Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Page 9

  The scientists called it a static solar anomaly, which was a fancy name for a binary star system whose twin suns truly were twins, exact doubles according to every spectrographic reading taken of them, and whose orbits precisely mirrored one another’s. What they were orbiting around, no one had yet been able to determine—hence the Equinox mission, this journey to a remote corner of the galaxy.

  When the ship eased itself into orbit around the stellar anomaly, Lina was awakened first, after the captain; as ship’s doctor, she had to be functional before any of the other crew members were roused from their unnatural slumber so she could take note of signs of cryo-sickness or other adverse effects from the long sleep.

  One effect made itself known to her almost immediately. She swallowed against the sour taste of bile in her throat and reached for the storage unit next to her cryo-rack for the electrolyte-balancing drink that had been left there within arm’s reach, awaiting just this moment. After the first sip, she wasn’t sure which was worse—the sick taste in her mouth, or the overly sweet fluid she had to force down to prevent herself from vomiting.

  “It’ll pass,” said Captain Rankin, who hovered over Lina’s cryo-rack and who looked, in her opinion, far too hale and hearty for someone who had just spent the last standard year hooked up to nutrient drips.

  She muttered, “I know,” and managed a few more swallows before she began to carefully unhook the feeds from her arms. Professional courtesy compelled her to ask, “And how are you feeling, Captain?”

  “Fine. Just fine. Get everyone up—we’ve got work to do.”

  No doubt. She nodded, then sat up slowly. Dizzy, yes, but underneath the slight vertigo, she felt well enough. The GEC, well known for its parsimonious ways, didn’t bother to have ship’s doctors on its short-hop vessels and instead relied on crew members with slightly better-than-average first aid training. But cryo-sleep was nothing to be trifled with, even though the Gaians had been using it for almost a hundred years. The effects of any artificially induced sleep that lasted for more than six months could be devastating—paralysis, permanent loss of muscle mass, respiratory dysfunction, even madness and death. Those possible ill effects were Lina’s reason for being on board. Unlike Rankin, she wasn’t career GEC. When the opportunity to volunteer for the Equinox project had come up, posted to the intranet of the university hospital where she worked, escaping Gaia for at least three standard years had sounded like a damn good idea. Philandering husbands had a way of making you want to get far, far away from it all.

  But right then she didn’t have time to think about her ex-husband Colin, or the wreckage of a personal life that she’d left millions of light-years behind her. He’d known what he was getting into, that he would have an absentee wife for the first few years of their marriage until she paid off the enormous debt she’d incurred while getting her medical degree. That was how it worked on Gaia; everything was pay to play. And, depending on the field you chose, you could keep paying…and paying.

  Anyway, with Colin gone—and with the Consortium offering to forgive the balance that remained of her debt load if she went on this mission—Lina hadn’t hesitated for very long. Once the Equinox mission was complete and she returned to her home world, she could forge her own future without having to worry about building a practice while burdened with crushing debt. Now, though, she had work to do.

  Commander Ramirez was Rankin’s second in command. Lina woke him next, overseeing the slow withdrawal of the drugs that would steadily bring him from the shadowy borders of hibernation to the waking world. Rankin’s awakening had been handled by an automatic system, and the same had been done with her, but it was less risky to have a human doctor supervise the procedure.

  Ramirez’s eyelids fluttered, and his eyes slowly opened, still half-veiled by a set of heavy dark lashes that didn’t look quite real. “There?” he croaked.

  “Safe and sound,” she assured him, and brought some of the replenishing fluid to his lips.

  He grimaced, but swallowed it without comment. A good, obedient career military man, just like Lieutenant Chung, whom she woke next. After him came Mita Singh, the mission astrophysicist, and finally Lewis Bakshi, the astronomer.

