We Are Your Robot Overlords

The Crew of the Jealous Mistress: Part Two: Getting Down to Business

2009-11-24T21:25:00.000-08:00

Gougham, who as you may remember was now lying in a heap just inside the door of the crew quarters, was not exactly in love with Fralt, though they had been secretly fulfilling each other's personal needs for some time now. Gougham was the only purebred Earther on board, and he kept this a secret from everyone but the very thorough and intimidating first officer. Since Kossprey had no interest in witnessing a lynching, his secret was reasonably safe, but as he did not know this, Gougham actually experienced moments of real panic on a regular basis when people made comments about Earthers and their ilk.

He could have been called handsome, with his mussed black hair and icy blue eyes, except that most of the crew viewed these as birth defects that made Gougham appear 'too human' and therefore somewhat pitiable. Vielt, by contrast, had dirty blonde hair and muddy brown eyes, a ruddy complexion with a rough growth of beard, and prominent nose and ears, yet if asked both Fralt and Kossprey would admit to being more attracted to Vielt. Of course, that could be attributed to his peculiar brand of luck.

Whatever it was that kept the ladies away, the result was that—aside from the vigorous playtime Fralt spent with him—Gougham poured all of his love into technology. Part ship's engineer, part science officer, Gougham usually made the call when it came to where they would be spending the next six months, and he did it through a combination of consulting with the ship's instruments and the careful application of a few gadgets of his own design. And although the ship itself was capable of doing some pretty sophisticated sniffing, when a likely rock was found the entire crew turned an unusually attentive eye and ear to the crew member they spent most of the voyage ignoring.

Gougham had fitted one of the ship's precious weapon port modules with a device that bombarded space debris with tetra-rad and then mapped the dispersion beyond the rocks. On a good day, this was a fool-proof way of finding turidium in asteroids, which was worth spending a month of drilling to recover. A bootlocker full of turidium would earn them a week in paradise at the end of a year-long stint mining.

On a great day, Gougham's tetra-rad mapper would find them a few grains or a few chunks—or a torso-sized slab if they were really lucky—of vellidium. One fist-sized nugget of vellidium, which was used to power deep-space vessels and which was so far unable to be replicated, would send them running to the intergalactic treaty banks. Anything larger than that might result in thievery on the part of one or more of the crew. Finding enough of it might mean outright mutiny and backstabbing.

So far, they'd been lucky insofar as they had been un-lucky. The most vellidium they'd ever recovered in a one-year stint was the size of a pea. The current crew had been together for six stints now, and Orliss Strohmer hoped that that meant two things: enough solidarity to avoid a melee if they got lucky, or poor enough luck with the vellidium to avoid it altogether.

Gougham was working secretly on an upgrade to the tetra-rad mapper that could more accurately map the size and location of deposits, but Strohmer had asked him not to share the details with the crew. Strohmer calculated—correctly, as it turns out—that such a request would ingratiate him to Gougham, who still felt like an outsider. The only other person who knew about the upgrade project was Valera Kossprey.

...

Valera Kossprey could not envision a scenario in which she would need to apply her considerable skills in seduction to Captain Orliss Strohmer. For one thing, she had a nigh unbreakable conviction regarding fraternization with superiors. For another, she believed that the fantasy Strohmer was constructing around her in his mind could never be equalled in reality. There was also the fact that she found him physically repulsive and anatomically ... challenging.

All this added up to a conclusion she had reached long ago: that in order to control this captain, she would have to appeal to Orliss Strohmer's principles. But she was not above stringing him along sexually in the meantime.

It was with all this in mind that Valera gave Psilos command of the bridge and returned to her quarters. There she discarded her jacket, opened the side vents in her 'utilities'--baggy shorts she usually wore underneath the mining rigs—and tied her hair back, away from a neck that she knew held a close second place to her legs in Strohmer's personal fantasies. Dressed just so, she crossed the crew quarters and thumbed the signal on the captain's cabin.

After a pause, Strohmer called her in.

...

First Mate Kossprey did not need an education in the economy of the Outer Rim. She had been brought up in the Inner Colonies, where the only thing anyone seemed to want to talk about was trade practices in the Outer Rim. Granted, most of what she heard was thick with accusations of illegality, epithets regarding the character of Outer Rim traders, and threats outlining what would someday happen to 'those people' and their economy, but somewhere in the spectrum of Valera's own studies, the darkly tinted school instruction on the subject, and her family's prejudicial rantings, Valera eventually pieced together an approximation similar to what follows.

The three confederations of planets—the Inner Colonies, the Union of Planets, and the Seviren—made their own laws regarding trade and travel between territories. As there was no larger federation governing them, these laws changed frequently to benefit or punish one confederacy or another, which unfortunately resulted in frequent trade embargoes, highly profitable smuggling, and a degree of graft in the government that made being elected or appointed to an office almost like a royal inheritance.

It is therefore no surprise that residents of all the several confederations projected their suspicions and greed on the traders who—for one reason or another—chose to do their business on the frontier of open space, that outer rim of backwater colonies and all-but-abandoned outposts now elevated from simply 'outer rim' to 'The Outer Rim' by virtue of their tacit solidarity against the confederacies.

Inhabitants of the Inner Colonies, for example, were so accustomed to paying off political officials for business considerations in legislation that their outrage over the idea of Outer Rim fiefdoms arising where outpost overlords insisted that residents of the outpost pay for the protections the outpost could provide—mostly outdated projectile defenses and pulse energy shields—did not seem ironic in the slightest.

In the Union of Planets, where business ran the government outright, the Outer Rim practice of appointing buyers who were in charge of the price of all goods bought or traded—whether within the Outer Rim itself or in the rare instance that trade with the confederacies was deemed profitable—sounded like something naïve and dangerous, not something that actually closely approximated their own system.

In the Seviren, a group of planets dedicated to a kind of socialist self-sufficiency, the isolationist tactics of the disparate populations of the Outer Rim—where one trade group often haggled with another and where the only agreed-upon law was maintaining a careful separation from the confederacies—looked to them like political suicide.

The colonists who fled from the confederacies and took up lives in the Outer Rim often found themselves targets as well: at one time or another, they were declared outlaws, illegals, or pirates by this confederacy or that. There had even been bounties placed on them by wealthy buyers in the Union of Planets who wanted not only the heads of Outer Rim buyers but also their full warehouses and well-stocked ships. There had been betrayals and political machinations, full-scale riots within the Union, and even some eventual pressure from the Seviren to abandon the bloody campaign against the Rim, as it affected them all to one degree or another.

In the end, neither the law nor public opinion could keep people from misunderstanding and hating 'rimmers'--or whatever name they applied to them—but eventually it became enough to keep all but the most unscrupulous from resorting to outright violence against them.

Business, the lifeblood of the galaxy, began to flow again, and life went on.

...

Imagine the disbelief giving way to terror that Valera Kossprey's parents experienced when she told them that after eight years of study in preparation for a lucrative post in the Ministry of Trade for the Inner Colonies, she would instead be taking a single-passenger skimmer to an outpost colony and joining the first mining crew that would take her.

Valera's mother hid it the best, but she never came to terms with her daughter's wishes, preferring instead to simply abandon any hope of understanding and make only perfunctory attempts at communicating with her in later years. Instead it was her father who came to her the next day and made a peace offering. After all the shouting and pleading he had done the previous day, it was her father that confessed to her that he was a tiny bit jealous of her decision to take such an enormous gamble when her own happiness was at stake. And it was her father who admitted also that he had taken a 'safe' route marrying her mother—not that he did not love his wife, but that he had had chances to seek his fortune in farflung places, but that she would not promise to wait for him.

Now he felt like he was undertaking that same risk by telling Valera that he supported her and would be waiting to hear from her on her travels. Valera cried and told her father that she loved him—two things she hadn't done since.

...

Orliss Strohmer's cabin was a mess.

The parrot-headed captain sat among the mess as though nesting in it, but as Valera made herself comfortable he occasionally tossed something from the rubble toward a glowing panel on the wall, where it passed through and was compacted. The piles of garbage were actually an accumulation of information and evidence from previous digs and excavations. Strohmer had been cataloguing the last three years of exploratory mining efforts, and as he muttered under his breath the computer beeped affirmations and responses overhead. There were probably pictures being taken and smells being recorded, spectrometer and techrometer readings being recorded.

Valera made a mental note that Strohmer had probably catalogued her when she walked in as well—it was actually standard practice for captains to begin recording everything once they had a visitor in their cabin, but Strohmer would not stop at simple visible light recordings or soundwave files, instead opting to have her measured and sniffed, perhaps to be holographically reproduced after she left.

Now she sat in a corner, prim and proper, waiting for her captain to come to a stopping point so that she could interrogate him.

Strohmer continued dictating and cataloguing for a while, one eye on the samples and printout flimsies, the other eye on anything except the legs. Eventually he drew to a stop and cued the program off.

“Miss Kossprey, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

Valera arched one eyebrow. “This is how you address your senior officers?”

“It is how I would address even my superior officers if they were as lovely as you.”

They both knew that this was not actual flirting, but ironic flirting—two people governed by Zeno's Dichotomy, destined to draw closer without ever actually meeting.

“I have a proposition for you—and spare me the proposition jokes, please.”

Strohmer clicked in what passed for a chuckle. “You sound like someone trying to hire me.”

“I am,” Valera nodded. “Unusual for a first officer to hire her own ship, but there it is.”

“A first officer with designs on her own ship usually goes the route of mutiny or assassination,” Strohmer pointed out, “so in this case, I'll gladly overlook the unusual nature of the request. What is it you have in mind?”

“I propose that we turn pirate.”

They both laughed as though she'd told an all-too-common joke.

The pause that followed, however, was uncomfortable—and uncomfortably long.

“Miss Kossprey, I understand that after ten years the ship feels a little small.”

“Captain, it has nothing to do with the size of the ship.”

“And I understand that some of our previous crew members have regaled you with tales of outrageous exploits.”

“I am not swayed by the boastful exaggerations of idiots.”

“Perhaps you are not satisfied with our productivity, then?”

“You hit the nail on the head there, but that's still not what is motivating me.”

“Then by all means, enlighten me: what has driven you insane, and is it contagious?”

“The opportunity for a little justice, a little retribution, and a whole lot of free capital.”

The Crew of the Jealous Mistress: Part One: Meet the Crew

2009-11-21T21:09:00.000-08:00

Orliss Strohmer, the squat parrot-headed captain of the mining ship Jealous Mistress, slouched moodily at the conn, empty darkness filling the viewscreen, hardly a sound disturbing what might soon become a fitful slumber for everyone on the bridge.

Several of his crew had taken up their positions on the bridge out of habit at this early hour of the day, but there was nothing to do—would be nothing to do for days, in fact—until the Mistress decelerated to a speed where visual wavelengths allowed them to at least assess their position relative to the distant star that was their destination.

Orliss watched them go about trivial duties with a mixture of respect and pity. Finally, he turned and let one of his eyes settle on his second-in-command, Valera Kossprey, and began ogling her legs. This was something that could potentially entertain him for hours, or until she got up and left. For a Zavinthian his size, those legs might as well be a mile long, and he had said as much to her more than once.

Valera shifted in her seat and threw him a warning glance. Orliss turned his attention back to his consoles for a moment, and when she was engaged in her work once more, he rolled his eye toward her again.

“Captain,” a voice at his shoulder intoned softly.

“Rrawwk!” Orliss squawked. He hated being caught by surprise, hated it even more when it caused him to make a sound reminiscent of a parrot—as he supposed it was fuel for species jokes among the crew—and hated it most of all when it interrupted a relaxing perusal of Miss Kossprey.

The voice was disembodied, or so it would have seemed to the untrained eye. There was a bare shimmer in the air and a distinct shadow on the floor. Psilos, the shade, expended a great deal of energy in this mode, and it only confirmed to Strohmer that he had been watching the captain watching Valera. Orliss shuddered, shaking the feathers of his head and shoulders back into place. One eye remained on Valera; the other turned slowly, deliberately to the heat-shimmer that was even now dissolving into the corporeal form of Psilos.

In his visible form, Psilos looked more like the classic xenophobic Earther's conception of an alien being: tall, slender, gray or green depending on the light, and large opaque eyes occupying most of a bulbous head. Orliss knew that Psilos allowed people to persist in the assumption that such a large cranium indicated a large brain and possibly advanced thought patterns. While the latter may have been true, Psilos' brain actually resided in his chest, close to where the human heart lay; as a result, Psilos had gotten up and walked away after several gunfights “ended” with an ignorant off-worlder trying to blow his brains out and then celebrating a little too soon.

Orliss clicked his beak—a sign of impatience—and Psilos stared back in fiegned ignorance until Orliss felt forced to ask, “Is there something you need?”

“I require a private sleeping accomodations and a recreational leave of absence,” Psilos hissed in a voice barely above a whisper. “These requests have gone unanswered for some time now.”

Orliss tried giving Psilos the full attention of his left eye, hoping to divide his attention between the whining of his head of security and the aforementioned legs, but Psilos repositioned himself strategicallly. Orliss clicked his beak again. “Your requests have not gone unanswered—they've simply been denied. There are no 'private sleeping accomodations' on this ship, and I do not grant anyone a 'recreational leave of absence' for any reason. See the doc about a dream vacation.”

