It was craziness for Min to be out of her cabin under these conditions. She should have stayed webbed into her bunk. But this wasn’t the first crazy thing she’d done, when it needed doing. If she lived long enough, it wouldn’t be the last. Dolph had chimed her intercom and summoned her. Without hesitation she’d unsealed herself to respond.
He wanted her to meet him in sickbay.
He hadn’t offered her an escort, and she hadn’t asked for one. She knew the way. And the fewer people who were exposed to this kind of danger, the better. It was bad enough that he took the same risk he asked of her.
Something had happened.
Again.
She didn’t waste energy wondering what it was. Instead she concentrated on trying to regain her reflexes; on piloting herself down the corridor with as little wasted motion as possible.
The instant she heard the klaxons, she dove for the nearest handgrips; cleated her zero-g belt. The bridge crew would give the ship as much warning as they could, but sometimes that wasn’t much. One grip in each fist, her back against the bulkhead, she waited for thrust to hammer her in some direction she couldn’t predict and might not be able to survive.
Straight deceleration: she recognized it as soon as it hit. It wrenched her forward so hard that her aft hand pulled loose. If she hadn’t attached her belt first, the sudden weight would have flipped her face-first into the wall. But the belt caught her; snatched at her like the recoiling crack of a whip. Fortunately she remembered to go limp when her grip failed. Otherwise she might have ripped the muscles in her back.
Five seconds of hard burn. White lighting yawed across her field of vision, then cracked into bits of darkness. Her pulse moaned in her ears: her body twitched and jerked under the strain. Then it ended. She spent a moment bouncing back and forth across her belt’s attachment while her mass dissipated its stored inertia.
At this rate she might need sickbay herself. She could already tell that some of these bruises were going to hurt.
Resting, she waited for the bridge to tell the rest of the ship what would happen next.
Another bleat of the klaxons: less intense than the first; shorter. Almost immediately forward thrust eased to life, firing the dark to regain lost velocity. Because this push was more gentle, it took longer; but after a couple of minutes the ship-wide intercom piped an all clear.
“Secure from collision stations,” a woman’s voice told the ship. “We have twenty-eight minutes until we start jockeying for position on the next obstacle. Use the time.”
The intercom clicked silent like the sound of the carabiner on Min’s zero-g belt as she undipped it from the bulkhead cleat. At once she kicked herself into motion again.
Damn it, Dolph, she muttered silently. What’s the damn hurry? Why couldn’t you wait?
She knew, however, that Dolph had called her from his quarters rather than the bridge. Probably he’d been resting. When he’d asked her to meet him, he might not have been aware that Punisher was near a patch of open space.
Grimly she wondered what the hell was urgent enough to make him risk himself as well as her like this.
She saw a hint of the answer when she floated out of one of the main personnel lifts into the passage which led to sickbay, twenty meters off to her right.
The corridor was festooned with g-hammocks: at least twenty-five of them arced at intervals up and down the wails on both sides of the entrance to sickbay. And they were all occupied. Sickbay itself had space for ten, counting surgical tables as well as berths. This was the overflow.
Some kind of accident? Explosive decompression? Matter cannon attack? That wasn’t possible. Min would have felt it. Any damage powerful enough to hurt this many people would have, sent shock waves of concussion and clamor throughout the ship.
Concentrating too hard to curse, she coasted past the hammocks; slapped the palm-plate which opened the sickbay doors. They slid shut automatically behind her as she entered.
Dolph was waiting for her inside, along with another man identified by his uniform and insignia as Punisher’s medtech. They sat with their belts cleated to mobile stools which were slotted into tracks in the deck and run by servos so that sickbay’s personnel could work under zero g or combat. The two tables were empty, but all eight of the bunks were in use.
The medtech saluted Min. “Director Donner.” His id patch said “Foster.” He sounded wan; stretched too thin.
“Hope you weren’t hurt,” Dolph grunted in greeting. “I didn’t think this could wait until we hit clear space.”
