The Dark Between The Stars

ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN
TOM ROM

Tom Rom never patted himself on the back to celebrate his own success. He did a job and took satisfaction in his work, glad that he had not let Zoe down. He would never let her be disappointed in him.

After returning to his ship on the crater floor, he stripped off his environment suit and quickly set the glass sample vials in a temporary bin on the counter inside the self-contained isolation chamber. The glass tubes had been sterilized, of course, and he would do the full isolation lockdown during the flight back to Pergamus.

First, though, he had to get away from the asteroid with all possible speed. He didn’t trust that woman. There was something about Orli’s eyes, the determination on her dying face. She was desperate enough, resourceful enough that she just might do something unexpected. Her ship’s damaged engine was dismantled, and once he left the asteroid she couldn’t come after him—at least not soon enough to catch him. She had nothing.

And yet…

He guided his ship out of the asteroid field and set course for Pergamus, where he would make sure that the repairs and upgrades to his ship were completed this time. Back at the research facility, he would happily endure the many hours of successive decontamination procedures so he could spend time with Zoe. Finally, he would stay long enough that they could have a meal together, talk about life, maybe about their past, maybe about their future.

Tom Rom would say little, and even Zoe would keep the conversation to a minimum, but they would be together—just as they had been in their last few years of caring for the dying Adam Alakis at the watchtower station on Vaconda. At least he would provide genuine companionship, a small reminder to help Zoe hold on to her humanity.

When he was safely on course with the autopilot secured, he went into the isolation chamber to inspect the sample vials. Orli Covitz’s blood looked as red as any normal blood, but he knew it was swarming with deadly microorganisms, possibly the last specimens of their kind in existence. Zoe and her research teams would be ecstatic. Within a few days he would be back at Pergamus.

The ship sailed on… but something didn’t feel right. He knew the ship’s vibration. His instincts were attuned to its lifeblood, its rhythms, the unscientific feel of its systems. He returned to the cockpit and studied the control panels. According to readings from the engines, the exhaust train, the power blocks, the numbers were exactly as expected. Before takeoff, he had done a cursory check out of habit and noted no anomalies.

Now he sat perfectly still, let his eyes fall half closed, and walked backward into his memory, trying to recall precisely what the readings had said. It was an exercise he had learned long ago.

His breaths were shallow, his focus complete, and at last he remembered the numbers. They were exactly the same as what showed now. All of them. Very unlikely. There should have been some variation between takeoff and now, hours later.

He touched fingertips against the control panel, drew deeper breaths as if trying to connect telepathically with his ship. There had been slight differences after the temporary repairs he had made on Vaconda, as if the engines were a fraction out of tune… but the vibrations felt different and were increasing in intensity.

He pressed his hands flat on the panel and thought he sensed the vibration jumping. The sound of the engines was too loud, but the diagnostic screens read exactly as they should. Exactly—like a textbook. He purged the diagnostics, reset the sensors, and took new readings.

That’s when he discovered an overload was imminent.

Automated alarms rattled through the cockpit. He muted them immediately so he could concentrate. The ship’s systems were damaged. The exhaust train was dumping massive amounts of thermal energy back into the reactor, and the containment was nearing collapse. Temperature spikes had already caused several systems to fail.

His fingers flew over the controls, trying to shut down or at least reroute the failures, but the ship’s controls were nonresponsive. The damage was already too great. The overload was building to critical levels.

His mouth went dry, and he froze with just a moment of indecision, which was completely unlike him. This could not possibly be the result of normal damage.

Sabotage.

Somehow Orli Covitz had rigged an overload in his engines… but she had never left the Proud Mary. How could she possibly… ?

The compy must have done it.

Seconds after understanding what was going wrong, he concluded that he would be unable to stop it. Overload and vaporization would occur in less than two minutes.

Tom Rom disengaged the stardrive, dropping the ship out of lightspeed to increase his chances of survival, then took a moment at the controls to perform a data backup, dumping all his records into the secondary systems. This took fifteen seconds longer than expected, and he watched the thermal spikes.

If his vessel had been fully repaired, the systems might have been stable enough to give him an extra minute, but they were breaking down. When he saw a suddenly increasing gamma cascade, he knew the reactor was failing.

He dove into the isolation chamber. The self-contained compartment would also serve as a lifepod. It was his only chance. He triggered the emergency launch, bypassed all safety systems.

The hatch slammed shut with the speed of a falling guillotine blade. It would have amputated his legs if he had been an instant slower. The explosive bolts severed the connectors from the main ship, flinging hull plates away. Tom Rom threw himself against the wall and held on as the escape engines ignited, launching him like a rock from a catapult.

Then the main ship exploded. The shock wave struck the escape pod like a vicious slap, sending it tumbling. The pod’s engines valiantly struggled to outrace the detonation—but they could not. A wash of light, radiation, and high-velocity debris battered the pod.

In theory, the containment chamber’s shielding would be sufficient to protect him against the external radiation bath. Even more important, he didn’t want the samples of the plague virus to be destroyed by a bombardment of X-rays and gamma radiation.

The pod continued to reel out of control in open space. Disoriented, hand over hand, he pulled himself along until he found the inset control panel and activated the stabilization thrusters. Finally, he turned on the artificial gravity.

Debris inside the escape pod tumbled down to what was now defined as the deck. As weight returned, he felt sharp pains in his body. He had been battered, and he took a moment to touch the sore spots, flex his arms and legs, press against his ribs. Taking inventory. He determined that nothing was, in fact, broken.

The containment chamber had its own short-range stardrive. Once he recalculated his position using navigational interpolation, he could make his way to a nearby system, acquire other transportation. He had planned for emergencies such as this. His ship had everything he needed in the short term, until he could limp back to Pergamus and present Zoe with an extremely valuable item for her collection.

With a start, he recalled that he had left the vials of Orli’s blood in the open bin on the counter. Unsecured items had flown in all directions during the buffeting.

He scrounged around, looking for the three vials. He found loose records, an empty specimen pack, then one of the vials, still intact and sealed, which he retrieved and placed in the cabinet where it should have gone in the first place.

Under a tumbled analysis tray and a pair of protective gloves, he found the second vial, also sealed. But the third proved elusive. As the evacuation pod continued to stabilize itself and the automated navigation sensors mapped the stars around him to determine his position, Tom Rom scoured the chamber.

He looked in corners, in between storage and analysis decks. Two rectangular system boxes had shifted apart during the explosion, leaving a narrow gap, and as Tom Rom crouched he saw a glint of the blunt end of a sample tube. He reached into the cranny to pull out the last vial, but when his fingers touched it, he felt the tiny bite of broken glass, a jagged edge.

He pulled the tube out. His fingers were covered with blood—Orli’s spilled blood, and his own from a small cut. With a detached analysis that was parsecs away from panic, he realized he was also infected now.

He was going to have much less time to get back to Zoe Alakis than he had expected.