Sharp groaned and slumped in his chair after a long moment of staring at Kira with an open mouth. Tarn was quicker to react, blurting out, “Them pirates followed us for a year?”
Kira shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. I think they were probably somebody else though.”
“ Who would be this far out?” Sharp perked up.
“ No idea, Sir, but more importantly we missed the asteroid belt by about eleven months. It’s damn near a light year away from us, but we didn’t just shoot past it, we also were pitched up about five degrees. Although the recent fight skewed us some more.”
“ So where are we headed?”
“ Out there…Sir.” Kira said. “Deep space. Deeper, we’re already outside the rim.”
The silence on the bridge was agonizing until, after a pregnant pause, Captain Sharp exhaled softly. “How are our maneuvering reserves?”
Kira called up another display on the main screen. “Seventy percent, Sir.” She turned to look at him, not sure what else she could or should do. He nodded as he looked at it, then stood up slowly. “Do we have broadcast ability?”
“ Yes Captain,” Eric said over the speakers. Kira noted his voice sounded subdued, then again she supposed not a one of them sounded the best. Their situation had passed desperate a while ago, now even bleak was an optimistic description. “Radio signal or direct transmission.”
“ I’ll be in my room,” Sharp announced abruptly. He paused, looking at both Kira and Tarn alternately. “If either of you have anything you want to say to anyone left behind, I suggest you figure them out now.”
Sharp left the two of them with that somber thought. Kira looked at Tarn and found her vision skewed by unshed tears. She blinked them away and took a deep breath that had potential to turn into a sob. She kept it controlled and offered the ex-Marine a faint smile. “Ex-Marine?”
He nodded. “Discharged for a little misunderstanding with some terrorists that took over a space station.”
Kira felt the muscles in her back stiffen even as the new memories flooded through her mind. “Blue Vistas space station?” He nodded. “You used a particle accelerator cannon to blow a hole through the hull! You killed nearly two hundred people, most of them civilians!”
Tarn shrugged. “Got the job done.”
“ You’re a cold blooded son of a bitch!” She hissed.
Tarn chuckled. The chuckle turned deeper as it went on, until he was laughing at her. Kira glared at him, ready to rise out of her seat and shut him up forcefully. She refrained either from a sense of curiosity or futility. They were all doomed, she figured, why not get her questions answered instead of just putting her foot through his teeth.
“ Wasn’t no warm and fuzzy girl that put down seven pirates,” He finally said. “Don’t know what you done girl, but I reckon you and I got something in common. And I’m not talking about lusting for that engineer’s horse- dick neither!”
“ I lost a friend on Blue Vistas. A civilian that got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and you spaced her.” Kira stared at him, feeling a sense of calm that scared her. It came from deep within her and, she suspected, it was a leftover from Emily. The friend she mentioned, she was a friend of Emily’s. Or at least as close to a friend as her alter-ego had ever had. Kira had never known her or known of her, but now she could see her faintly freckled pale face with a startling clarity. Her name had been Angela, but Emily had called her Angel. Especially when Kira’s hand went to her mouth to hide her gasp. Tarn frowned. “What? You was looking like you was about to shoot me now this?”
“ She was more than a friend,” Kira whispered. She was shocked. She’d never known. Another woman? She wondered if there had been any others.
“ Sorry,” Tarn shrugged, clearly anything but sorry. “Older I get, smaller the universe ends up being. You want some payback you come and get it. Maybe I’m old and fat and out of shape, but I still got what they put in me. Might be a good way to go — better than waiting for us to run out of food or die in my sleep.”
“ I’m not going to kill you.” Kira put the memories of Emily’s long lost friend away. That had been over sixteen years ago, she realized. Seventeen now, considering their prolonged sleep. “I think you’re kind of a loser, but my social options are limited.”
“ I’ll drink to that,” Tarn said.
Kira spared him a withering glare then turned back to her station. With nothing else to do but wait for the end to come she figured she might as well figure out what their future held.
Chapter 12
Each member of the Rented Mule’s crew recorded their messages privately. When it came Kira’s turn she realized she had no one left behind her. No family and no friends. She’d only had herself and, though she’d searched her memory long and hard, she could only find one resemblance of a relationship and that had been to Angela. Emily’d enjoyed a few trysts here and there — with men, Kira was happy to remember — but that was the end of it. Instead she rattled off instructions to have her various accounts, over a dozen of them, donated to charitable organizations that specialized in helping to provide aid and assistance to troubled children.
With that finished, the crew gathered on the bridge to plan what would become of the rest of their lives. It was a somber meeting, with none of them saying much. Eric stood next to her station but they did not reach for one another. Kira longed for the comfort of human touch but she thought it would be cruel to the rest of the crew. They had no one to turn to for solace.
“ All right, with any luck our messages will be received in a year or so. We’re broadcasting a distress signal, but we’re also stuck travelling away from help faster than most ships would risk going. A military vessel is our only hope for a quick recovery, and by quick I mean about three years.” Sharp looked around the bridge at his crew. He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a sorry lot of castoffs from society, but I guess I can’t think of anyone better to fly into the great unknown with. Well that’s not true, maybe some gene-bred triplets trained by a courtesan service might be a little more enjoyable…”
“ Sir,” Kira spoke up after giving everyone a chance to pretend they were amused by the Captain’s joke. “I’ve been studying the new readings our sensors are pulling in. It’s light years away still, but there’s a star close by. The other charts don’t make mention of it but that could be because of the angle we’re at, it looks like there’s a particularly dense asteroid belt ringing the system.”
“ Close by and light years away?” Sharp asked, pointing out her contradictory terms.
“ Sorry,” she said, seeing his point, “but yes, it’s less than 4 light years from us. That’s a little under eight years.”
“ Then what?” Tarn snorted.
Kira refused to favor him with even a glance. “Then we see what they’ve got there. Maybe we can find a planet big enough to hook us in orbit and sling us back around. We might even pick up some speed so that we head back core-ward at a faster speed.”
Tarn grunted derisively. Sharp stared at the display and then at her, nodding his head as his eyes lost focus. She glanced up at Eric and saw him staring at her with a hint of a smile on his face. “Eight years?” Sharp muttered. “Another eight years back…”
“ It’s a long shot, Sir,” Kira reminded them all.
“ But it’s better than anything else we got,” Sharp finished for her. “All right, do what you have to so we can get there. It’s not like we’re using our fuel for anything else. Then we’ll get the ship ready for a deep sleep and go for it. Our engines will run for a couple hundred years, but that’s just energy. We’ve got the chemicals on hand for a couple months of food and water, more if we go sparingly, and probably twenty years worth of cold sleep chemicals and nutrients.”
“ You’re talking about a deep sleep, not just a few months at a time?” Eric asked. Kira glanced up at him and, in spite of her earlier concerns, reached out to take his hand in hers.
“ Yeah, and it won’t be easy coming out with all of us down but as long as nothing messes up our computers again we should be able to do it.”
