The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith Read Free Book Online

secure Nicci’s to the wall. He opened up her Sleeper and moved back as far as the dimensions of the room allowed. He waited.
    Nicci looked at Amber. “Do I…just get in?”
    “Yeah, that’s what they said at the seminar.”
    “I don’t…I mean…Do I take my shoes off?”
    “You can if you want,” said Amber, and Scott said, “No, you can’t. No loose articles in the cabin.”
    “She can put them in her bag ,” Amber told him.
    “I already secured her bag .”
    “You can unsecure it and secure it again with her shoes inside!”
    “I’ll just wear them,” said Nicci, looking and sounding right on the edge of tears. “Okay?”
    Amber looked at her, feeling her temper at full throb right behind her eyes, and then turned that look on Crewman Everly Scott. “Listen, Space-Scout.”
    “Amber, please!”
    “You got a problem, you take it up with me, you don’t take it out on my sister.”
    Scott gave her a cold look and a wide smile and said, “Just lie down, Miss Bierce, and we’ll get you all tucked in!” in a voice like preschooler’s poison.
    Nicci slunk past Amber, her head bent and lips trembling. She sat on the edge of the Sleeper, kneading at its hard sides as she looked one last time from Amber to Scott and back to Amber. “Please,” she said, but whether it was please say we don’t really have to do this or please don’t fight , she didn’t know. Scott put his hand on the Sleeper’s lid and Nicci lay obediently down, even as she gasped out the first hoarse sob. The lid shut, snapped, hissed, and the single panicked, silent cry that Amber saw her sister make faded into sleep. Or into Sleep, she guessed.
    The snake-like cable of the umbilicus slipped out of its port inside the tube and slithered under Nicci’s shirt. She watched it tunnel across her sister’s unmoving body until it reached her navel. The stiff fabric of her clean, white, colonist’s shirt bulged and then slowly deflated. In almost the same instant, the panel above the Sleeper lit up, all its many systems diligently engaged. Amber could look at that panel and see that her baby sister’s heart was no longer beating, her lungs were no longer working, her brain was no longer thinking, and all this, according to the Sleeper, was perfectly normal.
    S he looked dead.
    “Any time,” said Scott, waiting in the hall.
    Amber backed up until the door hissed shut on the sight of Nicci in her ( coffin ) tube. She told herself they had nowhere to go, no one to take them in. This was the only way out. It was the only choice.
    ‘I just killed my sister ,’ she thought.
    “Your turn,” said Scott, printing out a nameplate on his scanner and inserting into the protective sleeve on door WA-0003. He did not pick up her duffel bag. He opened up her Sleeper and stood back against the wall.
    This was really it. She was going to close her eyes and it would be over and either she’d wake up on Plymouth and she’d be fine, or…or she wouldn’t. And that would also be fine, she supposed. At least, it’d be just as over.
    Amber slid her duffel bag into the rubbery, vaguely unpleasant-feeling net and gave it a pull to make it retract, just like in orientation. She got into the Sleeper, wriggling over as far as she could and very much aware of Scott’s contemptuous stare as he watched her try not to overfill the narrow mat. Just watching.
    “You waiting for a tip?” she asked, knowing she was blushing and hating him for seeing it.
    “Your shirt’s pulled up,” he told her flatly.
    Amber reached down, her face in flames and her chest in knots, to tug the stiff fabric down over the exposed swell of her stomach. There was no one to reprimand him for his huffy little laugh now; he made sure she heard it.
    “Yeah, they must have been desperate, all right,” he said, dropping the lid on her. She never had the chance to say anything back. She heard the snapping sound of the lid’s locking mechanism, but not the hiss of the gas.
    She was