The Runabout by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing Incorporated

Seventeen

The phrases “stupidest thing” and “shut down the drive” echo in my head for the next two days. We have no good choices, and I’m thinking about all of them.

We might end up choosing the option with the least degree of stupid, as my old friend Squishy would say. Sometimes great risks require a little bit of stupid.

We took a great risk coming in here, and now we might have to take another great risk to get out.

I spend most of those two days in bed. By the middle of the second day, I’m feeling well enough to want to walk around. The dizziness is gone, and the scans Jaylene shows me are better. The cells look like cells again, albeit different than they had before.

She tries to explain the difference to me, using terms that are familiar but used in a way I don’t entirely comprehend.

I understand situational medicine. I can wrap a broken arm, help someone who is oxygen deprived, figure out what to do about severe lacerations. I don’t know the details of human biology. It doesn’t interest me as much as spaceships and derelicts and wrecks and mechanical things.

So I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to the details of my own condition. I never expected to be in bed so long. I never expected to be so weak.

I figured, if something happened to me while diving, I would die out there. I never expected to be saved. I never expected to be damaged.

I never expected to be weak.

But I try not to dwell on it. I am improving, and rapidly, according to Jaylene. So is Elaine. We haven’t had a chance to talk yet, because Jaylene believes we both need rest more than companionship.

She’s right about the rest. I’ve fallen asleep in the middle of conversations. I’m still shaky at times.

I don’t like how I feel.

I also don’t like what I know.

I know I won’t be diving in the next few days, or even the next few weeks. I know there’s a possibility that I might never dive again.

But I don’t discuss that either. I don’t want people to tell me I’m being too pessimistic. I also don’t want them to tell me that I’m right.

I’m dozing for the fifth time today when Yash and Mikk enter my room. They pull up chairs beside the bed. They look determined.

I square my shoulders, scrunch my pillow behind my back, and pretend to have more energy than I do.

I force myself to focus.

“Okay,” Mikk says without preamble. “Here’s what we know. Whatever that energy field was—and we’ll discuss that in a minute—it came out of the runabout.”

I look away from his face to Yash’s. She nods.

“We checked every ship around the runabout again,” Mikk says. “Then we used that program Yash’s team was writing when you and I gave them all our information. Her program is very different from ours.”

“It works this way,” Yash starts, but I wave a hand.

“Tell me that later,” I say.

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