Chapter 2
Inside the shuttle, Cory switched off the comm and turned back to the first row of seats where the beaten minister was strapped in. A quick check revealed a strong pulse, so he was in no imminent danger, but his appearance was shocking.
His clothes were ripped, his hair tussled, and his jaw bore a ripening bruise. A cut over his left eye had been bleeding for some time and, in the absence of gravity, the blood had pooled up in his hair. Presumably he had taken part in some struggle before taking off and had barely managed to strap himself in before losing consciousness, but Cory had no time to speculate about the details.
Checking his watch, Cory saw that only four minutes remained to get the minister aboard the transport before Norm’s deadline. He released the seat belt, pulled him free, and took several luggage tethers from under the seat. He quickly wrapped one around the man’s torso to restrain his arms, and two more to bind his legs together. Once he was easier to manage, Cory took him by the waist and tugged his freefloating body out of the shuttle and into the docking bay.
Within seconds, the door from the main station shaft opened and the crew came pouring in. “Out of the way!” shouted Cory, and they cleared a path to the door. “Jackknife, grab his feet. Ramon, watch his head. And somebody get his bags. Now!”
Everyone scrambled into action. Several men helped to thread the minister down the station’s long shaft toward Module A, where the transport was already charging its engines. The others formed a water bucket brigade, passing his bags to each man down the line.
Once the crew reached Module A, they ferried the minister to the sealed airlock. Cory checked the radio and found that Norm had indeed shut off all communications. The rumbling of the transport’s engines steadily increased and everyone realized it would soon undock and slip into space.
A single thought seemed to strike them all at once. They grabbed whatever was available—pipes, wrenches, hammers—and began beating on the airlock with all their might. The noise was deafening. A torrent of vile curses aimed at Norm was nearly lost within the wild din of steel on steel.
Finally Ramon signaled for everyone to stop. “Look, look!” he shouted, pointing to the lock wheel that was slowly being turned from the other side. They cheered and stepped clear as the door swung open.
Norm Casper, a wiry man with thick glasses and close cropped gray hair, emerged from the airlock. “All right, all right, get your preacher in here. But he may be the reason the rest of us die.”
“No,” Ramon countered, “he’ll be the reason you live.”
“We don’t have time to argue. Just do it. And no bags!” He kicked a canvas bag out of one man’s hands and back into the docking bay. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? We don’t have enough fuel to carry anything else. Probably not even to carry him. If it were up to me—”
A young, black, zero-G welder named Tyrell Richards jumped in. “Look here, man, it ain’t up to you. We didn’t bring him all this way just to have you say no. There’s more of us than there is of you, so get out of the way.”
Norm backed down. Tyrell and Ramon flew past him with the minister between them.
“Are you crazy?” Norm shouted at Cory. “No bags and no corpses!”
“We don’t know what happened to him,” Cory said, “but he’s alive. You can tend to him once you've left.”
Norm shot Cory a vicious glare and then turned away without a word.
Inside the transport, Tyrell went ahead of Ramon in search of somewhere to put the unconscious man. The interior had been stripped down to the hull, and everything but the cockpit’s instrument panel and pilot’s chair had been removed to lighten the transport.
Tyrell found himself inside a large open area with dozens of sedated men lashed to the floor, ceiling, and walls. The dim lighting and motionless bodies lined in neat rows had a chilling effect on him and he turned back to Ramon. “Let’s get the preacher man tied down and get out of here. This place is like a morgue.”
Ramon nodded agreement and Norm came up from behind a moment later. “What happened to him? Looks like hell”
Tyrell locked eyes with Norm instantly. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know to show respect?” It took Norm a moment to realize his gaffe, but he showed no concern over it. Tyrell looked back down again. “It looks like somebody done beat him up pretty good, though.”
Norm released an exasperated breath. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means I can’t afford to sedate him until he comes to on his own. Not only have you cost us more fuel, but now you’ve cost us more air.” He threw his hands up in disgust. “Now, just tie him down and get out of here so we can leave.”
Tyrell looked around and saw that all the other passengers had been laid on foam pads and secured to support beams running the length of the transport. He removed his belt, and Ramon followed suit, lashing the minister to the floor just outside the cockpit. Then Tyrell took off his jacket and gently laid it under his head.
Without a word to Norm, they rejoined the crew in the docking bay. The steel door shut behind them, the lock spun closed, and within a minute the transport had departed.
Silence lingered for a long moment as everyone stared blankly at each other, uncertain what to do next once the emotional intensity had subsided. Then Jackknife, the tireless antagonist of sobriety, broke the silence with a loud shout. “Beer time!”
