Chapter 6
Harris woke up with a start in oppressive darkness. A layer of sweat covered her body as panic rose. She clenched her jaw while her senses registered suffocating signals. She made a conscious effort to bring her heart rate down. Breathe in, five slow counts, breathe out, repeat. It worked. Claustrophobia was no longer clawed at her. Nyctophobia ebbed. Obscurity was her oldest companion after all. Harris listened to the ethereal music playing in the background while her pupils dilated enough to make out the shapes around her. Weird. That shadow on her left was too wide to be her desk. And there were two of them. But the strangest thing came from her right: light. Tiny, little spots of light. Stars.
Harris sighed in relief.
She wasn't in the cage her parents had called a bedroom. She was lying on her back on the deck of a ship stranded god knew where.
The Robinsons' Jupiter.
Harris' jaw clenched again but this time it wasn't because of terror.
She rolled on her back, bringing one hand to her aching chest and the other to her pounding, burning head. Blood wet her fingers from an open gash at the hairline.
For a doctor who had sworn to do no harm, Maureen's daughter didn't pull her punches.
The memory of their earlier altercation hit her like a crashing wave on a rocky shore, exposing raw emotions as it receded into the sea of her subconscious.
That made one too many offense she'd suffered at the hands of a Robinson.
A flare of anger surged through her entire self. Harris focused her rage where it could be useful, on herself. She'd underestimated Maureen's combativity twice, and each time she'd ended up locked in a closet like an animal. True, she'd escaped both times, but if she didn't plan to be confined a third time, she needed to stop underestimating the Robinsons.
A memory resurfaced in Harris' mind and she heard John's hoarse voice speaking to his doubtful, naive wife: you'd be surprised what a man can do to protect his family.
Present or not, he was the one giving Maureen strength. His absence had been the trauma that had drawn his family together, injecting resilience in their veins and their very breath. Not leaving him to float in space had been a mistake, one that she'd be happy to correct.
Just as Harris began pushing herself to get up, the reptilian part of her brain sent her down in haste behind the console. The deck vibrated under her palm, loud thuds echoed, and a red halo dispelled the shadows at the back of the cockpit.
Harris gasped as the robot passed without noticing her presence and stopped two feet before the windshield. She stared at the four arms, perplexed. The robot had reverted into its combat mode once more. The question was: did she still have its protection? Will had lost it. But unlike the boy, she hadn't betrayed the robot. Nonetheless, caution commanded her not to take things for granted with this killer. A machine could be rebooted, hacked, reprogrammed, and she wouldn't know about it until it burst a fuming hole in her chest.
Harris took shallow, rapid breaths, willing herself to be invisible as she remembered the horrible smell of charred flesh in the Resolute's corridors.
The robot's spine twisted suddenly, causing her to jump.
Harris cringed as its globular head stopped less than one foot from her nose and its three-fingered hands sent an intense orange beam toward her face. Harris squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for high-intensity laser ray to pierce her body.
The metallic clapping of gear wheels in motion sounded above the furious beats of her heart.
"Danger, Doctor Smith."
Harris' eyes flew open.
The robot had rearranged its upper body to adopt a less aggressive, bipedal morphology. It still didn't get her name right and the speech ability was still limited. Harris let out a shaky laugh. Her dark guardian angel was back.
She stared into the robot's face and saw her reflection in the middle of the grey pixels swarming in its globular face. Harris twitched her head from side to side. The robot imitated her, its tiny dots shifting.
Were there billions of wireless neurons communicating or an open interface to the machine's core? Was someone looking at her through this gigantic eye? Someone wondering what or if she was thinking?
Harris flinched as the robot spun its head toward the windshield.
As the robot stepped back to the navigation console, dark cables sprung out of a grid in the deck and intertwined around the Jupiter's pilot command, producing a spellbinding, pervasive melody.
An object in the middle of the cables attracted Harris' attention. She had to suppress a gasp. It was a jet-injector.
Harris picked up the medical device, ejected the cartridge, and brought it closer to the light produced by the cables so she could read the tag. She whistled. There was enough sedative here to put an adult in a coma here. Nice. She knew nothing better than a medical emergency to keep people occupied and out of her hair.
Empowered by the robot's return but wary that it could fail her anew, Harris could almost feel the gears in her mind turning as she defined a new strategy.
Her fate would never rest again in Maureen's hands, nor in John's, nor in any of their miserable offsprings'. And certainly not in those of that dumb, yammering dullard of mechanic. The man was as annoying as a fly, and he was a snoop. To think that he was the one who had seen right through her! He'd get what he deserved sooner rather than later.
A wave of bitter disappointment hit her as she retrieved the flashlight from the emergency kit behind the communication console and strode out of the cockpit. Two-hundred-thousand years of evolution, and here she was, still a basic Homo sapien fighting for her survival in the middle of a band of degenerate Neanderthals.
Harris's eyes lit up with a murderous determination to assert her authority over this stubborn rabble as she crept up the dark corridor circling the locked hub, whistling, humming with the ship, matching its intonations, its harmony, in an attempt to communicate with her living environment.
The beam of her flashlight brushed the edge of the shaft leading to the fuel tanks.
A gunshot boomed in the passageway beneath her.
Harris leaped back in surprise while the bullet played a deadly game of pinball between the fuel tanks. What the hell was going on? Maureen had said the gun was secured. Harris paused for a moment in calculation, turning off her light. She'd heard John's voice in the cockpit earlier. His voice had come from the radio. He was the one firing. Harris grinned as a rush of adrenaline renewed her senses.
Sharp and alert, she swept the beam of her torchlight once more into the shaft, and snorted when a second detonation resounded.
Had Maureen's soldier lost it completely? Shooting while surrounded by metal?
Her thoughts froze and her eyes narrowed. A new thought stopped her progress dead. Three-D printed ammunitions didn't bounce, at least not so sharply. Good god, John was firing real bullets.
Her mouth fell open. A whisky smuggler and a possible arms dealer. What a crew!
Let's be serious, she berated herself. How many bullets did he have left? If he was a smuggler, it was hard to know. He could have shoved a couple of clips in his pockets.
Harris chewed on her already ragged lips. There was only one way to know.
She turned her flashlight on and off three times in quick succession. As she expected, shots burst each time. The echo of the last bullet bouncing between the fuel tanks was followed by a groan of pain.
She chortled. The guy was going to kill himself. It was so easy that it almost felt like cheating. Victory without risk was triumph without glory, one said. Well, she could live with it.
Harris waved the flashlight like a red cape in front of a bull, whistling the Toreador's song* and whispering its chorus, "Toreador, en guard! Toreador, Toreador! And dream away, yes, dream in combat, That a black eye is watching you."
She repeated the last sentence in her head and started whistling again. She admired Carmen's outspoken independence, but sympathized, as much as she was capable of sympathizing, with the desperate animal. Like her, the beast was driven by one goal: to gore everyone who stood between it and freedom. And like the beast, she had the power to do it.
The shots stopped. In the sudden silence Harris was aware of a drop of sweat tickling down her spine.
Her throat tightened as she scanned the circular corridor. Her fingers clenched the flashlight, ready to smash John's head in two if he dared to attack her from the rear. But she was alone.
Harris smirked. She'd heard John groan earlier. That it was his last rasping breath was a nice idea, but just in case... Harris took out the jet-injector and set it on the highest dosage. At the end of this corrida, the bull would put down the torero.
*Carmen, Georges Bizet.