wash my face and do my teeth?”
The medic gave him a distressed look.
“Comb my hair, at least?”
“Be quick.”
Nine minutes later, Victor and the medic were standing before the sliding partition of the captain’s quarters. The medic rapped lightly on the5 bulkhead.
“Enter,” came the captain’s voice.
Her quarters were a surprise to Victor: very feminine, pale pink covers on the bunk, an ornate vase on the desk filled with colorful flowers. Artificial, of course, he thought.
Cheena Madagascar herself was a collection of contradictions. She wore a set of jet black coveralls with a bright pink scarf around her throat, its ends tucked into her unbuttoned collar. Soft doeskin boots and a wide black belt studded with asteroidal silver, midnight dark hair cropped military style close to her skull, but silver rings glittering with gems on seven of her fingers and silver earrings dangling from her lobes. She was no taller than Victor, almost as slim as the medic, but her tight coveralls showed ample bosom and hips. Cosmetic nanotherapy, he guessed.
Without preamble, she demanded of the medic, “You gave this man alcohol to drink?”
“Yes, ma’am, I did,” the medic whispered.
She turned to Victor and he saw that her eyes were the same gold-flecked brown as the medic’s. “You got yourself so plastered that you couldn’t report for duty?”
“That’s right,” Victor answered.
“Or maybe it was an excuse to take a day off?”
“No. Not that.”
The captain glared at him. “Not that, huh?”
“Not that,” he repeated.
She turned to the medic. “You may go.” Before the younger woman had a chance to turn around, the captain added, “And no more dispensing alcohol. To anyone. Understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Barely audible.
“Get out of here.”
The medic fled, leaving Victor alone with the captain.
“Do you have any excuse for your behavior?”
Victor thought of the mother and baby he had recovered. But he said, “Not really.”
“Not really, huh? I heard you picked up something really stomach-turning. Is that right?”
“A woman. With a baby in her arms.”
“Upsetting.”
Before he realized he was saying it, Victor revealed, “I have a wife and children somewhere out in the Belt…” He stopped himself.
The captain stared at him for a long moment. Then she said, more softly, “I have a family too. I keep them with me.”
He recognized the sculptured cheekbones, the gold-flecked eyes. “The medic?”
“One of my daughters. The other one’s an engineer with the flight crew.”
“Is your husband aboard too?” he asked.
“Never had one. Never wanted one. Cloning works fine.”
Victor’s insides felt hollow, his legs weak. “I don’t know where my family is now.”
She seemed to stiffen, and drew herself up to her full height, eye to eye with Victor. “Well, you’re aboard my ship now and you’ll do the work you’ve signed on to do. No more booze and no more days spent in your bunk. Understand me?”
“Yes, captain.”
“Report to the infirmary at once. I want you to take a full physical and psych exam. I want you detoxed; get that alcohol out of your bloodstream.”
“Yes, captain.” Victor turned to leave.
“At twenty hundred hours, report back here.”
He blinked with surprise. “Here?”
“To my quarters. Twenty hundred hours. Understand me?”
“Yes, captain.”
ORE SHIP
THE GALLEY
Pauline Zacharias wondered why they had these meetings in the galley. The family’s living quarters included a perfectly comfortable sitting room, but somehow whenever they had something to discuss the three of them always huddled together over the narrow table of the galley.
Like old-time families on Earth, she thought, coming together in the kitchen. Maybe it’s instinct. Gather where the food and warmth are centered, where the air smells of cooking and everybody feels at ease. But
Still, Pauline thought, it’s the closest thing to a safe cave that the children know.
Children, she thought. They’re not children anymore. Angela’s old enough to start a family of her own. And Theo, he’s aged five years in the past six months, working night and day to keep this ship’s systems going, to keep us alive.
Theo was sitting at the head of the little table, Angela on his left. Pauline herself sat with her back to the row of freezers and microwave ovens. She had placed a meager bowl of thawed fruit on the table and a glass of reconstituted juice at each of their three places.
Theo was saying, “I’ve been working with the navigation program at night, trying to figure out some way to cut our trip time down and get us back to the Ceres area in less than eight years.”
“And seven months,” Angela muttered.
“And four days,” Theo added, grinning at her. Pauline realized that six months ago he would have lost his temper with his sister. Now he simply let her grumbles roll off his back. Theo’s growing up, she thought. All this responsibility is making a man of him.
Angela is maturing too, she realized. She’s become a real help to Theo; she can run the command pod’s systems just as well as he can. Pauline smiled to herself: The idea of Theo and Angela working together on repairing the ship’s antennas would have been preposterous six months ago; yet they’ve slaved away at it together without fighting, without calling each other names. Even when it became painfully clear that they wouldn’t be able to get the antennas functioning again, they didn’t blame each other.
Theo blames his father, though. He says Victor didn’t store the proper supplies for repairing the antennas. Maybe he’s right. None of us expected to be attacked. None of us expected the antennas to be so badly damaged.
That was her greatest worry. Not that they were drifting halfway to Jupiter, alone and unable to call for help. Not that they might run out of food or have the recyclers break down past the point where they could be repaired. Pauline’s greatest worry was that Theo blamed his father for this, blamed Victor for not supplying the ship adequately, blamed him for running away and abandoning them.
“We might be able to cut the trip time in half,” Theo was saying, “but it’s an awfully risky maneuver.”
With an effort of will, Pauline focused her attention on what her son was telling her.
“We put it all on a graph,” Theo said, fingering the palm-sized remote in his hand.
“We?” Pauline asked.
“Angie and me.” He hesitated, then admitted, “Angie’s a lot better at math than I am.”
