Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (19 page)

Slowly, he carried her back through the horizontal hall
and into the control booth, then through the airlock, and made that long step
down onto the improvised storage cabinet staircase. Three hundred pounds of
woman on top of four hundred pounds of man pushed the taller cabinet almost to
its limit. He staggered as it swayed under his feet. Kim was ten feet above the
hangar ceiling—four feet worth of cabinet and five feet worth of Mike. Not a
good elevation to fall from in two gees.
God, don’t let me drop her! It
would kill her for sure!

He managed to keep his balance until the swaying
stopped, but already his legs trembled with exhaustion and his breathing was
heavy and deep. The long step down onto the smaller cabinet produced a painful
jolt that traveled up through his body, from his heel to his neck, like some
kind of whiplash.

The small cabinet didn’t sway at all, so he took
advantage of its stability by attempting to shift Kim’s weight on his shoulder,
but either she was too heavy or his muscles were too fatigued.

Stepping down onto the hangar’s stainless steel ceiling
yielded a whiplash jolt even more painful than the first. He paused until the
pain faded, then lumbered toward the black tent, swatted its door flap aside
with his free hand and stepped inside.

“Tina!” he yelled. “Tina, wake up!”

Almost in the middle of the tent something yanked him
back savagely. He tried to regain his balance but his legs were now so wobbly
that he teetered backward through several steps until he pressed against a
section of the tent’s wall which stretched, stretched more, conformed to the
shape of Kim’s head and shoulders, then his head as well, but did not tear. He
reached equilibrium against this tension and came to a stop. Risking a glance
toward the door, he discovered Kim’s foot was caught on the black plastic flap.

Careful not to let the tent wall push him forward
enough to make him lose balance again, he eased away from it; then turned this
way and that until he’d freed her foot from the flap.

Carrying her up the chain ladder to her own bed inside
the pod was out of the question so he dropped down to one knee—another jarring
pain—and slid her off his shoulder onto his bed near the ladder’s bottom. As he
covered her with his blanket his arms shook drunkenly with fatigue.

“Tina!” He looked up at the pod. “I need your help.”

He grimaced as he examined Kim’s wound. The bleeding
had stopped but it still looked bad. He started fumbling with gear: pulling out
the antiseptics and bandages they’d collected while scavenging deck six.

Why doesn’t that woman wake up? Is she deaf?
He
put down the medicines, climbed the chain ladder and stuck his head into the
upside-down pod. “Tina wake up!”

Tina’s blankets didn’t move.

“Come on, Tina! You’ve got to wake up.” He reached in
and yanked the blankets away.

Tina squirmed and covered her face as though the
exceedingly dim light irritated her eyes. “Leave me alone,” she mumbled with a
slurred southern accent.

“Kim’s hurt! You’ve got to help!”

Tina sat up. “Kim’s hurt?”

“Yeah. Come on.” He climbed down.

She followed.

He fumbled with the medicines even worse now, dropping
things and repeatedly failing to open containers he should have opened easily.
Partly this was muscle fatigue, partly it was adrenaline, and partly it was the
fear that his beloved Kim might die.

Tina took the medicines out of his hands. He didn’t
argue. Her hands were steady. He watched for a moment as she proceeded to do
the doctoring, then he turned and began changing the batteries in his
flashlight.

“While you work on Kim I’m gonna secure the hall door
and search this hangar for Nikita. If she’s in here,” he said flatly, “I’m
going to kill her.” He screwed the end back on his flashlight, flipped it on,
grabbed a large wrench, swung the tent flap aside and stomped out into the
hangar.

_____

Tina found herself sitting alone with Kim, dabbing
white antiseptic cream onto an ugly swollen wound shaped like the side of her
pistol.
Yes, you go do that.
She smiled with genuine happiness.
I’ll
stay here and work on Kim.

She looked around at the miscellanea scattered within
the tent.
Damn, where’s a good ice-pick when you need one?
She shook her
head suddenly.
Oh, no, no, no. Can’t do anything that will make her bleed.
Blood would give me away. Can’t have that.

Tina tried to think clearly, logically—not always easy
when you’re having so much fun.
Mike had a hammer earlier. What did he do
with it? It’ll make the wound deeper, but maybe he won’t notice.

_____

After locking and barricading the control booth’s door
to the horizontal hall, Mike pointed his flashlight into every imaginable
hiding place in the control booth, hangar one’s airlock and of course all of
hangar number two: the dark corners, the tool and equipment storage
lockers—including those two currently being used as stairs. He even shone his
light up around the pod’s docking grapples: a location probably impossible to
reach without a rigid ladder twelve feet long: an item Corvus has never
carried.

