Captain's Away! Chapter Ten
A Precarious Situation
Captain’s Away! is a long form, weekly serial. New chapters come out every week (more or less). Comments and suggestions welcome as we go along.
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Previously in Captain’s Away!
Yolande and Bertrand Doucette are trapped in an emergency bunker floating aimlessly in space with thirty-five other survivors after Yolanda successfully severs it from the Northumberland space station moments before the Northumberland is destroyed by a Realm battleship. This after already having fled from the space station Evangeline after it too was destroyed, likely by the same ship.
The Doucette’s son Alain is missing, presumed dead, and their daughter, Marie-Josée, has been unconscious for hours, though she appears uninjured. The survivors can last in the emergency bunker for about a week if they’re lucky, and their oxygen and power hold out.
The Doucettes haven’t exactly been lucky so far…
Chapter Ten
“A Precarious Situation”
Bertrand thought he got all the bits of vomit, but it was hard to tell for sure—some of it had drifted quite a distance. He didn’t really care; he could barely concentrate on what he was doing.
Alain.
That kid!
What did he think he was doing running off? Alain was always doing dumb stuff like that, all his life. It had gotten him into trouble plenty of times.
Now he’d gone and gotten himself—
Bertrand could barely think the word.
Killed.
No. Not killed.
There was still a chance. There was always a chance, until there wasn’t.
Yes, the Northumberland had just been attacked, the medical bay had detached from the rest of the station, but it was impossible to tell the condition of the rest of the space station. There could be survivors. Alain could have survived. He had to have. The alternative was unthinkable.
Bertrand massaged his temples with his thumbs. The not-knowing was driving him insane. Losing the Evangeline, that he could handle. Even whatever was wrong with Marie-Josée he could bear, for now.
But Alain—if only the boy hadn’t run off. If only Bertrand had kept a closer eye on him. If only the robot Sebastian had found him in time. If only… if only…
If only Yolande hadn’t been so quick to seal off the medical bay.
Bertrand shook his head violently, squelching that line of thought as soon as it occurred to him. No—he couldn’t blame his wife, his friend, his best friend. Sealing off the medical bay had been necessary. It had saved them all. What had (or might have happened) to Alain wasn’t Yolande’s fault. She had been trying to save everyone. It must have been an excruciating decision for her. He looked over at her now, trying to get the monitor wall working. God, she was beautiful. Such energy even under duress. Bertrand understood what she was doing: keeping herself busy so that she wouldn’t have to think about Alain, or the rest.
It was simply too much. First their home, then Marie-Josée, then—
No, dammit. Alain was still alive. Yes—Bertrand clung to that thought like a lifeline. It kept the encroaching madness at bay. That and…
Bertrand was a God-fearing man. He’d always gone to church. At least, when they weren’t busy evacuating space stations. He was a good father. A good husband. A good man. God wouldn’t do this to him.
He laughed aloud at that. More a sob than a laugh, really. Who was he kidding? He wasn’t always a good father or a good husband or even a good friend. Sometimes he was a jerk. He liked to poke peoples’ buttons. Not all the time, just some of the time. He couldn’t resist. He couldn’t have said why.
But he was a peaceful man. Kind. He made people laugh, helped lighten their load. He was certainly not a bad enough man to deserve losing his son. Or have his daughter put in a coma. Or have his home blown up right beneath his feet. Except that all that had happened. So maybe he was that bad. Or not good enough. Maybe you had to be especially good to make sure nothing like that ever happened to you.
A terrible thought struck him. He had bribed their way onto an escape pod. It had cost him a handful of cigars—and maybe the lives of a whole other family. He hadn’t thought the situation that serious. He tried to tell himself that, but it wasn’t true: he had done it precisely in case the situation became serious. Would anyone else would have done differently?
Yes.
Someone better than him.
Whatever he had coming to him, he bloody well deserved it.
He was sweating.
Because he didn’t know what else to do, he prayed.
Dear God, he prayed.
Please keep Alain safe.
“What’s that?” a man floating by asked.
Bertrand didn’t answer. He used his foot against a chair to push himself off, away from the man. Like most Akkadians he’d had plenty of experience in Zero gravity. He moved now with barely a thought what he was doing or where he was going. He wanted to bust out of there. He needed privacy to come to terms with his grief, with his emotions, but there was nowhere to go. He was trapped in here with everyone else and his wife, his lovely wife, who was furious with him. The chill in Bertrand’s bones settled deeper as realized that he may have lost more than just his son this day.
