The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith Page B

rooms.”
    “No! Don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”
    “I’m not leaving, I’m just—”
    “No!”
    “Damn it, Nicci, just do it!” Amber shouted. “This is serious, so stop acting like a fucking baby and go!”
    Nicci stared at her, tears sliding sideways on her face in the wind.
    Amber stared back, as stunned or more than she’d been after Nicci’s attack. She and Nicci fought now and then, but she didn’t think she’d ever raised her voice before. At Mama, sure…but not at Nicci. She wondered if the crash had made her go crazy, the way that things sometimes did in the movies. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said. “Okay?”
    Nicci nodded, silent. She looked down, hugging her duffel bag to her chest, then slowly got to her knees. Her lips moved, but the wind took away her words.
    “You can do it,” said Amber, backing away. “I’ll be right back.”
    Nicci did not react. She might not have heard, the way Amber hadn’t heard whatever she’d said. It was the wind…and the screaming.
    Amber turned around, groping her way along the wall past Nicci’s room and her own to the next room, WA-0005. The door opened when she slapped the pad and the woman pacing inside immediately turned on her in the kind of calm, accusatory fury that meant she was probably on the verge of some pretty impressive hysterics. “It’s about goddamn time! What the hell is going on? Who are you? Are you one of the crew?”
    “No, I’m from next door. We crashed. Get your things.”
    “Figures. This is all the military’s fault,” s he spat, yanking ineffectively at her duffel bag until Amber came over and opened the restraints. “The Director had billions and billions of dollars, but oh no, he had to let the military take over and what did they do? They contracted out to the lowest bidder. Over eighty percent of this ship was built in Uruguay, do you believe that?”
    “Uh…”
    “It’s a fact,” the woman insisted, shrugging the duffel onto her shoulder. “You can look it up. Or at least, you can look it up when we get back to Earth and you better believe that’s where I’m going right now. Right now! And if they don’t have a lifeboat on this goddamn thing that can get me there…” She faltered, some of the fire in her eyes fading behind a shine of watery panic, but only for a moment. She shored herself up, her shaking hands clenching into fists around her duffel bag’s strap. “Where are we going?”
    Amber moved aside. The woman’s eyes flicked past her to the smoky sky where the other half of the hallway should have been. Her brows knit. She took one step forward and looked down, at the top of the Pioneer . Her lips parted, then pressed firmly together.
    “I am going to sue their precious little Director to death,” she announced. “I’m going to start a class-action suit and just…just kill him with it. Where do we go?”
    Amber pointed down the ledge to the place where Nicci still huddled, hugging her duffel bag. “Drop down from there. Make sure she gets down too, okay?”
    The woman nodded and went, keeping one hand on the wall and the other in a firm grip on her duffel’s strap. Amber watched until she saw the woman talking and Nicci listening, or at least looking up, and then worked her way back to room WA-0007, but when the door opened, it showed her only half a room. The hallway wall might continue on for two more doors, but the ship itself stopped here. There was no Sleeper, no angry occupant ranting about lawsuits and Uruguay, no floor. There was only smoke, broken framework, spitting cables, and the ruin of the ship below her. Of the four thousand people who shared this mod of the women’s dorms, she’d saved everyone there was to save.
    All three of them.
    The shock she hadn’t known she was in suddenly welled huge inside her and popped, soundless, like a soap bubble. Amber staggered back, feeling the slant in the floor and the distance between her and the ground for the