Every step in this search, he took with his wrench held
high. He was ready— No. More than ready. He was
eager
to bring it down
on the head of Nikita Petrov. He wanted to see blood in her red hair; wanted to
watch her collapse; wanted to see her become as limp and unresponding as his
fair love. And then he wanted to kill her; to kill her with his own hands; to
beat the life out of her; to feel the life leave—

He stopped walking. The circle of illumination thrown
by his flashlight had fallen across red letters painted on the hangar wall.

You killed my Bull,

now I’ve killed your Kim.

The water is boiling,

let’s see you swim.

Bull!
Mike read it again.
William Bull
Dozier. Nikita’s definitely one of the smugglers. My Bull? Your Kim? Or maybe
she was Bull Dozier’s lover.

He stared at the words for a moment then shook his head
vigorously.
How does she do it? How does she get in here and out again
without us seeing her? Or hearing her?

Looking toward the hangar’s large outer door, he
squinted.
Soon it won’t matter. Very soon.

He turned and walked around to the tent flap, threw it
open and stepped inside.

Cradling Kim’s head in her lap, Tina smoothed Kim’s
clothing and stroked Kim’s forehead as though trying to comfort the unconscious
woman. A large white bandage was now wrapped around Kim’s head.

“How is she?

“Still out cold. I washed and dressed the wound but she
hasn’t responded to any stimulus.”

Mike stared at Kim’s slack jaw and closed eyes.

“The wound is bad,” Tina said, sounding genuinely
concerned. “She may pass into a coma. She may even—”

“Yes, yes; I know,” Mike said quickly.

“I guess now everything’s up to you and me.”

“Yeah,” Mike whispered, staring at Kim. “Just you and
me.”

Chapter Fourteen

“Just you and me,” Mike repeated absently, still
looking down at Kim. As he spoke the words an earlier thought returned:
I
never even kissed her goodbye. I never—

He shook himself; shook his entire body in a massive
effort to break free of his negativistic mental wanderings. He looked at Tina
and in a harsh tone that could easily have been misinterpreted as anger said,
“We’re leaving.”

Tina’s eyes lost their compassionate softness as they
left Kim and gaped at him. “What?”

“We’re leaving Corvus. Load all the supplies into the
pod.”

“Are you crazy?”

“It’s the only way we can survive.”

“But the ship said a pod is even less capable of
surviving solar passage than Corvus.”

“We’re going to use more than a pod.”

“You’ve run simulations of this?”

“Yes.”

She paused as if absorbing this change in plans; as if
searching out its ramifications. She looked at Kim. “What about her?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get her up and into the pod somehow.
You can count on that.”

During the next six hours Mike and Tina loaded pod
number two with everything they could think of: plastic food envelopes, squeeze
bladders of water, extra oxygen tanks from the hangar’s storage lockers, even
tools and spare parts. Mike didn’t want to forget anything. Once the pod was
launched, there would be no flying it back into the hangar. For the sake of
thoroughness, he took his time; it was one thing he still thought he could
judge.

He was wrong.

_____

Mike flipped open the door of a storage locker that,
because it was lying on its back, resembled some kind of cheap metal coffin.
If
no other way,
he thought, as he leaned down into it,
at least we can
kill Nikita by leaving her behind.

Days earlier, when Corvus first began spinning and the
centrifugal gee force had grown strong, six of the ten maintenance storage
lockers inside the hangar had broken loose from their wall brackets and crashed
to the ceiling, denting themselves to varying degrees and damaging some of
their contents. Searching for things that might prove useful, Mike now dug
through each.

Tina swung the tent flap aside. “Hey, does it feel warm
in here to you?”

Mike pulled his head out of the locker and straightened
to his full height. He held a short black oxygen hose in his right hand and a
clear plastic box of assorted O-rings in his left. “I thought I was just
sweating from hauling so much stuff up that chain ladder.”

Tossing the gear in his hands back into the storage
locker, he turned and looked at the hangar’s large outer door. Beyond it lay
the vacuum of space—and the raw heat of the sun. Stepping across the room, he
reached out a hand to touch it but recoiled before contact. He looked
surprised.

“What’s wrong?” Tina asked, still standing in the
tent’s doorway.

Holding his hands a foot from the door as if warming
them before a fireplace, his expression changed to one of worry. “It’s hot.”

“How hot?”

“Enough to burn skin.” He frowned at the large door’s
metallic surface. “We’ve got to finish loading and launch the pod.”

“But I thought solar passage wasn’t until late
tomorrow.”

