He found the pulser unit in under the counter storage, taped it to his wrist and handed himself across the bridge, fighting the spiral drift along to the right-hand corridor, a controlled stagger with right foot on the tiled footing curve and left on the deck. He got the Pharmaceuticals he wanted and brought them back to his place on the bridge, another stagger down the footings and swing along the hand grips. Then he knelt down in the pit and used tape and braces to rig her as she had been rigged before, taped the drugs he would need for jump to the side of the armrest where he could get at them; taped down some of the safety controls—also illegal; he set up the rig for the sanitation kit, because he would need that too, much as he dreaded it.
A second trip, rightward, this time, past sealed cabins, into the narrow confines of the galley and galley storage. He filled water bottles, and took an armful of them back to the bridge, jammed them into the brace he had long ago rigged near the command console… scared, if he let himself think about it. He swallowed such feelings, bobbed his head up now and again to check scan, down again to open up the underdeck storage where he had shoved some of the dried goods, not to have to suit up for the chill of the holds to hunt for them. He knelt there counting the packets out, taped them where he could get at them from the chair. His braced limbs shook from the strain of G. He dropped a packet and lunged after it, taped it where it belonged.
The lane still showed clear. He crawled up and held onto the back of the cushion, staring at the instruments, finally edged his way back to one of the brown plastic bunks at the aft bulkhead, to give his back a little relief from the strain. His eyes stung with fatigue. He rested his hands beside him, arms pulled askew by the spiral stress of acceleration, leaned his head against the bulkhead, not really comfortable, but it was a change from the long-held position in the cushion, and he could get the com or the controls from here if he had to.
There were compartments all about the ring, private quarters. Diametrically opposite the bridge was the loft, where the children had been… he never went around the ring that far. This was home, this small space, these bunks aft of the bridge, plastic mattresses patched with tape and deteriorating with age. One had been his when he was ten, that over there, nearest lie partition spinward; and there had been Papa Lou’s, which he never sat on; and one his mother’s; he had had brothers and sisters and cousins once, and there had been three children under six, cousins too. But Papa Lou had vented them and old Ma’am too, when their boarders turned ugly and it was clear what they were going to do.
They had had Lucy’s armament, but that had been helpless against a carrier and its riderships; they had had only two handguns on the ship… and the boarders who had ambushed them in the nullpoint had said they were not touching crew, only cargo. It had been Lucy’s clear choice then, open the hatch or be blown entirely. But they lied, the Mazianni, pirates even then, in the years when they had called themselves the Company Fleet and fought for Pell and Earth. They respected nothing and counted life nothing, and into such hands Papa Lou had surrendered them… not understanding.
He himself had not understood. He had not imagined. He had looked at the armored, faceless invaders with a kind of awe, a child’s respect of such power. He had—for that first few moments they had been aboard—wanted to be one of them, wanted to carry weapons and to wear such sleek, frightening armor—one brief, ugly temptation, until he had seen Papa Lou afraid, and begun to suspect that something evil had come, something far less beautiful inside the armor, that had gotten into the ship’s heart. He always felt guilt when he recalled that… that he had admired, that he had wanted to frighten others and not be frightened—he reasoned with himself that it was only the glitter that had drawn him, and that any child would have reacted the same, in the confusion, in the shaking of reliable references, in ignorance, if not in innocence. But he always felt unclean.
Most of it had happened here, on the bridge, in the commonroom and the corridor, in this widest part of the ship where they had gathered everyone but the children, and where the boarders started showing what they meant to do. But Papa Lou had gotten to the command chair and voided the part of the ship where the children and the oldest had taken refuge, before they shot him; and most of them had died, shot down in the commonroom and on the bridge; and some of them had been taken away for slower treatment.
But three of them, himself and old Mitri and Cousin Ross, had lain there in the blood and the confusion because they were half dead—himself aged ten and standing with crew because he had slipped around the curve and gotten to his mother’s side. They had not died, they three, which was Ross’s doing, because Ross was mad-stubborn to live, and because after they had been left adrift, Ross had dragged himself from beside the bunk where he had fallen on him and Mitri, and gotten the med kit that was spilled all over where the pirates had rifled it for drugs. That was where his mother had been lying shot through the head: he recalled that all too vividly. She had gotten one of the boarders at the last, because they had given the women the two guns—they needed them most, Papa Lou had said—and when Papa Lou vented the children his mother had shot one of the boarders before they shot her, got an armored man right in the faceplate and killed him, and they dragged him off with them when they left the ship, probably because they wanted the armor back. But Aunt Jame had died before she could get a clear shot at any of them.
Here they had fallen, here, here, here, twelve bodies, and more in the corridor rightward, and himself and Mitri and Ross.
Those were his memories at times like this, fatigued and mind-numbed, or cooking a solitary meal in the galley, or walking past vacant cabins, sights that washed out all the happier past, everything that had been good, behind one red-running image. Everywhere he walked and sat and slept, someone had died. They had scrubbed away all the blood and made the plastic benches and the tiles and the plating clean again; and they had vented their dead at that lonely nullpoint, undisturbed once the pirate had gone its way—sent them out in space where they probably still drifted, frozen solid and lost in infinity, about the cinder of an almost-star. It was a clean, decent disposal, after the ugliness that had gone before. In his mind they still existed in that limbo, never decayed, never changed… they went on traveling, no suit between them and space, all the starry sights they had loved passing continually in front of their open, frozen eyes—a company of travelers that would stay more or less together, wherever they were going. All of them. Only Ma’am and the babies had gone ahead, and the others would never overtake them.
Mitri had died out on the hull one of the times they had had to change Lucy’s name, when they had run the scam on Pan-paris, and it had gone sour—a stupid accident that had happened because the Mazianni had stripped them of equipment they needed. Ross had spent four hours and risked his life getting Mitri back because they had thought there was hope; but Mitri had been dead from the first few moments, the pressure in the suit having gone and blood having gotten into the filters, so Ross just called to say so and stripped the suit and let Mitri go, another of Lucy’s drifters, but all alone this time. And he, twelve, had sat alone in the ship shivering, sick with fear that something would happen to
Ross, that he would not get back, that he would die, getting Mitri in.
Leave him, he had yelled at Ross, his own cowardice, before he had even known that Mitri was dead; he remembered that; and remembered the lonely sound of Ross crying into the mike when he knew. He had thrown up from fright after Ross had come in safe. Another lonely nullpoint, those points of mass between the burning stars that jumpships used to steer by; and he could not have gotten Lucy out of there, could not have handled the jump on his own, if he had lost Ross then. He had cried, after that, and Mitri had haunted him, a shape that tumbled through his dreams, the only one of Lucy’s ghosts that reproached him.