seals.

Above us, a red light starts strobing.

‘Warning, illegal override,’ a machine-voice chants.

‘Yeah, we know!’ Murdo slaps the screen again.

The warning chokes off. He mutters something over his shoulder to us about opening outer doors with pressure still inside, so the body will be blown out.

As he does, I feel the slightest of thumps.

We take turns gawping through the clear-view panel set into the inner airlock door. Beyond the open outer door, the pilot’s body tumbles slowly away from us against a backdrop of stars. I’d heard stories that if you ended up in space without a pressure suit it would be messy. But he doesn’t explode and his blood doesn’t boil out of him.

I can’t decide if I’m relieved or disappointed.

The two dead kids, Mav and Kaya, we leave until last. Somebody’s gone to the trouble of wrapping them up in canvas tarpaulins, a sort of makeshift burial shroud.

‘Anybody want to say a few words?’ I ask.

At first all I get is eyes flicking uneasily away from me, but then Cam surprises me.

‘They died fighting . . . so we could be free,’ he says.

Anuk repeats it. Next thing, they’re all at it. I glance at Sky, expecting her lip to curl. Not a bit of it: her eyes are shiny and she chants it as loud as anyone.

Two more soft thumps and the red light quits flashing.

‘Least they didn’t die in a cage,’ she says to me.

We clamber back into the hold and start making our way back to the crew compartment, while the machines that allow us to breathe start scrubbing away the stench of death.

‘Hey, not so fast,’ Murdo says, sticking his head up from the floor hatch. ‘Bring the prisoners.’

‘You’re not serious?’ I say.

Sky rolls her eyes. ‘They’re slavers. Serves them right.’

‘No! Please don’t!’ skinny guy whines.

Murdo laughs, real ugly, and tells us there’s an escape craft down below with four empty stasis pods. ‘Stick ’em in there and it’ll save us watching and feeding them.’

When we look dumb, he curses and grudgingly explains what stasis pods are. Seems they work by slowing your body down into a sort of super-hibernation. Deep-space escape craft have them so occupants can survive until they’re found, which can take years. Whatever. I’m just relieved he’s not going to space the prisoners in cold blood.

Sky mutters we should leave them in the cage to be zapped. But Murdo’s captain and gets his way.

Curious to see the escape craft, I help carry the man Cam stunned. Skinny guy doesn’t look thrilled, but climbs down himself and keeps his gob shut.

It’s accessed through a second airlock. Disappointingly, the inside is a small compartment, with two recesses in the walls either side, one pod above the other. Murdo and Cam wrestle the unconscious guy into the upper left. When they’re done, they step out to make room and I shove skinny guy ahead of me into the cramped interior.

‘Upper right,’ Murdo orders.

Skinny guy hesitates, shaking. A shove from me gets him moving though. He clambers up and rolls into it.

Murdo hits a switch. ‘Sweet dreams.’

Translucent panels swish downwards to close off the two occupied pods. A dazzling blue light fills them. I smell that sharp stink you get when electrics short out. And jump back as skinny guy’s hand, fingers spread wide, slams the inside of his panel. The blue light fades away, but the hand stays planted. Frozen.

That does not look like fun.

‘Let’s go,’ Murdo says, already shuffling his way out.

Back in the hold, we crowbar open all the wooden crates that were loaded aboard on Wrath. Nestled inside each is a small unmarked metal chest. I worry darkblende’s not stamped on them, or its tech name – promethium. Murdo says I’m a gom for thinking it would be. Screens on the chests list the weight of their contents. Twelve crates, with five hundred kilos in each.

Whatever it’s worth, Murdo bloodshot eyes go greedy.

Minutes later, with the crates hammered closed again, he’s back in the pilot’s seat with as many of us as can squeeze inside the flight deck watching him. Sky’s not here. She stayed in the crew compartment, busy sulking.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask him.

‘Shanglo.’

‘What’s there?’

‘An old contact. Deep pockets. Doesn’t ask questions.’

As his fingers tap and slide on the control screen, Murdo tells us Shanglo is the moon of a planet orbiting a half-dead sun. At max drive speed it’ll take seven standard-days to get there. Our curved blue course line shifts inside the glowing star map to point at a closer bit of space. The map zooms in and a new destination star pulses red. Looming over it, as if about to pounce, is what looks like an orange dust storm shot through with wisps of yellow and green.

‘What the hell’s that?’ Cam asks.

‘Some kind of nebula. Dust and gas, that’s all.’

With a flourish, he stabs at his screen. I feel the lurching sensation as the freighter’s drive kicks in. The stars in front of us seem to smear themselves towards us. But the flight deck’s shielded, so that’s as bad as it gets. Until the view ahead snaps to a sudden dark nothingness, like a cleverbox screen that’s been powered down.

Nobody whimpers exactly, but I hear shocked curses.

‘Hey, where’d the stars go?’ I say, startled.

Murdo slumps back in his seat with a satisfied sigh. ‘Relax. They’re still out there. We just can’t see them through the dee-emm, now that we’re shifting.’

Dee-emm. Shifting. I’ve already passed on the little I know to the other kids. Like how suns are so far apart even light takes years to travel between them. How our dee-emm drive ‘shifts’ us into something called dark-matter space so we can go faster. Murdo calls it a sneaky short cut, a clever way of going behind the back of regular space.

‘I see weird stuff out there,’ a boy called Taka calls out.

