Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (26 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Twelve days after solar passage Mike turned and looked
at Kim’s profile through the curved glass of both his faceplate and hers.
Tapping on her vacuum-suited shoulder, he pantomimed: scooping imaginary food
into his mouth. She nodded, and they began unfastening their helmets.

They’d been using signals like these for days now
rather than their suit radios in an effort to conserve the tiny hydrogen and
oxygen reserves of their suits’ electricity producing fuel cells. Electricity
was one of several things they didn’t want their suits to run out of. Like the
pod, a suit without electricity could provide no lifesupport. Extra oxygen
tanks, they had; extra hydrogen tanks, they did not.

An annoying bit of irony was that the pod’s fuel tanks
contained an abundance of hydrogen—probably enough to run their suits for six
months—but they had no way to transfer it from the pod’s tanks to their suit’s
tanks: a simple operation, provided you have the proper hoses, fittings and
pressure reducing valves; which they did not.

Cold air bit at Mike’s face when he lifted his helmet.

As the pod’s distance from the sun had increased day
after day, the temperature inside the cabin had dropped steadily. It was now
well below freezing, and—thanks to the combined body odor of three people who
hadn’t bathed or changed clothes in weeks—stank to the highest heaven.

Kim raised her helmet and grimaced at the foul smells.

Involuntarily, Mike’s body refused to breathe the
chilly dry air based on its memory of the stench last time. After fifteen
seconds he forced himself to inhale through his mouth. It didn’t help: his nose
caught a whiff as he exhaled and his stomach lurched. He consoled himself with
the knowledge that, if it was like last time, the nausea would soon pass.

Long white jets issued from his and Kim’s mouths and
noses as all the moisture in every breath condensed. These jets remained
visible for a minute or more, rolling into little cloud puffs and wandering
aimlessly about the cabin.

Most everything inside the pod—walls, windows, control
console, floor and ceiling—had become covered with a one-inch layer of crunchy
white frost which had accumulated almost exclusively from the moisture in human
breath.

“So what would you like to eat?” Mike asked, as he
scraped frost from the front window with the knife from his suit’s patch-kit.
He popped a flat chunk that was almost too wide for him into his mouth. A few
lesser-sized flakes got away and floated across the cabin; each one tumbling
like a miniature model of Corvus.

All three suits had run out of drinking water days ago
and there were no more water bladders in their dwindling supplies. The only
remaining source of fresh water was frost, but of this there was plenty.

Mike grabbed the two largest tumbling flakes out of the
air and tossed them into his mouth. “We’re out of chicken stew and pepper steak
soup, but we’ve still got a couple of onion soups and clam chowders.”

Kim scraped frost from her side of the window with her
suit’s patch-kit knife. “Don’t we have any more Salisbury steak soups?”

“Nope; all gone.” He did not remind her that they had
only five more meals to divide between the three of them. They had never
discussed the possibility of food rationing, since they hadn’t expected their
oxygen supply to out-last the food by more than ten hours or so. They still
didn’t.

Kim shrugged. “I’ll have an onion soup.”

Mike pulled a few food envelopes from his suit’s left
and right thigh pockets. He’d stored them there so they wouldn’t freeze solid:
an important consideration since there was no way to warm them. Reading the
labels, he handed one to Kim.

She frowned as she accepted the envelope. “These things
get colder every time we eat.” She shook it in front of her face. “This one’s
got bits of ice floating in it. How about if we put them inside our suits? At
least they’d be skin temperature.”

He picked one for himself and put the rest back. “After
we eat, we’ll move ‘em.” He tore open his clam chowder and squeezed some into
his mouth, and immediately wanted to spit it right back out. The flavorless
clot lying corpse-like on his tongue was so cold it gave him a deep chill; and
its grease, which had curdled into slimy lumps, clung desperately to everything
it touched: tongue, teeth, roof of mouth. Swallowing it with a shudder, he
squeezed out another mouthful.
Eat it fast. Get it over with. Try not to
taste it.

“Where do you figure we are?” Kim asked.

“A little farther from the sun than Mars,” he said.

“Any chance we’ll pass within a million miles of Mars?”
she asked without looking at him.

“Nope.”

“Didn’t think so.”

