Rambaud fled.
Noyes stared after him. “They were going to suicide all of us anyway, for nothing. If I’m going to die, it might as well be doing my job.”
“Hell, yes.” Max’s job was getting the specifications on the deflectors to Drozhin. If the captain took the escape shuttles and flew in system, then it was Max’s duty to retrieve the chips from his quarters and get on a shuttle.
He followed Noyes back into the mouth of fire instead.
“They’re coming out!” someone shouted.
Four more men this time, in worse shape than the others. Noyes had to hypospray them full of painkillers just to get them down to the shower. Max carried the man with the tattoos. They were coal black in his skin. Whatever lived in the cells and gave them their luminescence had been killed off by the radiation.
Before they finished the others, Chevrier was brought to them, covered with burn blisters, his hands raw meat, his eyes blind. He couldn’t speak.
“Did he get it done?” shouted Max.
No one knew, so Max flew back toward the monitor room, where the handful of men who remained were arguing over the monitors. “The temperatures are still climbing,” shouted DePuy. His voice had risen an octave in pitch. “I tell you he didn’t get it running.”
“What’s going on?” asked Max.
“The pipes aren’t open,” said one of the electrician’s mates.
“Somebody needs to go in there and turn this valve here,” said DePuy. He pointed to a spot in the middle of the thick steam that surrounded the overheating reactor.
No one volunteered.
They were boys mostly, eighteen or nineteen, junior crewmen. They’d all seen the others carried out, had smelled the burned flesh, had listened to their weeping.
The cut on Max’s leg throbbed. His face and arms felt hot, burned. “I’ll go in,” he said.
Reactors were the only ship system he wasn’t officially trained on, and all the reading he’d done before the voyage seemed inadequate to the task now. But he could go in there and turn a valve. He could do that much.
He went out to the corridor and found it blocked by a man in a vacuum suit, dragging a plasma cutter on a tether and reading the manual in his palm-pad. The man turned, his face gray behind the clear mask covering his face. It was Kulakov, the chief petty officer.
For a second Max thought the man would freeze up.
Kulakov looked back down at his diagram. “Be sure to seal the locks tight behind me,” he said. “Send someone right now to levels three and four, portside, directly above us, to clear the corridors and seal the locks there. You have to do that!”
“Will do,” said Max. Then, “Carry on.”
Kulakov passed through the hatch, but when Max went to seal it, the freshwater supply tubing blocked it. “Damn,” he said, with a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Damn, damn, damn.”
Then DePuy was there beside him with a clamp and some cutters. He severed the pipe, and tossed the loose end through the hatch after Kulakov. Max sealed the door. “Did someone go to three and four?”
DePuy nodded. “But I’ll go double-check,” he added, glancing at the bare spot where Max’s comet should have been. No, he was looking at Max’s radiation badge. It was orange-red, bleeding into a bright crimson.
“You better head over to see Doc,” said the electrician’s mate at the monitors.
“Not yet,” said Max.
On the video feed they watched Kulakov move methodically from point to point, comparing the hook-up and settings with the diagram on his palm-pad. It took him much longer than it had Chevrier when he was naked. A couple times it was clear that between the fog, and the loss of sensation caused by the suit, Kulakov became disoriented crossing an open space. He spun in circles until he found the right side up again. He reached the final valve but couldn’t turn it. He peeled his gloves off, surrounded by the steam, and slowly cranked it over.
The electrician’s mate pounded the monitors. “It’s running! Look at the temps drop!”
Max did, but he watched Kulakov too as he struggled to put his gloves back on, picked up the plasma cutter, and then burned a hole through the hull.
The weeping sound of the radiation alarms was joined by the sudden keening of the hull breech alarms. The whole ship shuddered, the bulkhead creaked beside him, and Max’s ears popped.
But he kept his eyes fixed on the screen in the reactor room. The steam and all the radioactive water whooshed out of the ship. So did Lukinov’s body. And so did Kulakov.
There was a dark, flat line straight across one of the screens, like a dead reading on a monitor.
Kulakov’s tether.
“Hey look!” whispered one of the crewmen as Max entered the sick bay. “The Corpse is up and walking!”
They all laughed at that, the survivors, even Max. Chevrier was dead, and so was Rucker, and so were two other men. Of the six surviving men who’d received red badge levels of radiation exposure, only Max was strong enough to walk.
Kulakov sat in the middle of them. His hands were wrapped in bandages, two crooked, crippled hooks. Max nodded to him. “They still giving you a hard time?” he asked.
“You know it,” grinned Kulakov.
“Well it’s not fair that he should be the only one who gets leave while we’re on this voyage,” said one of the men.
“How can it be shore leave without a shore, that’s what I want to know,” said Kulakov.
They all laughed again, even Max. That was going to be a ship joke for a long time, how Kulakov got liberty-hanging on a tether outside the ship.
“Papa sent me down here with a message,” said Max. Captain Petoskey, Papa, had only been to the sick bay once since the accident, and quickly. Most of the other crewman stayed away as if radiation sickness were something contagious.
“What is it?” said Kulakov, the words thick in his throat.
“He wanted me to tell you that he’s going to request that they rename the ship.” The crewmen looked up at him seriously, all the humor gone from their eyes. “They’re going to call it the New Nazareth.”
New Nazareth had been nuked the worst by the Adareans. The land there still glowed in the dark.
Kulakov chuckled first, then the other men broke out laughing. Max saluted them, holding himself stiff for a full three seconds, then turned to go see Noyes. The medtech slumped in his chair, head sprawled across his arms on the desk, eyes closed. “I’m not sleeping,” he muttered. “I’m just thinking.”
“About your fiancйe,” asked Max, “waiting for you at home?”
“No, about the bone marrow cultures I’ve got growing in the vats, and the skin sheets, and the transplant surgery I have to do later this afternoon, that I’ve never done unassisted before, and the one I have to do tonight that I’m not trained to do at all.” He twisted his head, peeking one eye out at Max. “And Suzan. Waiting for me. And the ship flying home. How are you feeling?”
“I’d be fine if you had any spare teeth,” Max said, poking his tongue into the empty spots in his gums. That didn’t feel as strange as having gravity under his feet again.
“They’re in a drawer over by the sink,” said Noyes. “Take two and call me in the morning.”
Max walked through corridors considerably less crowded than they had been a few days before. Almost everything inside the ship had received some radiation. The crewmen went crate to crate with geiger counters deciding what could be saved and what should be jettisoned. With the grav back on, the men’s appetites returned. They also had a year’s worth of supplies and only a short voyage ahead of them, so every meal became a feast. Some celebrated the fact that they were going home, and others the simple fact that they’d survived.
Only Captain Petoskey failed to join the celebration. When Max entered the galley, Petoskey wore the expression of a man on the way to the lethal injection chamber. Max couldn’t say for sure if it was the condemned man’s expression or the executioner’s.
Ensign Reedy sat on one side of a long table, with two troopers standing guard behind her. Petoskey and Commander Gordet sat on the opposite side with Simco standing at attention. Petoskey looked naked without his beard, shorn before they recorded these official proceedings. Burdick, the other intelligence officer, sat off to one end.