The doctor in question was Moah, a cephalopod-like creature who—in everyone's opinion—was far too touchy-feely in his examinations. On their last trip through the Tier Siehni system, Moah had acquired a batch of dream vacations: pills that rendered the patient (or victim, really) unconscious for days on end while intense and vivid dream sequences played out. The batch had turned out to be somewhat ... sour. The result was that most of the dream vacations turned into haunting nightmares, usually derived from emotional images in the patient's past. Although the 'vacation' itself was a bust, it still had its intended effect: the patient returned to work with a vigor and a sense of relief.

Psilos did not feel the need to point any of this out to the captain, as it had clearly been an ironic suggestion, but the silence with which he replied was cold and dry.

“I do have another request, captain,” he said instead.

“Yes?”

“We are hauling this load to the Outer Rim, are we not?”

Orliss nodded, anticipating the conversation that followed.

“Let me scout the buyer for this load, captain.”

“We've been over this--” Orliss began.

“Yes, sir, but I can employ my skills to discover how much the other haulers are being paid.”

“Psilos, it's illegal.”

“Only if I'm caught.”

“Some haulers get paid more, and the quality of the ore is different from load to load.”

“They say it is different; I say ore is ore.”

“Psilos ... I already know what other haulers get paid.”

Psilos was incapable of showing emotion in his eyes or his face, but the surprise came across in the way he paused before plunging ahead again.

“Then we ought to demand a better price. We could refuse to sell.”

“And do what with the ore? We can't sell it ourselves, and if we did, we'd get an even worse price than the buyers will give us. We're not buyers, and we don't have an opening to sell to a plant. Those get bought out as soon as they become available. We'd have to knock somebody off to get an opening, and even if we did, there are always a hundred buyers right there, ready to outbid us.”

Psilos fell silent again, but this time under the onslaught of sentiments he'd already heard expressed a thousand times. Orliss poked absently at his shoulder with the tip of his beak, a nervous grooming habit from his youth. His mind was elsewhere, having had this same conversation with his former captain, the tables now turned.

“How do you know what the other haulers are paid?” Psilos asked finally.

Orliss stopped grooming and shifted in his seat. After a long pause he replied, “My mother's family were buyers. It's why they say she left my father: he was a long hauler, never got a good price for his loads, and she got tired of seeing him ripped off.”

In the corner of one eye, he could now see Valera listening. She had barely adjusted her posture, but her eyes were unfocused, her head turned just so, and her hands had stopped flitting over the controls at her station. For some reason, Orliss did not want her to hear about his father, did not want her to like him or dislike him for his family problems, and certainly did not want her pity.

“Captain,” Psilos began, “could we not take advantage of your family connections--”

“No!” Orliss held his voice down—no more squawking, he willed himself—and bit off the word sharply to keep the anger and humiliation out of his voice. “No, we're not going to do that.”

And that was the end of it, as far as Orliss was concerned.

Psilos excused himself, and Orliss managed to get some work done on the wave of anger that had surfaced over these painful memories. Eventually, he tried to go back to ogling Valera, but she was stretching her legs out just so, and something in the twisted mind of Orliss Strohmer suggested that she had heard it all, that she was putting herself out there for him because she felt bad for him. He clicked his beak and turned the conn over to his navigator, and a moment later he disappeared from the bridge.

...

The brief disturbance of the captain barging through the drop bay on his way aft did not throw Agram Vielt off his game—a game still called poker but so different after six thousand years that the name was little more than a symbolic nod to its predecessor. Agram held a stack of cards loosely in his left hand, which was still more or less the original appendage, although the skin had been grafted poorly. His right arm was robotic from the shoulder, and gleaming precision-tooled parts showed through the rubber flesh in places. The arm ended in what could be called a hand, though it was more like a conglomeration of tools that could be folded into something resembling a fist. Agram was accustomed to it by now, but fidgeted the thing constantly: folding it, unfolding it, switching tools, and so forth. All he really cared about was being able to handle his weapon and his mining equipment, but occasionally he would find an unexpected situation to use one of the other tools, and that really irked him.

Agram had lost his arm in a common mining accident: a cave-in. With no significant savings, no membership in the galactic guilds, and nothing paid toward medical emergencies, the doctors were supposed to simply seal the wound and make other repairs to the missing joint and nerve endings—Agram would have gone through life a one-armed methropod. Unfortunately for one of the other patients in the facility, a long-timer with a lot of paid-in medical and a current guild membership, he got put in the same pre-op ward with Agram. Agram sold several patients on the story that he was unlikely to survive the surgery, tempting them with the chance to win a little inheritance from a dying man.

Two days later, a whole lot richer—and a whole lot drunk—he sank his winnings into a gaudy replacement for his missing appendage. His twice-wounded roommates plotted their revenge.

Accustomed to thinking on his feet while drunk, Agram then skipped post-op recovery and bartered passage on a medical cargo looper before the anesthesia had even worn off completely. By the time anyone could catch up with him, Agram had already had plenty of time to practice drawing and reloading his sidearm with the mechanical limb.

Now Agram did his best to scan the faces of the other players without looking like he was scanning their faces. Agram didn't have a tell—that he knew of—but he frequently manufactured one for the other crew members when he thought they were looking.

Zuvie Matusek was looking.

Zuvie had come a long way to join the crew of the Jealous Mistress—not as far as Dr. Moah, but close. She was a Meratonan, childlike in appearance, at least until she got very upset or exerted herself physically, at which point she would undergo a disturbing physical transformation and more than quadruple in size. It's not really necessary to describe it at this point, since it does not usually take long for Agram to upset her.

Zuvie sat directly across from Agram, smiling contentedly—or at least, trying to appear contented. She had stopped looking at her cards, hoping to project an air of overconfidence, but Agram kept pace with her, raise for raise. She was desperately trying to keep a tic from appearing in her forehead.

Just as she looked back at Agram—trying not to look like she was looking, but failing—she saw the briefest line appear on his forehead: the faintest vertical crease of consternation, a sign she'd never seen from him before. Zuvie suppressed a smirk and decided that the time had come to call Agram's bluff.

When the cards hit the table, Zuvie's face went on a little journey, starting at smug celebration and then progressing through confusion, shock, self-disgust, and eventually misery. But it didn't move on to rage until Agram began laughing, and then Zuvie had to watch him scooping up his winnings—her winnings.

And then Agram winked at her.

One meaty hand slammed down on the table, and the two other crewmen bolted out of the drop bay as the transformation began to progress up Zuvie's arm, like a series of explosions in her muscles: one moment, Zuvie sat in the little chair, one arm impossibly huge and pressing on the table with its claw-like hands, and then less than a minute later, the snaggle-tooth grimace of Zuvie's alter-ego, Matusek, leered down at Agram with blood in his eye.

“I'll tear your arms off!” Matusek roared.

Agram stacked cards and credit vouchers lazily, keeping one eye on Matusek but not moving from his seat—deliberately so, in fact.

Matusek raked the table and two of the chairs out of the way—the table ricocheted off the ceiling and two instrument panels before clattering to the floor behind Matusek—and wrapped two crab-like hands around Agram, pinning him to his chair. “Did you hear me?!” the beast roared.

There was the faintest clack and hum then, and Matusek lowered its gaze to the Kreyk projectile weapon centered on its chest. Zuvie's voice came from somewhere inside Matusek: “Did you have that under your chair the whole time?”

Agram nodded.

Matusek's eyes squinted, and Zuvie's voice came out again: “Am I that bad?”

Agram looked down at the claws pinning him to his seat, the monstrous arms, the hackles standing up on Matusek's shoulders, the slavering jaws, and the remnants of the pink party dress impossibly still clinging to the creature in places.

Slowly, ever so carefully, Matusek—Zuvie, really, Agram considered—set the chair down and Agram with it. Zuvie's voice sounded one more time, as though she were deep down now inside Matusek, perhaps hiding and feeling humiliated: “I think I'd better go to my room.”

Agram kept his eye on the retreating beast, but he disarmed the Kreyk and holstered it. Eventually, he set about folding and stowing the table and chairs, and he was just starting to collect his winnings again when Strohmer reappeared from the hatch leading aft.

“Vielt!” the captain squawked. “Didn't I order you not to play poker with Matusek?!”

“I was not playing poker with Matusek,” Agram replied calmly, folding a stack of vouchers into his pocket. “Fralt, Gougham, and I started a game, and Zuvie joined us for a while. I have not seen Matusek for some time now.”

Strohmer clicked his beak impatiently. “You know what I mean, Vielt!”

Agram held up a hand placatingly. “Yes sir, I know what you mean, and I assure you that the moment Matusek showed up, the game ended by unanimous accord.”

Strohmer turned one eye on Agram Vielt, then the other, and finally made his way to the forward hatch, rawking to himself. “Ought to have Psilos sit in on these games,” he was saying as he disappeared through the hatch.

...

Fralt and Gougham didn't begrudge Vielt his winnings. When they had bolted from the game, Fralt had stuffed half her poker hand, two credit vouchers, a polarized mirror film disguised as a poker card, and a lucky charm—which was actually a small signal repeater—into her jacket before swinging through an upper hatch into the auxiliary cannon nest.

Gougham had stashed a similar grab-bag of items in his pants and launched himself through the first door he could find. In typical Gougham fashion, however, he'd managed to throw himself into a cargo hold, which he filled quite neatly, and which he only later realized he would be unable to open from the inside.

Gougham followed the ensuing 'conversation' between Vielt and Matusek—and jumped when a smashing sound caused the door to pucker inches from his face—and then waited at least ten minutes before tapping out a timid SOS.

Vielt was the first to hear it. He cracked open the cargo hold and shoved the Kreyk in—only to withdraw it and slam the hold shut again a moment later.

Eventually Fralt came looking for Gougham and managed to unfold him from the uncomfortable position he'd had to assume. She supported him carefully as they limped toward the crew quarters, but when Gougham suggested hopefully that he could use a massage, Fralt slipped out from under his arm and headed in the opposite direction.

...

Terza Fralt was no delicate flower, though she managed to pass for feminine when she wan't standing next to Valera Kossprey. The two despised each other for no other reason than that they were both women and they were both struggling for credibility in a crew full of chauvinists and womanizers. Any closeness between Fralt and Gougham was ammunition for Kossprey, and any perceived camaraderie between Strohmer and Kossprey was fodder for the entire crew. Typically, the two women avoided each other, and words between them were as icily civil as they could be made while still completely avoiding sounding polite.

Fralt was muscular, athletic, graceful when no one was looking—but she maintained a careful gorilla-like posture and demeanor whenever the crew found themselves planetside or on the outpost stations. Nothing made her more angry than to be mistaken for a sexual surrogate—or worse: for a crew mother.

Some ships had them: matronly women who shipped out with miner crews and served as nurse, psychiatrist, cook, maid, and—an unfortunate fact of deep space travel—eventually a kind of madame. Fralt found the entire concept disgusting, but she'd learned not to take up the topic—or have the conversation steered toward it—unless she wanted someone characterizing her as their crew mother. This sort of comment, in her opinion, had to be met with brutal violence, as in Vielt's case: she had casually tossed her drink on him.

Then she had set him on fire. They had been in deep space, and Moah had done his best to graft skin for his left arm, but the artificial skin cultures they had on hand were of the cheapest variety. Now Vielt's arm was like one of the many warning signs posted around the ship:

DANGER: AIR SEAL – IMPROPER USE WILL CAUSE BREACH
DANGER: ELECTRICAL SHOCK – WEAR INSULATOR GLOVES
DANGER: FEMINIST – SHE WILL SET YOU ON FIRE

Fralt had even assaulted Matusek once, but since Matusek deserved it—and since Fralt had bounced off like a rubber ball—that story is less interesting than Vielt's, so there you go.

The Dark Glass - Chapter One - A Wayward Child

2008-12-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

Chapter One: A Wayward Child

Before the rest of this story can be told, a few things must be made clear.

First of all, fat old Ciffo is dead, and that is that. There is never any doubt that Ciffo was the first to lay eyes on the child. According to Ciffo’s sweetheart wife, who is now in her eightieth year, the boy wandered down the muddy road and into Ciffo’s arms as Ciffo stood thinking in the doorway of the inn. Marie remembers Ciffo calling her name and then blundering into the kitchen with the grimy tot tucked up under his chin like a violin—a tiny thing no more than two or three years old and fast asleep already.

And that is that.

Any man still alive who ever lived in Droffos will make up some foolish lie about seeing the child but thinking that he belonged to someone else; or else they will tell you that they gave him food and tried to find his parents. That is bunk. Some eighty young children wandered the streets in those days while their parents made business in town, and one pack of mangy brats was indistinguishable from the next. Ciffo didn’t mean anything special by picking the boy up; he assumed someone would come by eventually looking for him.

After a time, Marie adopted the child as her own, and that was that.

Ciffo’s inn was burnt to the ground while Ciffo spent a week in a cage on the account of a vengeful thief—or so they thought him at the time—named Richard. Richard was from Perea, which is something everyone says about undesirable characters because Perea is a lawless place and not concerned with things as trivial as reputation. If someone had once said Richard was from Odumai, there would have been a delegation from Odumai sent to dispel the rumor.