They finished eating without conversation.

“So,” Mike said lightly, “who’s turn is it to feed the
witch?”

Kim answered, bitterly, “You know it’s mine.”

“I was trying to be subtle.”

“Then you failed.”

Kim unstrapped herself and climbed into the back.

Very slowly—so Kim wouldn’t notice—Mike twisted around
in his seat enough to keep an eye on her. He was not at all sure if he should
trust her alone with the prisoner. The last time she’d tried to feed her, she’d
lost her temper and roughed-up the woman pretty badly.

Kim checked the bonds at Rebecca’s hands and feet, then
removed the prisoner’s helmet. Rebecca’s eyes were closed. Kim drew a hand back
and slapped her cheek. “Wake up!”

Rebecca opened her eyes and stared at Kim with intense
hatred but made no sound. Secretly, Mike was impressed at Rebecca’s
self-control—a trait he had never associated with her in her guise as Tina.

In a tone indicating revulsion at having to pretend
civility, Kim asked, “What do you want to eat?”

Producing tiny white clouds with every syllable,
Rebecca whispered, “What exactly remains in our cornucopia?”

While keeping his eyes on the two women, Mike slipped
his pocketsize out of his suit’s thigh pocket, opened it and turned it on. To
conserve its battery during the last few days, when not in use, he’d kept it
turned off. “Pocketsize?”

It did not respond.

“Pocketsize?”

It did not respond.

He glanced down. Its screen was not lit, and it did not
display the picture of Kim and him French-kissing while holding water-balloons
over each other’s heads. It displayed nothing.

“Damn!”

Kim turned toward him. “What’s wrong?”

“My pocketsize is dead!” He closed it and shoved it
back into his thigh pocket. “I was going to try to estimate our location with
respect to Mars, but the stupid thing’s dead.”

Kim frowned slightly, then turned back to Rebecca.
“We’ve got clam chowder and onion soup.”

“I’ll have the chowder.”

Without shifting her gaze from Rebecca, Kim announced
loudly, “She wants the chowder.”

Rebecca closed her eyes and smiled. “Isn’t it funny
how, having survived enough heat to melt structural steel, you two fools will
die by freezing?”

Calmly, Kim accepted the envelope from Mike; but showed
more enthusiasm when she tore it open and squirted half of its frigid content
all over Rebecca’s face. Rebecca spat what little made it into her mouth up
into Kim’s eyes and hair. Kim took a swing at Rebecca’s nose with her right
hand—which might have done more damage if that hand hadn’t been holding the
food envelope.

Mike tried to scramble into the rear and put a stop to
all this but forgot he was still strapped in. Trying too hard and too fast to
unfasten his seat restraints, he fumbled repeatedly.
Why does she provoke
her like that? Does she want to get beaten to death?

Rebecca spat long strings of saliva across Kim’s face.
“You’re both going to die!”

Kim tossed the food envelope away and punched Rebecca
solidly in the nose.

Rebecca swayed like a zero-g tube-hammock that someone
had just crawled out of. She smiled and blew bubbles of blood from her left
nostril. “Slowly freeze to death!”

To prevent herself from drifting away in reaction to
her punches, Kim used her left hand to grab a handful of the loose cloth of
Rebecca’s vacuum suit, and continued to use her right hand to punch Rebecca in
the mouth and then the eye.

“Won’t be long now!” Rebecca’s huge smile was oddly
cartoon-like. Every tooth was outlined in red; blood had flowed into the gaps.
“Your lives are almost over!”

Kim turned her back to Rebecca and began searching the
pod’s rear. Mike knew what she wanted: something hard, or sharp, or both;
something that could kill.

After scraping an inch of frost from a wall-mounted
tool box, she forced the box open—despite the resistance of its cold-stiffened
hinges—and started digging through its tools.

Finally free of his seat restraints, Mike clamored over
the top of his seat and, lacking a better plan, jumped onto Kim’s back. He
grabbed both of her arms at the elbows with the goal of keeping her from
fighting long enough for her to calm down and think rationally again.

But wrestling in a vacuum suit is nothing like
wrestling in street clothes. She twisted loose almost immediately. Placing
himself between her and Rebecca, he tried blocking her from her target. He
assumed the pose of a sumo wrestler, though he felt more like a sand crab
drifting slowly sideways in zero-g. “Kim! You can’t kill her. It’s not right.”

