Adrift, page 8
He rubbed his forehead again, and the sweat came away pink. He wondered how bad his face was. He couldn’t feel it. At some point while he worked, it had gone numb. Tron was grateful for that, and he didn’t really want to encourage the pain to return, but he had to get cleaned up. The dried blood was itchy. And even though he’d been in the suit, he was certain he could smell the death of Dr. Geddes clinging to his clothing. That was as good an answer as any he could give, he supposed, and better than some. “Now I take a shower. Then we go deal with that hopper in navigation.”
Where There’s Smoke
Tron had expected Kivi to go back to her family’s room while he showered, but she situated herself on his bed and waited. It was bizarre, having her in his storage. No one ever came down there but him. Not since he’d been exiled, and all the equipment that used to be kept there was hauled out by maintenance. It would’ve been even stranger to have a girl sitting on his bed, if Kivi seemed to have any concept of the impropriety associated with it.
Lucy was a small ship, and quarters were tight, which made the family even tighter. Feelings tended to be more intense, as a whole, than they might be back on Earth. That was what Jay told him. The captain meant it to mean that he understood why Tron inevitably reacted poorly to every stressful situation, but Tron knew it extended further than himself. Without any friends or his family around to distract him, he filled his meal and rec times by watching all the people around him. He saw romantic relationships bloom and die, almost all of them inappropriate. By the time he was twelve, he’d read enough to know about adultery and saw enough signals to know it was a real risk. Lucy was a colony ship, which meant families. The only singles allowed were a few of the core crew like Jay and Hector, and the religious leader of their particular expedition, Father Andrei. But that didn’t mean that the married couples didn’t notice other people. Not in a space like this. He wondered why no one seemed to act on it, and why no one ever talked about divorce for a long time.
Then he realized that the ship had its own culture, one every bit as influential as the ones they’d left behind if not more, and that it didn’t allow for such things. Jay was right, the feelings on Lucy were always high. Even when everyone was falling in line and acting perfectly pleasant, there were undercurrents of emotions constantly for anyone paying attention. It was a pot at a rolling boil, mere seconds away from spilling over. But it never did. Plenty of people got more attached than they were supposed to. Even the incorruptible Father Andrei gave Constance the same love-struck looks Tron had seen between the other kids. None of them ever seemed to act on it, though. He’d seen it done twice, and had puzzled over the hypocrisy for months after the second time before he put the last pieces together. There was nowhere to go on the ship. If a marriage fell apart, if improper relationships were ever allowed to really take root, all the people involved would be trapped together for decades. All it would take was one cuckolded husband to take objection and react violently, the way Tron had seen happen in all kinds of vids from Earth, to set the water boiling over and end their colony in a spectacularly unpredictable storm. It was survival that made them all hypocrites.
As the children started getting older, the same sentiments were applied to their inevitable mating games. There was no stopping it, of course. Hormones always found a way. But the adults went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that it was never more than holding hands and maybe a few secret kisses. Tron was never included. He was simply too far ahead of their curve to be a prospective partner in the dance. There were a couple girls who chased him for a day or two, but he could never bring himself to see them as anything more than kids, no matter how badly his lusts insisted he do otherwise. Not that his, or anyone else’s, lusts were ever given a chance to be acted on. They couldn’t afford the fallout of a teenaged relationship gone bad; the results of the controlled ones were difficult enough. He’d seen all kinds of drama unfold between fourteen year olds who thought they’d get married one day realize they didn’t actually like each other all that much.
The single most important rule about interactions on Lucy was that no two singles could ever be alone together. Especially not in a bedroom. Especially especially not sitting on a bed. Tron knew what a scandal it would be, having her here. He even thought there was a point to it. Kivi was closest to his age. In another life, a life before the attackers, having her here would’ve probably been the tipping point his hormones had been waiting for. Alone as he always was, it wouldn’t matter how much he wanted to think of her as a kid. It wouldn’t even matter how weird she was. He could’ve tried to talk her into things that would’ve ruined both their lives.
It was different now. Everything in this new world was different. Having her here wasn’t romantic, and it only occurred to him that it might’ve been because of the oddity of it. He kept expecting her to leave, and she kept staying. He understood it perfectly. She was just like him, incapable of walking through this new world on her own. This place, which was supposed to be so full of life that it was overwhelming, stood too empty. It demanded thoughts about everything that was missing. She was here because if she was somewhere else then they would both be alone. Tron wasn’t ready for that any more than she was. They were the last foothold of life in this ship of the dead. They were clinging to each other to keep from being swallowed up. Still, he did think of it. And for that, Tron felt a twinge of shame. If there was any way to apologize without making everything a thousand times more awkward than he could stand, he probably would’ve.
Luckily Kivi was as oblivious about that as she seemed to be about sarcasm. She had the torch and some of the tools from the pack he’d snagged with the pressure suits, and was taking it apart. He’d nearly screamed at her when he first realized what she was doing. But when he thought about the machines she’d built, the ones that had helped him, he bit his tongue. She’d obviously handled a torch before, and had probably taken one apart plenty of times. He’d heard how she hummed while she was working on the hook. If playing with a machine’s insides was what gave her peace, he wasn’t about to take it away by acting like an idiot. So he let her to her task while he handled the shower.