As I said, Ciffo was in a cage on Richard’s account, and only Ciffo would have thought what Ciffo was thinking—which was, “Oh, well, it is not his fault; this town is full of ignorant and vengeful people and they have turned this crime on me.” As it turned out, Richard had made off with his rightful pay for a job and when the money was missed someone fingered Ciffo for it, but that is another matter.

What happened in Droffos was that Ciffo’s wife and adopted child were forced to move in with her sister while the inn was rebuilt by some of the more remorseful citizens—with Ciffo’s direction and under his own steam mainly—and then someone finally said, “Where did this boy come from?” The person who said that was Marie’s sister.

“What is this?” she demanded one day, out of the blue. “The boy is not dirty at all! He’s got dark skin!” It was bath day for the children, and Marie’s sister had been at the child’s face with a rag and making no progress. Upon removing the rest of his clothes, she found the problem to be more widespread than she had imagined.

Marie was actually aware of the child’s tanned skin, having bathed and cared for the child often. She took Kell—for that is what she called him, after her lost cousin—by the hand, and said petulantly to her sister, “What’s that to you? He’s more beautiful than your child!”

Now, Marie needn’t have said that. Her sister, Tanna, had spoken in surprise—not disgust—and her own child, Nabu, had a weaselly look to him, notwithstanding there never was a sweeter child born into this world. But alas, these are the hurts we bring on the ones we love; Tanna made a hollow place in her heart from that day on, and Kell felt her hating him with her eyes.

When Marie and Ciffo moved back into the inn, there was already talk going around about the dirty-skinned child and “its secret origin”—this was in the days when a child’s parentage was a thing used to impress. Tanna mustn’t be blamed for starting the gossip; the talk was kept discreet until she began inviting it into the open, and then it was public. Everyone speculated about the child, even in his presence.

“He’s not black, like the warriors from the south.”

“No. Not black. And not that burnt sugar color like those strange-talking merchants from the east.”

“Of course not! They never bring children with them. Is he a Tehuaco—a cliff-dweller?”

“Could be, but look at his hair! Did you ever see a Tehuaco with curls of hair like that?”

“No. Their hair is always straight and smooth. Maybe…”

This is just an approximation, of course, of the type of talk to which Kell became accustomed, although he could never understand why the most interesting thing about him seemed to be his skin.

“Could he be some kind of mix?”

This comment was generally regarded with contempt, although it was made often and by different listeners. There was a taboo in those days—which perhaps does not now exist—regarding the mingling of different races of people. It is probably what made the question of his ancestry so intriguing. Perhaps if Kell had been found anywhere but Droffos, little if any would have been made of his skin color.

Droffos was not an interesting town, nor was any part of the boy’s life there, but it must be noted. Also, considering the little which was previously known of his life after Droffos, his brief childhood there seems instructive. If it seems so, it is probably only because people have a tendency to overanalyze what little is known about a thing until some new information is gleaned elsewhere.

Kell was fast on foot, and could outrun any boy in town younger than an apprentice by the time he was five. He was also nimble like a pickpocket, and until he could learn that such things were unacceptable in an organized society he went about proving this from day to day. There would have been harsh penalties if anyone could have proven that Kell was responsible for the rash of thefts, but Kell didn’t know this. One day he seems to have simply realized that stealing is wrong; thereafter, nothing went mysteriously missing in Kell’s quick hands.

These two bits of information are not surprising or especially interesting, but they are often dramatized in histories such as this one because everyone is fascinated by the boy’s past. Therefore, none of the usual stories about his childish exploits will be told here.

Here is something those other histories won’t explain, because Marie kept it to herself. In fact, everyone kept it to themselves. Where was Kell for almost ten years? This is where the other historians leave off, because they weren’t there.

But I was.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Four - For Talented Pilots - Part Two

2008-12-03T07:45:00.000-08:00

But it would be a few weeks before Ecksel heard that story. Hawking called Spencer into his office the next day, relief evident on his weary face.
“I want you to take this passkey and this print, and I want you to report to Don, who will escort you to the Pathways authority for processing.”
Spencer just stared at Hawking, not moving. “Am I under arrest?”
Hawking looked up, his brow furrowed. “Should you be?”
“No! What the hell—why are you turning me in?”
Hawking shook his head, laughing. “J. Albert Devonshire! Spence, I’m assigning you to the Pathways rotation for deputization. I changed my mind about sending you for orbit detail, that’s all.” He fell back into his chair and exhaled explosively. “Apparently, two of our long-timers didn’t pass health inspection—not unusual, but unexpected this time—and they’re on their way back here now. I guess they’re qualified to ride a rocket at forty-thousand kps, but not qualified to park transports at a hundred kph.”
Spencer passed a hand across his forehead, which had developed a sheen of sweat. “Who is J. Alfred—who?”
Hawking waved a hand. “My grand-daddy’s favorite curse when grandma was around.” Then he eyeballed Spencer. “You really thought I was having you arrested? What in hell for? You got a guilty conscience?”
Spencer bristled. “It’s not a guilty conscience; I just—I have a history of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is all.”
Hawking snorted. “That’s a bit of an understatement. Well, if you get yourself in trouble with Pathways, it’s out of my hands, but around here we overlook an awful lot for talented pilots—probably why those two are on their way back, come to think of it.”
Spencer hedged for a moment, then said, “And if I have an episode while I’m out there?”
Hawking raised an eyebrow. “An episode of what?”
Spencer hesitated only a second or two. “Yes, sir. On my way.” And then he was out the door and gone.
Hawking thumbed his desk and the screen he had been studying all morning sprang to life again, filled with data and maps and a small portrait in one corner with the legend: DaSilva, Ramon. “Yes sir,” Hawking drawled, “around here we overlook an awful lot for talented pilots.” He thumbed a commlink on the edge of his desk and barked, “Laruso, find me that smuggler; I want to see him in my office.”

It was difficult to believe that one could feel excited about something as mundane and tedious as orbit detail, but Spencer credited part of the excitement to the fact that he would be flying something new, a new ship, no matter what it looked like. It was the reason he gravitated toward test-piloting—that and the very real possibility of an accidental death, but that was an area of his own thinking he steadfastly ignored.
As he passed through the bullpen, he ran into DaSilva and wished him luck, thinking DaSilva might be long gone by the time he returned. DaSilva remarked cryptically, “You never know; a place like this grows on you. I could get used to it.” But then Spencer was on his way to meet Don, and DaSilva’s words were forgotten.
Don—or Donny—Firenze was a retired pilot, one of the few who retired by choice rather than due to a crippling illness, accident, or death. He was a fuel jockey for the station now, a regular drunk when off-duty, and something of an unofficial mentor for some of the pilots since he had more stories than anyone else, both the true and the completely fabricated varieties.
Donny’s other talent was planetside leave parties; since the crew never knew until the last minute where their drop would be—or which off-planet transport facility they would be disembarking on their return to Marques—they couldn’t very well plan out their vacations, so they would gather around Donny just after the announcement of the drop to hear Donny’s “unofficial” recommendations of places they might want to visit while planet-side. Invariably there would be a few reputable locations thrown in for comedic effect, but generally it was a recitation of brothels, bars, bookies, and brawling spots that the crew could frequent, tailored to their drop spot and their point of disembarking.
Donny never went on drops—at his age and constitution, he had a special dispensation from both Ecksel and the planetside medics for vessel transport—but he was always the handle pilot for the slow rig between Marques and the offworld transport. In this case, he would be piloting Spencer to a rendezvous with the Pathways scull, where he would trade Spencer for the two disqualified pilots and then return them to Marques.
It occurred to Spencer to wonder if Hawking had orchestrated the transfer this way to keep Pathways from encountering DaSilva, but there might have been any number of casual violations on the flight deck that a Pathways officer would feel duty-bound to report, and so he decided that Hawking just didn’t want to clean house for company.
Donny greeted Spencer gruffly and complained about the transfer, but as the deck decompressed and the magnetic moorings uncoupled, Spencer saw the satisfaction on the old-timer’s face. It was a familiarity that came only after many, many years in the pilot’s seat, and Spencer surprised himself as he realized that—for the first time in quite a while—he hoped to live long enough to feel that way … about anything.
It was stupid to get so emotional about something so dumb, he scolded himself. Then he smiled and shook his head, because he didn’t care.

The flight was not long—half an hour or so—and it passed quickly with the two men yammering away about Spencer’s experience so far on Marques. When the Pathways transport came into sight, Donny fell silent, and so did Spencer, guessing at the level of technical expertise he was about to witness.
There was a panel full of instruments under the dry, shriveled hands of Donny Firenze, and those old but capable hands glided over them, reading them like a blind man might—but Donny didn’t appear to be reading those instruments at all. He glanced at the door-seal light once, but the rest of the time he had his eyes on the approaching ship, even when it slid alongside them, almost completely out of sight from the front viewport.
The panel that should have been lit up, a small collection of laser-guided and magnetic alignment tools that usually beeped and chirped to let pilots know how the docking procedure was progressing—it was pitch black the entire time, and Spencer wondered whether it was just turned off or completely disabled. Perhaps it had never been hooked up at all on Donny’s ship.
The distances and leveling were all done by eyeball and sixth sense, but there wasn’t a bump or a thump to be heard until the single, triumphant clink that announced that the Pathways ship had accepted the docking seal from Firenze’s tiny vessel.
When the two doors had been opened between the ships, a Pathways officer leaned around the corner and called, “Smoothest hands in the business, Donny!”
“That’s what the ladies say!” Donny called back, and then cackled away while Spencer and the two returning pilots traded places.

“Spencer Fyodorim, welcome aboard transport number eight-zero-zero-eight. Are you carrying anything poisonous, explosive, flammable, sharp, or illegal?”
Spencer shook his head.
“I’m required to ask you to answer verbally, sir, as this conversation is being monitored and recorded.”
Spencer looked up at the co-pilot in amazement. “No, sir, I am not carrying any of those things—in fact, I’m not carrying anything at all.”
The co-pilot looked around, and it was his turn to be amazed. “Three weeks on our station and then a wet-drop for planetside leave, and you didn’t bring one single thing?”
Spencer snorted. “It’s not like we’ll be out in the wilderness, right? I assume you guys have soap and running water.”
The co-pilot snorted back. “I assume you know how to use them—but I always assume that about you boys, and I’m often wrong.”
Spencer laughed it off. “I didn’t mean anything by it, sir; I just like to travel light is all. The more stuff you bring, the more likely you are to lose something, or have it stolen. Besides, when you go planetside you get most of your stuff taken away anyway—no offense,” he added, realizing he was talking to a pair of customs officers.
“Oh, none taken,” the co-pilot shrugged. “It’s not like we get any of it. It’s all recycled or destroyed. Right, Eff?”
“Ri-ight,” the pilot drawled, a thin smirk on his face.
Spencer settled into his seat and strapped in. There was a brief conversation between pilots, and then a double-check of the hatches between ships; finally, the clink of the docking seal giving way signaled that they were free. After a slow maneuver to safe distance, the Pathways pilot lurched the ship forward, glancing at Spencer over his shoulder.
Spencer rolled his eyes, but decided to pretend he was impressed, knowing he was about to spend three weeks with these guys. “She’s got a little power to her,” he noted dryly.
If they picked up on the sarcasm, they ignored it. “Yeah, this baby looks big and clunky, but we took the propulsion system from an old Quasar—designed for quick acceleration because they were used—”
“Because they were used for automated supply runs over long distances, ships packed heavy and tight to withstand the stresses of compressed deceleration. I know.”
The pilot and co-pilot guffawed over that, and the co-pilot said, “Ooh, Effey, we got us a real specialist here. Hey, where’d you go to school, Doctor Fyodorim?”
Spencer’s eyes narrowed at them. He muttered a reply.
“Say again, boy? Where?”
Spencer exhaled slowly, counting in his head. “Serpeset,” he repeated, slowly and clearly. Then he leaned forward suddenly in his seat. “Is that a comet?”
“Is that a—what the hell?” The pilot turned slightly to see what Spencer was seeing, and as he did so they all saw the short streak of blue-white make an S-turn and head for Earth.
“That,” said the co-pilot, deadly serious now, “was no comet.”

Levi's Rock - Chapter Four - For Talented Pilots - Part One

2008-12-01T07:38:00.000-08:00

Chapter Four: For Talented Pilots

From a few hundred thousand kilometers distance, Earth has rings like Saturn. They turn as the Earth turns, and they scintillate in the light of the sun. There are gaps in the rings, and they are multicolored, swirling from time to time as ships dip in and out. The large space stations orbit just outside these rings, and satellites are synchronized to avoid them.
In the dark shadow of Earth, the rings almost disappear, save for a few twinkling lights. There is an elliptical quality to them, and as the eye follows them to one extremity it can faintly discern one gossamer-thin strand of the outermost ring as it flings itself toward Earth’s moon. There it meets the glimmer of a developing ring around the moon, and the evolution of the rings is illustrated.
As ships near Earth, the nature of the rings becomes clearer. What appears to be dust, debris, and rubble from a distance gains detail, takes shape, and comes into focus. The individual particles of the ring resolve themselves into tiny ships and large vessels of all types, and the grayish wash of the rings becomes a mosaic of ships of every type, style, color, and cut.
There are rings of ships parked in perfect slumber, rings of ships alive with arriving and departing passengers, clusters of connected ships docking and communicating with each other.
Between all these ships dart the nimble ships with the Pathways icons on them, shepherding and sheriff-ing the other ships into formation—creating order out of the chaos, so that from a distance the serene and surreal image of a ringed Earth is preserved, harmonious and beautiful among its cousins.
The Pathways officers are numerous and respected, but the traffic that flows into these rings—both from the planet surface and from deep space—is unpredictable. From time to time, extra help is needed.

