Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (25 page)

She struggled and fought, but it was too late. Her body
was stretched across the pod’s rear cargo section like a zero-g tube-hammock.
Her feet were six inches from one wall; her hands eight inches from the other.
Mike wiped his forehead and rubbed one eye. Rebecca continued to thrash and
scream in rage. Several times she spun like a top.

Finally calming, she closed her eyes and breathed
deeply. Mike took this occasion to pluck her eyeglass computer from her face.
She displayed no visible reaction, though she must have felt it. Mike wondered
if her lack of a reaction was real or a carefully performed act to trick him.

He held the headup close to his eyes as if about to put
it on. Its lenses were as clean and transparent as glass—until he managed to
view them from exactly the right angle. Then they resembled twin computer
screens; small and finely detailed, and yet still transparent, like a fighter
pilot’s headup display—hence this type of computer’s trade name. The twin
screens displayed a row of tiny icons across the top, a list of items along the
left edge and some text across the bottom.

Without opening her eyes, Rebecca said, “The writing is
far too small to read, McCormack, unless you put them on.” She smiled slightly.
“Or are you afraid?”

Either she wants me to put them on because she’s got
them booby trapped, or she doesn’t want me to put them on and is just trying to
make me think they’re booby trapped.
He folded the glasses.
This is no time
to take unnecessary risks.
He slipped them into Rebecca’s thigh pocket. “If
they blow up, they’re on you.”

Rebecca’s close-lipped smile grew wider and more evil.
Unsure if this too was real or an act, Mike decided to ignore it. He turned to
Kim. “That was quite a coincidence: your coming out of the coma just when she
was about to shoot me.”

Rebecca strained quietly against the ropes at her
wrists, trying to work the knots loose.

“It was no coincidence,” Kim said. “I’d been awake for
five or six hours. As soon as I saw her, I knew I had to pretend I was still
unconscious. I’d already discovered she was the killer, and I figured she
probably knew that I knew. So I loosened my straps and waited for a chance to
jump her.”

“Are you—” Mike stumbled for words.

“What?”

He bit his lower lip before asking, “Do you remember
me?”

“Yes, of course.”

He wiped his cheek, then squinted and moved closer. “Do
you remember that you love me?”

Kim looked frustrated. “Why do you continue to insist
that we are in love?”

Despite the lack of gravity, Mike’s posture sagged.
“Never mind.” He turned his back to her and began gathering small floating
objects he’d scattered when he yanked the patch-kit out of his pocket.

Kim’s frustration lingered. “Why?” she asked.

“Never mind!” He raised his hands in surrender. “Forget
I said anything!”

“Fine!” Kim turned her back to him as well.

“Pocketsize,” Mike said, “did you record the audio of
Rebecca’s confession to the sabotage and all those murders?”

“Yes,” said the softly feminine voice from inside the
chest area of his vacuum suit.

Rebecca stopped trying to wiggle the knots loose on her
wrists and smiled. “Digital audio recordings are not admissible as evidence in
court. They’re too easy to fake.”

“True,” Mike said, “but they’re a perfectly legal
source of information for detectives to use in searching for other things that
are admissible as evidence; things like a dead body wearing the wrong skin, a
stolen medsys, a dead programmer. And besides, a simple genetic test will show
that your current skin has a different genetic code than all your internal
organs, muscles, bones and blood. How do you plan to explain that in court?”

Rebecca thrashed for a few seconds then stopped
abruptly. “None of this nonsense is going to do you any good! No ship will be
sent to rendezvous with this pod. They don’t expect you to survive, remember?
You’re going to sit, alone and helpless, in this little coffin while it travels
past the planets, out of the solar system and into the endless void between the
stars. You’ll sit in here until you use up all your food, water, electricity
and oxygen. And then you’ll die. Just as I planned!”

Chapter Seventeen

Mike stared intently at the window in front of him.
Except for the white lines, globs and smears of leak sealant on its inside
surface, most of the window appeared completely black. A thick layer of soot
had accumulated on its outside surface, even covering the area he’d cleaned
before the mechanical arm got smashed. For the last two hours he’d stared at it
while waving one hand in the air.

Wearing a claw-glove, he was cleaning an area of window
about one foot square using nothing more than the pointy tip of a metal sliver
the size and shape of a toothpick which jutted from the broken end—just beyond
the elbow—of the one and only mechanical arm that still functioned.

Progress was slow. It was like trying to clear an
Etch-A-Sketch by running its tiny drawing tip back and forth across the glass a
few thousand times in an effort to see the secret mechanical workings hidden
inside the toy.

Tedious as it was, there was no other way to wipe off
the obscuring soot save going outside and doing it by hand—a thought Mike did
not find tempting; at least not yet.

His eyes burned from staring and his arm ached from the
carefully repeated movements. Fortunately, the pattern of lines he had
scratched in the soot now formed a reasonably clear window in the larger window
of blackness—a window within a window.

Removing his hand from the claw-glove, he flexed his
wrist and elbow, then wiggled his fingers until they began to move normally.
“It’s been four days,” he said suddenly, breaking the silence in the cabin.

