Meme: Claimings Universe. (Patreon)

This is for Raelin who asked for the one where Rownt get custody of an orphan. I ended up with several orphans, and I didn't focus on the Rownt, but it's in the neighborhood.  Fair warning, my mom has gone in the hospital again (the doctors assure me that she needs time and medical help for her lung function but she's not in immediate danger). I can't quite find my happy muse. I might revisit this snippet and give it a part two when I'm in a better mood.

“This is the Earth ship Violet requesting assistance. Rownt ship, please respond.” Alison coughed hard enough to send blood splatters across the screen. “Please,” she whispered without triggering the transmit button. She knew Rownt lacked any sort of altruism, but she had one last card to play. “Rownt ship, we had a radiation leak and we have children on board. We need assistance.” 

Alison waited. The radio remained silent. Seeing another ship on her sensors was a torture almost greater than the radiation poisoning. The door opened behind her, but she didn’t turn. She prayed he would go back to the nursery once he’d seen she was still alive. She hoped in vain.

“Anything?” Chad asked as he sat in the secondary communication seat.

“Nothing,” she said. A wave of dizziness slammed into her and she grabbed the edge of the control panel. Chad was there at her side, his hand under her elbow to keep her from falling over. “Don’t,” she snapped. Her body was radioactive, and Chad was too young to survive much exposure. As it was, he shouldn’t be out of the most heavily shielded area.

“I’m not going to let you fall over.”

“Sooner or later you’re going to have to.” Alison blinked away tears. Her vision was always blurry now. “If I get too sick, keep hailing them, once every hour. Add new information each time—the number of children, the number of dead on the ship, the rad levels on the engine breach—anything. Just keep them interested.”

“If they aren’t going to save us, why bother?” Chad asked. “We’re just going to die anyway.”

“You tell them that,” Alison said. “You tell them that the children here are going to die.” She started coughing. She couldn’t stop the spams this time, and she barely turned to the side before dull blobs of blood came up. 

“Alison!” Chad tried to reach her, but she reached out a trembling arm to hold him back. The closer he got, the more radiation he was absorbing. He was only twelve. It would take a fraction of the radiation to kill him as it would an adult. Even now he was probably doomed to die of cancer, even if the Rownt did take him off this flying coffin.

Chad went around to the other side, and Alison turned the back of her chair toward him to keep him from trying to offer her some pointless comfort. Then she heard him.

“If you’re not monsters, you have to come save Alison. She’s the only one left. I don’t know how to help her. You have to come!” He started crying. Alison didn’t even know if he’d managed to trigger the communication switch, but she hoped so. The manual said the Rownt protected children, and if so, she hoped they suffered guilt for the rest of their freakishly long lives for leaving these children to die. Alison knew she would. She wouldn’t live long with that regret, but she still felt the pain of it.

A computer-generated voice came over the radio. “Young one. Are no other adults present?”

“Just Alison,” Chad said. “All the others are younger. You have to come save Alison. She’s coughing up blood, just like the others did before they died. You have to save her. You have to.”

The manual also said Rownt respected logic, and that was the least logical argument Alison had ever heard, but she didn’t have the breath to tell him that. Her vision grayed as she struggled to get air through the blood in her lungs. It was surreal, hearing the death rattle in her own lungs. In the last week, she had lived with the sound, woken to the sound, fallen asleep to it. It had grown fainter as her crewmates had died one by one, but now the rattle filled her ears. She could tell Chad was still talking to the other ship, but the words were lost as she lost her grip on consciousness.

Maybe it was the pointless hope of a dying woman, but she imagined relief in Chad’s voice. She pretended that meant the Rownt would come for the children. She pretended that she had saved the children in the end. It was a last, ridiculous hope she indulged in as she closed her eyes for the last time.