  He seemed to take the longest to come out of the haze of cryo-sleep, and even after his steel-blue eyes opened, they seemed to stare, unseeing, at the bulkhead above him. Frowning, Lina pulled the penlight out of her coverall pocket and flashed it twice, one time in each eye. His pupils contracted and expanded normally, so on the surface it seemed that he hadn’t suffered any neurological damage.

  Still, she knew you could never be too careful. “How are you feeling, Dr. Bakshi?”

  One blink, somehow just slow enough that it set off the alarm bells in Lina’s mind. Lowered reaction times could often be a symptom of cryo-sickness. She reached down to take his pulse, but he pushed her hand away and then sat up.

  “I’m fine,” he snapped, although his eyes wouldn’t quite meet hers. “Out of the way, Dr. Golan. Some of us have work to do.”

  Since she knew one of the most common side effects of prolonged cryo-sleep was irritability, Lina only stepped aside and watched him with narrowed eyes as he pushed himself off the cryo-rack and stood. He was a tall man, slim and athletic, probably chosen for his physical fitness as much as his scientific accolades. But then, the same thing could be said for all of the crew, every one of them in the prime of life, between twenty-five and thirty-five, healthy and attractive. Oh, they each had their own small issues, already corrected by surgery or medication as necessary, but nothing that would prevent them from carrying out their duties.

  Despite Lina’s sharpened scrutiny, Lewis Bakshi seemed steady enough to her eyes. Nothing in the readouts on the sensors that had been hooked up to him showed any sign of anomalies, so she kept her mouth shut.

  Still, she knew she had better keep a close watch on him. Just in case.

  Once Lina had assured herself of the crew’s basic level of health, she found herself somewhat superfluous. The introductory astronomy courses she’d taken at the university in no way prepared her to offer any sort of meaningful assistance with the scientific tasks at hand, so she mostly tried to stay out of the way, and watched the crew members for any signs of delayed cryo-sleep syndrome. While rare, the condition did occur from time to time, and it seemed the least she could do to earn the debt forgiveness the GEC had bestowed upon her.

  The binary system, Faraday I and Faraday II, named for the astronomer who’d discovered the stars, occupied everyone’s time. Even Lina, who’d spent most of her life concerned with more down-to-earth matters, had to admit that the sight outside the ship’s windows was spectacular—two huge orbs of flaming gas, seeming almost close enough to touch, but safely tempered by the polarized viewing screens on the GEC ship, the Kanawa. The suns faced one another, moving in slow orbits around some nexus whose origin neither Dr. Singh nor Dr. Bakshi had yet been able to determine. She watched the scientists, envying their industry as they took recordings with instruments she didn’t recognize, and then entered those findings in their handhelds.

  From time to time Lina noted how Leonard Bakshi’s hands would shake, and how his gaze seemed to dart from corner to corner, never wanting to meet hers. Delayed reaction, or merely shyness? Hard for her to say, and certainly nothing she felt brave enough to mention to him. She knew that her own reactions to him made her uncomfortable; from the first time she’d seen him at one of their orientations, she’d been struck by his looks, and also by his air of quiet intensity, so different from her unfaithful but oh-so-charming ex-husband. Yes, she could tell herself that it was very unprofessional to feel attracted to someone who was part of the Equinox mission, but her libido apparently had other ideas. However, she figured that as long as she remained utterly neutral around Dr. Bakshi, and did her best to conceal her feelings, she’d manage to survive. After all, it wasn’t as if she worked closely with him on a daily basis the way Mita Singh did.

  One duty that
did remain to Lina was to take standard physical readings from every crew member at the end of each day. That was the most difficult moment for her, when she had to stand close to the astronomer and use her handheld to read his biometrics, but she schooled her features to impassivity during those moments, and prayed he wouldn’t notice the way her heart rate accelerated when she was around him. At any rate, nothing except slightly elevated blood pressure separated Bakshi from the rest of his crew mates as far as his physiological readings were concerned.