Tron sagged against the wall as the warm water hit his sore back. It felt amazing, and he could feel the knots there starting to loosen. Soon the small bathroom was filled with steam and he was so relaxed that it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. Then the water began to heat up.
He couldn’t figure out what was happening. He hadn’t bumped the buttons that controlled the temperature. Tron had barely moved in the last five minutes, so there was no chance he’d caught one with his elbow. So far as he knew, there was no other way to change the temp of anyone’s shower. If there were, one of the kids would’ve figured it out during one of the many prank wars, surely.
He’d spent hours looking at the coding for the sensors himself, and had even snuck a trip down to Port Storage to poke at the water pump when he couldn’t find another way in. He’d had some great idea about paying back the kids who called him ‘the giant’ and liked to joke about how he must’ve been let on Lucy out of pity for some mental disorder. It was before Tron had realized just how much an advantage the height, which had come on him suddenly when he turned sixteen, was when it came to correcting such teasing with violence. He’d also decided to include his dad in the prank, just to see if it changed the man’s morning rituals. Tron might not be as brilliant as some of the others on the ship, but he’d learned fast that stubbornness got you pretty damn far with machines and programs. He’d spent months trying to get his own showers to change without the buttons, but nothing he’d done had ever managed had raised it by even one degree.
Confused, wondering what Whitman had done to screw up something as solid as water temps, Tron hit the cool twice to get it back where it was supposed to be. After another minute, he had to hit it three more. Finally, he gave up and shut down the water altogether. He was startled to find himself shivering. Hadn’t he just been hot? The man in nav had to be messing with climate controls as a whole, and that was dangerous in the extreme.
He tried to think of a solution as he dried off and dressed, poking at the bruises on his face as he glared at them in the mirror. They weren’t too bad, all things considered, but he didn’t like them. They were like testaments to how Whitman’s people had beaten him. It wasn’t a fair fight, but that didn’t make him feel a lot better about it. That wasn’t nearly as important as figuring out how to stop the madman now, though. By the time he returned to his room, all he had by way of a plan was to get on the com and plead with the man like a couple of desperate children. Which, Tron supposed, was pretty much exactly what they were.
He never got the chance to share this grand scheme with Kivi. Almost the same moment Tron opened his mouth, the room switched to a flashing red and the alarm started blaring. Their eyes locked, and he knew she was thinking of food storage. He slapped the code for nav into the intercom. “What’s going on?”
There was a delay in response that seemed to stretch on forever. The alarm was giving him a migraine, and any second he fully expected to be sucked out into space or have the invaders return with whatever horrible weapons had killed everyone so quickly. Tron wanted to reach through the coms and shake Whitman for making them wait so long for the answer.
Finally, the man spoke. “Not sure. It’s second deck, larboard.”
Tron blinked. Not food storage. That was habitation deck. The only thing there were living quarters and hydroponics. He and Kivi were both up and running in an instant.
Hydroponics was, debatably, the most important part of the ship. It didn’t just help Lucy filter out the carbon monoxide from all the breathing they did, but it provided a source of the fresh produce that kept them healthy. With only the two of them – three, Tron amended – the first function wasn’t so important. There was no way they made enough CO2 that Lucy’s scrubbers couldn’t handle it on their own. The fruit and vegetables were another matter. With food storage gone, all they had left were cold storage and what they could pick out of hydroponics.
It had taken a long time to perfect the art of growing plants in space. Tron’s father had gone on about it all the time, even before they left Earth. The old man was always fascinated by the idea of creating life in a vacuum, and Tron always figured that was why they signed up for colonization in the first place. His mom never spoke much about her job, but his dad would drone on for hours about how challenging it was to keep all the plants thriving. It always sounded like, to Tron at least, the slightest thing could kill every one of the green things that had monopolized his father’s attention. They’d been without gravity or oxygen flow for at least twenty minutes. Maybe longer. He fully expected to find the place filled with dead plants.
It was worse. Much worse. He should’ve known. Dead plants wouldn’t cause the alarm. Fire did.
Hydroponics was the exception to the windows rule. There were large ones on either wall, and if it weren’t the same size as the mess hall and filled with plants it would be easy to see through to the corridor on the other side. Normally he thought it was stupid, but today it proved its worth. Without the clear plastic, they wouldn’t have been able to see a plant that had fallen onto a broken lamp burning high and hot. As he watched, the flames leapt to two other plants before the first one was ash.
Tron didn’t hesitate. That was their food in there, their life. Even with Cold Storage, they needed the vitamins that that they could only get here. He’d read about Ancient Earth. He’d learned about scurvy and a myriad of other diseases that were prevalent among sea-farers with poor diets. But none of that was why he charged in the second the hydraulics slid the door open. In that moment, all he was thinking about was his father, and how broken hearted the old man would be if Tron let his life’s work burn up.
