Chapter 62: Making A Change

HISS!

A small peristaltic pump on the outside of the housing pulsed four times, drawing fifty milliliters of dark heavy crimson up into a clear sealed flask.

The needle slid back out of his arm, the port in the quartz closed without leaking a single drop of the mineral bath, and a little mechanical tray extended from the base of the dais, presenting the warm glass flask right to her hands.

[Take it, Crew Unit Chloe,] the AI said, its dry voice softened by a rare and almost imperceptible note of approval. [You declined to eat the dead raider vermin, you declined to lick the Master Captain off the bridge floor and you dismantled three hostile combatants with your bare hands... He would be proud of your restraint.]

The tray clicked into place, and the AI added a sharp drawl that made the boundaries very clear.

[Do not mistake this for charity... This unit serves the Master Captain and protects his vessel, and he would find it immensely inconvenient to wake up and discover that his strongest Crew member had starved to death on the floor so drink your ration. There will be no second serving.]

Chloe picked up the flask with both hands, and the heat of Leo’s blood came through the glass and warmed her cold trembling fingers.

She pulled the stopper with her teeth, tipped her head back and drank it down in three long desperate swallows with the heavy metallic sweetness coating her throat like liquid fire.

GULP!

It hit her all at once.

The cold hollow ache in her belly vanished in a rush of warmth, and the spike in her skull dissolved like it had never been there.

Her vision sharpened, the tremor in her hands went still and the feverish fog behind her eyes cleared into perfect razor-sharp focus, and for the first time since the Black Kite she felt warm all the way through.

She lowered the empty flask and wiped a tiny smear of red from the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist, then turned back to the glass and looked at his face with her green eyes glowing with fierce devotion.

"Thank you, Leo..." she whispered.

She leaned in and pressed her lips to the cool curved quartz, leaving the faint warm print of a kiss right over his closed eyes, and she stayed there a moment longer with her forehead against the glass, listening to that slow stubborn drum one more time then she stepped down off the dais and looked toward the open service hatch.

"I’m going to take a bath now," She told the empty room, her voice light and completely at peace. "I have to wash the bad men’s blood off before he wakes up..."

She slipped through the doorway and vanished down the lit conduit, her soft footsteps fading until only the bubbling of the tank remained.

...

Up on the bridge, the silence was heavy and thick with an ugly tension that wouldn’t lift.

Four of them had washed the raider’s grime off their skin and changed into clean utility jumpsuits from their lockers, but fresh clothes did nothing to hide the bruises or the hollow exhaustion carved into their faces.

Aoi stood by the astrogation table with her left eye under a clean square of white gauze and her dark hair pulled back in a tight braid over her shoulder, while Elena lingered by the engineering station in a pressed grey uniform with her arms pinned to her sides.

Camila sat on the bottom step of the mezzanine with her knees drawn up against her ribs and her eyes red and puffy, and Jin-Ah sat stiffly behind station three in front of a blank monitor with her hands folded in her lap.

Nobody looked at the dais for long, because the whole command deck was a frozen grotesque reminder of what they’d done.

The dark lake of Leo’s blood had dried across the plating into a thick rusty crust littered with scraps of his flight jacket and white flecks of bone, the headrest of the command throne was stained black and long smears ran down the inside of the canopy where his chest had burst against the glass.

Elena swallowed hard and turned her face up toward the grille.

"AI," she said, her voice trembling despite her best effort to sound composed. "The... the organic residue on the dais represents a significant biohazard. Dried cellular matter will interfere with the optical arrays and the neural cradles... Could you deploy the maintenance arms to scrub the surfaces at least?"

CHIME!

[A fascinating request, Crew Unit Elena, It appears your refined sensibilities are offended by the physical consequences of your own treachery. How tragic... Unfortunately, the ship’s cleaning drones are currently engaged in a permanent union-mandated strike against treasonous personnel.]

Elena’s jaw tightened as her fingers curled into the seams of her trousers.

[However,] the machine went on cheerfully, [a manual industrial mop and a twenty-liter utility bucket can be found in maintenance locker 4-B, forty meters down the central service corridor. Use cold water... Hot water cooks the Master Captain’s hemoglobin into the non-slip grooves. Happy scrubbing!]

Elena flushed red and opened her mouth to snap back, but the hatch at the rear of the bridge hissed open before she could draw breath.

PSSH!

Harper walked onto the bridge.

She walked past Elena and Aoi without a glance and never once looked up at the speaker in the ceiling.

She wore a faded grey tank top over dark work trousers with her dirty-blonde hair tied back in a messy knot with a twist of insulated copper wire, and her freckled arms were bare and still wet from the washroom.

In her right hand she carried a heavy grey mop with coarse cotton strands dragging along the runner, and in her left she hauled the twenty-liter bucket filled to the brim with cold clear water, sloshing against the rim as she marched up the center aisle.

She climbed the three steps of the dais and set the bucket down hard.

THUD!

She dipped the mop and jammed it into the squeeze-wringer on the rim, leaning her whole weight on the lever.

CREAK!

Grey water drained back into the pail, and without a word to anyone, Harper slapped the wet strands dead center into the crusted puddle right in front of the throne.

SPLAT!

She planted her boots wide, gripped the handle with both calloused hands and began to push.

The coarse threads dragged across the Graventhal, breaking the dried crimson crust into thick reddish-brown streaks that smeared and dissolved into murky foam.