  Lina dutifully monitored herself as well, although she knew she would find nothing out of the ordinary. She’d gone through every physical screening the Consortium could devise before being accepted for this mission. However, after a few days in orbit around the binary stars, Lina found her sleep disturbed, again broken by those odd skittering noises, by voices whose words she strained to understand but which remained forever mysterious, incomprehensible as a conversation in an alien tongue. She found herself waking suddenly in the black hours of the ship’s artificial night, ears straining to hear those voices. There was nothing, of course, nothing but the cycling of the air through the ventilation system, and the almost imperceptible creaks and groans of the ship as its hyper-alloy expanded and contracted under the neutron bombardment by those twin suns.

  Each day she watched the faces of the other crew members, trying to see some hint that their sleep had been as fitful as hers. She noticed nothing out of the ordinary, no shadowed eyes, no reddened irises. True, Leonard Bakshi still avoided her gaze, and seemed to make no attempt to join in the casual conversations the rest of the crew shared during the times they took meals together, but a tendency to be antisocial wasn’t quite enough basis to recommend a more detailed physical examination.

  It didn’t help that Captain Rankin only laughed off Lina’s concerns when she tried to bring up the subject one day. The two of them were alone, since the two scientists were in the observation chamber arguing about gravitational anomalies, and Ramirez and Chung had gone to the opposite end of the ship to check a possible leak in one of the hydraulic lines. Lina guessed that was something of a crap assignment for them, as on a larger vessel they would have had a dedicated tech crew for that sort of project. But GEC research vessels traveled light; the government wanted to pretend it cared about something more than maximizing trade and exploiting the worlds it had already discovered, so it authorized these missions and then staffed them as minimally as possible. She didn’t dare ask Captain Rankin who he’d pissed off to get stuck with an assignment out here in the ass-end of space.

  “Bakshi?” he said in response to her tentative question, and then let out his hearty laugh, the one she’d thought somewhat charming when she first met him but which had become increasingly grating in close quarters. “He won’t win any awards for congeniality, true, but he’s a very competent scientist.”

  “I’m not debating his competence,” she replied. “I’m just saying that he seems a little…off.”

  “You could probably say that about all of us.” Another chuckle, and she tried not to wince. “Come to think of it, Lina, I’ve thought you looked a little peaked lately. Shipboard food not agreeing with you?”

  She didn’t bother to correct him about using her first name. Rankin seemed to regard her as something quite apart from the rest of the crew, occupying an uneasy middle ground between the two scientists who were the raison d’être for the mission and the two crewmen who were clearly under his command. She was just as much a doctor as Singh and Bakshi, but the captain appeared to be oblivious to that fact, or didn’t want to acknowledge it because the astronomer and the astrophysicist were vital to the mission, whereas she…really wasn’t.

  “I’m fine,” Lina said. She knew better than to tell him she hadn’t been sleeping well. “Feeling a little superfluous, but that’s about it.”

  He clapped a hand on her shoulder and smiled, a slow, easy smile that was just a touch too familiar. She stiffened, and he withdrew his hand immediately.

  “Oh, well,” he replied, his tone a little too hearty, “if you weren’t here, we’d have all come down with Eridani spotted fever or something even worse, so don’t you go calling yourself superfluous again.”

  Somehow Lina managed to smile, and left as soon as she could without seeming rude. This sort of thing happened more often than the GEC liked to acknowledge—little flares of attraction, acted on or not. She knew that better than anyone else, wrestling as she continued to do with her unwelcome interest in Lewis Bakshi. To Rankin, she was above all a female, and, to all intents and purposes, unattached. He couldn’t know—thank God—that it was someone very different from him who occupied her thoughts.

  The next sleep rotation, Lina surreptitiously took a few sedatives. Light doses, just enough to quiet the jabbering parts of her brain. She did sleep, but sleep was no refuge, because the voices seemed louder than ever, sounds coming through the thinnest of walls. And then she realized they weren’t coming through the walls…they were in the walls.

