Thirty-Five: Ashton Childe

THIRTY-FIVE

ASHTON CHILDE

My head hurt. The whole left side of my face felt bruised. Alva Clay stood over me. Her hard plastic boots were close enough to stomp my face. Her fists were clenched and she had the butt of her Archipelago pistol sticking from the waistband of her olive combat trousers.

“Are you awake, shithead?”

I turned my aching eyes from the overhead lights. “What happened?”

“You made a damn fool of yourself. If your girl here hadn’t tranquilised your stupid ass, you’d be dead right now.”

I swivelled my neck so I could look up at Laura. She was sitting in a wheelchair with her needle gun on the blanket covering her legs.

“You shot me?”

Her hands were clasped and her knuckles were pale. Her lips were a tight white line. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Like hell you didn’t.”

I tried to move my arms but they were securely fastened to the deck at elbow and wrist.

Clay watched with contempt. “I’m going to hit my bunk,” she told Laura. “If he moves again, tranquilise him.”

She stepped over me and marched out of the room and into the main corridor. I heard the receding clomp of her boots on the deck plates, and then she was gone.

My neck was stiff.

“What time is it?”

“About three in the morning, ship’s time.”

“And you got given the first watch, huh?”

Laura smoothed down the sides of her blanket, tucking them between her thighs and the arms of the wheelchair. “I just wanted to be sure that woman wasn’t going to slit your throat and eject you into space.”

“Do you think she might have done?”

Laura pursed her lips. “If she had, you would have deserved it.”

I frowned. I knew something had happened, but the actual events were scratchy. I had vague recollections of my own voice sounding hoarse and angry, of my fingers gripping somebody’s face. I remembered a terrible, all-consuming panic. I remembered lashing out…

“What did I do?” I felt like a waking man trying to catch the last wisps of a bad dream, or a hung-over drunk trying to recall and parse the fuzzy degradations of the previous night.

“You attempted to hijack the ship.”

My eyes widened and I tried to raise my head. “I did what?” Even wearing a powered suit, such an attempt at insurgency would have been pointless. Carnivore-class heavy cruisers were designed to take care of themselves and make their own decisions. They had complete control of their internal environments, and therefore possessed a hundred different ways to kill or detain intruders. They were almost impossible to commandeer, as the citizens of Northfield had discovered to their cost. “That’s stupid. Why would I even—?”