Wilma Gray leaned over her patient, checking his vital signs and looking for signs of distress that she might have missed on her previous examinations. Despite her worries, Ben was getting oxygen, and appeared to have no internal bleeding near the larynx.
“Poor kid. Might have been better off choking to death on his own blood,” she caught herself thinking. “What the hell’s wrong with me? Hours ago I was thinking he was lucky.”
She sat down at her desk and put her feet up. “Wilma darling, you are one complete mass of confusion.”
Taking a deep breath, the doctor grimaced and allowed the words to sink in. What was wrong with her? Would the death of this boy be an act of compassion? Wasn’t that something she was taught that physicians should demonstrate?
“Didn’t I also,” she spoke aloud, “just condone a cold-blooded murder?”
She would never forget the first time she watched someone die, that much was certain. It was as fresh as yesterday in her thoughts, yet nearly thirty years had passed. Her family had taken a trip together, Wilma, her sister Judith, her parents, and her grandfather. They were exploring the hills of New Zealand, wandering up and down hills and mountains of such majesty she could never have imagined. It was, she reminisced, so, so beautiful.
Until they reached Darren Mountains.
The Gray family was very pleased with its progress. Every bit of toil and struggle had been worth it for the chance to take this journey, to explore this area of the world. They were not rich; they worked. But they had enough, and they knew enough to appreciate that their lives were something to appreciate- their family was intact. Through it all, their family was intact.
Wilma sat down on the ground, looking out over the landscape, marveling at the sight of a waterfall crashing hundreds of feet from the top of a cliff, and her curiosity was insatiable. “Daddy,” she asked, “what would it be like to be under the waterfall? Would it be like taking a really big shower?”
The older man plopped down next to his daughter and put his arm around her shoulder and laughed. “No, sweetie. From that height the water would be pretty painful. It’d push you below, too, and you’d drown.”
She pondered that for a moment, wondering what it would feel like to be pressed down beneath the water, unable to reach the surface, feeling your life slipping away from you one bubble at a time. She felt her father’s arm so slack and move away from her, and missing it, she reached for it, only to find that it was very limp. Startled, she looked up at his face, and it had gone blank, awareness gone from his eyes. Wilma screamed, and her mother and grandfather came running. They began to panic, and for the first time, Wilma realized that the danger of death was frighteningly real. Her mother began radioing for help, but an instinct inside of her told Wilma that it was already too late.
“And now here I am,” she thought. “Once again trying to find a way to keep from being pushed down below the water.” There was no chance of staying afloat with Morrison, she told herself. He was going to just let them drown. The Keys kid… he was different. From the moment she had met him, there was something about how he carried himself that set him apart from the other EAD cadets. His family had been in the thick of things in the First Period. He carried around journals and materials from his ancestors, wary of repeating any part of the past. “I think,” she allowed herself, “that he gives us the best chance of survival.”
Survival, after all, was what Wilma Gray was ultimately about.
Richard paced around the engine room, hands clasped behind him, looking very much the mad scientist. Occasionally he would stop, run his hands across his face and then look skyward. It was time to put his life’s work into play, and suddenly there was a lot more at stake than graduating college.
He knew what Jack wanted. Richard had extended the scoop previously as an experiment, and part of the safety setup involved keeping it on a “leash” instead of mooring it to the ship itself. “No need,” Morrison explained, “to have any accidents until it’s time to have one, you understand?”
Park understood.
But whatever Jack had planned, the time for being tentative was past. It was time to fully attach the scoop and put it to its intended use.
“Faster than light travel. Hot damn!”
The pacing stopped as Richard checked the monitor and observed the progress of the robotic arms. He had spent months writing a proper program for getting them to delicately put the scoop in its permanent place, and the anticipation was almost more than he could handle. If he had screwed any part of the programming up, he knew it would kill his educational career, but now he realized that, if he had screwed any part of the programming up, it would kill everyone on board, including himself. Wherever they were headed, if they weren’t able to put lots of distance between the War Angel and the Omegans, they were toast. Outnumbered, outclassed, and outgunned.
A green light lit up next to the monitor. The robotic arms had completed their task.
Richard moved to a different station and engaged a different computer. One button pushed, and the scoop retracted beneath the safety of the standard engines. Flick- another one pushed, and it moved out from its housing and into place above the engine block. His fingers darted across the screen, and the scoop’s arm maneuvered slightly, changing position. “Okay, so we can move; well, hopefully we can move while we’re in motion. Would have been nice to have a chance to test that. Shit.”
The young engineer continued running through the series of tests he had prepared for the tachyon scoop project, eating up a few more minutes of time. Finally, after multiple tests of each aspect, Richard had a thought that scared him, which was not the emotion he had expected to feel. “All systems are ready. The only thing left to do is fire it up and fly.”
“Shit.”
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