Me too. Mostly it’s darkness so deep it feels as if it’s sucking my eyeballs out of my head. But there’s something else. Oily and slippery, it oozes around the edges of my seeing. Look straight at it though and there’s nothing.

‘What the heck is that?’ I ask Murdo.

He glances around. ‘Spacers call it “seeing the spooks”. It’s to do with the way the dee-emm drive operates. And why we leave the flight-deck lights switched up when we’re shifting, so we can’t see outside. Spend too much time watching them, you end up going crazy. Some say –’

He hesitates, then flicks the lights back on.

‘Tell us,’ I say, catching his eye.

He grimaces. ‘They say spooks are alien life forms. Monster space fish who swim around in dark matter.’

‘What do you say?’

‘I say we’ve plenty to worry about already,’ he growls.

Life aboard our star freighter takes getting used to. The crew compartment would’ve been cramped for five, and there are thirteen of us. But the hardest thing is there’s no day and night, which makes it tough to sleep.

Murdo’s feeling better though, and loving life.

He says we have to wean ourselves off Wrath-time and onto the standard-time spacers use. Standard-hours are about the same length, but there are only twenty-four in a standard-day! We all moan like hell, feeling cheated, but he just laughs at us. Says standard-months have more standard-days in them, so what’s it matter anyway?

Well it turns out it does matter!

He re-calculated our ages in standard-time. I’d been looking forward to turning seventeen in two Wrath-months; now I’ll have to wait six more standard-months.

The only person more fed up than me is Sky. She was seventeen, now she’s back to being sixteen!

With bog all to do, we count the days down to Shanglo. I teach the others stupid games I played as a kid. They teach me some of theirs. By far their favourite thing is to get me or Sky or Murdo to tell them stories about our adventures. They never tire of listening. But three standard-days out of Wrath we hit our first snag. Anuk put Stitch in charge of the food because he’d done cooking duties back in her camp. Now she drags him in front of Murdo, a face on her like thunder.

‘Tell him!’ she rages.

Shame-faced, Stitch admits we’re almost out of food.

‘He couldn’t be arsed to check,’ Anuk says.

I figure Murdo will go off on one, but all he does is shrug. ‘Just as well we’re only four days out from Shanglo, not a month out from Enshi Four. Isn’t it, Sky?’

Sky gives him a spike-eyed glare, but says nothing.

Anuk says we’ll manage, but it’ll mean short rations and going hungry. Been there, done that, but it’s still bad news. Murdo reassures us we’ll be able to load up with food at Shanglo.

Everybody settles back down.

But when nobody’s looking, Murdo whispers that I should meet him outside the cargo hold. Before I can ask why, he slides off in that direction, real furtive.

I tell Sky. She says she’ll come with me.

The few kids that aren’t sleeping are playing games or taking it easy. Anuk’s in the galley, chewing Stitch’s ear off about the food, so nobody notices as we stroll out after Murdo. At the far end of the main companionway, we catch up with him. He’s outside the hold’s closed hatch, by the big red warning sign about the lack of shielding.

When Sky goes to say something, he shushes her.

‘Keep it down,’ he hisses. ‘There’s something I have to do, but I’ll need Kyle to help.’

‘What with?’ I whisper, suspicious.

Murdo glances past us, but we can’t be seen back here because of a dog-leg in the corridor. His lived-in face is less battered by now, but he looks uneasy.

‘These dark-market contacts of mine,’ he says. ‘They’re all chancers. With promethium being so valuable, there’s a risk they’ll just try to take it off us.’

‘Let them try,’ Sky mutters.

Murdo grins. ‘All the same, I’d feel better if we had insurance. We should stash some of the cargo. That way, if we have to run for it, we won’t have lost everything.’

Sounds reasonable to me. ‘Where would we hide it?’

‘In that escape craft, with the prisoners.’

Sky sniffs. ‘Oh yeah, nobody would look there.’

But Murdo’s no fool. He tells us that after we’ve loaded a couple of crates aboard, he’ll launch the escape craft. It can float about until we come back to retrieve it.

‘But what about the guys in stasis?’ I ask.

He shrugs. ‘What about them? Won’t do them no harm.’

‘And you’re sure we can find it again?’ Sky asks.

‘They have distress beacons, but you have to be close to pick up the signal. We know where to listen.’

‘What if somebody else hears it?’

‘They won’t. I’ve altered course. We’re in dead space now. No starship has any reason to be out here.’

‘So how come we’re sneaking off to do it?’ Sky asks.

Murdo glances past us again. ‘The fewer who know, the better. So don’t go telling anyone.’

About now, the warning sign behind him catches my eye.

‘Will you shut the drive off ? Or we’ll be zapped.’

He grimaces. ‘Best not to. The others would feel it and wonder what’s going on. It’s not like it’ll kill us.’

I look at Sky, unsure.

She shrugs. ‘Makes sense, I guess.’

Thankfully, Murdo knows his way around handling cargo, so we’re not in the hold too long being fried. Using an overhead hoist we lower two of the massively heavy crates into the airlock compartment. Using levers, rollers and wedges, we sweat them into the pod. It’s heavy work and even I’m shaking by the time Murdo slaps a push-panel with a red handprint on it and the access lock snaps shut. We scramble back up into the hold and Sky lets us out.

When she closes the hatch behind us . . . it’s bliss!

After a breather we return to the crew compartment. We haven’t been missed. Murdo carries on through to the flight deck. A minute later, the deck shifts under me.

‘Did you feel something?’ Anuk asks.

I look at Sky. She looks at me. We shake our heads.