“It’s not,” he said. “Maybe this door isn’t as well
insulated as the rest of the ship. There’s no telling how fast the air
temperature in here is going to rise. We’d better hurry.”

He gave the lopsided black tent a fretful look, then
quickly crossed the hangar and entered it. The air inside seemed a little
cooler. Leaning down, he listened to Kim breathe but didn’t hear anything.

Behind him, Tina asked, “Is she—?”

Lowering himself onto one knee, he brought his face to
within an inch of Kim’s. He felt a fleeting sensation of warmth as her breath
brushed delicately across his lips. “Yes,” he announced, “she’s still alive.”

The high gravity combined with Kim’s rag doll-like
limpness turned the task of getting Kim into a vacuum suit into a major
undertaking which consumed a full twenty minutes. It was, of course, not the
one she wore while returning to the ship.

Mike eased a helmet onto her head and closed its
latches. The helmet would act as a bump-guard, to protect her head and
especially her head wound from further impacts. He expected the launch to be a
rough ride.

Tina donned a suit—except for its helmet—then climbed
up and into the pod. This left Mike to begin implementing the method he’d
invented of raising Kim high enough to get her through the pod’s hatch.

First, he tied a yellow nylon rope to her suit’s belly
ring. He then climbed the chain ladder carrying a pulley he’d found in one of
the storage cabinets. He hung it from the docking grapples above the pod’s
hatch and threaded the yellow rope through it.

As he climbed back down to Kim, he paused seven times
to tie eight-inch-wide loops in the rope. The loops were spaced about eighteen
inches apart and extended almost from the pulley down to the hangar ceiling, as
though to form some kind of crude rope ladder.

Standing on the ceiling, he rested a moment, as sweat
ran down his face and dripped from his chin. He wiped it out of his eyebrows
with the back of his hand to prevent it from running into his eyes.

Grabbing the loose end of his new rope ladder, he
pulled it taut. Kim’s belly ring stood up.

Placing his foot in the lowest loop, he eased his full
weight onto it and forced it down to the ceiling. Kim’s head, hands and feet
all remained in place; but her back arched as her stomach lifted into the air.

Raising his other foot, he slipped it into the next
loop. When he forced it down to the ceiling Kim became airborne. She rotated
slowly; unwinding whatever unseen twists the rope had accumulated while not in
use.

Mike continued his pantomime of climbing until he’d
hauled Kim level with the pod’s open hatch; then he called to Tina, who reached
out and dragged her inside. With Kim aboard, Mike began pulling all of the
tent’s gray duct tape and black plastic sheeting loose from the pod’s hull.

The air outside the tent had grown surprisingly hot.
Like the air rising from a just-opened kitchen oven, it burned his eyes and, when
he inhaled, burned in his nostrils and throat. He tried to hold his breath and
hurry but some parts of the tent tore rather than letting go and he had to
double back to get them.

Removing it all was vital. Survival depended on it.
Anything on the outside of the pod that increased its absorption of light or
radiant heat would make their odds worse—and the odds were already poor.

Mike began to wish he’d put his suit on before tearing
the tent down; but once the job was complete, he pulled on a suit and found
himself able to breathe normally. The hissing sound of his breath echoed back
at him from the inside surface of his helmet. The echo was crisp and harsh;
still he found it wonderfully soothing, perhaps because of its long-standing
familiarity.

As he walked toward one of the hangar’s corners—the one
to the right of the large outer door—he kicked huge wads of wrinkled black
plastic out of his way. Shining his flashlight into the corner’s darkness, he
spotted his target: a small access panel located nine feet up the wall.

A narrow ladder built into a shallow recess in the wall
between the access panel and the large outer door stretched the entire fourteen
feet from the ceiling up to the floor. Its ten inch rungs were striped
diagonally in red and yellow.

Mike climbed to the access panel, opened its little
door and took a few seconds to read its upside-down instructions. He grasped a
handle labeled:
Warning! Emergency Use Only—Bleed Hangar Air to Ship’s
Exterior
.

Rotating the handle ninety degrees rewarded him with a
noise so loud it hurt his ears even through his helmet. The locomotive-like
sound filled the hangar and shook the rung in his hand as well as the one
beneath his feet.

The large outer door had no windows, but Mike didn’t
need a window to know what was happening outside: two great jets of gas were
spraying out into the vacuum from twin ports beside the large door.