Min returned Foster’s salute from the anchor of a handgrip, but her attention was fixed on Dolph. “What’s happened?”
He met her gaze for a moment, pursed his black lips. “A couple of things.” Then his eyes slid down to the deck as if he was too tired to go on looking at her. “But let’s take them one at a time.” He gestured toward the medtech. “Foster.”
“They aren’t hurt, Director,” Foster said on command. “I mean the ones outside. I couldn’t monitor that many of them if they were, but they aren’t. They’re sick. I’ve”—he faltered briefly—“never seen anything like it.”
From Min’s perspective, he didn’t seem old enough to have seen much of anything.
More than twenty-five of them? she protested to herself. What was this, some kind of epidemic? Resisting a surge of impatience, she asked, “Sick how?”
Foster shrugged like a wince. “Nausea. Vomiting. High blood pressure. Disorientation. Hallucinations.” He glanced at Dolph as if he were hoping for confirmation, then added, “Five of them told me separately that the walls are leaning on them. Trying to squash them.
“None of them are in danger. They aren’t sick enough to die. But the way they feel, they might prefer dying.”
Nearly half the crew—
Min growled through her teeth. “Sounds like they’ve been overdosing on stim and hype.”
Tension clenched Dolph’s shoulders; instinctive rejection. But he didn’t interject a retort.
“Actually”—Foster gave another uncomfortable shrug—“it sounds like SAD. Space adjustment disorder,” he explained unnecessarily. “The symptoms are classic.”
Because she feared that he might be right, she had to stifle an impulse to shout at him. “SAD?” Punisher was damaged, shorthanded, and worn-out. “A goddamn epidemic of SAD?” The whole vessel had already suffered too much in this system. “On an experienced ship like this?”
Now Dolph spoke. “That,” he breathed heavily, “is the problem. You don’t believe it. I don’t either.
“Director Dormer”—he pronounced her name and title with special precision as his weary gaze rose to her face—“I think we have a sick-out on our hands.”
Abruptly Foster slotted his stool away to one of the walls and began working at the main sickbay control panel, ostensibly checking the condition of his immediate patients. Apparently he agreed with his captain. Perhaps his sense of medical ethics barred him from saying so.
Sick-out. Stung by alarm and indignation, Min stilled herself; became as poised and motionless as her handgun. Not an epidemic: a protest. Mute, passive resistance to her orders. Disobedience which stopped short of mutiny. But the UMCP Code of Conduct made no provision for such an action. It was called “malingering”: it was a court-martial offense.
“Captain Ubikwe,” she asked softly, “what kind of ship are you running?”
Dolph’s mouth twisted bitterly. “As far as I can tell, it’s the kind I’ve been told to run.” Anger ached in his stained eyes. A moment later, however, he said, “She’s my ship, Min. My problem. I’ll deal with it. But there’s something I need from you first.”
Min waited like a weapon aimed at his head. Punisher had been turned aside from a much-needed leave so that she could chase a UMCP gap scout all the way to Massif-5—and then put Nick Succorso in command. This was the result.
That wasn’t Dolph’s responsibility. It was Min’s. And Warden Dios’.
&
nbsp; “I said a couple of things have happened,” Dolph went on, holding her glare. “The other may be worse.” He paused to search her face, then announced, “Trumpet has switched off her homing signal.”
She didn’t move; didn’t react. Nevertheless her hands burned as if magnesium flares had been lit in her palms. If Nick Succorso had been there in front of her, she might have started breaking his bones, one at a time.
“We didn’t lose it,” Dolph asserted flatly. “Class-1 homing signals are just too damn helpful to be lost. They tell you everything you need to reacquire them. And when they’re switched off, they tell you that, too.
“Trumpet,” he concluded, “is trying to get away from us.”
Min looked back at him as if she were impervious to surprise or shock. Past a fire which only felt like pain because she couldn’t act on it, she asked, “What is it you need from me?”
“I need an explanation,” he broke out in sudden passion. “I need to know who’s doing what to whom in this goddamn farrago.” But an instant later he stopped himself. “No, forget it. That was uncalled for. If you knew, you would have told me already.”
