John and his older brother, Karl, shared a small bedroom. Karl was gone, probably hanging out with his gang—he was a member of the Skins, a real gang, the local white-boys’ gang. Karl was way cool, but he never wanted Johnny to meet his gang buddies; said he wanted Johnny to have something better out of life.
Stinky was smoking a cigarette he’d found in Johnny’s mother’s cupboard, and Fishface was sitting on Karl’s bunk bed. Karl would have gone ballistic if he’d seen one of Johnny’s friends on his bed, but Karl wasn’t there, so fuck him. Fishface was picking at the wall, the cheap plasterboard coming loose from the studs. One end was already free, and Fishface, bored, wiggled and pried at it until he worked it loose enough to pull out and look at the ragged insulation underneath.
“Shit, boy,” Stinky said, “what the fuck you got there?”
Fishface didn’t bother to look up. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Shit.” Stinky dropped the cigarette on the floor, walked over, and reached down inside the hole. “You dogfucker, you call this nothing?”
Stinky held up what he had found: a nine-millimeter automatic, gleaming dull gray and malignant in the feeble sunlight filtering through the dirty window.
Johnny hadn’t realized that his brother had it. “Hey, Stinky, I think you’d better put that back,” he said, nervous.
“What, are you a pussy? Afraid your badass brother gonna see?” Stinky held out the pistol, pointed it at Johnny’s head, and squeezed the trigger.
“Bang,” he said.
Johnny had flinched when he saw Stinky’s finger whiten on the trigger. The trigger hadn’t moved. “You faggot,” he said.
Stinky laughed and popped the safety. “Thought you bought it there, didn’t you?” He turned the gun over, ejected the magazine, and looked at it. “Full load, too. Man, your brother is packing.” His voice held a tone of envy.
“Look, this isn’t funny,” Johnny said. “You’d better—”
Stinky held the magazine in one hand and the automatic in the other. He pointed it at the window. “Bang,” he said, and pulled the trigger again.
The gun firing in the tiny room was louder than anything Johnny had heard in his entire life. It jumped in Stinky’s hand, and all four of the boys jumped.
“Holy shit! You asshole!”
There was a huge hole in the ceiling above the window. Plaster dust and gunpowder smoke swirled in the air.
“Hey, how the fuck was I to know it was loaded?” Stinky shouted. “I took the clip out.” As if to show it, he rammed the magazine back into the gun. “It was empty.”
“Put the safety back on, you asshole,” Johnny said.
The door kicked open, slamming against the wall. Johnny’s brother was silhouetted in the doorway. “The hell you assholes are doing?”
“Oh, shit,” Johnny said. He stood up. “Hey, Karl, we was—”
“Shut up,” Karl said. He was looking at Stinky. “Asshole, give me my gun.”
Stinky pointed it at him. “Hey, man, be cool. We were—”
Karl slapped the gun out of Stinky’s hand with a move almost too fast for Johnny to see, and in the next instant he had Stinky by the throat. “You point that gun at me again, fat boy, and after I rip your balls off I’m going to shove them up your ass. Got it?” He didn’t give Stinky a chance to answer, but reached down with the other hand, grabbed the crotch of Stinky’s pants and picked him up and tossed him toward the door. Stinky staggered, bounced off the doorframe, and then caught his balance and ran.
“I ever see you around here, they won’t scrape up enough of you to fill a jockstrap,” Karl shouted after him. Then he turned around and looked at Fishface. “You got some business here?”
“No, sir,” Fishface said.
“Then get the fuck out.”
“Yes, sir!” Fishface said, and ran out of there so fast that Johnny wondered whether his feet even touched the ground.
Karl didn’t bother to look at Johnny, just reached down, picked up his gun, put the safety on and jammed it into his pants. Then he walked over and looked down on Johnny.
“Hey, Karl,” Johnny said, tentatively. He knew that he was going to get a pounding, but it was best to see if he could defuse his brother as much as he could. The sharp smell of powder and the dust from the ceiling seemed to choke all of the atmosphere out of the room. His ears were still ringing. “We didn’t mean nothing.”
“I know that, kid.” Karl sighed. “What are we doing to you, kiddo? Just what are we doing?”
“It was an accident,” Johnny said. “We just sort of found it by accident—”
Karl slapped him. Johnny saw it coming and tried to dodge, but he wasn’t near fast enough.
“What was that for?” Karl said.
Johnny’s ears were ringing from the blow. He tried to frame his words. “For taking your gun—”
Karl slapped him again, this time with no warning. “Asshole. I don’t care about the gun.” Karl raised his hand again, and Johnny cringed.
“That’s for having stupid friends,” Karl said. “Your friends are stupid, and you’re stupid, for having stupid friends. What the hell were you morons thinking about?”
“I dunno. We weren’t thinking about anything.”
“That’s right, you weren’t thinking. You’ve got a brain, but nobody would ever know, since you never bother to use it.” Karl sat down on the bed, hard, and put his head in his hands. “Oh, shit, kid, what the hell are we doing to you? We’ve got to get you out of here.”
That had been a long time ago. John hardly ever thought about his brother Karl anymore, except sometimes when he got drunk, and he almost never got drunk. By the time he had gotten into high school, Karl had dropped out of school and had spent time in jail twice.
Nobody else in the projects seemed to have noticed the shot, or if they had, they paid attention to their own business. The hole Stinky blew in the ceiling had seemed huge to Johnny, but nobody from the housing authority had ever noticed it, even when they came around once a year to do the inspection.
Yeah, John Radkowski thought, Trevor can get a little annoying sometimes. But on the whole, he was okay. Not half the trouble that I’d been.
Now that both he and Chamlong were back in the cabin, it was Ryan Martin’s turn to go out on the surface. Ryan was deeply engrossed with the computer. Radkowski walked over and put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Hey, how’s it going?” he said. “You ready to take a look around outside?”
“I’ve been checking out the Dulcinea’s systems,” Ryan said.
“So?” Radkowski said. “We checked her systems a dozen times during cruise. I can’t think that anything’s likely to have changed in the last four hours.”
“Well, sure, but now that we’re on the surface, I have a higher bandwidth connection,” Ryan said. “I can command sensors in real time now, get more than just the health check signal.”
“And?”
“These readings are screwy.” Ryan shook his head. “Take a look at this,” he said. “Here. I’m looking at the fuel temperature. The tanks ought to be holding steady at about 90K, but they’re up over 200K, both of them. Tank pressures are fine, both tanks are full, but I can’t understand these thermal readings.”
Radkowski looked at the display. “Looks like a broken thermistor to me.”
“Both sensors on both tanks? Seems unlikely.”
“Shit,” Radkowski said. “According to the mission plan, we’re not supposed to check her out until the morning. Look, why don’t you go on outside and take a walk around. If you think we need to check her out today, that’s your call, but think about it for a while first, okay? We’re all running a little bit on overload.” The commander clapped him on the shoulder. “Anyway, it’s clear to me—you need a break. Go on. You deserve it.”