The Trouble Run

2

Properly treated, radiation burns weren't terminal. Long use of nuclear power had taught humanity how to mitigate its dangers.

Half blinded by the pain, Li Jie pulled himself to the medical supply locker. Mercifully, the Shàngbān was no longer under acceleration. Her drive had probably been wrecked in the attack. Li Jie could drift most of the way, rather than dragging himself along the deck plating. Still, every time he had to shove off or brake his flight, it felt like skin was being flayed from his hands or feet.

After a prolonged period of torturous effort, during which Li Jie blacked out twice, he finally reached the locker. Inside, he found a knife. A few quick slits—it felt as if the blade was cutting flesh rather than fabric—rent his pilot suit up both arms, down both legs, down his chest, and around his waist. Pausing only a moment in apprehension, he seized pieces of the suit in each hand, took a shuddering breath, and pulled.

Agonized curses echoed through what remained of the Shàngbān. The scraps of flight-suit came away from his body with great blotchy red patches of flesh attached. He had never endured anything so painful. The seconds it took him to remove the suit seemed interminable.

At last he floated, naked and bleeding, before the locker, a corona of small scarlet globes filling the air around him. Despite the pain, he had to treat himself before weakness from blood loss made it impossible. With a Herculean effort of will, he removed a can of surrogate skin from the locker and began dressing his wounds.

The skin contained an anesthetic that dulled the pain. After twenty excruciating minutes, the fog in Lie Jie's head slowly began to clear. When he could think straight, he turned back to the supply cabinet for the antirad. Surrugate skin took only a few minutes to set, and most of his wounds were now covered with a blue-white congealed seal. While he would have preferred to apply the antirad treatment earlier, he hadn't wanted to risk losing too much through his bleeding wounds. Grasping the injector firmly in one hand, Li Jie sought out a fairly undamaged portion of natural skin under his left arm and applied the tip. He heard a hiss, and felt a sharp pain as fluid was forced into his bloodstream. In about 30 seconds, the injector was empty. He let it drift free and blacked out again.

Li Jie came to floating in the middle of the compartment. The anesthetic had done its job—his pain was now a dull ache. How long had he been out? For the first time since the attack, he realized the Shàngbān's status indicators in his corneal all showed null. He queried the ship's systems for data, but received no response. At least his internal clock was working—it looked like a little over 30 minutes had elapsed since the attack.

The situation was not good. He was adrift in a wrecked freighter, with no remaining weaponry, somewhere between Ceres and Mars. Unknown parties had just nuked his ship. Twice.

Curiously, it bothered him that he was still alive. Why had the hunters fired only a single missile? He was confident the remaining HKD could have finished him off after he detonated his initial spread of mines. He'd now been drifting, dead in space, for at least half an hour. Why was he still here?

Unable to answer these questions at the moment, Li Jien set them aside. Kicking against a nearby bulkhead, he glided back into the pilot's compartment, finding it almost completely destroyed.

Interplanetary ships--even old freight-haulers like the Shàngbān—were equipped with EMP protection. Decentralized electrical systems seemed to have more-or-less survived. If not, life support would have failed, leaving Li Jien to suffocate and freeze in the dark.

Such protection, however, did nothing to shield against the force of the concussion. Li Jien's mines were sheathed in tungsten, which converted to plasma upon detonation. This expanding wave of plasma had hit the Shàngbān, twisting the frame of the ship, crumpling bulkheads, and ripping instruments from their mountings. One wall of the pilot's compartment had collapsed inward. The acceleration couch in which Li Jien had been strapped when the mines exploded was canted drunkenly to one side. There was surprisingly little fire damage, but a great deal of melted plastic. He wasn't certain he wanted to know what temperature the compartment had reached when the blast struck the Shàngbān.

Despite the damage, he had little choice other than to salvage what he could. He also hoped to find clues as to why the last HKD hadn't finished him off.

Li Jie snagged a badly singed strap, still attached to the acceleration couch, and reeled himself in.

The control board was a hopeless wreck. Five minutes sorting through the mess of melted insulation, exposed wires, and warped circuit boards convinced Li Jien he would get nothing useful out of what had once been the Shàngbān's nerve center. The auxiliary controls were the only chance of determining what was going on outside. He hoped they were in better shape. Failing that, he told himself wryly, he'd have to be content looking out a viewport.

Li Jien shoved off the ruined console, grunting a bit at the strain, and caught the ladder leading from the control center to the deck "below." There was, of course, neither up nor down any longer, now that the Shàngbān was drifting dead in space.

The control center was the forward-most compartment of the ship. Immediately aft was the crew lounge—a space large enough for maybe two or three people to share when off duty. Typically this had not been a problem—most of the time, Li Jie was the only crew aboard.

Further down the long axis of the ship were the crew cabins (four private cubbyholes), a head, and an airlock spaced around the circumference of the hull. Beyond, the mess and the galley were followed by the engineering space—and the auxiliary controls.

Li Jie got as far as the cabins before he gave up. The control center was the farthest from the detonation, and had sustained the least damage. The farther he pushed into the wreck of the Shàngbān, the more he realized it was hopeless. Aft of the sleeping quarters, the ship had been crumpled like a discarded aluminum can. There was no way a grown man could force his way past the compressed bulkheads, twisted support struts, and crushed debris.

Seeing the extent of the destruction, Li Jie was amazed the ship still held atmosphere. He needed to look up the manufacturer of the self-sealant which lined the inner hull and buy some stock--if he survived.

At the moment, this was doubtful. Since he couldn't get to engineering, he had no way of knowing the status of the main drive—but running a fusion reactor through a trash compactor didn't seem like a good idea. Even if the reactor was intact, it was highly likely the power conduits had been severed—the Shàngbān could very well be running on batteries. If so, Li Jie had less than 90 minutes of life support left.

"Time," Li Jien told himself, "to step outside."

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