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Like I said before there ain't much cause to get together on the big cargo haulers like St. Melinda. There's always just a handful of crew and they work together maybe 2 days of a three-month flight unless something major goes wrong. There's crews that like to socialize and there's crews that doesn't and we were one of them that doesn't. You eat in your own tube and you shit in your own tube and you never see the captain at all unless there's a problem. It ain't like we're all friends out here. So to make sure there's nothing wrong you wear these monitor bands and they ping your vitals to someone on board who's supposed to care about that kind of thing. So if you fall down and break your leg or you krang your head on a step and get knocked out or you have a heart attack from the shitty reconstituted food they serve in your tube, the monitor band says boo at whoever's minding the store. But they also got these tickers, and the ticker goes off on everybody's monitor band if something's gone wrong and the guy minding the store doesn't respond for a while. It's a fail-safe, see? A lot of people call it fool-proof but I never saw something a really determined fool couldn't fuck up if he put his mind to it. When the ticker went off I was out on one of the catwalks playing double-damn with Leslie, the language student who was taking the jaunt with us as a passenger. Normally we could have just played in a hallway but she said she wanted to see the cargo pits. I said sure, if you want to sit on a catwalk suspended eighty feet over a bunch of lifters stacked with steel and titanium sheets, be my guest, who am I to criticize your choice in scenery. I guess the thought we were hauling stuffed toys or Alphane rock-cats or something interesting. Nope, just metal, Leslie. I don't really like double-damn, and we weren't even playing for money (she didn't have any), but what I like about it is the rules are simple, so she didn't ask a lot of questions, but it requires concentration, so she didn't talk much. She asked too many questions, and when she wasn't asking she was telling about language theory and her boyfriend back on Ender, neither of which interested me very much. I was just about to make my first jump of the game when the ticker went. "What's that?", asked Leslie. I told her it's the ticker and it means that someone's got a medical issue. I didn't tell her that Loto hadn't responded to said medical issue, because I didn't want her to ask any more questions. The ticker signal was coming from Murray's tube; Murray was this hitcher we'd brought on at Miller Bay some three months back and I ain't seen him since, so I figure maybe he's throwing up from too much ship food or what have you. I got on the beeper and hailed Loto. He didn't answer. This was the first time all trip I'd been worried. After that I hailed Frahm. Frahm was the captain. He liked to be called Captain Frahm, and I liked to be paid a decent wage. Neither of us respected the other's wishes. "Hey Frahm." "This is Captain Frahm, Krilov. What do you want? You get the grip from that schoolgirl?" "Christ, Frahm, she's standing right next to me," I said. "And no. You got Loto up there? You guys discussing how to divide up the profits you're cheating the rest of us out of?" "Some profits. You cost more than the docking fees at district and you do less work. What do you want Loto for, if you don't got the grip?" "My ticker's going off. Isn't yours?" I asked. There was a pause on the other line and he rustled around. He probably wasn't even wearing his monitor band, the fucker. I could report him for that but then he'd put out the word I wasn't reliable just to be petty. "Shit, yeah. I had the hailer up so loud I didn't even hear it at first. " Sure. Good story, Frahm. "Well, I just tried to hail him and I got nothing. He's not usually forgetful, is he?" "Nah. But we've never had a medical emergency since he signed on. I'll put the ship on track and go hunt him down. Who's ticking?" "Murray," I told him. "Who the fuck is Murray?" "The hitcher," I sighed. "The guy we signed at Miller Bay. You want me to look him up?" "Yeah." Frahm signed off and I got up from the double-damn square to go to Murray's tube. All of the sudden Leslie makes noise like she wants to come with me and I have to set her straight. "But I could help out, maybe. If he's sick," she said. "I took first aid classes when I was a lifeguard back home. Three years." "What's a lifeguard?" I asked, and regretted it. "Never mind. Look, we got liability issues. Insurance, you see? First of all, the privacy issue, and second of all, maybe contagion, and all kinds of other factors. No way are you coming along." Actually, I was pulling all that shit out of the empty air -- there probably were insurance issues, but fuck if I knew what they were. I just didn't want her tagging along. I took a lifter to Murray's tube because I didn't feel like walking. Frahm hailed me along the way and told me Loto wasn't in the office or the sickbay, and he was gonna tear him a new one when he found him, like I believed that. He was just saying it to impress the rest of the crew. I said send Loto to Murray's if you find him and then shut off; to be honest, I was excited. Nothing interesting ever happens on these hauls and I was kind of determined to make the most out of it if I could. When I got to the tube, the ticker was going nuts, which meant whatever was wrong with Murray was getting worse. If it went silent that would mean we wouldn't have to worry about Murray no more one way or another. I coded open the door to the tube and stepped in. The lights were on but no Murray's home. This was confusing because the ticker was near to falling off my wrist it was going so heavy. The bunk wasn't made and his personals were here and there, so I figured he'd been there recenty. Thinking he might have passed out in the shitter, I coded that open. Murray wasn't in there. Loto was in there. I heard a lot of sounds one after another: I heard a rasping, ugly gargling hiss that I later found out was Loto trying to breathe through the hole in his neck that Murray had opened up with a knife. I heard Leslie screaming, since she was so smart that she'd followed me all the way and now was getting the special treat of seeing Loto sitting on the shitter with his head almost sawed off. I heard my beeper whine as Frahm tried to hail me. I heard a heavy dripping, which I noticed way too quickly was the stump at the end of Loto's right arm leaking its last into the shitter. Then I didn't hear anything else. The ticker had gone silent. We didn't have to worry about Loto no more. Leslie was freaking out. Well, I was freaking out too, but I was quiet about it. All she kept doing was breathing really hard, like she was about to have a coronary, and gasping "What do we do? What do we do?" I told her we didn't do nothing, but that I was going to hail back the captain and get this shit sorted out quick like. I told her to go to Dani's room, because it was secured. And I told her not to get hurt on the way there, that was really important. "Why?" she asked. "Because Loto was our medic," I told her. "With him gone, nothin' better happen to the rest of us." Permanent Link. |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "(Los Angeles) seemed a city where everyone seemed to live in a bungalow on a broad avenue lined with palm, pepper or eucalyptus trees, where there was never any snow." (Kevin Starr) |