The Lost Ship of the Tucker Rebellion - Marie Sexton Page 0,66
about to say was going to make pretty much everyone angry. “The thing is… he’s not wrong.”
Marit’s glare could have been used to start a fire, it was so hot with anger. “He’s a fucking stowaway! We’re already going to be rationing by the end of the trip with this person along”—she jerked her thumb at Ginn—“and that’s not taking into account the fact that whatever we find on the other end of this journey, there’s not likely to be a lot of food left on an alien ship after a hundred years floating in isolation.”
“We should kick him out the airlock and be done with it.” Ginn’s face was full of distaste.
It was time to set anger aside for a moment. “Anybody here a biologist?” Denver asked. “’Cause I’m not. And that’s the point he’s making—we’re gonna need food, and we don’t have a lot of resources to make it ourselves. Gru knows what he’s doing there.” It occurred to Denver, not for the first time, that they really were running into this mostly blind. If only he’d had time to plan, if only they hadn’t given the game away so soon…
It didn’t matter now. They were committed, and he’d be damned if he was going to watch anyone on this ship die of something as ridiculous as malnutrition when he could prevent it by putting up with Gru. It was a tall order, given the bastard’s confrontational personality, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t secretly a little glad the man was here.
“This sounds like something you should have thought of before you blasted off from Titan X,” Ginn said.
“Maybe we would have if you hadn’t helped to spread the word and get us run off the station,” Marit replied, as quick to turn on a new threat as she was to harbor a grudge against an old one.
“All I’m saying is, tossing him out of the airlock is still our best bet.”
“We’ve got more reason to put up with him than turn him out,” Denver countered. If he was going to throw anybody out of an airlock, it’d be Ginn. But he kept that to himself and turned to Spence. “How do you feel about it?”
Spence grimaced. “I don’t like it. I don’t like having him here, I don’t like the fact that he was sleeping a few meters away from us for days, and I really don’t like the fact that he’s been talking to my little sister this whole time. But…” He shrugged. “I don’t see a reasonable way around him at this point.”
Ginn folded her arms. “Is no one listening to me about the whole airlock thing?”
“No,” Denver and Marit said simultaneously. Ginn looked at Laramie, and when he shrugged, she turned on her heel and stalked off to his bedroom, slamming the hatch closed once she was inside.
“That’s gonna be a lot of fun to deal with.” Laramie looked at Denver. “But the main thing is, we can’t let him wipe OPAL.”
Marit sighed. “Look, I love her too, but she’s just a bot. Her functionality won’t change just because she can’t remember everything she’s ever experienced. She has backups of herself on the mainframe, right?”
“Not anymore!” Gru called from the back of the cargo bay. “I made sure of that.”
“Bastard,” Denver muttered.
Laramie shook his head. “Losing her would be like watching him commit murder. Or killing a damned lovable pet, at the very least.”
“Maybe,” Marit conceded. “But the consequences of that would be on him, not you.”
“I like him,” a new voice popped up. They all turned around to look at Treesa, who was standing at the door to Denver’s room. “He’s got a real live garden, and he teaches me songs that make the plants happy.”
“He doesn’t scare you?” Spence asked, taking her hand. “He’s never done anything to frighten you?”
Treesa shook her head. “When I was worried, he made me feel better. He said space doesn’t go on forever, and someday we’ll be someplace with a garden as big as Titan X.” She sounded thrilled by the prospect. “He said I could have my own tree, just like in my name!”
Spence sighed. “Okay.” He turned Denver. “I vote he stays.”
Denver looked at Laramie and Marit. Neither of them looked thrilled, but they didn’t offer a rebuttal, either. He shrugged. “I guess he does, then.”
“Do you think she could be right?”
It’d been four days since they’d found Gru in the cargo hold. Laramie and Ginn were fighting constantly, about what Denver wasn’t entirely