Thirty of the pilots crowded into the Marques briefing room, where assignments were usually distributed, and the last to arrive was Hawkins. He pressed his way to the front and thumbed the viewscreen to life. He had to repeat the voice-code twice over the buzz of the pilots—they had gotten the call less than ten minutes ago, and most of them were on the wrong rotation right now, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Alright, listen up,” Hawking grumbled, as a series of images poured up on the screen. “We’ve been asked to provide thirty pilots for temporary assignment as Pathways support officers. This is not your chance to lord it over civilians and throw your weight around. You’re going to be deputized for three weeks on a rotation; at the end of your stint, you hit the drops for planetside leave, and as soon as your feet touch solid ground, your deputy status ends.
“Ten of you leave now, ten next week, and the last group two weeks from today; you’ll fly a twenty-four hour shadow patrol, and for the first week you will be eyes-only, echoing everything to your counterpart officer. Most of you are already familiar with the routine, and I expect you to fill in the rookies. Make us look good out there; there’s a bonus in it for the station, and I don’t have to tell you it won’t be going in anyone’s pocket—we still need some repairs to the auxiliary ship-lift, right Corsi?”
There was some good-natured razzing which Corsi endured with a groan.
“You’ll be flying … er,” Hawking hesitated and cleared his throat, “I’ve been told you’ll be flying impounded vehicles—now, just hold on—it’s ….” After that, it was no use trying to quiet the men down for a few minutes as the room erupted in an equal mix of cheers and jeers.
Hawking’s personal philosophy was that any pilot worth his seat-space should take to whatever ship he was given like a wild animal to a mate. If the ship was fast or powerful or looked nice, that was a bonus, but all a pilot should care about—in Hawking’s opinion—was whether it moved and how to steer it.
Unfortunately, Pathways was not guaranteeing that speed, strength, or beauty would accompany the ships to which these deputies would be assigned. The men from Marques Station who had accepted stints like these in the past knew that Pathways could not even guarantee the ships would move—or steer. This was because instead of issuing out their own ships—which were boring but plentiful—Pathways frequently insisted on using ships that had been impounded, some of them because they had been parked in the inner rings for years, disowned or discarded when the owner died.
There was a lottery-like chance of getting a nice ship, particularly if a smuggler had been caught recently, but any ship that Pathways had in impound was probably not worth much, since they usually went on auction right away. If it was worth very little—not enough to sell, but just enough to keep it from getting scrapped and parceled out to little space concerns—then it sat in the Pathways impound until needed.
The cheers among the Marques pilots being briefed was probably an even mix of pilots with Hawking’s enthusiasm for any new ship and pilots who looked forward to being paid for three weeks of turning in ship after ship that broke down on them, “forcing” them to endure the three weeks on the Pathways base station. The Pathways base station was easily three times the size of Marques, and the amenities made it a perk for officers.
The jeers among the pilots were also an even mix—on the one hand were pilots who didn’t look forward to flying hunks of space junk, and on the other hand were pilots whose own ships would languish back at Marques because Pathways was too cheap to insure them against damage or loss. Some of Hawking’s top pilots had sunk every cent they earned during their tenure at Marques into ships that were luxurious rides and impressive performers. To be forced to leave their babies behind for three weeks, followed by another few weeks of planet-side rotation, was akin to having their baby kidnapped—or in this case, hijacked—right out from under them.
Hawking waited, waited, and finally began reading out the names of the ten pilots who would be leaving first. Better that they find out about the health inspection later, he decided.

Hawking, Ecksel, and Spencer had a brief meeting after the first group was dismissed to pack for the transfer. Hawking cut straight to the point.
“You will not be in any of the groups assigned to Pathways rotation,” he said bluntly.
Spencer shrugged. “We didn’t need a meeting for this. It’s your call who goes and who stays. I’m not the only one staying.”
Ecksel looked back and forth between Hawking and Spencer, but he addressed Spencer. “You’re not bothered by this decision at all? You do have more experience than a lot of these guys, even if it wasn’t here at Marques. Do you think you would do a better job than some of these guys?”
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t say so—not right now, not like this. Besides, any idiot can park ships in the space lanes. It’s a fair bit safer than their usual job.”
Hawking nodded. “I’m glad you feel that way. But I’ll be honest with you: it’s not your attitude I’m worried about. You’ve made some close friends in the last few weeks. If anybody asks you how you feel about being excluded from this nice, cushy assignment—well ….”
“I would say I’d rather be here anyway; it’s bound to be a lot quieter, and I can get some work done on DaSilva’s ship—unless you’ve got something else for me to work on?”
Hawking shook his head. “Excuse us,” he said, gesturing to Ecksel, and a moment later Spencer was vanishing through the door.
“And how is he physically?” Hawking inquired after a moment’s pause.
Ecksel waved a hand absently. “He’s fine. He comes out of those states as shaky as a leaf, and his body chemistry goes nuts for a while, but after a few days it’s like nothing happened, except—well, except for the dreams, which are more intense for a while—and the amnesia. Mind you,” he held up a hand, “he’s only had three since he arrived, and one of those arrested prematurely, but I’m going on the information from his file as well. This guy Schill—the medic on C’bathos—took some good notes on him.” Ecksel’s face clouded over. “Too bad he won’t be talking anymore.”

Whether because they were both too busy or because neither wanted to admit it, both Ecksel and Hawking arrived at the conclusion, over the course of the next few days, that it had been a mistake not sending Spencer with the rest of the pilots.
There were complaints about Spencer’s nightmares—complaints that were familiar, but hadn’t been heard in over a month. With the first batch of pilots gone, many of the men were accommodated simply by switching their sleep rotations, but it left Spencer’s shifts sparse, meaning the men on his rotation worked harder and accomplished less. The irritable, cabin-sick pilots who hadn’t been chosen for Pathways duty had been awarded station repairs and inventory tasks; the ones on Spencer’s schedule were crankier and more overworked, and Hawking could tell it wouldn’t be long before there was a fight.
He headed one off the day before the second crew left for orbital patrol. Passing through the mess hall on a shortcut to the crew quarters, he overheard a conversation that was reaching the pitch just below venomous, when neither party is sure whether the other guy is joking. An old instinct kicked in, and Hawking paused as though he had forgotten something. He was holding a tablet, and he clicked through page after page of data, not really seeing it as he concentrated on eavesdropping.
The men were ganging up on Spencer, interrogating him in deliberately controlled tones, implying what might happen to him if he couldn’t get his nightmares under control—and offering friendly suggestions of how he might do that.
Spencer’s low, steady tone made his replies impossible to make out from this distance, but after one murmured rejoinder several of the men lurched toward him—kept in check only by the hisses and muted gesticulations of the ones whose job it was to keep their eye on Hawking.
Spencer eventually got up and walked out between the other men without a scratch, and Hawking continued on his way smoothly—but he knew it would be a mistake to stop like that again in the future, transparently signaling to the men that Spencer was somehow under his protection. He resolved to let Spencer fight his own battles from then on.

Spencer slapped on the door a few times, then cranked Ecksel’s door open.
“Come to cheer me up?” Ecksel quipped, sweeping a hand across his desk to clear the screen. He looked up, revealing dark circles under his eyes.
“Nothing I have to tell you will cheer you up—and it won’t help you sleep either,” Spencer added.
Ecksel snorted. “I don’t have trouble sleeping, I just have trouble finding time to sleep—I sometimes switch my sleep rotation if I have a lot of work to do, but then I end up pulling three or four shifts in a row. It’s probably not the sleep at all, you know.”
Spencer nodded. “Oh, I know: my doctors have always told me I needed ‘creative free-time’ more than I needed extra sleep, especially after an episode.”
“Yes. I’ve noticed you drawing on your tablet. I’d like to see what you draw if you don’t mind—not in a medical context, but purely out of curiosity.”
“Sure. So, should I come back? Are you going to take a nap?”
“If you leave, I’ll just work on something else; I’m too busy to stop right now. It’s probably better if we have a session. At least I’ll work a different part of my poor, addled brain.”
Spencer laughed and settled in on the couch.

I was ten years old when Kiyos was torn apart. Kiyos wasn’t destroyed from above by spaceships with bright green lasers; it was broken up from underneath by careless miners and bad math.
It took me ten years to say that. For ten years I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it could be the fault of the miners, because that would put at least part of the blame squarely on the shoulders of my father. He was my hero, and he was a great man, but he was also a miner trying to feed a family, and maybe the fact that the mines were tapped out—or that the contracts were depreciating and falling through—maybe something drove him to make a bad decision, to take a risk that cost so many people their lives.
I think about the day that it happened less and less as the years pass, but when I do … I still review the events of the day with a morbid fascination. I can’t help going over and over the sights, the sensations, the horrible realization that the whole world was coming apart. It was weeks later, at my aunt’s home on Serpeset, that I finally got the whole story, the meaning behind the madness. I rebelled against the truth with a vengeance, and for years afterward I told everyone that there was a conspiracy—a plot to destroy the mining colony—and that my father must have been at the center of it.
It was too perfect not to believe: my father must have known what was happening, and he died trying to stop it.
Maybe it was C’bathos that convinced me that accidents happen. Maybe it was just time to stop deluding myself. I’m sure that the horrors I have seen since Kiyos have made me consider the evil in everyone I meet. I never know who will betray me.

“Does that make it difficult to make friends?”
“It doesn’t make it any easier.”

I owe my life to my father’s foresight. He had our home built miles from the town, on a high, sheer cliff overlooking the crater—our lives revolved around that crater and everyone in it. I went to school with those kids, I greeted everyone in town almost every day, there was no one on the whole damn rock that I didn’t know personally—and I was only ten years old. Right up until the day I left—forever—I hoped I would live the rest of my life on Kiyos.
Of course, that sounds ridiculous now: for one thing, the whole rock was only so big, not even a planet by scientific standards, and the mining would have been halted in a few years, contract or not. You can only dig so far before you come out the other side—or, as we found out, before the structural integrity of the rock is compromised.
It was just bad math, that’s all. Maybe somebody knew they were pushing too hard, and maybe nobody knew; the point is moot now, because the cookie crumbled.

“You seem intent on trivializing what happened,” Ecksel interjected.
“What do you mean?”
“Several times since our sessions began, you’ve referred to this event—the destruction of Kiyos, your first home—with colloquialisms and quaint terms, almost as though you are diminishing the importance of the event.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Doc; I was devastated when it happened. It’s just that it’s been so long, and so much has happened since then … it seems like Kiyos was just the beginning. Wait till you hear about Serpeset.”
“Okay.”

Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part Three

2008-11-28T09:24:00.000-08:00

DaSilva sat alone the next morning at breakfast, not really eating and not really thinking. He looked up briefly when Spencer sat down at the other end of the table, but then said nothing. Finally, after taking a drink of his juice, he grimaced and said, “I think I stayed planetside too long—this juice tastes like oil.”
“It is oil,” Spencer chuckled. “They call this juice, hot cereal, and toast, but it’s really oil, oil, and oil. It’s infused with nutrients, but everything’s artificially constituted—mainly out of soy and vegetable oil. It’s what you get when you’re on rotation—why ship the good stuff up here? In a few weeks, we’ll be on planetside rotation and it’ll seem like heaven after this.”
DaSilva laughed obligingly at this, then studied Spencer for a while before making another overture. “What were you doing on C’bathos?”
Spencer shrugged. “I had a job re-fitting engines, but really I was there to get away from home.”
“First time away?”
“No. Just restless, you know. Getting out into space felt like shaking everything off for a while.”
DaSilva nodded. “I hear that.”
“And you?”
DaSilva took a long drink of his oil, grimacing again, and then shrugged. “Just another delivery. I take long runs for a while, build up a little cushion, and then spend it all someplace nice.” He laughed. “Ever been to SeaCap Station?”
Spencer shook his head.
DaSilva smiled in a way that was faintly disgusting, but did not elaborate.
Spencer rolled his eyes and turned back to his cereal. “Is that your next stop, then?”
“Nah. I’ve got another few runs to make. SeaCap’s expensive. I’ll probably spend my next vacation out on a border colony. A little money and a few souvenirs from home make you a regular celebrity out there.”
Spencer nodded, smiling.
DaSilva tried to pick up on it, saying, “So, C’bathos isn’t the furthest you’ve been?”
But Spencer had finished breakfast, and he picked up his tray. “What’s your itinerary?” he asked abruptly.
“Itinerary?” DaSilva laughed. “I haven’t had one of those in a while.”
Spencer’s forehead wrinkled. “I thought you had a delivery to make.”
“That stuff’ll keep for a while. Besides, who knows when Pathways’ll get around to issuing me a code. I could be here for a while.”
“Yeah, about that: what happened to the one you had?”
DaSilva caught the sarcasm in Spencer’s voice and responded in kind. “I guess I lost it. You know, when someone’s chasing you at high speed through a Lepinski depression, you throw out anything that’s slowing you down.”
They both laughed, but it was perfunctory, forced.
“Well, if you’re here for a while, why don’t we work on your Ojira for a while?” Spencer offered. “You can’t turn down free labor, can you?”
“No, I suppose I can’t. Thank you.”
“Sure. No problem.”