Glaring at him, Kim said, “Look around, stupid! She’s
already killed us!”

He tried to sound forceful. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Kim spoke coldly. “Don’t worry; you won’t,” then
switched to a childishly mocking tone. “You love me! Remember?” And then she
laughed; a laugh almost as evil as Rebecc—

Drang! Drang! Drang!
A noise, hard and metallic,
rang through the hull.

Though drifting, Mike froze in position and stared
wild-eyed at Kim. She stared wild-eyed right back at him.

Somebody’s outside!
he thought, and immediately
looked where he usually looked to see outside: the front window. But it was
covered with frost—even where he and Kim had scraped away the frost for a drink
had frosted over anew. He looked at the little round window on the rear hatch,
but it too was covered with frost.

Who could be outside? Who else aboard Corvus could
have survived solar passage?
His mind searched for someone.
Nikita?
Could it be Nikita? I never actually saw her dead. No, no, Kim saw her dead.
Frank? Impossible. He couldn’t have survived. Maybe it’s not a person at all.
Maybe we just bumped into someth—

Drang! Drang! Drang!

Somebody’s out there! It’s a person. It’s gotta be.

The sound seemed to come from the hatch, so he grabbed
Rebecca and yanked himself across her toward it. She yelled, but he ignored
this and began scraping the frost from the little round window with the tips of
his gloved fingers.

The frost was moist now rather than dry and crumbly:
they had all been breathing the stale cabin air for some minutes and a good bit
of freshly exhaled moisture had condensed and soaked into the frost that
covered everything.

Long slushy lines of frost peeled from the little
window and curled into the palm of Mike’s glove. Its consistency was such that
he could have packed it easily into a nice, if somewhat icy, snowball.

Mike jerked his head back in fear. Through the four
narrow lines he’d cleared, he thought he spotted a face. At least it looked
like it might be a face. He wasn’t sure.

Throwing away a handful of slush, he hit Kim solidly in
the chest with his elbow. She was trying get close to the little window too.

Scraping a few more times removed most of the slush.
Mike switched to rubbing in circles to clear the last frosty clumps and to wipe
away the foggy condensate of his own breath which, in his excitement, he kept
blowing onto the glass.

It was a face all right, but it wasn’t anyone Mike
recognized. A middle-aged man with light brown hair, who—
Impossible! Am I
hallucinating?
The man wore no helmet and no vacuum suit. His lips moved,
but Mike could not hear the words.

Mike mumbled, “What’s he saying?” and jerked sideways
when Kim yelled joyously just inches from his ear.

“He’s telling us to open the hatch!” She tried to push
Mike out of the way and grab the hatch handle.

“Whoa!” Mike used both arms to shove her over Rebecca
and against the back of the co-pilot seat. “Nobody’s opening this hatch until
we’re all wearing suits! And I mean
all
! If you even touch this hatch
again, I’ll break both your arms.”

Kim pulled herself up straight and scowled at him.

Mike scowled right back at her. “If you don’t believe
it, just come on over here and try me.”

Her facial expression eased a bit, but Mike’s didn’t.
He said, “Put on your helmet and throw me mine.”

She reached into the front and pulled out the two
helmets, tossed him his and began putting on hers. He watched her; holding his
at the ready for use as a blunt weapon if she charged him.

Just before she finished putting hers on—and wouldn’t
be able to hear him—he added quickly, “As soon as you get it fastened, climb
into the front and sit in the co-pilot seat.”

When she had it fastened she looked at him but didn’t
move.

He pointed toward the seat and mouthed the words, “Do
it!”

She obeyed, but reluctantly.

Watching her every second, Mike put his helmet on too.
He then grabbed Rebecca’s from the wall by her feet where it had drifted.
Before slipping it over her head, however, he took a moment to bang it against
his to knock out some slush that he must have tossed into it from the hatch. He
double-checked his and Rebecca’s fasteners and signaled Kim to double-check
hers.

Turning his back to Kim just long enough to scrape the
frost from a small red and yellow striped access panel next to the hatch, he
opened it and turned the red-handled valve inside.