“On duty?” asked one of the men with pungent sarcasm. They all turned to Cory for a response.
“Why not? Put it on my tab.”
The room burst into cheers, and everyone spilled into the station’s main shaft, racing for the kitchen at the far end.
Cory smiled, possibly for the first time that day, and turned his attention to the window. He watched for a full minute as the transport slowly faded from view into the darkness of space. When no trace remained, he turned to leave and found he was not alone. Tyrell floated several feet away, an unmistakable longing in his eyes.
“Tyrell, I thought you’d be with the others.”
“Now’s the time for thinking, not drinking,” he said. He continued peering intently out the window, never meeting Cory’s eyes. Cory looked back to the window, thinking some trace of the transport must have still been visible, but only a dusting of stars adorned the blackness.
“It’s gone, Tyrell, and no amount of wishing is going to bring it back.”
Tyrell continued to stare out the window. “It’s funny. When I was in that transport, all I wanted to do was get out. It was spooky. But now—”
“Now you want what we all want, and what we can’t have. Look, we all knew the risks involved in coming this far out in space, so far from even the nearest colony. That’s why we were rewarded with the highest level of hazard pay.”
“But that don’t help the family we leave behind.”
“The money? No. Nothing’s going to make their loss any easier to deal with, but at least you can rest assured that the insurance will take care of them for the rest of their lives.”
Tyrell flinched and quickly looked away.
“Tyrell, you do have—you didn’t get the mandatory insurance waived, did you?”
Tyrell looked back up with a flash of anger in his watery eyes. “I had to, okay? I had to! It was more money up front. It was my first real job and I didn’t know no better. I saw how much it cost and knew we needed the money then. I argued and stopped up my ears when they told me I shouldn’t do it, but we owed money. Lots of money. You should see my momma, Cory. She was already pretty old when she had me, and now her hands are all knotted up and her back is stooped. She can’t support herself and my pop left a lot of bills when he died. Who’s gonna take care of her now?”
Cory was silent for a moment. “What you did was a mistake, but you already know that. As for what you can do now, I don’t know. I’m wishing I could say or do something, but I don’t know what it would be, son. I’m at a loss, and I can only hold out hope that they were telling us the truth?
??that there really is a chance we’ll live through this. But if there’s thinking left to be done, I hope you can come up with an idea nobody else has thought of yet.”
Ramon’s voice broke over the intercom. “Cory, you still there?”
Cory's eyes remained locked with Tyrell’s for a moment, then he turned toward the intercom panel. “Yes. What is it?”
“We’ve got a problem.”
“Other than the obvious?” He glanced at Tyrell with a gentle smile, but got no response.
“Yeah, there’s more,” Ramon said. “When we met you in the shuttle bay, I went into the shuttle and tossed the preacher’s stuff out to the guys. Then I followed everybody to Module A. Nobody else went inside—I would have remembered.”
Cory’s face took on added gravity. “What are you getting at, Ramon?”
“The door to the engine compartment in the back of the shuttle was locked. I know, ‘cause I tried to open it and look for more stuff. Sometime since then I lost my pocketknife, so I went back to check on it. The door was wide open.”
“So maybe someone went in after we got the preacher on the transport.”
“No way, man. When you say ‘free beer,’ nobody turns that down. Everybody but you and Tyrell made a B-line for the kitchen. The only other guy onboard is Biggs, and he’s been holed up in the bunkroom for hours. Somebody else was on that shuttle. I’m positive.”
Cory rubbed his chin absently as he thought it over for a moment. “Then it would have to be the guy who attacked the preacher, or at least someone who knows what happened to him. Maybe a convict that planned to throw him off board and take control of the shuttle?”
“Yeah, could be. Or maybe he was already on board when the preacher came in, so he hid. Then the autopilot program locked the doors and lifted off. But whatever he was up to, I’d say he took out the preacher for sure. There was plenty of blood back in the engine compartment, too.”
“And now that he’s on board, there’s no telling where he is or what he plans to do.”
“Cory, it’s a problem—him being here and all—but I just don’t know how big a problem. Is it worth—”
“Look, Ramon, I’ve always been an optimist, and I plan to be one for another few hours yet. I won’t have that cut short by a wrench to the back of the head from somebody who’s got nothing to lose. And as long as it’s still my watch, we’ll have order on this station, and maybe justice, too. Besides, if this really is the last crisis we have to face, it’s also the last mystery we have the opportunity to solve. Meet me in my quarters.”