He and Kim had removed their vacuum suits two days
ago—having waited until they were absolutely certain the pod’s hull contained
no holes which were only temporarily plugged by the fragments that had made
them.

Rebecca did not respond. Still suspended across the
rear, she remained inside her suit—minus helmet and gloves—there having been no
reason to untie her and remove it.

Kim, strapped in the co-pilot seat and reading a book
on Mike’s pocketsize, stirred slightly, but did not look up from the text.
“What?”

“Four days,” he said. “It’s been four days since solar
passage. I think we should be far enough from the sun to leave the shadow.”

Kim lowered the pocketsize and looked him in the eye.
“Are you sure?”

Placing a hand on the location jet joystick, he raised
his eyebrows. “There’s only one way to find out.”

“OK,” she said nervously, “but be ready to get back into
the shade fast.”

Nodding agreement, he pushed the joystick to the right
for a few seconds. Half a minute later the sun came out. Though far brighter
than when seen from Earth, it was not bright enough to produce pain.

Aware that the soot covering the pod’s exterior would
cause it to absorb more of the sun’s heat than if the pod had still been clean
and white, Mike tapped the window once with a bare fingertip. When this proved
safe, he pressed his hand flat against the window. The glass was warming, but not
alarmingly so. “I think we’re OK.”

Kim touched it too.

Without unstrapping, Mike leaned forward, bringing his
face close to the little section of window he had so laboriously cleaned.
“Let’s go see what the sunny side of Corvus looks like.”

“All right,” Kim said. “But be careful.”

Corvus’s dark side, illuminated only by the scattered
stars, showed no features other than a back-lit outline and the occasional
flash of sun poking through its ravaged interior. These visual clues provided
just enough detail to discern that the great ship now tumbled with extreme
slowness—requiring more than two minutes to move through one rotation.

As Mike eased the pod around toward Corvus’s sunlit
side, Kim unstrapped from her seat and pulled herself near him in order to look
out the little square clean spot he’d made. He had to unstrap from his seat and
move his head close to the window to prevent her from blocking his view.

Their heads were now side-by-side, their temples and
ears touching. They were so close to the window that several times Mike inhaled
Kim’s exhaled air after the window’s surface had curled it toward his face.
This intimate proximity reminded Mike how much he longed for her. Feeling a
tightness in his throat, he worried that she might be about to see him cry.
Mercifully, his emotional state was interrupted when he got his first good look
at the extent of Corvus’s damage.

He had known to expect a burned-out hulk but it was
much worse than he had imagined. The great ship Corvus—the ship he and his
construction crew had spent months helping to build—was now reduced to a
hollow, soot-covered skeleton.

Maneuvering the pod as close to Corvus as seemed
safe—far closer than he would have if the ship’s fearsome tumbling had not
slowed nearly to a stop—he noticed that the blackness that coated everything
had a texture: it was fuzzy. Not a thin layer of fuzz like velvet or velour or
even carpeting, this layer was startlingly thick; probably half a foot; thick
enough to round off sharp corners and obscure small objects such as door
handles.

Most of the hull was gone leaving empty rooms open to
the vacuum of space. Many deck floors remained in place; most noticeably in the
cargo decks where there was little else to see. Portions of the vertical
hallways were also intact; some of their doors still stood open, though some
were closed and some were missing.

In the engineering decks two of the four main fuel
tanks could be seen as well as a dozen lesser miscellaneous tanks. All were
either shattered or split wide; their contents long boiled away.

The most ruggedly built chambers in the ship—the two
emergency, two boarding and four maintenance airlocks—seemed to have undergone
the least damage. The hangars had also held up well, though their large outer
doors were off their guide rails and jutted from the ship at odd angles,
resembling giant rippled potato chips so overcooked that they had been reduced
to charcoal.

The rad-shield was missing. Its foamed lead alloy had
probably provided most of the rain of molten metal. The engines and their
support beams were tangled together like old dead flowers—again, painted with
black fuzz.

Half the bridge dome was gone. The jagged edges of what
remained reminded Mike of its explosion. He stared at the bridge’s ruins,
shocked and confused. He’d never before realized how much he loved that old
man.
Goodbye, Larry.

Kim touched his arm. “Hey, are you all right?”

He shook his head gently. “No,” he whispered, still
staring at the bridge. “I lost my two best friends in that wreck.” He was about
to say that of the two, she was the greater loss, but changed his mind. The Kim
he loved was gone, and this Kim would neither believe nor understand, no matter
how hard he tried to expla—

All of the pod’s remaining interior lights went dead.
Illumination inside the pod dropped to one tenth. It would have dropped lower
but warm sunlight streaming in through the little round window on the rear
hatch formed a bright oval on the ceiling at the top of the pod’s front window,
and this oval filled the cabin with a soft glow.

“What happened?” Kim asked.

Mike scoured the instrument panel for answers, but its
indicator lights were all dead too. He checked the power readouts: also dead.
Then he had a frightening thought:
Could Rebecca have done this?
He
shook his head.
I took her computer. To transmit signals now,
he
thought, sarcastically,
she’d have to have had a computer surgically
implanted inside her skull and hardwired into her brain.