  She sat up in her bunk, clutching the thin but supposedly high-efficiency blanket against herself. It might as well have been tissue paper for all the good it did. Shivers racked her body, and she shuddered, clutching her knees against her chest, teeth chattering so loudly she couldn’t believe the sound hadn’t woken up Dr. Singh, who snored in the bunk below her. The astrophysicist shifted, and the metal frame of the bed creaked, but she did not wake.

  Fingers knotted in the useless blanket, Lina held her own breath, listening, waiting to hear again those insidious whispers. They came through, barely audible, followed by a skittering noise like a thousand rats turned loose on a polished metal floor.

  She did gasp then, and from below her she heard a muffled, “Wha?” followed by, “Lina?”

  Something told her she shouldn’t reveal what she’d heard. She hesitated, then said, “Just a nightmare.”

  “Ah.” Another creaking sound, probably from Singh rearranging her own position in the bunk. “Ship’s having a hard time coping with the gravity fluxes. It can mess with your head, if you let it. You’re probably feeling that.”

  “Probably,” Lina agreed, not trusting herself to say anything more.

  “We’re all feeling it. Yesterday I was ready to push Bakshi out the airlock. I don’t care how good-looking he is…he’s one arrogant son of a bitch.”

  During the past few days, Lina had tried her best not to notice Lewis Bakshi’s looks…without much luck. Letting herself get distracted by a man was the last thing she needed right now. What was the point of fleeing for hundreds of millions of miles, if all she was going to do was let her foolish heart get her into more trouble?

  Lacking anything better to do, she lay back down and pulled the blanket up to her chin. Her ears strained, but for the moment the noises seemed to have been stilled—driven away, she guessed, by the sound of Singh’s voice. They would return at some point, no matter what Lina did, but in the meantime she thought she’d better steal what sleep she could.

  Bakshi…

  The name was nothing more than a hiss in her ears. She sat up and looked around, but saw nothing, no one. Dr. Singh’s bunk was empty; the chronometer on the wall told Lina they were well into the next ship’s rotation. Most likely the astrophysicist had already met Leonard Bakshi in the observation chamber, where no doubt they were discussing what a lazy ass the ship’s doctor was.

  Scowling, Lina climbed out of the bunk, but not before carefully surveying the floor below to make sure it was empty. She didn’t know where the sounds came from, or what made them. She didn’t want to step on something…or someone.

  But the polished composite floor only shone up at her, somehow mocking in its gleaming perfection. Wanting to shake her head at herself, she gathered up her clothes and went into the little sanitizer unit. The air was still slightly damp and smelled of the spice-scented soap Dr. Singh had brought from Gaia. So she hadn’t been gone all that long.

  Lina turned on the water
, and it misted out in the carefully calibrated spray that preserved as much as possible of the precious liquid while still giving the crew the sensation of a real Gaia-style shower. She lifted her face to the fine jets, let the warm liquid trickle down over her skin.

  Bakshi…

  Starting, Lina reached out and touched the cool metal of the shower wall, then looked around. Nothing there, of course, but somehow in her mind she saw the astronomer’s lean face, the mocking blue eyes that would never meet hers.

  You can’t trust him, she heard then, as clearly as if she had said the words aloud. This voice was familiar, because it was her own.

  Why not? she asked herself.

  How well do you know him? How well do you know any of them?

  Not at all, of course; the GEC put these missions together from the personnel available at the time, and the interested parties either answered the call or they didn’t. It wasn’t as if the Commission bothered to throw a meet-and-greet with watered-down cocktails and lukewarm finger foods so everyone could get to know each other before they were shot into space to spend the next several years together. Teamwork was not a high priority—the people involved only had to perform their individual functions efficiently without costing too much money.

  Lina guessed that Mita Singh and Lewis Bakshi must have known one another before the mission, if only peripherally, because of their backgrounds and areas of specialization. Captain Rankin had come to see Lina several days before departure, more because he seemed to feel it was the captainly thing to do than because it was all that necessary.