Hawking having already freed Spencer up from the duty schedule, there was nothing to stop Spencer and DaSilva from spending the whole morning—about five and a half hours all told—repairing burns, pits, scars, streaks, and scalds from the outer hull of the Ojira. Half of them had stories behind them, which lengthened the work out, but many of them were purely incidental to the dangerous nature of the long space haul—and the scars were so old that Spencer didn’t go ten whole minutes at a time without reminding DaSilva where neglectful pilots went when they died.
Jimenez joined them an hour before they broke for lunch, his own ship recently refitted with an engine they could not talk about in front of DaSilva. DaSilva suggested they race the two ships, but Jimenez politely declined and said, “I’m not sure if the engine they fitted me with is supposed to shoot me across the solar system or just pop like a balloon and kill me. Better to find out on my own.”
When they broke for lunch, DaSilva and Jimenez headed for the mess, but Spencer said he was going to take a nap, so they split up. Spencer grabbed a sandwich from the cooler in the shop. Then he headed for Ecksel’s office.

“Now listen, Spencer, I’m not going to make you any promises, and I certainly don’t want you to think you have to tell me every detail about everything that ever happened to you—just anything you think might be relevant. I’m going to call this therapy, but that’s just so you still get paid for sitting around on your ass for a while telling me stories, okay?”
Spencer nodded.
Ecksel was parked in his office chair, a small terminal on a swing-arm slung up next to him; he had a cup of coffee steaming on a little table, and his sock-feet were parked on a little stool. He looked comfortable.
Spencer decided to get comfortable, too. He got up from the chair he was sitting on and moved to the couch, stretched out, and propped his head on a cushion.
“I’ve had black-outs all my life,” he began.
Ecksel listened intently.

I’ve had black-outs all my life. My parents would call them seizures, but that was just their way of trying to understand them. I wasn’t unconscious, comatose, or catatonic—I was simply acting without memory of what I was doing.
To the observer, I was acting with complete clarity. I appeared deliberate and aware of my surroundings. Frequently, my actions had a positive impact on others—as with this latest episode with Corsi—but I have to stress that to this day I remain completely unaware of my actions during these black-outs or even my intentions. I can’t claim that rescuing Corsi was an act of honor or selflessness because I don’t know how or why I did it.
The best comparison I can draw is to sleepwalking—although even that one is a stretch. I do know that I have woken up sometimes with a sense of well-being and calm; other times I have woken up feeling sick and lonely and frightened. Some have speculated that I felt upset or frightened on the occasions that I was interrupted or woken up prematurely. I can’t attest to this, since I know so little—and only second-hand—of how I spend this ‘lost’ time.
My mother says that I experienced two of these black-outs at school when I was very young. I don’t remember them—I only remember being sick a few times, and I can’t recall time missing that early on. However, I had an episode when I was eight years old that I remember with much greater clarity. I’ll give you the short version of that one.
We lived on Kiyos which, as you know, was a mining colony. I used to attend school in a pressurized facility near the center of the town. I was in school one day, and there was a practice evacuation. Just when the signal was given, I blacked out. I had a dream that time—nothing like what actually happened—which I will tell you about later. When I woke up, I was being transported to the medical facility. Not the school’s medical facility, the one in town. My mother was in the transport with me, and I realized that it was much later in the day. I asked her what had happened, and she said that I had saved someone’s life. I went to sleep again, and when I woke up I was at home. My father was there, and it was morning, and I realized he was not going to go to work, and that made me happy.
My parents explained to me then what had happened.
Our school facility had a detachable module for evacuations. It was like a large transport, and all the children would board it in emergencies. Then it would roll away from the school until the crisis had passed. It was important that we board the module quickly and that it detach correctly to maintain pressure within the module—otherwise, the module would de-pressurize and we would all suffocate.
Just as the signal was given for the practice evacuation, I apparently stood up and announced to everyone that there was a seal breach, and that we should remain where we were. My teacher was upset at first, not only because I was counter-manding instructions, but also because everyone in the classroom obeyed me almost unthinkingly. He took me by the hand and told me to remain at the end of the line, and he instructed the other students to line up. Then I fell to the floor and began shaking, and he contacted the administrative team to cancel the drill.
A few moments later, the seal breach became critical, and the detachable module was compromised. Alarms went off, and the man at the outer door only just had time to uncouple the module and seal the school in order to prevent a massive decompression. Had anyone been on the module, they would have been caught outside and most likely killed.
I heard all of this second-hand. I do not quite believe it myself.
The only part I know about first-hand is the dream, which I will tell you now. I have had similar dreams many times since, both during my black-outs and during normal sleep cycles. I do not pretend to know what it means, although if you are familiar with it, the history of Kiyos might suggest an interpretation.
I was standing in the school, looking up through a skylight that didn’t actually exist in the classroom, and I saw ships—alien ships, or at least ones I had never seen before—firing great bursts of green light into the surface of Kiyos. I knew why they were there, and surely enough, the ground soon began breaking up, until I was certain that Kiyos would soon cease to exist.
The same dream has come to me many times—and it always prominently features these ships I have never seen before, as well as the destruction of my home. When I lived on Kiyos, it was Kiyos being destroyed. When I lived on Serpeset, it was Serpeset. It is always the same.

Spencer stopped for a minute, taking deep breaths, and then he turned to look directly at Ecksel.
“Now you tell me, Dr. Ecksel: Kiyos, Serpeset, C’bathos … what do these three places have in common—besides that they are all places I have lived?”
Ecksel kept a stone face and said simply, “They are all places that no longer exist.”

Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part Two

2008-11-26T09:18:00.000-08:00

Though they had planned on being best friends with DaSilva throughout his brief stay on the station, Spencer and Jimenez quickly found that DaSilva did not have trouble making friends. Later that evening, Jimenez found him sitting in the pilot’s mess—surrounded by crew and pilots alike—telling one story after another. If the first story rode the edge of credibility, the next one sailed right over that edge and took the whole audience with it.
“The cargo hold is full of explosives and the guy is smoking this big cigar, but I can’t say that, so I tell him it’s ice!”
“I was holding the hatch shut with one hand and steering with the other!”
“There we were, buck naked except for our gunbelts, being escorted through interplanetary customs like a pair of celebrities!”
“I was so drunk, I don’t know what I said, but they gave me a commendation for boosting company morale!”
“I was at C’bathos that day, oh yeah. I was there when the rings blew off. The shockwave from the explosion knocked me into my console—I thought it was my own ship going up, I was praying and crapping my pants at the same time!”
By the end of the night, there was both applause and loud, good-natured booing at the end of each story—but no one would have put money on what was true or what was good old-fashioned fertilizer.
“You were at C’bathos?”
The buzz died down a bit, and DaSilva stopped laughing, scanning his audience slowly to see who had spoken.
Spencer obligingly raised a hand. He was propped up in a corner, and he had been quiet and apparently inattentive for most of the evening, but now—though he appeared relaxed and casual—he was leveling a penetrating stare at DaSilva as he waited for the answer.
DaSilva paused, sending a searching look back to Spencer, then nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said, “I docked on the outer ring about an hour before the ships that caused the explosion.”
“So why weren’t you on the station already when it happened?”

The intermediate stop for any traffic leaving Earth’s solar system was an enormous space station approximately one billion kilometers outside Pluto’s orbit. The station was called C’bathos.
Its official name was Station 1147, and on some books it was still called Ryan’s Station. It had once been a waystation orbiting Saturn—serving mining efforts and the inevitable crew of border patrol Pathways officers—but for the last fifty years of its existence Station 1147 had formed the core of a much larger space station. Maneuvered carefully out of the solar system and fitted with an array of outer rings that hosted docking facilities and transfer protocols for connecting travelers, Ryan’s Station was promoted from a mining resource to a full-fledged galactic colony, complete with a mayor and a permanent Pathways office.
The first mayor of the new station was a man named Velasnik, and he had been a refugee from a town on Earth called C’bathos, a town with a tough history and a tragic ending. Velasnik continually referred to the station as a town and nicknamed it New C’bathos, and for the long-term citizens—including medical, engineering, and scientific posts—the name stuck. Visitors were welcomed to C’bathos, the town in space.
But the name brought its history with it. The town on Earth that had been known as C’bathos was the site of an energy plant malfunction that obliterated the entire town, a pointless and incomprehensible end to a struggling community. The station known by the same name suffered a similar fate.

“I don’t understand,” DaSilva lied.
Spencer shook his head, not sure why DaSilva was leading him this way. “Come on, DaSilva,” he drawled, elaborately casual, “if you docked, registered, underwent standard inspection, passed through medical, and got yourself tagged for the civilian sections, you still would have had a good fifteen minutes to get to the bunks or the cafeteria before the attack.”
“I said ‘about an hour’ not ‘exactly an hour’ for one thing,” DaSilva murmured, “and for another thing, I don’t think anyone who was there would have called it an ‘attack’ so much as an accident or a bit of bad luck.”
Spencer said nothing but waited.
“As it happens,” DaSilva proffered, “I was a little anxious about the cargo I was carrying, and I didn’t know of anything on C’bathos tempting enough to draw me out. I was planning on sleeping in my crawlspace—I hear you like to do that, too.”
There was a little applause at that, and Spencer chuckled and nodded, but he still didn’t say anything.
“So you’ve been to C’bathos?” Da Silva probed.
Spencer nodded.
“There when it all happened?”
Spencer paused, then nodded.
“Well, if you’ve got a story to tell, let’s hear it!” DaSilva waved graciously at Spencer, and most of the crowd turned to look at him.
“I’m sorry to disappoint, but I was in the medical hub at the time. I don’t remember anything about the attack. By the time I woke up, they were evacuating us on any ship still able to disembark. There weren’t many left.”
DaSilva nodded slowly. “I was docked about ninety degrees along the ring. I didn’t see the ship, but I saw the blast. I was just lucky the power shorted on the docking clamps. My ship almost decompressed, but when the ripple effect reached us it whiplashed my ship away from the ring, and I was loose. And I was alive.
“No one called it an attack. There were plenty of mining supply ships coming and going from C’bathos every day. Fortunes are still made running supplies one way and loading up with raw goods on the way back. Unfortunately, a very precious commodity for miners is weapon-grade explosives.”
Spencer wasn’t looking at DaSilva anymore. DaSilva seemed about to add something, but suddenly turned on the humor again. “Anyway, I heard it wasn’t the ship’s fault at all. It was all over the news nets. Turns out there was this rookie engineer working the docks that day—bumbling little guy named Trevor, apparently couldn’t tell which end of a spanner was which—and he was on rotation when the ship came in. My guess is: he docked the ship freehand, didn’t know his positive from his negative, shorted the whole ship out—and then when the lights were out, he struck a match to see what happened—and BOOM!”
This interpretation of events was met with uproarious laughter, and once DaSilva had the crowd’s attention again only Ecksel noticed Spencer get up and stumble out.

Ecksel headed Spencer off halfway to the bunkhouse.
“Fyodorim, freeze!”
Spencer faltered, turned around bewildered. His face was a mess. Ecksel thought he might have been crying a moment ago.
Ecksel caught up to him a little. “Hey, listen. I’m a medic, so it’s my job to notice things, so I’m just doin’ my job when I tell you that you are one scary son of a bitch.”
Spencer blinked hard. “Is that your professional opinion?”
Ecksel snorted, then let loose a real belly laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that. Listen, I’m concerned—just concerned right now—and it’s not because we’ve got a flight-certified pilot who has seizures, and it’s not because you wake up yourself and everyone else on a regular basis with these recurring nightmares, and it’s not because you punched me in the face once and now you’re looking like you want to do it again!”
Spencer realized with a shock that he had, indeed, been clenching and unclenching his fist. He relaxed with a visible effort.
“That’s better,” Ecksel said. “Now, I’m not taking this to the next level—at this point, I don’t see a real need to alarm Hawking or Graeber about this—what?”
Spencer was chuckling. “They already know.”
Ecksel let out a slow breath. “Well, I knew that, but I didn’t know that you knew that.”
Spencer rubbed his chin. “I knew that you knew, but I didn’t know that you didn’t know that I knew they knew.”
Ecksel snorted again. “See? There you go again. You know, sometimes you can be downright familiar and friendly.”
“And the rest of the time?”
Ecksel gave him a frank stare. “You are a mystery and a freakshow.”
“Thanks, doc.”
Ecksel grimaced. “Now, listen, I meant that in the nicest possible way. It’s not that you have all this weird shit in your past—it’s not that at all. It’s the way you deal with it that’s the problem.”
“Is that the problem?”
“Yes, that’s the problem. So here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to come see me every other day—say, on the B and D rotations. It’ll be easy to remember because B. D. stands for Boring Doctor visits, right? And when you come to see me, we’re just going to talk.”
“Talk.”
“Yes, talk. We can start by talking about C’bathos, since it is the first part of your enigmatic past to surface. Come by just after evening meal; you can tell everyone you’ve got the squirts if it makes you feel any better.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Well, tell them whatever you want then, but the first B or D rotation I don’t see you, I’m taking this straight to the top. Do you understand?”
Spencer nodded.
“Alright, then.” Ecksel turned to leave, then did a double-take. “Were you really in sickbay during the incident on C’bathos?”
Spencer nodded slowly.
“What were you there for?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Lost time. I’m sure you’ve had time since to think about what that might mean.”
Another nod.
Ecksel returned the nod, hesitated over what he was about to say, then plowed ahead. “So there might be some feelings of responsibility for what happened.”
Spencer froze inside. He must have frozen outside as well, and it didn’t escape notice.
Ecksel took a step toward him. “They reported on that incident for years afterward, Spencer. Hell, they’re still reporting on it when there’s nothing better to talk about. I’ve watched a dozen different analyses of what happened. If you had been there, you’d be dead right now. There’s no doubt about it.”
When Spencer spoke, it was with a depth and a bitterness that was a little frightening. “I wasn’t at my post. Maybe there was something I could have done. Maybe there was nothing I could have done. But I wasn’t there. That means someone else was. No matter how you slice it, someone is dead instead of me. Or because of me. I don’t see any difference.”
Either Ecksel could think of nothing to say, or he couldn’t see the point, and a moment later Spencer was rounding the corner and out of sight. Ecksel began preparing mentally for D rotation the next day and the first session with a new patient. He began by going back to see DaSilva.

