A Guilt of Orphans Part One
“This is the Earth shipVioletrequesting assistance. Rownt ship, please respond.” Nasila coughed hard enough to send blood splatters across the screen. “Please,” she whispered without triggering the transmit button. She knew Rownt lacked any sort of altruism, but she had one last card to play. “Rownt ship, we had a radiation leak, and we have children on board. We need assistance.”
Nasila waited. The radio remained silent. Seeing another ship on her sensors was a torture almost greater than the radiation poisoning. The door opened behind her, but she didn’t turn. She prayed he would go back to the nursery once he’d seen she was still alive. She hoped in vain.
“Anything?” Chad asked as he sat in the secondary communication seat.
“Nothing,” she said. A wave of dizziness slammed into her and she grabbed the edge of the control panel. Chad was there at her side, his hand under her elbow to keep her from falling over. “Don’t,” she snapped. Her body was radioactive, and Chad was too young to survive much exposure. As it was, he shouldn’t have been out of the most heavily shielded area.
“I won’t let you fall over.”
“Sooner or later you’ll have to.” Nasila blinked away tears. Her vision was always blurry now. “If I get too sick, keep hailing them, once every hour. Add new information each time—the number of children, the number of dead on the ship, the rad levels on the engine breach—anything. Just keep them interested.”
“If they won’t save us, why bother?” Chad asked. “We’re going to die anyway.”
“You tell them that,” Nasila said. “You tell them that the children here will die.” She coughed. She couldn’t stop the spasms this time, and she turned to the side before dull blobs of blood came up.
“Nasila!” Chad tried to reach her, but she held out a trembling arm. The closer he got, the more radiation he was absorbing. He was only twelve. To kill him it would take a fraction of the radiation as it would an adult. He was probably already doomed to die of cancer, even if the Rownt did take him off this flying coffin.
Chad went around to the other side, and Nasila turned the back of her chair toward him to keep him from trying to offer her some pointless comfort. Then she heard him.
“If you’re not monsters, you have to come save Nasila. She’s the only one left. I don’t know how to help her. You have to come!” He started crying. Nasila didn’t even know if he’d managed to trigger the communication switch, but she hoped so. The manual said the Rownt protected children, and if so, she hoped they suffered guilt for the rest of their long lives for leaving these children to die. Nasila knew she would. She wouldn’t live long with that regret, but she still felt the pain of it.
A computer-generated voice came over the radio. “Young one. Are no other adults present?”
“Just Nasila,” Chad said. “All the other survivors are younger. You have to come save Nasila. She’s coughing up blood, just like the others did before they died. You have to save her. Youhaveto.”
The manual also said Rownt respected logic, and that was the least logical argument Nasila had ever heard, but she didn’t have the breath to tell him that. Her vision grayed as she struggled to get air through the blood in her lungs . It was surreal, hearing the death rattle in her own chest. In the last week, she had lived with the sound, woken to the sound, fallen asleep to it. It had grown fainter as her crewmates had died one by one, but now the rattle filled her ears. She could tell Chad was still talking to the other ship, but the words were lost as she lost her grip on consciousness.
Maybe it was the pointless hope of a dying woman, but she imagined relief in Chad’s voice. She pretended that meant the Rownt would come for the children. She pretended that she had saved the children in the end. It was a last, ridiculous hope she indulged in as she closed her eyes for the last time.
A Guilt of Orphans Part Two
Ayounger Grandmotherappeared at the top of the stair. “Have theCaltigrandmothers sent the information on human children yet?”