He saw that Yolande had gotten the monitor wall working. Now she was cycling through the various feeds to see if any sensor arrays still worked. One did, an exterior array, or at least the camera mounted to it. It showed an enormous debris field, chunks large and small, moving at various speeds alongside the emergency bunker—the remains of the Northumberland.
Bertrand quailed at the sight. Oh no, no God—how could anybody have survived that?
But chief among Bertrand’s flaws was stubbornness. Oh, how Yolande railed against that sometimes. Once it was set, you could not get Bertrand to change his mind. And Bertrand made up his mind now. That Alain was not dead. He refused to give his son up for lost. Alain was alive. Alain was alive because God was on Bertrand’s side. No, he was not the most God-fearing man alive, or the most devout, but he had always believed, deep down inside, that God was on his side. Even now, after all that had happened, he believed it. That was important, wasn’t it? Faith? Wasn’t it a miracle that Bertrand himself was still alive? And Yolande?
Despite all Bertrand’s other flaws, he could do faith. He could believe—all evidence to the contrary— that his son was still alive until God, God damn him! delivered Alain safely back into his hands.
Calculating the probability of Northumberland Station being destroyed at about ninety-six percent, the robot Sebastian had definitely minded going after Alain. It hadn’t wanted to be destroyed along with the station. It did have a couple of tricks up its metaphorical sleeve that could help should that come to pass but knowing that didn’t help its mood because there was only a twelve percent chance that the first trick would work and a three percent chance that the second would. Also, looking out for the boy had nothing to do with Sebastian’s mission. But long experience with flesh and blood types told Sebastian that saving the boy would almost certainly endear it to the boy’s guardians, and the more trust it built up the better.
It hadn’t taken long to find Alain.
“Alain,” Sebastian said when it found him. “It’s time to go back. It’s not safe out here.”
Although clearly scared, Alain said, “I don’t need help.”
“Yes, you do,” Sebastian said.
Before it could shepherd the boy to safety, the station lurched violently beneath them. Alain fell. Even Sebastian almost lost its balance.
“Are you all right?” it asked Alain, as the boy climbed back to his feet.
Alain nodded.
“Stand close,” Sebastian instructed the boy, though it already knew enough about him to understand that his impulse was to do exactly the opposite as instructed. It was, Sebastian suspected, a fundamental part of the boy’s nature. Even fear was not enough to trump Alain’s contrary nature. Seeing that he was about to bolt, Sebastian went immediately to him and wrapped both its mechanical arms around him. It did so with a speed that Alain could not have anticipated and that prohibited escape. This was extremely fortunate for Alain because seconds afterward the passageway began to fall apart around them. Sebastian projected a small force field around the two of them, one of a handful of tricks that would have astonished anybody who had known it as a mere maintenance robot. It could not project the force field far beyond its body, just half a dozen metres or so—but that was more than enough to protect it and a small boy. It could not do so for long, though.
Sebastian monitored all aspects of this extremely precarious situation carefully, paying special attention to Alain’s well-being as the boy stared in wide-eyed wonder at the space station disintegrating around him, touching neither him nor his benefactor. Were it not for the force field, within less than thirty seconds they both would have been exposed to the cold vacuum of space. The devastation buffeted them about, both robot and boy experiencing several awful jolts, and soon they found themselves hovering in the void as remnants of the station of varying sizes whizzed past them.
Sebastian had no trouble identifying one large section floating nearby as the emergency bunker, but it was leery of propelling them there. The force field was already using up too much of its power. It used what little energy it had left to propel itself out of the way of several station fragments. It sincerely hoped that no large bits hit them—the force field wouldn’t be able to withstand that. It understood that it would have to find a pocket of air soon for Alain, who wouldn’t last much longer with the miniscule portion of air trapped inside the small force field.
Of course, one of the problems of having a space station blown out from under you and finding yourself trapped in the vacuum of space is that air isn’t all that easy to come by.
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This has been an installment of the ongoing serial Captain’s Away! A Strange Dimensions book.
Also by Joe Mahoney: A Time and a Place
An unlikely hero travels to other worlds and times to save a boy who does not want to be saved in this unique and imaginative adventure, by turns comic and tragic.
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