Ship's Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

sighed and looked around the cabin to see if perhaps something else needed to be done. Anything was better than that image! But sadly there was nothing. So, after smiling at the sight of milord and his son snuggled up in bed hugging each other, I floated over to the viewport to watch...
    Well, the end I supposed.
    The final Field collapse hadn’t done would-be stargazers any favors—we were spinning on all three axis, though not particularly rapidly on any of them. The result was that even though Marcus Prime took up almost half the sky, the planet zipped by at seemingly random intervals and odd angles. It was sick-making, yet I stood and watched anyway. For all its shortcomings, this was the best show on.
    Was it just my imagination? Or were we growing visibly closer with each sweep?
    I was still standing there with my mouth hanging open thinking about what it meant to be free when I heard a knocking sound. Instantly I was alert and attentive again, listening for leaks. Perhaps a bit of debris had shifted somewhere? Then the knocking came again, this time in the five slow and evenly-measured raps of the trained spacer. My mouth dropped open again—someone was out there! Instantly I drew my knife and used the hilt to signal back with five raps of my own…
    …and a spacesuited man swam across the viewport!
    “Milord!” I cried. “I… I mean… We…”
    “I saw,” he answered gently.
    I rapped five more times, then turned on my helmet-lights. I don’t know which of the two did the trick, but almost immediately the figure was back, pressing its visor up against the ‘port and cupping its hands around its eyes to stop the glare. I flashed my lights five more times…
    …and the figure waved! Even better, it gave a thumbs-up, pulled out a vacuum marker pen and scrawled a big fat “X” on the glass. Best of all, when it turned away to go get more help we were all three able to clearly make out the Royal Marine emblem on its shoulder.
    “Good God!” milord muttered. “I wonder where they came from?”
    I wondered too. But I also knew that our rescuers were going to have to cut their way in, and do it in a hurry. “We need to get you two into bubbles!” I explained. “The more pressure there is when we do it, the easier it’ll be for you to breathe.”
    Milord nodded. “Get us a pair, please.”
    That proved a problem. The cabin had originally been equipped with five bubbles. Someone had ruined the seals on two of them, probably Jenkins. He didn’t normally travel with milord, and was therefore unfamiliar with space gear. Milord and James had used up two more; bubbles weren’t reusable even when they hadn’t been slashed wide open. And the last…
    …was still wrapped around poor Jenkins’ corpse, covered with reprecipitated boiled-off goo and clutched tightly in cold, dead hands. But still perfectly usable.  
     

9
    We might’ve gotten the survival bubble halfway clean, given more time to work with the bedsheets. But James and I only had long enough to rather disrespectfully separate Jenkins from his shroud and gloop out a few handfuls of liquid as milord sat helplessly by and watched. “I’m sorry, good friend!” he sobbed at one point, clearly near tears at such disrespectful treatment of an old, dear comrade. “I wish there were another way!” The result was a stinking, filthy parody of the sterile-packaged emergency gear of an hour ago. But the seal still looked good and there weren’t a lot of choices left.
    Despite my outward calm, I was still deeply worried about the whole situation. Survival bubbles looked simple enough, but there was a lot more to them than met the eye. For example… Over the years they’d varied in size enormously as their designers grappled with the relative importance of various features. At first the answer looked obvious—one should make a survival bubble as large as was practical so that the occupant would have more air. But, exactly how large was