After we killed the passengers, we put the bodies in one of the low-pressure, unheated storage compartments. Some people had wanted to have some kind of solemn burial-in-space thing; that was too ghoulish for most of us, though. Mostly the ones we killed had been volunteers, but a few had to be forced. I had had to kill one of them.
Afterward, I ran into Jenny Fenton in the lounge. She’s a tall black girl, an able spacer, real smart. I’d thought we might end up getting something together, but we were just friends. She bought me a beer.
“Rough?” she said.
“Yeah.” I took a big swig of beer to avoid giving her details. “I just hope it does some good.”
She ignored my implied question. “Come on, Vas, you know there was no other way. The lottery was fair, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking at all, actually.”
“So what else is new?” Gordon Yamaguchi sat down, which didn’t please me a lot. Ordinarily I liked him okay—not great, just okay—but he was good at being flip and sarcastic, and I wasn’t in the mood for it.
“Stow it, Gord,” said Jenny.
Gordon shrugged. “When you gotta go, you gotta go. Hell, most of them were triage cases anyway.”
“Some of them would have made it to Minerva,” I said.
“Yeah, dead, like the rest of us.” Gordon ordered a double Scotch, which made me think maybe he wasn’t as cool as he pretended to be.
I finished the beer. “Look, Jenny, what’s the deal? Are we going to have to do a second round?”
Jenny shook her head. “Sorry, Vas, I don’t know. They’re looking at the life support now, what’s left of it I mean, and trying to figure how much time we lost getting back on course.” She lowered her voice. “I probably shouldn’t tell you guys this, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to get our comms and detection gear back anytime soon.”
“Jesus,” said Gordon. “How are we navigating?”
“The old-fashioned way,” said Jenny. “Drop out of hype, look at some stars, measure some angles, crunch some numbers. That’s why it’s taking so long.”
I went back to my quarters, but I couldn’t sleep. The face of the passenger I had killed kept coming back to me. This passenger was an ordinary guy, about forty-five, graying hair, a little potbelly. I’d seen him, I think, but I never knew his name. He wasn’t the type you’d have expected to make trouble, but at the last minute he jumped me, screaming.
We didn’t have guns—who takes guns on a passenger liner?—so all I had was a big wooden billy club, made from an ornamental lamp that had been in the first-class lounge. Anyway, what scared me, thinking about it in my berth, was that I hadn’t hesitated. Not even a little. I don’t know what I had been thinking, if I was thinking at all. I remember what I did perfectly, but it’s like my brain was a total blank. I whipped that lamp around as hard as I could and got him smack on the temple. It sounded like someone crushing a plastic cup. He crumpled up, kind of sideways, and I hit him again. I could smell his blood.
I got up and wandered the corridors. The lighting was way down to save power, not that that was the worst of our worries. Some of the corridors had been sealed off to conserve air, though. I was in second class, and the corridors were like a motel—bland carpets, painted walls. Up in first class they were softly lit and paneled with wood; down in steerage they were bare, with pipes and conduits and exposed lights. That was where most of the colonists were, and where most of the civilian casualties had come from.
I had been walking just like this when the meteor hit us. The lights kind of wobbled, and the ship rang, like a gigantic bell. Nobody knew what had happened, but it didn’t seem like anything to worry about. We joked about it as we steadied ourselves. Someone was saying something about the captain getting nailed for DUI. We should have thought a little. The ship was a whale,
