“Commander, are you better now?”
“Yes, but you didn’t listen to me! He’s dead!”
“I heard you. How do you know?”
“He didn’t answer me when I spoke; I reached over and shook him and he—his head—it just flopped. I thought he needed air; I opened his faceplate and he’s—he’s dead.” Her voice rose.
“Commander Bentik, stay where you are.” Dread added to the cold lump in her belly. What if the Commandant— She turned to look at him again.
“The Commandant?” Vispersen unhooked his safety restraints.
“Hasn’t said anything.” Ky lurched back across the aisle. “Commandant? Sir? Are you all right?”
The Commandant didn’t reply, didn’t move. She could not see his color through the faceplate; Vispersen slid it back. The Commandant’s face was gray, his expression fixed. His lips were bluish, with a little white foam at the corners of his mouth.
“No!” the steward said. “Did he—it must have been a heart attack—” He felt for a pulse and found none. “He’s so cold—”
“He’s dead, then?” Ky felt a chill too deep for her suit to compensate. The Commandant and his aide? What about the flight crew? The rest of the passengers? What would have happened to Jen and her if they’d worn the Spaceforce survival suits? And who, now, was in command?
“It’s just like his aide.” Jen was up out of her seat again, crowding in next to the steward to look. “That foam at his lips.”
Ky agreed on dead. She’d seen it before. “Let me check his pulse. Get his helmet off and his survival suit open.” The steward gave her a startled look, then unlocked the neck ring, pulled off the helmet, and peeled open the upper third of the suit.
Ky stared at the Commandant’s neck, where a steel needle was embedded; when she leaned to look, another needle had penetrated the other side of his neck. “Poison,” she said. “It’s murder.” She glanced at the steward. He looked stunned, confused. She turned to Jen. “Did you see a needle like this in his aide’s neck?”
“N-no. I didn’t open his suit, just the faceplate. What if—what if the suit they wanted me to wear had poisoned me?”
“You’d have been dead,” Ky said. “And so would I. But we don’t know that those suits were rigged to kill.” She was sure they had been; she was sure whoever had done this had intended to kill at least all the officers aboard. She pulled a stylus from her sleeve pocket and poked into the neck of the suit. “Quick-acting, didn’t let him thrash—didn’t activate just from putting the suit on, because we were talking after that. When he closed the faceplate maybe…” She looked inside the helmet and prodded the inside, near the faceplate.
“Admiral, we need to exit the module—” Vispersen touched her arm. He still had that stunned expression, the words coming out of his mouth in a monotone, as if read from an instruction card. Perhaps they were—one he had seen many times.
“We need to find out who else is alive,” Ky said. “The flight crew; the other passengers.” Jen, with a bruise rising visibly on her forehead, would be best sitting down for now. “Commander, sit back down over there. Sergeant—Vispersen, isn’t it? Check the aft compartment and get a count of survivors and any injuries. I’ll check the flight crew.”
Ky made her way forward and opened the hatch to the cockpit. Both pilots were immobile and unresponsive in their protective gear. One was dead—no vital signs readout on his helmet nor, when she opened the faceplate and unlocked the helmet, any pulse in his neck. Like the Commandant, his face was gray, his lips blue with a line of foam. The copilot’s face was the now-familiar gray, but she could hear his staccato grunts. Not dead yet.
She looked back and saw the steward, whose expression now was more alert, and, she thought, appropriate. Except that he wasn’t where she’d told him to go.
“Same as the Commandant. Poison,” she said.
He nodded. “The suit was sabotaged?”
“Yes. Go check the aft compartment, Sergeant.” She put more bite in her voice. He stared at her.
“What are you going to do?”
“Retrieve the flight recorder and the crew’s IDs. Gather evidence. Go on now. We need to get the life rafts ready to deploy and I’ll need a medtech up here if there’s one aboard.”
Vispersen headed back down the aisle; Ky turned her attention to the copilot again. She unlocked his helmet, opened the neck ring, and saw that only one needle had penetrated his neck. Would he live?
She lacked the training to do anything; she hoped they had a medtech aboard who could. Meanwhile, that flight recorder… there, a compartment with the familiar orange stripes. She opened the latch and unhooked the connections, then pulled the flight recorder out of its hole, slightly reassured by the blinking light on its top surface. It might have been sabotaged as well, but unless it contained no data at all, it should have something useful. It just fit into the external chest pocket of her protective suit. She put the pilot’s ID tags and the shuttle’s command wand into one of the leg pockets.
She heard voices from the other end of the module; when she looked, Vispersen was making his way forward, followed by several others in orange survival suits. The suits had no name tags or rank insignia, but they introduced themselves briefly: Sergeant Cosper, Corporal Inyatta, Corporal Riyahn, Tech Lundin.
“Master Sergeant Marek has taken charge in the rear compartment,” Sergeant Cosper said. “He’s the only one of us who’s ever been through a passenger module landing. It was just in training, though.”
“Much better than nothing,” Ky said. “Pilot’s dead. The copilot’s been badly injured—I think poisoned like the other, but he’s still breathing, and I think his leg’s broken. Anyone here trained in trauma?”
“Me, sir. Uh, Admiral.” Tech Lundin was a strongly built woman with a steady gaze out of gray eyes. “I’m certified fourth-level trauma life support.”
“Excellent,” Ky said. “You’re in charge, then.”
“Yes, sir… Admiral.”
“Just sir,” Ky said. “Be sure to collect the copilot’s tags; I have the pilot’s, and the flight recorder.”
Lundin pointed to a bulkhead compartment. “Should be a basket in there, Corporal, and an IV setup in number four. I’ll need both. Sergeant, if you’ll follow me.” She moved forward past Ky.
Ky looked at Vispersen. “I’ll go back and talk to Staff Sergeant Marek.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there survival equipment in this compartment that we’ll need?”
“Yes, sir.” He pointed to the overhead. “Life raft there—three more in the rear compartment. Contents of some of these lockers—”
“If Tech Lundin doesn’t need these two, start getting supplies together.”
“Deploy the raft, sir?”
“Not yet—just get supplies we’ll need from bulkhead compartments; put them on the seats. I’ll talk to Marek first.”
She made her way down the aisle; when she came abreast of Jen, who looked both scared and offended, she hoped a touch of humor would help. “This is not the homecoming I planned.”
“I thought not,” Jen said. “It is certainly not what I expected. This doesn’t happen back—”
Ky held up her hand. Jen said no more. “We must focus on the here and now. I need your report—did you check the aft compartment before you came forward?”
“I told you about the Commandant’s aide being dead. And Senior Lieutenant Ghomerti, in the compartment with us. I didn’t go back—I came to find you,” Jen said, her voice uneven. “All poisoned. If we’d worn those suits—”
“But we didn’t,” Ky said. “And we’re not the only survivors.” Her thoughts raced; most of them would not help Jen stay calm. Whoever sabotaged the suits had chosen the most critical targets first. With the pilots dead or incapacitated, the shuttle would crash at sea, maybe without separating the passenger module, and the others would die in the crash.