Controlling his emotions with formality, he said, “Director Donner, I need to know what we’re going to do now. How can we follow Trumpet if we don’t know where she’s headed?”
In silence, Min chewed flame and obscenities.
Warden Dios, you misguided, secretive sonofabitch, what the do you want from me?
Of course she saw Dolph’s point. To confront his crew’s fear and resistance would be costly for the whole ship. If his people refused him, hardened their position, they might all end up facing courts-martial. But if they backed down under pressure, they would lose respect for themselves—and cops more than anyone else survived on the strength of their respect for themselves. Why should Dolph try to persuade or intimidate his people back to work, if Punisher no longer had anything to do?
So what were Min’s choices?
Give up? Head home? Forget that she, too, needed self-respect? That questions which affected all human space rode with Angus, Nick, and Morn aboard the gap scout?
Or search for Trumpet’s particle trace? Quarter the complex sargasso of the system until the cruiser’s entire crew came down sick in earnest from simple strain and exhaustion?
Or call in VI Security, req help? Help which might take days to get organized?
Or give up in another way? Find a listening post, flare UMCPHQ, ask for instructions?
Or guess. Stake everything on her own judgment or intuition.
Slowly, choosing her words with care, she answered, “I said they might go looking for a lab. Let’s assume I’m right. How many bootleg research facilities are there in this system?”
Punisher had left her tour of duty around Massif-5 only a few days ago. Dolph Ubikwe had everything he’d ever known about the system at his fingertips.
“Six. That we’re aware of.”
Six? Shit. Min wrapped a hand around the butt of her gun to cool the fire in her palm. Massif-5 was heaven for illegals. “How many of those could Trumpet reach on the general heading of her last signal?”
Dolph gazed at her without blinking. “Two.”
“Just two? That helps.” She chewed her options for a moment, then asked, “Which of them is equipped to study drugs and mutagens? Which is likely to recognize Vector Shaheed’s reputation and let him work there?”
Nothing moved in Dolph’s face. He might have given up breathing as well as blinking. “Deaner Beckmann’s.”
Then he added, warning her, “But it’s murder to get to. A gap scout—any small ship—can maneuver in there a hell of a lot better than we can.”
As if she were saying, I don’t give a damn, Min announced, “That’s where we’re going.” She glanced at Foster’s back, cocked an eyebrow toward the corridor full of hammocks. “Unless you have a better idea.”
Snorting softly, Dolph lowered his head. “Shit, Min, all my ideas are better than that. But if I were in your place, I might make the same decision. At least I hope I would.” Memories of Massif-5 and damage seemed to weigh on his shoulders. Slowly at first, then faster and harder, he scrubbed his hands on his thighs. He might have been trying to generate courage by sheer friction.
Then he slapped his knees and looked up at her again. He’d reached a decision of his own. “In the meantime,” he drawled, “it would help if you happened to consider this an appropriate occasion to yell at me.”
He surprised her. Angrily she snapped, “Say what?”
“Chew me out,” he explained. “Give me a dressing-down.” Hard humor pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Blame me for this sudden outbreak of SAD. Say whatever you want, just so long as you mean most of it. And you’re loud about it.” When she went on staring at him as if he’d lost his mind, he grimaced. “I want them to hear you outside.
“You can do that, can’t you?” Sarcasm gave his voice a taunting edge. “You’ve been wanting to tear into me ever since you came aboard. As far as I can tell, the only real secret of command is being able to pick your occasions to get mad. So get mad at me now. Be in command.”
He met her glare of consternation with a sardonic smile, as if he’d tricked her somehow.
She wanted to retort, Chew yourself out, you bastard. You’re a big boy now—you can supply your own abuse. But the humor behind his provocative smile told her that she’d missed the point. He thought he had something to gain if his sick-out crew heard her—a phrase popular in the Academy—“stripping the paint off his hull.”
Maybe he knew what he was doing.