This last thought stopped him cold.
If she could,
she would!
Then he felt ashamed.
That’s just plain stupid! Paranoia;
pure and simple.
“Pocketsize, where’s the breaker box?”

Speaking from Kim’s hand, it said, “Recessed into the
wall near your left elbow.”

Mike turned and opened it. None of the circuit breakers
had been thrown. “Where are the fuel cells?”

“Behind an access panel in the ceiling,” it said,
“directly above and slightly behind your seat.”

Pushing himself up from his seat and close to the
ceiling, Mike’s feet floated near the front window as he opened the access
panel. Kim joined him; crowding him again. The oxygen gauge read sixty pounds
of pressure, but the hydrogen gauge read zero. “We’re out of—”

Something big hit the pod. It scraped loudly against
the hull and sounded like old metal crying. It hit hard enough to shove the pod
toward its own rear at about two feet per second.

Kim blurted, “What was—” but if she said more it was
drowned under Rebecca’s scream as the prisoner swayed toward the front which
pulled tight the ropes on her hands and feet.

Mike saw the front window coming at him and Kim. Since
they both floated freely, the pod and its cabin was now momentarily traveling
rearward without them. When the window banged into their feet and knees they
collapsed against the glass, bending at the waist and slapping its rigid surface
with their hands.

It did not shatter.

Mike bounced off, tumbling away over the top of his
pilot seat. Stretching, he grabbed a handhold on the ceiling above Rebecca and
used it to turn himself around. Kim, he saw, was swinging from a handhold at the
window’s base.

She pointed and said, “Look!”

A large I-beam could be seen through the portion of
window Mike had so patiently cleaned. Plump with black fuzz and slightly
twisted, the beam was two feet beyond the window and perfectly stationary.

“We’ve bumped into Corvus!” Kim said. “Or vice versa.”

She planted her feet against the base of the window
three feet apart with the handhold she was gripping placed exactly between
them. In this position, she used her legs to rock her body vigorously from
side-to-side while grasping the handhold as a pivot point.

Mike puzzled over what she might be doing, then he got
it: For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Each time she
rocked, the pod should have responded by shifting slightly in the opposite
direction. The shift would be small—inversely proportional to the ratio of her
mass verses that of the pod—still it should have been obvious. But there was
none.

She quit rocking. “We’re stuck!”

Rebecca let out a demented laugh. Her bound and
suspended body responded by swinging like a two-person jump rope stretched too
tightly. “If someone comes to see if you’ve survived—not that they will, but if
by some miracle they did—they’ll take one look at this burned-out wreck and
turn for home!” She laughed again. “They won’t even see you!”

Leaping from the window, Kim stopped herself skillfully
using only one hand on the back of Mike’s seat. Closing her free hand into a
fist, she shook it at Rebecca. “Shut-up or I’ll shut you up!”

“Ignore her,” Mike said. “She’s just trying to make you
stop thinking rationally. It’s her last weapon. We’ve taken everything else
from her.”

He pulled himself into the pod’s front over the top of
Kim’s seat, then placed the side of his head against the window and looked
outside at a sharp angle. He wanted to know exactly what kind of grip Corvus
had on the pod. As he moved his head all around, trying to see everything
possible in every direction, he said, “She’s right about one thing: we’ve got
to figure out a way to signal whoever comes looking for us.”

“I’m right about something else, too,” Rebecca said.

“And what’s that?” Mike asked with far less annoyance
than he actually felt.

“With no electricity, you’ve got no lifesupport; and
the air in here is already beginning to get stale.”

_____

Within an hour the air in the pod was corrupted and
they were all, once again, sealed inside their vacuum suits—even Rebecca, as
much trouble as that had been: keeping the gun trained on her; blindfolding her
so she couldn’t swing a fist or grab anything as a weapon; using additional
ropes to tie each of her wrists to a handhold individually; untying only one of
her hands at a time; slipping her vacuum suit glove onto her free hand and
fastening its air-tight seals; then tying that hand again so the other hand
could be untied for similar treatment. At least putting her helmet on had been
easy.

Their prisoner, of course, had been correct: with no
electricity, the pod had no lifesupport. The days that followed, they spent
living in their suits, removing their helmets only to drink and eat.

Shaking the pod loose from Corvus had taken two days.
Mike and Kim tried forcefully rocking their bodies from side-to-side but
succeeded only when they slammed themselves against the rear wall in unison.
They had no light except suit lights and the sun; no radios except suit radios;
and—thanks to their body-slamming escape from Corvus—the pod was now slowly
tumbling.

They suffered Rebecca’s occasional taunting for several
days, until Mike turned her suit radio off. Partly he did this because he was
tired of listening to her, but mostly because he was tired of keeping Kim from
shooting her or beating her to death.

Rebecca still taunted, but only when they fed her. Even
then, Mike wished he could stick a gag in her mouth. But it’s exceptionally
difficult to feed a woman with her mouth gagged. He learned this quickly. It
was not only difficult, it was also messy.