I waited while the doors sealed themselves and Romulus did something to the feed. Eventually, he turned his head towards me and nodded.
My reprieve was at an end and I still hadn't figured out where to start the story.
"There was a mutiny aboard Mimir," I said, for lack of a better option. "Our security chief must have been planning it for a while and smuggled people aboard. I wasn't familiar with the entire crew, but a lot of the mutineers I did see had no identity tags on the ShipNet."
Romulus' projection once again had that particular stillness that meant he wasn't feeding it directions on how to move. I took that as an indication to keep going.
"The first I knew of anything happening was when Holliday locked us all in our cabins. I went to start my shift and couldn't get out. All my system permissions had been revoked. Then, he started a priority broadcast on the feed; a video of himself in the Captain's cabin—with Captain Kavara's head on the desk in front of him."
Captain Kavara hadn't exactly been my friend. He hadn't been anybody's friend. I wouldn't have worked for him if I'd had a better option and he knew it. Worse still, he knew about my spot. I hadn't stayed on Mimir for as long as I had because I liked the facilities. He'd made it clear that he'd blacklist me with the Spacer's Guild if I tried to leave and he still had enough clout with the Guild to pull that off.
Mimir had been a safer berth when I signed on, before Captain Kavara started to 'diversify' into alternate income streams. That was the main problem of a ship the size of a Leviathan. You could hide a lot from certain parts of the crew since we rarely encountered each other and relied entirely on the feed to know what was going on while we were underway.
I can't say how long Mimir had been engaging in intermittent piracy for, but I know that security and the deck division were in on it. My guess is that Captain Kavara was satisfied with the occasional prize to pad out a bad quarter. He was better at balancing risk with reward.
"He announced that he would be taking over command and that the personnel he'd chosen to keep would be alerted via the feed. The rest would be terminated immediately."
Romulus' projection glitched and then steadied.
I spared him my recounting of the hours I spent huddled in my tiny cabin. Holliday had kept the broadcast going and made us watch the executions. His people would wrench one person out of their quarters and march them individually to the airlock, where they were spaced; no hesitation, no mercy, and no pauses.
There had been eight hundred people aboard Mimir before the mutiny. Holliday's list of essential personnel, not including his pirates and mutineers, had less than three hundred names. As security chief, he knew where all the deadwood was and he cut it all out in a single, brutal surgery.
"I was on the list of people to 'keep'," I continued. "Holliday knew I could run the shipbots by myself, even as Driver Third, and he hated the Driver First and Driver Second. There was some personality conflict there and I guess it was bad enough to kill."
I flexed my hands, trying not to remember the hours grinding past as I was forced to watch a parade of murder. You'd think that there would be some small, ugly consolation in knowing that I wasn't meant to be one of them, but you'd be wrong. The entire spectacle was meant to reinforce our understanding that Holliday could and would kill us all if he deemed it necessary.
The message was so thorough that I wasn't even surprised when my door suddenly opened.
"Despite that, one of his mutineers came for me. He's an old enemy of mine from my school days. His name is Wasp."
I almost hadn't recognized him. We had both changed. He'd gotten taller and his complexion had (mostly) cleared up. He was still thin and bony with sharp features and a lazy eye. As an adult, he wore his dark brown hair buzzed down to a shadow and had replaced his crooked incisors with gold-tone fangs, but the greatest change in his appearance was the witchmark on the lower half of his face. It spread over his jaw and lips, mainly on one side like the witch had been holding his head down when it marked him.
He'd smiled when I recognized him and greeted me by name. 'Long time no see, Sin.'
"Weston Avery, crechename; Wasp," Romulus recited, looking distant. "Early graduate of Creche Nerio, the second Martian Social Contract Creche Schools. Middling grades. Numerous behavioral infractions. Displayed signs of antisocial personality disorder at a young age that failed to resolve with treatment or counseling. He is noted as having been released for the safety of his fellow students."
"Dare I ask how you got that information?" I asked.
"Lupa acquired a copy of the school's databases some time ago and I agreed to host it in exchange for free access to the contents," he explained.
