In Space No One Can Hear You Scream by Hank Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

a stream of water toward her to push her away. I hadn’t spent a year in zero g for nothing; I had a feel for how to do this now.
    I kept her away from the pod walls, all of them. I held her away from saving herself.
    Inside the ball of water, I saw the shooting snot, the little chemical speaking packets, dart out into the liquid. But they couldn’t escape. The water tension held them in. Her words of command couldn’t get to the ship wall and receive activation.
    Frog glop , I thought. Frog water.
    I had to smile.
    She couldn’t turn off the water.
    She couldn’t tell the ship to save her.
    She couldn’t even scream.
    I watched her in that frog water. She turned from milky white to blue. And when she was blue, I saw something else she was doing. She was forming a picture on the surface of her membrane.
    Not fair.
    It was Mom. Her face. Frowning, the way she’d looked when I hurt her feelings. After she drank the frog water and was gagging over the kitchen sink and I was laughing at her.
    Aleria had stolen enough of me to show me that.
    But I’m eleven. I know real from fake.
    I kept on laughing.
    I mean, she was a blob in a quivery, jiggly coating of froggy, jumpy water. It was the water I was laughing at, the way it moved.
    I kept on laughing while Aleria went from blue to green and from green to brown.
    She stayed brown.
    My laugh turned into a kind of a chuckle, then a wheezing kind of thing, and then it felt like it was going to turn into crying. I didn’t want that, so I stopped as quickly as I’d started and held it all in. After that, I stared at Aleria for a long, long time.
    She drowned—suspended in a quivering coating of water, only a few meters from safety. A dead blob in frog water.
    When I finally spoke, it was a whisper. “Is Aleria dead, ship?”
    “Affirmative. Captain Aleria is dead.” The voice was neutral. No feeling. Gray. And it was a huge relief to hear after Aleria’s honey-sweet Mother voice. I could go with gray for now.
    Of course I didn’t take the ship’s word for it, not entirely. Like I said, the ship wasn’t the brightest brain in the universe. No, I left Aleria floating there for another light cycle. When I woke up from a tired, restless sleep, she hadn’t wiggled free. Hadn’t somehow come back to life. There she hung.
    Aleria was dead. I made double sure of it by expelling her remains via the disposal unit.
    “Space or recycle?” asked the ship.
    You can guess the answer I gave.
    I ate. The stuff the ship fed me through a food maker-bump was gray and didn’t taste like much, but it kept me alive.
    It was time to have a serious talk with the ship.
    I went to the bridge. There were still lots of gobs of water hanging around. I hadn’t managed to suck the place dry yet. Floating around there felt a little like walking in that misty stuff when Da took us on the hike up to that overlook one time. I couldn’t remember the name of the place. Mount Overlook or something like that, but I knew that couldn’t be the right name. Who would call a mountain Mount Overlook? I wished, like I always wished, that I had been paying better attention.
    That’s okay. I was just a kid , I thought.
    And then I realized I wasn’t anymore. Not now.
    So I was all ready to have an argument with ship, for it to be a struggle. The truth was I was expecting to have to figure out some way to sabotage the vessel if I had to. There was no way we were going to the Meeb system. I’d blow us up first.
    “Ship,” I said. “We need to talk.”
    And the ship answered in its neutral, gray tone with maybe the sweetest words I’ve ever heard.
    “Yes, Captain Aleria, how may I serve you?”
    “But ship, you know Aleria is dead. You said she was dead yourself.”
    “Speaker mech signal identifies as Captain Aleria,” the ship replied. “Previous reading has been discarded.”
    I sighed, and felt the tightness and a little bit of the scared-ness and terrified-ness leak out of me.
    And then, I think I