He headed straight back. There was no putting out the fire. He knew that. On Lucy, fire containment was taken very seriously. Standard operating procedure was to lock down the room and vent the oxygen. That killed fire instantly, but wasn’t an option in a place like Hydroponics, where even a few minutes without air would be catastrophic. That meant that there was a secondary fire containment system in place. They’d all been taught about those, shown how to use them and where to find them. He pressed in to the far portside wall, where the container of fire-suppressing foam would be located.
As though it read his mind, the fire moved to block him. Sparks flew from the cord of the lamp, where it was closest to the heat, and those landed on the line of trees directly between him and his destination. Under normal circumstances, this room was always manned and, like the mess, had doors on either side. The foam was kept near the lab equipment where those who worked in hydroponics would be spending most of their time. If he’d come in the other door, it would’ve been almost at his fingertips. As usual, Tron had made the wrong choice. Now he couldn’t reach the one thing he needed to save this place.
“Tron!” Kivi’s voice reached to him as if out of a dream. She’d been screaming for him since he’d charged in, he realized belatedly, but he’d tuned her out. Now that the flames were kissing the ceiling in front of him and thick black smoke was beginning to fill the space, he’d stopped long enough to process her voice. He turned back, coughing as the acrid stuff burned down his throat.
There wasn’t much smoke where she was standing, not yet, and he could just make out the dial she was pointing to. It was too high for her to reach herself, but she kept bouncing on the balls of her feet and gesturing as though it were the most important thing in the universe. Understanding hit him hard, as he realized just how stupid he was. Lucy was built with two controls for the sprinkler system in the room. They were as stationary as the coms. He scooped up a small tree near him and carried it back as quickly as he could, hoping that getting it out of the worst of the smoke would at least do something to minimize the waste of his headlong charge.
As soon as he reached the wall, he cranked the dial all the way up and waited for the blast of water that would follow. All that came out was a slow trickle; nowhere near enough. He swore and twisted the dial off, then back to full blast. Again, nothing more than a trickle.
“It’s broken?” Kivi sounded as startled as he felt. Tron wanted to scream and beat the walls until the damn ship started doing what it was supposed to. Thirteen years of near-perfect operation, and now that they truly needed her to hold together, Lucy was falling apart. It was Whitman and his friends. They’d started all of this. He couldn’t lose his temper, though. There wasn’t time for it. Just like there wasn’t time to wait for Kivi to sort out the problem, as he was sure she was trying to do. The fire was spreading fast, and the smoke was rushing to swallow the room. If they didn’t move fast, they would lose everything in the room.
“Go grab blankets from the living quarters!” He had to shout to be heard. Already, the fire was near deafening. “As many as you can carry!”
She nodded and darted out of sight almost as fast as she’d moved in zero g. Tron shoved the tree he’d carried out the door, then headed back into the worst of it. He got underneath the trickle of water and took off his shirt, holding it up until it was good and soaked. Then he wrapped it around his face. His lungs recognized the difference immediately. It was harder to draw in air, like trying to fill his chest with nothing but a straw, but it didn’t taste so much like acid now. More importantly, he could go much longer without the hacking coughs.
Once that was done, he pressed as close to the fire as he dared and pulled out two of the plants that hadn’t caught yet. They were too heavy, nearly toppling him the instant he swung them up onto his hips, but Tron didn’t let it stop him. His arms screamed with the effort, but he got them back out the door.
He got a total of six plants out, soaking his shirt between each haul, before Kivi returned. She was buried beneath the pile of blankets she was lugging, and he had to stop to help her before she collapsed beneath their weight. It took a few minutes to get a couple of them wet enough to be of use, which was time they didn’t have. The fire took the opportunity to spread through half the room while they were busy. Even as they started beating at it, attempting to smother it, Tron knew it was too late for such tricks. He dropped his and went back to carrying as many plants out as he could manage, but Kivi wasn’t ready to give up. She kept working, trading in one blanket for another when the water dried and the cloth began to burn. She couldn’t possibly control the fire, but she did keep it as far from him as she could while he grabbed the pots of dirt.
They found a rhythm, and for a time they were containing the disaster. But that didn’t last long. Tron felt exhaustion creeping up on him, and knew he wouldn’t last much longer. His trips were now for just one plant at a time, sometimes resorting to shoving it across the floor. Kivi’s blankets were catching more frequently, and the coughs were turning into a serious problem. All of it should’ve warned him that it was time to go. But he was stubborn.
He’d found a miniature orange tree and was determined to get it out. Flames burst out of a nearby bush as he shifted the pot away, catching the leg of his pants. Tron screamed and dropped to the ground, rolling away and losing his shirt in the process. It felt like his whole body was on fire, not just his leg. There was pain and heat everywhere.
Then something heavy and cool dropped over him. He fought against it at first, his terror convincing him it was some other death grabbing at him. It wasn’t until he had his head and shoulders uncovered that he realized Kivi had dropped a blanket over him. When he looked down, he was shocked to discover that most of the damage was contained to his pant leg. The skin beneath was an angry red, but it didn’t look too serious. He couldn’t find any sign of the fire burning across every inch of his body. The coolness of the blanket kept the pain away, but he could still feel the flames trying to consume him.
