The Death of Sleep
- Автор: Маккефри Энн, Най Джоди Линн
- Серия: Planet Pirates #2
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Death of Sleep». Краткое содержание книги:
Her last conscious thoughts were of her daughter, and she hoped that the rescue shuttle wouldn't take too long to answer the Mayday.
All lights on the shuttle except the exterior running lights and beacon went down. Inside, cold cryogenic vapor filled the tiny cabin, swirling around Lunzie's still form…
Three days later, Lunzie waited outside the bridge until the silver door slid noiselessly aside into its niche. Captain Aelock had left word for her in her cabin that he wished to speak with her. Before she stepped over the threshold, she heard her name, and stopped.
"… She'll bring bad luck to the ship, sir. We ought to put her planetside long before Alpha Centauri. We might never make it if we don't." The voice was Ensign Riaman's. The young officer had been ignoring her pointedly at mealtimes and muttering behind her back when they passed in the corridors.
"Nonsense," Captain Aelock snapped. It sounded as though this was the end of a lengthy argument, and his patience had been worn thin. "Besides, we've got orders, and we will obey them. You don't have to associate with her if she makes you nervous, but for myself I find her charming company. Is that all?"
"Yes, sir," Riaman replied in a submissive murmur that did nothing to disguise his resentment. "Dismiss, then."
Riaman threw the captain a snappy salute, but by then Aelock had already turned back toward the viewscreen. Smarting from the reproach, the ensign marched off the bridge past Lunzie, who had decided that she'd rather be obvious than be caught eavesdropping. When their eyes met, he turned scarlet to his collar, and shot out of the room as if he'd been launched. Lunzie straightened her shoulders defiantly and approached the captain. He met her with a friendly smile, and offered her a seat near the command chair in the rear center of the bridge.
"This Jonah nonsense is a lot of spacedust, of course," Aelock told Lunzie firmly. "You're to pay no attention to it."
"I understand, sir," Lunzie said. The captain appeared to be embarrassed that she had been affected by the opinion of one of his officers, so she gave him a sincere smile to put him at his ease. He nodded.
"We've been out on manoeuvres trying to catch up with planet pirates, and they still haven't come down from the adrenaline high. After a while we were seeing radar shadows behind every asteroid. It was time we had a more pedestrian assignment. Perhaps even a little shore leave," Aelock sighed, shrugging toward the door by which the ensign had just left, "though Alpha Centauri wouldn't be my first choice. It's a little too industrialized for my tastes. I like to visit the nature preserves of Earth myself, but my lads consider it tame."
"Have the pirates struck again?" Lunzie asked, horrified. "The last raid I heard of was on Phoenix. I once thought my daughter had been killed by the raiders."
"What, Doctor Fiona?" Aelock demanded, smiling, watching Lunzie's mouth drop open. "It may surprise you to know. Dr. Mespil, that we had the pleasure of hosting the lady and her dog act fifteen Standard years ago. As charming as yourself, I must say. I can see the family resemblance."
"The galaxy is shrinking," Lunzie said, shaking her head. "This is too much of a coincidence."
"Not at all, when you consider that she and I serve the same segment of the FSP population. We're both needed chiefly by the new colonies that are just past the threshold of viability, and hence under FSP protection. The emergency medical staff like her use our ships because we're the only kind of vehicle that can convey help there quickly enough."
"Such as against planet pirates?"
Aelock looked troubled. "Well, it's been very quiet lately. Too quiet. There hasn't been a peep out of them in months - almost a year since the last incident. I think they're planning another strike, but I haven't a clue where. By the time we reach Alpha, I'm expecting to hear from one of my contacts, a friend of a friend of a friend of a supplier who sells to the pirates. We still don't know who they are, or who is providing them with bases and repair facilities, drydocks and that kind of thing. I'm hoping that I can make a breakthrough before someone follows the line of inquiry back to me. People who stick their noses into the pirates' business frequently end up dead."
Lunzie gulped, thinking of Jonahs and the airlock. The captain seemed to divine her thoughts and chuckled.
"Ignore the finger-crossers among my crew. They're good souls, and they'll make you comfortable while you're aboard. We'll have you safe and sound, breathing smoggy Alpha Centauri air before you know it."
Chapter Eight
She didn't have time to worry about her new label of Jonah on the brief trip to Alpha Centauri. A number of the crew from theDestiny Calls broke out in raging symptoms of space traumatic stress. There was a lot of fighting and name-calling among them, which the ship's chief medical officer diagnosed as pure reaction to danger. In order to prevent violence, Dr. Harris assigned Lunzie to organise therapy for them. On her records, he had noticed the mention of Lunzie's training in treating space-induced mental disorders and put the patients' care in her hands.
"Now that it's all over, they're remembering to react," Harris noted, privately to Lunzie, during a briefing. "Not uncommon after great efforts. I won't interfere in the sessions. I'll just be an observer. They know and trust you, whereas they would not open up well to me. Perhaps I can pick up pointers on technique from you."
Lunzie held mass encounter sessions with theDestiny crew. Nearly all the survivors attended the daily meetings, where they discussed their feelings of anxiety and resentment toward the company with a good deal of fire. Lunzie listened more than she talked, making notes, and throwing in a question or a statement when the conversation lagged or went off on a tangent; and observed which employees might need private or more extensive therapy.
Lunzie found that the group therapy sessions did her as much good as they did for the other crew members. Her own anxieties and concerns were addressed and discussed thoroughly. To her relief, no one seemed to lose respect for her as a therapist when she talked about her feelings. They sympathised with her, and they appreciated that she cared about their mental well-being, not clinically distant, but as one of them.
The mainframe and drives engineers were the most stressed out, but the worst afflicted with paranoid disorders were the service staff. They complained of helplessness throughout the time they'd spent awake helping to clean up theDestiny Calls, since they could do nothing to better the situation for themselves or anyone else. For the mental health of the crew at large. Captain Wynline had ordered stressed employees to be put into cold sleep. In order to continue working efficiently on the systems which would preserve their lives, the technicians had to be shielded from additional tension.
"But there we were on the job, and all of a sudden, we'd been rescued while we were asleep," Voor, one of the Gurnsan cooks, complained in her gentle voice. "There was no time for us to get used to the new circumstances."
"No interval of adjustment, do you mean?" Lunzie asked.
"That's right," a human chef put in. "To be knocked out and stored like unwanted baggage - it isn't the way to treat sentient beings."
Perkin and the other heads of Engineering defended the captain's actions.
"Not at all. For the sake of general peace of mind, hysteria had to be stifled," Perkin insisted. "I wouldn't have been able to concentrate. At least cryo-sleep isn't fatal."
"It might as well have been! Life and death - my life and death - taken out of my hands."
Lunzie pounced on that remark. "It sounds like you don't resent the cold sleep as much as you do the order to take it."
"Well…" The chef pondered the suggestion. "I suppose if the captain had asked for volunteers, I probably would have offered. I like to get along."