Like giant airlocks, Corvus’s two hangars were designed
to withstand the differing structural stresses involved in containing air,
versus containing no air. When filled with air, a hangar’s large outer door was
under great stress; typically holding inside the ship dozens of tons of air
pressure—measured a few pounds per square inch at a time. On the other hand,
when empty of air, stress was shared unequally amongst the floor, ceiling,
walls, airlock and control booth window—all shoving in the same direction:
inward toward the hangar’s center. The air in the rest of the ship was, quite
literally, trying to crush the hangar like an empty soft drink can.

The sound in Mike’s ears faded to a whisper, indicating
there was very little air rushing to create the noise and very little air left
in the hangar to carry the vibrations of that noise from the walls to Mike.

Time for the next step: opening the large outer door.
Normally this would be done by electric motors under the control of the ship’s
computer—an impossibility now, thanks to the ship-wide power outage. Closing
the first access panel, Mike opened another below it which revealed the emergency
back-up opening mechanism—a hand-crank. He flipped the handle out and started
cranking. The door gave a mighty shudder and began moving downward.

It was a segmented roll-up door that slid along a pair
of tracks hidden in the walls. In some ways it resembled a heavily-reinforced
garage door. Its individual foamed aluminum segments were hinged and
interlocking, and each possessed a single gasket running around the periphery
of its mating surface.

Whenever the air pressure inside the hangar deck was
greater than that outside—which always remained zero—the gaskets were pressed
tightly together. But when the inside and outside pressures were both the
same—again, always zero—the gaskets relaxed. This provided an additional
measure of safety, since the door could never be opened unless the gaskets were
relaxed, which could only happen when the hangar contained vacuum.

Mike noticed, after turning the hand crank six times,
that a narrow strip of door had disappeared into the ceiling below and a narrow
gap of starry sky had appeared up near the floor. Two more cranks and a thin
slab of sunlight broke through. He paused to watch the brilliant line of
illumination sweep upward across the torn and wrinkled pieces of black plastic
tent scattered about the ceiling, then across the pure white hull of the pod,
across the hangar’s grey textured floor and then disappear. Seconds later it
returned to sweep up through the hangar again. And then again; and again; and
again.

Turning off his flashlight, he stuck it in his suit’s
thigh pocket and resumed cranking.

Twenty rotations later, he stopped to rest. The gap was
larger, over a foot wide, but he still had thirteen feet to go.

More cranking and sunlight began slapping him across
the face. He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced in pain. The light on his face
felt hot; not warm or sultry, but painfully, scaldingly hot; hot enough that a
sixty second exposure could blister skin. This was his first taste of the true
danger that lay ahead.

Flipping his helmet’s gold-plated face-shield down over
his faceplate helped a lot, though not as much as he would have liked. It
reflected about ninety percent of the light.
If this sunlight were
continuous my suit’s life support would overheat in three or four minutes; then
I’d be cooked.

He spent the next twenty minutes alternately cranking
and resting; during which time the flashes of sunlight grew longer and longer
but no more frequent. When he finally had the large outer door cranked
completely open to the black sky and flashing sun, he climbed down from the
recessed rungs and walked back to the chain ladder hanging down from the pod.

Pausing for one last look at Gideon’s shrouded body,
Mike tried not to imagine what exposure to raw vacuum must be doing to his
corpse right now. He’d considered moving Gideon into the control booth before
opening the large door but there was no way he could lift the overweight
gentleman; not by hand and not with a single pulley. A system of two pulleys
might have given him the leverage needed, but that would have taken time they
just didn’t have.

Goodbye, my friend.

Mike climbed up and into the pod, unhooked the chain
ladder and tossed it away, then closed and sealed the hatch. Laying on his side
on top of food envelopes and water bladders, he squirmed to look around the
pod’s tiny cabin.
Kind of dark in here.

He raised his gold face-shield.
That’s better.

The setting resembled the interior of an oversized
terrestrial automobile: one that had been flipped upside-down and stuffed with
half the contents of a convenience store. The automobile analogy was not exact;
while the pod did have a pair of front bucket seats, it had no seats in the
rear. That space was intended for cargo, as evidenced by the coils of yellow
nylon rope and the stainless steel tie-off rings mounted on the walls. The
entire cabin was no more than eight feet long, eight feet wide and five feet
high. The hatch Mike now lay next to was located in the center of the rear
wall.

Reaching to his collar, he turned on his suit’s radio.
Should
have done that earlier in case Tina needed me. Too late to worry about it now.
He cleared his throat. “Attention, pod two, this is your commander: Mike
McCormack. How are your systems?”

An unfamiliar voice of indeterminate sex said, “All
systems are functioning normally.”

“Good. Bring the interior lights up and flood the cabin
with air.”