Jimenez and DaSilva were arm wrestling. Jimenez made a little show of grunting and huffing, but he had the shorter arm and all the upper body strength; after a minute, he slowly clamped DaSilva’s wrist to the table amid cheers.
“Left arm?” Jimenez offered gallantly.
“What would be the point of that?” DaSilva laughed.
“So, you owe me: what’s on your ship?”
DaSilva shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re going to be a little disappointed. All I’m carrying is bird seed.”
“Bird seed!” exclaimed a few of the men. Someone coughed out a colorful name for a liar, and laughter followed.
“No, really,” DaSilva insisted. The colony I’m working is running a trade for game birds, and the price includes a load of bird seed. I got here in my Ojira, but I’ll be going back at the helm of a big Senuti full of cages, and every one of them a drugged game bird.”
“Is that legal?” someone asked.
DaSilva looked around as though he hadn’t heard the question.
“Were you in your Ojira when you docked at C’bathos?” Ecksel called out from the next table.
A couple of pilots groaned at the change of topic, checked the time, and left. DaSilva and Jimenez shook hands, and then Jimenez headed for the door, turning at the last second to make a gesture to Ecksel: two fingers pointed at his eyes, then the same two fingers pointed at DaSilva. Ecksel nodded and waved him off.
DaSilva sipped some coffee from a cup, then slid it away, grimacing at the taste. “I guess you get used to that stuff after a while, huh?”
Ecksel nodded, waited.
“You want to know if I was in my Ojira when I sat there and watched the largest space station ever built—the largest one there ever will be, if I am to put my faith in the interplanetary directives—crack open like an egg and spill people out into space.”
“Yes.”
“What difference does it make what I was flying at the time?”
“It’s a detail you left out, that’s all. You seem to have flown a lot of really rare ships—at least, if I’m supposed to believe everything I’ve heard tonight—and this is the one story where you don’t say what kind of ship you were on.”
DaSilva eyed Ecksel coolly for a moment, then said, “A Gulang.”
Gulangs were big cargo ships usually converted nicely into bunks for traveling groups. If one needed to charter a ship to take twenty or forty people on a long haul, a Gulang would accommodate them cheaply without making them feel like cattle.
“What kind of cargo were you carrying?”
DaSilva looked him dead in the eye. “Refugees.”
Ecksel let out a slow breath and looked away.
DaSilva picked at a loose patch on the shoulder of his jacket. “You know, a couple of years before C’bathos, I got in debt over some contract disputes—back when I let other people make the rules for me—and they were going to take away my last ship, a Vertex B! Well, I got desperate and started taking any job that came along. Lo and behold, one day a guy comes to me begging for help; he’s got a shipload of people stranded and they need to get back to Earth.
“Now, I hedge at first until the guy offers me a body bag full of money, and then I get all magnanimous, tell them I will do whatever it takes to get them home. I trade my VeeBee for their fat ride and arrange to pick it up on the return trip.
“Just when we get in range of Pathways—right when I’ve got my hand on the hailing switch to clear us through—the leader of this little group of castaways reveals to me that they’re illegals. They don’t have any clearance to enter the atmosphere, they can’t go through customs, everything they’re carrying is fake, and they need me to do a dead drop. You know what that is, right?”
Ecksel nodded.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t. First they tell me to outrun the Pathways welcoming committee—which I’d never done, so that was a learning experience—and then they tell me to aim for the ocean.”
Ecksel shook his head. “It’s not much better than just aiming for hard ground—and then they wouldn’t have to be rescued.”
“Ah, but rescue is the whole point for these people. If they arrived in one piece, hair in place, carrying bags, it would be no trouble arresting them and deporting them. But there’s something about a disheveled, wounded, frightened animal that you snatch from the jaws of death—makes you want to keep it safe a while longer.”
Ecksel snorted. “And how many of them died in the crash?”
“An acceptable number, by their account.”
“Right.”
DaSilva took a deep breath. “Anyway, my ship was returned to me in a timely fashion, I was paid handsomely, and I decided to screw the politics and help the little guy. I’ve been doing dead runs like that ever since.” He leaned forward a little. “Now, why did you want to know all that?”
Ecksel shrugged. “Mostly for my own edification, but I do have a tangential interest on behalf of one of my pilots.”
“The one who was in here, I assume.”
“Yes. Tell me: was your ship full when you arrived at C’bathos?”
DaSilva stood up abruptly, grabbed his jacket, and headed for the door.
“It was empty, wasn’t it?” Ecksel demanded.
DaSilva kept walking, didn’t turn.
“You were there to carry away survivors, weren’t you?” Ecksel called after him.
The door clanged shut behind DaSilva, and Ecksel was alone in the mess hall.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part One

2008-11-24T09:14:00.000-08:00

Spencer was drawing in a hammock while several other men egged on Affwell and a tank-shaped man named Jimenez who were wrestling and had been locked in a tough hold for a while—when there was a bang on the door and Hawking leaned in.
“Jimenez—and Spencer—on deck, now. We’ve got a visitor.”
After their latest visitors, the crew were wary about the word, so there was some hesitation. Hawking didn’t move, and Jimenez suddenly seemed to snap out of it. He punched Affwell in the shoulder and said, “Re-match later, che,” and then he was out the door with Spencer close behind.
“Who’s the visitor, sir?” Jimenez asked on the way to the flight deck.
“Not a client, if that’s any relief,” Hawking grunted.
Jimenez’s eyebrows shot up. “Supplier?”
“Nope.”
Jimenez shot a look at Spencer and got the same look back, both of them at a loss. After they entered the bullpen, Hawking cranked the manual seal and thumbed a code into the commlink on the wall. Spencer didn’t recognize it, but Jimenez did; it was a black-out code, effectively sealing off the room against eavesdropping. The temperature seemed to go up in the room.
“Alright, listen closely, you two,” Hawking murmured, barely moving his lips. He was apparently concerned with lip-reading from the video surveillance, which could not be counter-coded. Spencer glanced up at the cameras in the corners involuntarily, then chided himself for doing so.
“I don’t know where this guy is from, but the manifest he transmitted to us is fake, he is arriving at—not leaving from—Earth, his ship has battle scars, and he is carrying cargo in lead-lined containers. He says his name is DaSilva, which is basically Portuguese for ‘Smith’ and he … uh,” Hawking cleared his throat, “well, he says he ‘lost’ his passport code.”
Jimenez and Spencer both snorted in unison, which made Hawking crack a small smile.
Pathways, the official police of the space lanes, issued an algorithm to every ship authorized through inter-planetary customs, and that algorithm governed the transmission of a code sequence back to Pathways that was unique to the ship to which it had been issued; it was always programmed remotely, and if a ship was not broadcasting its code it meant it was not cleared to navigate into planetary space. Marques Station, in upper Earth orbit, was at the limits of planetary space, and such stations usually charged fees for ships leaving orbit to lay over until a customs crew could inspect the ship. For DaSilva to claim that he had already been issued a code was obviously false, but it raised a question: how had he left the last planet he’d docked without one?
“So he’s a pirate,” Jimenez muttered, mimicking Hawking’s careful stone-face.
“Oh, no,” Hawking quipped, “this guy is just a poor, wayward pilot in need of an emergency layover. Now, he’s going to think you two guys are interested in his ship—which you will be when you see it—and I want you to get as good a look as you can while it’s docked here, but most importantly I want you two to never … leave … his … side while he’s here. Is that clear?”
Jimenez and Spencer nodded carefully, and then Hawking led them to the hatch that opened onto the deck. He stopped to thumb a code into the commlink, and then cranked the hatch open.

DaSilva—whatever his real name was—was sitting on a crate just inside the bay door of his ship, but neither Spencer nor Jimenez noticed him at first. They were staring at his ship.
The Ojira was a class of ship all by itself, long and sleek, shaped like a dart but with a cone-shaped cockpit and a ring-shaped propulsion unit. It could have been a small cargo ship for its capacity, but the engine in it made too many mouths water in the private sector, and for the first few years of its run it was bought out almost exclusively by rich, immature guys with racing streaks. On an almost daily basis, interplanetary trade was interrupted by the twin streaks of two Ojiras trying to outstrip each other—followed closely by a Pathways officer at a safe distance. Although the Ojira was un-catchable at its peak speed, when it inevitably ran out of fuel—racers usually had lightning quick reflexes but no math skills to speak of—the Pathways officer would come toodling along and tow the ship and its meek owner back to impound.
Pathways started a collection of the ships at first, but by the time the second series of Ojiras came out, they had had so many instances of people stealing the first-run Ojiras from impound that they decided to just auction them off as soon as they could and use the proceeds to obtain faster ships and bigger guns to combat the few who had begun to use the Ojiras for bootlegging and gun-running.
DaSilva’s Ojira was in bad shape. Most wealthy ship owners would have restored an Ojira, treating it with every protective coating they could apply until it shone in the decklights, effectively putting it off limits to everyone and every thing. The idea was to make the ship look never used. Well, this one looked used. The long, trim Ojira had prominent—and painful-looking—scarring along its prow, corroded gels on its landing lights, scoring on the viewplates, some kind of welding or melting on two of the struts, and other, more serious structural problems. Far from trying to protect his ship, this guy seemed to be running her into meteors.
DaSilva laughed out loud at the horrified looks on the men’s faces. Hawking introduced them, told Jimenez and Spencer to “get DaSilva squared away,” and then disappeared.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” DaSilva chuckled.
“Well, that’s a relief, because it looks pretty bad,” Spencer growled.
DaSilva looked taken aback. “Hey, she’s my ship, not yours, buddy.”
“You’re damn right,” Spencer snapped, “because if she was my ship, I’d at least have her sand-blasted. You need to see a domestic abuse counselor, ‘buddy’.”
DaSilva laughed out loud at that, and Jimenez shook his head.
“Seriously, though,” Jimenez interjected. “This is either the oldest Ojira I’ve ever seen, or you are guilty of criminal negligence, muchacho. Did you take a wrong turn through the asteroid belt on the way here?”
“She’s old—she’s an original. See the wing tilt? They didn’t do that on the second series, or any series after that. But the scoring is from asteroids.”
Jimenez tried nodding as though that was a perfectly reasonable explanation, didn’t quite pull it off, and then was rescued by Spencer breaking into a rowdy laugh.
DaSilva seemed to freeze for a moment, then decided it was safe to laugh as well. “Yeah,” he drawled, “those asteroids sure put up a hell of a fight. Especially when you’re not broadcasting your customs code.” They all laughed again, and everyone was trying to sound natural for different reasons.
“Damn asteroids,” Spencer cracked, “think they own interplanetary space and everything in it, am I right?” Then he laughed so loud and with such a phony bent that they all stopped laughing and dropped the charade all at once.
Jimenez spoke first. “Just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page.”
For a full minute, Spencer and DaSilva stood staring each other down while Jimenez tried to think of an excuse to get on the ship. Finally one occurred to him.
“So, did you mod up your console or what?” He took a step toward the hatch, and DaSilva intercepted him neatly.
“Nah, I like her just the way she is,” DaSilva said, and as they watched, he thumbed a code into the hatch door and then closed a levered hatch over the code pad. As soon as he had done this, he returned to the cargo bay door, activated the mechanism, and turned to stare them down, while behind him the bay door groaned and hissed shut and then thunked loudly three times, old barlocks ramming into place automatically from the inside. “Hey, anybody hungry?” he asked suddenly, and began ambling toward the bullpen hatch.
Jimenez and Spencer hung back a bit.
“Suspicious old fart, ain’t he?” Spencer hissed to Jimenez.
“You get the code?” Jimenez hissed back.
“Of course.”
“Me, too.”
And then they followed DaSilva off the deck.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part Four

2008-11-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

It was Corsi, fittingly enough, who extended the first olive branch to Spencer. They were on the same rotation for meals and sleeping that week. One day at breakfast, Corsi sat down across from Spencer and started eating, not saying a word.
Spencer’s eyes flicked up at him once, but then he didn’t say anything either. Halfway through the meal, Corsi salted his toast. It was one of his personal quirks. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then picked up the salt and salted his toast, too.
Corsi watched him take a bite. “Good, huh?” he said.
Spencer nodded. A minute later, Spencer poured some of his juice in his hot cereal. After Spencer had taken a few bites, Corsi did the same. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then Corsi nodded.
Finally Corsi said, “You saved my life. I feel like I owe you. Anything you ever need, just ask and it’s yours—no questions.”
Spencer shrugged a little and said, “I don’t remember doing it. I mean, they told me the whole thing three times, but—I don’t remember.”
Corsi looked around. There were a few crew members at the next table pretending not to look, probably pretending not to listen, too. “Look, I might as well tell you, because this kind of thing gets around. I know your medical records are supposed to be confidential, but we all know Keter wets the bed, so there’s no sense pretending we don’t, right?”
Spencer nodded, but didn’t look up.
“And we all know this has happened to you before. Black-outs, I mean; stuff you don’t remember. So, I mean, the whole crew knows.”
“Do they?” Spencer had a dull, resigned look on his face now.
“Yeah, and they don’t care.”
“Is that so?” he said with a little edge in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s so,” Corsi insisted.
Spencer stood up to leave.
“They don’t,” Corsi repeated, but Spencer was headed for the door. Corsi grabbed both of their trays and headed the other way.