She shoved the mop forward with a furious violent rhythm, scrubbing until her shoulders burned, her teeth clamped so hard the muscles in her temples bulged and her breath tearing out of her nose in short jagged huffs.

’You told him to handle it himself,’ the thought hammered inside her skull with every wet heavy stroke. ’You stood right at that rail, looked your best friend in the eye and told him to handle it himself...’

She remembered the hot summer asphalt behind Henderson’s auto repair shop, six years ago.

She’d been twelve, crying her eyes out behind the rusted oil drums because her older brother had laughed at her skinned knees and told her girls didn’t belong around engines.

Leo had climbed up the drainpipe with his sneakers squeaking on the peeling paint and two half-melted cherry popsicles he’d stolen from his family’s freezer, and he’d sat down next to her on the blistering gravel roof, kicking his heels against the tin.

He’d handed her one without asking why she was crying, waited until she stopped and then told her Henderson’s shop was a dump anyway, and that one day they were going to build something that flew fast enough to leave the whole town in the dust.

...The popsicles had melted all over both their hands, and she’d laughed for the first time all day.

He had always stayed.

When her dad had lost yet another job, when the power got cut to her block, when the white light swallowed the sky... Leo had never walked away from her once and she had walked away from him on this bridge because her feelings were hurt over a tool kit.

SCRUB!

She slammed the mop into the base of the dais and scoured the flecks of bone off the chrome stanchion with her knuckles white and her grey-blue eyes burning with tears she refused to wipe away.

’Handle it yourself, Cap,’ the words echoed in her head, poisonous and vile. ’You stupid selfish idiot... You left him alone to get kicked out a hatch, and now you’re mopping him off the floor.’

The mop head grew heavy and soaked through.

She dragged it back to the bucket, plunged it into the water with a violent churn and hauled it into the wringer again, and the water in the pail turned a thick sickening rust, foaming pink around the edges.

She held the lever down with one trembling forearm as the fury finally broke, leaving her staring down into the swirling pink water with wide frightened eyes.

"AI..." she whispered, her voice hoarse and shaking with terror of what the answer might be.

She stared at the bucket because she couldn’t make herself look up at the empty throne.

"How long...?" Her lower lip trembled. "How long is it gonna take him to recover? Be straight with me... How bad is it?"

The bridge went entirely still.

Camila stopped crying with her eyes locked on the speaker, Elena lifted her chin with her breath caught in her throat, Aoi stepped away from the astrogation table with her good eye wide and pleading and Jin-Ah leaned forward over station three with her fingers pressing into the edge of the desk.

CHIME!

For once, the machine had no insult ready.

[STASIS PROGRESS: LEO KAINE]

[Thoracic Reconstruction: 11%]

[Cranial Reconstruction: 7%]

[Neural Pathways: Severe Trauma / Stabilizing]

[The mineral emulsion synthesized from the asteroid belt is stabilizing his cardiovascular tissue and bridging the fractures in his ribcage, The energetic trauma to his neural pathways remains severe... Provided the ship’s environment stays stable, and assuming your collective incompetence does not introduce a new catastrophe into his life support loop, his estimated return to basic consciousness is three or four days.]

A tiny pause.

[Perhaps a week.]

Harper let out a long shuddering breath that sounded like all the air being crushed out of her lungs at once.

On the bottom step Camila folded over her knees with both hands pressed to her mouth, and Aoi had to grip the edge of the astrogation table to stay on her feet, while Jin-Ah sat back very slowly in her chair and closed her eyes.

She closed her eyes and bit down on her lip until she tasted copper, and her forehead dropped against the cold handle of the mop.

Three or four days... perhaps a week.

It felt like an eternity stretched over an open pit, but he was alive, fighting in the blue soup down the hall with the same mule-headed refusal to quit that had kept them all breathing since the tutorial ended.

She pulled the lever back, lifted the wrung mop out of the rust-colored water and set it back against the stained plating, pushing it forward in slow measured strokes.

The others watched her from the stairs in unbroken silence.

Nobody offered to take the handle.

They stood there like ghosts trapped in their own ruin, watching the girl who had loved him longest wash their captain’s blood off the floor then the soft scuff of a shoe on wet metal broke the silence.

Elena had watched every single stroke from the foot of the stairs, and now she was moving.

Elena Sterling walked up the three steps of the dais and she kept her eyes off the empty throne.

She took the hem of her clean grey trousers between her fingers and deliberately knelt down on the wet soapy deck right beside the bucket, and the cold rust-colored water soaked straight through the fabric at her knees.

It bit into the bones of her kneecaps, but she didn’t flinch.

"Mmm..."

She reached her bare manicured hand into the bloody water, found a coarse yellow rag at the bottom and pulled it free, squeezing the pink foam out between her trembling fingers then she leaned over the stained plates with her honey-blonde hair falling across her cheek and pressed the rag flat against the dried spray under the flight console.

Harper stopped mopping.

She leaned on the handle with her knuckles white, staring down at the heiress of Sterling Orbital kneeling in a puddle with her knees soaked in blood.

’What are you doing, Sterling?’ she thought numbly. ’What the hell are you doing?’

Elena kept her eyes down on the rag, scrubbing one small circle of metal with slow trembling pressure.

"His sister..." Her voice was a quiet hesitant whisper that barely crossed the half meter of wet deck between them.

Her knuckles whitened around the rag.

"...what was her name?"