So she took a deep breath, held it for a moment while she tapped the depths of her old outrage. Then she spent the next three minutes doing her best to burn blisters into Dolph Ubikwe’s fat cheeks.
When she finished, Foster was staring at her with his mouth open. Mute laughter shook Dolph’s shoulders.
“Now you tell me,” she rasped, keeping her voice low. “Why is that funny?”
He shook his head. “Wait. You’ll see.”
Lugubriously, pretending that even in zero g his bulk was difficult to move, he undipped his belt and drifted off his stool. Wearing a look of exaggerated pathos, he palmed open the doors. As he floated out of sickbay, however, his expression resumed its earlier fatigue and concern.
Min followed him far enough to hold the palm-plate so that the doors stayed open.
Out among the g-hammocks, he paused briefly as if he were surveying a battlefield. Then, apparently at random, he selected one and bobbed toward it. Curling his fingers in the mesh, he frowned sadly at its occupant. “How’re you doing, Baldridge?” He could have read the man’s id patch, but Min was sure that he knew all his people by name. “You must feel like hell.”
“Aye, sir,” Baldridge answered thinly.
“What’s going on? What’s happening to you?”
The hammock shifted as if Baldridge were squirming. “Don’t know, sir. I was working my board like always, just sitting there, and my eyes went spotty. Couldn’t see the readouts. Then I started puking. Spots were so damn big, I couldn’t help trying to heave them up. My duty officer had to bring me here.”
“Sounds miserable,” Dolph rumbled sympathetically. “They’re going to have to make the sickbays on these tubs bigger. You shouldn’t have to hang out here in a damn hammock.”
“Aye, sir.” The uncertainty in Baldridge’s tone was plain.
Again without any obvious reason for his selection, Dolph approached another invalid. This time a woman answered him. He asked her the same questions in different words: she gave him her version of the answers. He patted her head through the mesh as if he wanted to comfort her, then moved to a third hammock.
Glancing aside, Min saw that Foster had come to watch from the doorway with her. He seemed full of his responsibility for his patients: perhaps he wanted to be sure that Captain Ubikwe didn’t mistreat them.
When Dolph had expressed his solicitude a third time,
he stopped moving around. Instead he told the man he’d just questioned, “You know, almost the same thing happened to me once.”
He spoke as if he were talking to the man personally; but now his deep voice was pitched to carry, so that everyone in the corridor could hear him.
“It wasn’t on my first ship, it was the second. I mean, I wasn’t still wet behind the ears. At least I didn’t think so. But it happened to me anyway. Our medtech—he was a crusty old SOB who’d been through the gap a few times too many—told me I didn’t just have SAD, I was fucking depressed.”
A grin flashed across his face. Then he became serious again.
“Before it happened, I thought I was doing pretty good. Only my second ship, and already I’d worked myself up to targ third. On my way to the upper ranks, where they get to make their own decisions practically every day. The fact is, I thought I was hot shit. Unfortunately that turned out to be true.”
His mouth hinted at another smile, but he didn’t stop.
“We hit heavy action, four illegals, one really huge hauler and three gunboat escorts, and they were trying to duck us in an asteroid belt. It wasn’t my first action, or even my first heavy action, that first tour wasn’t what you could politely call a cake-walk, but for some reason it scared me different than I’d ever been scared before. The hauler wasn’t agile, but those gunboats could spin rings around us, especially when we were moving slow enough to survive in a belt. They were coming at me from every direction at once, I couldn’t keep all those trajectories on my readouts at the same time, not to mention in my mind. And for reasons which weren’t exactly clear to me, the old man—our captain wanted us to call him that, God knows why—didn’t let me put targ on automatic and just blaze away. No, he wanted to pick his own targets in his own sweet time.
“For a couple of minutes there, I thought I was about to die. My hands were sweating so hard my ringers skidded off the keys. By the time I got around to firing after the old man gave me an order, there was nothing to fire at except rocks and vacuum. He swore continuously whenever he didn’t have something else to say, and I knew he was swearing at me.”