Over the next few days, however, Corsi’s words came back to him a dozen times.
One day the food processors went on the blink and the men were forced to eat “cold mash”—which meant they were eating raw foodstuffs like wheat grain, fruit pulp, uncooked ground beef, and cheese, smashed together into a loaf. Spencer saw some of the men collect a loaf like that in the mess hall and leave with it. He took a loaf for himself and was about to leave when Durrang steered him out a different door.
“Bring it down to the deck,” Durrang said.
Spencer was taken aback by the directness, but followed Durrang. When they arrived at the flight deck, he found a line of men waiting for the deckhands. As he and Durrang neared the front of the line, Spencer could see what they were doing.
A few deckhands had plugged in superheaters—the type used for welding and other hull repairs—and as the men reached the front of the line, the grunt would hold out a bowl-shaped piece of hull. The crewman would drop in his loaf of “cold mash” and then shield his eyes. A brilliant flash would go off, and then the grunt would hand back the loaf, steaming. The crewmen would wrap it in paper or foil and head out.
Durrang saw the light go on for Spencer and laughed. “I eat it all the time, and I’m still alive.” Then he clutched at his chest and dropped to his knees, gasping for breath. The grunt nearest to him shook his head.
“Real funny,” he said, as Durrang let his loaf fall into the metal bowl. “That some kind of comment on my cooking?”
Durrang—now miraculously recovered—pointed an accusing finger at the grunt. “Mickey, you burnt mine last time. Shave off about point-zero-zero-five this time, will ya?”
Mickey rolled his eyes, but turned around and clicked a dial on the machine behind him. “Ready?” They shielded their eyes and the blue flash went off.
“Ah, now that’s gourmet cooking,” Durrang murmured, gathering the loaf up into a sheaf of papers. He nodded at Spencer. “Your turn, mate.”

Later, Spencer was preparing the cockpit of a pod for a test run when the power was tripped for the whole deck. The ships ran off of power from the station while docked, and Spencer was not actually in the cockpit but stuffed into an access tube behind the control panel; what little light he’d had wasn’t working, so it was pitch black and cramped. The headset he was wearing, which was wireless, filled with groans and barks for a minute as the pilots bad-mouthed the deckhands and control personnel.
A few seconds later, the control tower announced it was a local drain of power and would take a minute to isolate. More groans and foul threats poured into Spencer’s headset, so he took it off and laid it to one side.
Spencer knew it was useless to do anything but wait for power to come back on, so he settled himself in. It was a very close space, but he didn’t mind, and it didn’t seem worth it to leave and come back. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing a bit. It seemed like he had just begun to meditate, when suddenly the lights came on and people were shouting at him.
“Hey, Spence, you okay?!”
“Get him out of there! Does he have air?!”
“What’s going on!? Is he dead?!”
Then he was being dragged feet-first from the access tube by a giant of a crewmate, and when he saw the crowd that had gathered, his first words were, “Did I fall asleep?”
“Did you—what?” someone said, and then the whole deck was laughing. Someone near the wall thumbed a switch and said, “I hope you got that.”
“Yeah, we got it,” the voice came back. “I’m writing it down next to ‘Did I do something wrong?’”
Affwell—the one who had dragged Spencer out of the tube—was just staring at him, incredulous. Later, Spencer and Affwell talked for over an hour. Spencer told Affwell about his father and the mines, and how Gregor Fyodorim would sometimes nap under the bed in Spencer’s room. There were never any monsters under Spencer’s bed—just homesick miners.
Affwell, it turned out, suffered from claustrophobia, and so stories about the mines and small, confined places where Spencer had fallen asleep as a child fascinated Affwell to no end. He would shiver and rub his hands together as though chilled to the bone when Spencer would talk about cave-exploring.
After that, Affwell—easily twice as big as Spencer—would pause in the middle of a story about some cramped cabin or narrow tunnel and turn to Spencer to say, “You know, the kind of place that would put you right to sleep,” and then guffaw and stomp his foot.

Abruptly one day Spencer was surrounded at the mess hall. One minute he was sitting by himself pouring synthetic sweetener on his eggs, the next minute his table filled up with crewmen who had no trays. At first, Spencer’s alarms were going off. It looked like an ambush—which it was, but not the type he was expecting.
“Where are you from?” The tone of the question bordered on threatening, but Spencer was not intimidated. Rather he was caught off guard.
“Excuse me?” he hedged, trying to read the body language of the other men. If they were going to interrogate him for information, they were giving off either a very surly or a very lazy vibe right now.
“We want to know where you’re from,” the same guy demanded, leaning a bit closer. His stare was pointed, but not angry.
“Why do you want to know?” Spencer stalled. He had a vague idea that they had pegged him as being from somewhere they disliked. With his past, he could claim any number of places as home—but not knowing which one to claim made him nervous. The men were exchanging shifty looks now, too. What was going on?
A hand descended on his shoulder, and Spencer turned his head slowly to look up a little at a large pilot with a dimpled chin and a handlebar moustache. “We just want to know, that’s all,” the man said in a voice that was so calm it sounded more menacing than ever.
“Hey,” an accented voice said from across the table to his left, “we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.”
There was a different kind of silence after this remark, and suddenly the guy with the moustache said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way? What the hell are you talkin’ about, Oren?”
“Yeah,” somebody said, and Spencer realized nobody was looking at him anymore, “what the hell, man—you want to beat it out of him?”
Some of the pilots laughed, and Spencer gave a relieved snort too, but that made them all get quiet again.
“Listen,” a short, dark-haired deckhand explained, “we got a little bet going—what?”
Spencer’s eyes closed and he slumped—with obvious relief—until his forehead touched the table.
“You okay?” the deckhand demanded, with genuine concern.
“Is he passing out? Is that what happens when he passes out?” somebody asked in the back.
“I’m okay,” Spencer interjected, raising a hand and looking around at the small crowd. “I’m okay. I was just trying to figure out what you guys wanted.”
Realization dawned on a few faces. “You thought we were here to kick your ass!” somebody cackled, and there were a few congratulatory gestures passed around as though that had been the plan all along.
Spencer let out a long, slow breath and wiped a hand over his face.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part Three

2008-11-19T09:08:00.000-08:00

Corsi’s ship was less than a minute from impact.
Twenty men in space suits were sitting in the bullpen, holding onto their seats.
Three more men in space suits were moving through the crawlspace under the deck.
Corsi was buckled into his seat, and he had run a strap from his right arm to a handle above him; hopefully, even if he passed out, the handle would be pulled.
Hawking hadn’t looked at Graeber once throughout the ordeal. He looked now. Graeber had his eyes closed, and his lips were moving. At first, Hawking couldn’t figure out what Graeber was doing, but when it came to him he said, “Amen,” and turned back to the viewscreen showing the deck below.
He gave the command to open the bay doors.

Either fuel or power to the reversed engines gave out while Corsi’s ship was still moving. Then the explosion of air from the bay doors opening slowed the ship down considerably—but it also tore a couple of smaller ships loose from their magnetic moorings. And finally, as predicted, Corsi’s ship slammed into the deck with a force that was felt all over the station.

Corsi had no helmet, but he didn’t think he was going to need one. You don’t need a helmet when you’re dead. Fortunately, as Hawking predicted, it was a ricochet landing, and Corsi had just the amount of clarity necessary to engage the magnetic docking clamps after a bounce. Within three seconds of entering the bay, he was docked—poorly done, but a record nonetheless.
Corsi had all of two seconds to congratulate himself. Then the alarm sounded in his tiny cabin and his blood froze.
It was the imminent explosion alarm. Impact had jarred a tank loose, and there was already a blowtorch of flame shooting out somewhere.
Corsi looked up through the porthole and saw the airlock cycling on the ship next to him. He didn’t understand that, but he didn’t care. He was waiting for the signal that minimum compression had been reached, so that he could get the hell out of his ship.
Hawking’s voice came barking over the commlink, but Corsi didn’t need to be told what to do. He paused for a split second to pray that his head didn’t explode, and then he reached for the hatch bolts—
With a popping sound that was barely audible in the low pressure, the hatch flew free, and in the sucking wind from the hatch came Corsi, falling to his knees and choking—and Spencer was there, slapping a breather on his face and dragging him toward a trap door.
In a few seconds, the men under the deck had yanked Corsi and Spencer into the dark tunnel, and no sooner had they sealed the trap than the second deck-quake in thirty seconds struck the space dock. In the darkness, a tinny voice said, “Tell me they got in. That’s the only thing I want to hear. Say it.”
Someone struck the intercom with an elbow and a muffled voice replied, “Two in hand. They’re alive.”
Hawking slumped into his seat, and below him somewhere the bullpen doors were bursting open so that men in suits could repair the bay doors and re-pressurize the deck. Graeber unbuckled from his own seat and slapped Hawking on the shoulder on his way out. “Nice work,” he said simply, and left the control room.

Graeber preceded Hawking into the medical bay only by rank—Hawking had gotten there first, but Ecksel had the transparent door secured. They could see him hooking Spencer up to life support systems, but Ecksel ignored the impatient paging and knocking for a full five minutes, taking readings of Spencer’s brain activity, heart rate, and other vital signs.
Finally, when they were allowed in, Graeber seemed completely nonplussed at not being able to congratulate crewman Fyodorim on his original thinking and heroism on behalf of his crewmate. “When do you think he’ll wake up,” he demanded of Ecksel.
“I don’t know if he’ll wake up at all,” Ecksel muttered, making notes and calling up Spencer’s files on the wall display. “I don’t want to jump the gun here, but I think this kid is dying.” He looked them right in the eye to make sure they’d heard and that they knew he wasn’t joking or exaggerating.
Hawking spoke first. “Dying? I mean, in his file it said that he goes into a coma or a very deep sleep, but—what makes you think he’s dying?”
Ecksel took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “He’s got low-level brain activity, which is inconclusive—he could stay like this for years, or he could snap out of it any second—but what really has me worried are his vitals. His heart rate is very slow, like someone with hypothermia or an extreme drug problem; his blood is running high in indicators for [not finished—really need to show him at death’s door and bring in the negative effects these events have on his body and mind]

Hawking called a meeting of the senior crew later that evening, while Corsi entertained visitors in the medical bay and Spencer slept, attended closely.
“You all understand that he doesn’t remember anything that happened. He can’t explain it, and he keeps asking for details that we don’t have—things he did when he was out of contact with us.” Hawking let out a slow breath. “The file on this one is going to be slightly modified. Usual trash we feed clients when things go wrong, but not a word about Spencer in any of it. Understood?”
The men looked around at each other for a minute or two, and then someone said, “Nearly as I can recall, Spencer was in the bullpen with us the whole time. Didn’t we play cards or something?”
“Yeah, we always play cards,” someone else said. A few voices agreed, and some plausible stories were suggested. When they had reached an agreement, Hawking adjourned the meeting.

Thirty-six hours later a delegation from the client showed up—the people who owned the engine in Corsi’s demolished ship—and the men were forced to endure the usual barrage of interrogations and re-tellings. What was unusual was the level of tension displayed by the Marques crew. They were accustomed to having every move questioned; Corsi and the deck crew had been rehearsing their lines for weeks. However, they were not accustomed to having to leave out entire chunks of the story—and the client’s delegation seemed to pick up on it.
One member of the delegation in particular, an engineer who had helped autopsy the ship, cornered one of the deck crew—completely by surprise—and said, “There are holes in this story I could fly a barge through. When are you guys going to tell us what really happened?”
Durrang, the deckhand, just blinked a couple of times and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The engineer stared him down for a moment, then turned and stalked off.
Durrang let out a long breath and shook his head, then turned around to leave.
Spencer was standing in the corridor, watching him.
Durrang raised a hand briefly, but Spencer ducked through a hatch, and Durrang went off the other way.