"I'm pretty sure I explained data privacy to you two," I sighed and rubbed my temples.
"You did," Romulus agreed. "I have encrypted the database and maintain it as an offsite backup for the school. As your legal next of kin, I have authority to view your records and, as the Sysop for this station, I have access to review any data stored here. Accessing that person's record is well within the scope of my authority. Please continue."
I sighed.
"It wasn't a friendly reunion. Wasp found out that I was aboard and arranged an accident where I was mistaken for Casey Malone, the Driver Second. They took me in her place."
Wasp knew what he was doing. His people swarmed my cabin with stun sticks almost as soon as the hatch was open. They put me down before I had a chance to fight and dragged me out.
Romulus frowned some more. "How did you escape?" he asked.
I gave him a wan smile. "I didn't."
He shook his head. "That's not possible. Humans require stable pressure, temperature, and gases. You are here and alive, therefore you must have escaped."
I tapped my chest, spreading my fingers so that the spot lay between my thumb and index finger. "This little guy came to my rescue." I had to laugh at the expression Romulus made. "It's more than a benign growth. It changed my body when I was exposed to the vacuum. Thank god there was no port in the airlock or they might have seen what happened."
In hindsight, it's hard to tell what stole the air from my lungs first; the vacuum or the panic attack I had while laying helpless on the floor in the airlock. I was conscious, but groggy and in pain when they dumped me inside. I'd lost consciousness for a little while after they subdued me in my cabin and I didn't come to until the cold air in the lock chocked me awake. By then, they were already sealing me inside and it was too late to fight.
Looks like I win, bitch. Wasp sent his final taunt through the intercom since they'd cut my access to the feed. That was the only warning I got before the exterior doors opened and I was torn out of the airlock and jettisoned into the darkness.
What I remember of those first few seconds is just incoherent terror as I tumbled, head over heels, into the emptiness of space. Decompression isn't the instantaneous death they like to show in dramas. It takes about two minutes. The only mercy is that you won't be awake for more than ten to fifteen seconds of it. During those ten to fifteen seconds, though, your lungs will expand in your chest and can even rupture if you try to hold your breath. Your tears and saliva boil off. Your body swells as the water vapor in your skin and muscle tissue swells. This is the point where most humans would pass out from hypoxia.
I kept waiting for all that to happen. My breath stilled in my chest, but I stayed awake and, after a while, I realized that I wasn't in pain.
Slowly, I opened my eyes and the fist thing I saw was the glow emanating from my chest—from more than my chest, even. The light had spread through my entire body and shone through the thin barriers of my skin and flesh. I could even see my bones, a little, when I held a hand in front of my face.
I had also stopped drifting. A little momentum will carry you a long way in the vacuum and I should have still been moving away from the ship, but I found that I could move around according to my own will. It felt like swimming, but there was no water.
"I was alive and comfortable outside of the ship. Once I calmed down, I could even fly around," I explained. "I must have been one of the last executions because no one else was sent outside or, if they were, it happened somewhere else on the ship where I couldn't see it. I went hunting around the hull for another place where I could sneak back on board, but the best I could find was an un-pressurized maintenance hatch. The interior door was sealed, but I was able to fit myself inside. I knew we were low enough on tankage that we'd have to stop somewhere in the next day or so. That's how I ended up on Fjord orbital. I hopped off the hull and pulled myself along the maintenance tram track to the station ring where I found an unsecured airlock and got inside. Once I was inside, my lungs started working again and I passed out on the floor."
I rolled my shoulders to shake off the memory. I hadn't felt cold or hungry or tired until the glow until my skin abated, but then all those accumulated feelings rose up to hit me all at once.
"When I woke up, I found out I'd burned through nearly all my body fat and had even lost some muscle mass. That was when Jack Grace showed up and tricked station security into releasing me into his custody."
Romulus froze in place and stayed that way for several seconds—and then minutes. I was starting to think he'd experienced a hardware failure when all the animation returned to him at once.