It was Corsi, fittingly enough, who extended the first olive branch to Spencer. They were on the same rotation for meals and sleeping that week. One day at breakfast, Corsi sat down across from Spencer and started eating, not saying a word.
Spencer’s eyes flicked up at him once, but then he didn’t say anything either. Halfway through the meal, Corsi salted his toast. It was one of his personal quirks. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then picked up the salt and salted his toast, too.
Corsi watched him take a bite. “Good, huh?” he said.
Spencer nodded. A minute later, Spencer poured some of his juice in his hot cereal. After Spencer had taken a few bites, Corsi did the same. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then Corsi nodded.
Finally Corsi said, “You saved my life. I feel like I owe you. Anything you ever need, just ask and it’s yours—no questions.”
Spencer shrugged a little and said, “I don’t remember doing it. I mean, they told me the whole thing three times, but—I don’t remember.”
Corsi looked around. There were a few crew members at the next table pretending not to look, probably pretending not to listen, too. “Look, I might as well tell you, because this kind of thing gets around. I know your medical records are supposed to be confidential, but we all know Keter wets the bed, so there’s no sense pretending we don’t, right?”
Spencer nodded, but didn’t look up.
“And we all know this has happened to you before. Black-outs, I mean; stuff you don’t remember. So, I mean, the whole crew knows.”
“Do they?” Spencer had a dull, resigned look on his face now.
“Yeah, and they don’t care.”
“Is that so?” he said with a little edge in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s so,” Corsi insisted.
Spencer stood up to leave.
“They don’t,” Corsi repeated, but Spencer was headed for the door. Corsi grabbed both of their trays and headed the other way.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part Two

2008-11-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

Ecksel was in the bullpen when Spencer entered. He took one look at Spencer—distracted, nervous, and flexing his fingers—and realized that Spencer was having an attack. No one else seemed to realize it.
Ecksel did nothing. He stepped back against the wall and watched.
Spencer headed straight for him.
Ecksel opened his mouth to say something, but then Spencer reached past him to the intercom, removed the handheld unit, and left the bullpen.
After a moment, Ecksel followed.

Hawking and Corsi were still debating when the intercom sounded. Someone answered, and then Hawking was interrupted by Ecksel shouting, “The rookie’s in the crawlspace—I think he’s headed for the deck—Hawking, he’s having some sort of a seizure—,” and then Ecksel was cut off by Spencer’s voice, eerily calm like a sleepwalker, saying, “Stay put, sir. It’ll be fine.”
For a moment, no one moved. Hawking closed his eyes and took a moment to regret ever letting Spencer get comfortable. Graeber was surely questioning his judgment.
On the deck and in the control room, the men began shaking their heads and murmuring, the general consensus being that Spencer had lost it completely now.
“Did you hear me?” came Spencer’s voice again. “Stay put.”
“Why does he keep saying that?” Hawking asked no one in particular. “Where does he think we’re going to go?” He reached for the commlink, but stopped as Corsi’s voice poured out.
“Oh my God! He’s right!” Then louder. “That’s it! That’s it!” Over the ship’s transmission, everyone could hear Corsi suddenly begin demolishing the cockpit. He must have just grabbed the nearest heavy object and started smashing everything—the console, the viewscreen, the overhead controls—and suddenly Hawking realized what he was doing.
“That boy’s a damn genius,” he whispered.
Spencer’s voice came back, echoing a little. “Clear the deck. Brace for impact.” The echo turned into a whine of feedback. He must have passed an intercom in the crawlspace—
“Crawlspace!” Hawking hissed. “Ecksel, where did you say he’s headed?”
“To the deck, sir.”
“Why through the crawlspace?”
“Clear the deck, please,” Spencer droned, still sleepwalking.
Hawking realized that only a few of them could hear the request, and he quickly thumbed an open channel, shouting, “Get off that deck! Now! Clear the deck!”
“Do you want me to open the bay doors, sir?” someone asked behind Hawking.
“No!” Hawking barked. “Not yet—he’s down under the deck. I think he’s planning on coming up under one of the ships.”

Hawking, Corsi and Spencer were now on the same page.
Ships like the ones they were testing were usually cobbled together with parts from decommissioned ships; if someone built a new engine or a new propulsion system and wanted it tested, they could integrate it into a cheap ship built out of spare parts instead of building a whole new vessel. Fancy prototypes were usually built once all the bugs in the various systems were caught.
What Corsi was flying was a ship with a scavenged console, which was why it had frozen up on him—but being scavenged meant it had Pathways protocols in it already, and one of those protocols was called “Stay Put.”
Stay Put was an emergency procedure that the ship could perform without any help. Basically, in the event that the navigation system became inoperable, the ship would retain its last reported position—or as close to it as feasible—and signal for help until towed or until it received course instructions, demonstrating that it could be piloted again.
When the console froze up and the ship kept moving, Corsi waited only a minute for Stay Put to take over before he assumed that the ship was not equipped with it. The problem was that the ship was still receiving course information from the console—even though Corsi could not get in to change it. This also explained why Hawking was unable to access it remotely.
In order to get Stay Put to kick in, Corsi was going to have to render the console completely useless in the next three minutes. After that, even the ship’s computer would not be able to brake fast enough to avoid the station.
There was a chance that, even if the ship fired its braking thrusters in the next minute or so, it would still impact with the station at high enough speed to kill Corsi and demolish the flight deck. Hawking had an idea of his own, but he didn’t know if he could communicate with Spencer—he wasn’t sure Spencer was capable of actual discussion in this state. They would just have to wait and see.

Within a minute, the station received a signal from the ship—and it wasn’t Corsi’s voice. It was the ship itself, asking for assistance. Over the simulated voice came a whooping, cheering voice that was definitely Corsi’s, and he informed them that the braking rockets had fired.
Hawking cut off the loud response from the crew and asked for quick calculations as to the ship’s deceleration arc and distance from the station. He needed to know whether they should open the bay doors now, or wait, or not open them at all.
The tricky part was knowing whether Corsi would survive if they kept the doors closed. This was the best option for the station and the crew—and if Corsi could withstand the impact, he would probably come out of it damaged but alive.
The next best option was opening the doors at the last moment and doing so without decompressing the deck. This would force a jet of air out, probably damaging the doors, but hopefully slowing the ship just a bit before it slammed into the deck or one of the ships inside. Instead of a direct impact, it would be a ricochet, sparing Corsi some damage but severely damaging the deck and perhaps obliterating another ship as well. Hawking hoped that Spencer was headed for the right ship. The wrong choice would put him in as much danger as Corsi.
Hawking looked up as one of the techs finished his calculations. The news wasn’t good.

Hawking silenced everyone before opening a channel to Spencer; he wasn’t sure Spencer would even hear him, but if he did then it had to be clear.
“Spence,” he called out. “Are you on deck yet?”
For a moment, nothing came back. Then a voice said, “Stay put.”
Hawking exhaled slowly. “Stay put. Got it. What now?”
There was silence. Hawking waited. The crew waited. Nothing came back.
“Spence,” Hawking called.
Nothing.
“What now?”
Silence. Then a crackle, and a static-smothered voice said, “Blow the hatch, and get the hell out of there.”
It made no sense to Hawking; he looked around and got blank stares from everyone else as well. Turning back to the panel, he said, “Blow what hatch?” But that was the last time Spencer spoke to anyone for a while.
Corsi was coming in, and he was coming in fast. Hawking projected cool with every spare bit of energy he could muster, but under the surface he wanted to scream. He closed his eyes and began mentally surveying the ships on the deck—
“That’s why his voice was breaking up; he’s gotten into the airlock on one of those ships, but why?”
—the controls to the bay doors—
“They don’t blow open, they just slide apart, that can’t be it”
—and Corsi’s ship—
“It’s got a hatch, but he can’t get off the ship, he’s got no suit, why would he get off the ship?”
And with another rush of adrenaline, Hawking caught up to Spencer again. He lurched for the open channel and began shouting commands. This wasn’t just going to be close—they were about to have a by-God catastrophe on their hands. The braking thrusters had given them about five or six extra minutes, but that was the last reprieve they would get. Everyone on the station was moving.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part One

2008-11-14T07:04:00.000-08:00

For more than a month after the incident, the people funding the Ghail project plagued the station, poring over reports and interviewing Spencer and everyone else. The Pathways officers were in and out fast; this type of paperwork and investigation was ongoing and routine for them since their main jurisdiction was off-world transportation. Spencer endured the scrutiny for about a week, but then Graeber stepped in on his behalf.
“I don’t care how long you boys want to go over and over this with me or my staff, but the crew are now off limits; they have jobs to do, and this company comes to a complete halt when you waste their time like this. You have depositions, video-, audio-, and testimonial records; you also have the ship itself to study. Call us when you find something.”
The next day, Spencer had a new assignment. Things went back to normal. For a while.

He was sketching something on a tablet again, tuning out the other men—who, in turn, seemed to be talking about him as though he wasn’t there.
“Anything good?”
“He’s drawing some ship I never seen before.”
“Is it any good?”
“Look, it’s a ship; what do you want?”
“Well, I can’t draw.”
“You can’t bluff either. Call.”
“I wanna raise—”
“No, you don’t. Look at these.”
“Shit.”
The intercom came to life, cutting off the game and the conversation.
“Ray? You down there?”
One of the guys thumbed the wall unit. “Ray’s in the can. What do you want?”
“You guys should get up here. I think Corsi’s gonna eat it.”
There was a moment’s silence, then someone barked, “What’s goin’ on?”
“He’s on a collision course with the station and he can’t steer.”
Ray appeared from the toilet, yanking his coveralls over his shoulder. “Say that again!” he shouted, struggling to get dressed.
The voice in the wall complied.
Ray snapped the portable unit out of its clip in the wall, and the voice came through in stereo for a moment until Ray got out the door, several of the men behind him.
Spencer listened to the technical details spilling from the wall unit, and heard Ray—moving at high speed through the corridors—confirming parts of it.
Corsi had been setting a course back to the station when his ship’s entire navigation system seized up. The computer was basically worthless now, and he could not gain access to the actual engine from the cockpit. Just as he’d been about to call for a rescue, the main engines had fired, sending him hurtling toward the station at high speed. Now he had about ten minutes until the ship smashed into the station unless they found some way of diverting it—but diverting it almost certainly meant sending him streaking toward Earth with no brakes.
When he’d heard enough, Spencer launched himself from the hammock and headed for the bullpen himself. He wasn’t morbid, but he could not sit in the bunkhouse and hear about this over the intercom.

Premonitions are tricky things. Before Spencer arrived at the flight deck, he had realized that the crew would not be allowed in; the deck would most likely be depressurized in anticipation of an emergency landing—surely someone could think of a way to stall the ship. The crew would, however, be crowded into the bullpen waiting to rush in and help if Corsi somehow managed to dock in one piece.
Spencer had a clear plan in his mind, but he was doing his best to ignore it. In his mind, he saw himself bypassing the bullpen and entering the flight deck via one of the service crawlspaces; he could not imagine why he would want to do this, since he did not know what use he could be. He rejected the plan for several other reasons, chief of which was his certainty that the deck would be a vacuum already when he arrived.
He rounded a corner and ducked through the low, metal door into the bullpen. All the doors leading into the flight deck—from the observation deck, from the control room, from the bullpen—and any door leading into one of those three sections was oval-shaped and equipped with a magnetic seal in case of emergencies such as hull breach or decompression. The doors were supposed to be closed at all times, and a pilot would “knock” (a slang term for checking instruments and calling an all-clear) before opening any of them; it was merely a courtesy ninety-five percent of the time, but the other five percent of the time it was a life-or-death requirement. Spencer didn’t notice as he ducked through the door to the bullpen that it had been left open, but when he saw the next door open, he looked back and thought, ‘There’s something really wrong here. Why haven’t they decompressed the flight deck?’
Pushing past the few men in the bullpen, he stepped through the next door and found the men standing on-deck, listening to the conversation between Corsi and Hawking.
“I don’t think you can afford to crack your console; if it doesn’t work, you’ll have no way of correcting your course.”
“I’m reasonably sure I can make the change—and if I can’t then I’m stuck on this course anyway.”
“Not true. If you can drain a tank and get the deceleration protocols to kick in, you’ll spiral—it’ll give us time to get someone out to you before you get too close to the atmosphere.”
“You hope it will. I think I’m better off trying to short one of the engines; it’ll make me peel off course more slowly, but it’s a more reliable option.”
“Yes, and then you go shooting into the upper atmosphere at high speed—besides guaranteeing no one ever finds a piece of you, it will leave us with no autopsy. It’s bad company policy, Corsi,” Hawking joked.
Considering the situation, it was about the closest to emotional Hawking was likely to get—at least on the intercom—and the men on deck were deadly silent.
“How long?” Spencer whispered to the guy next to him.
The pilot turned an ugly eye on Spencer, and a wave of disgust washed over Spencer. This was not the time for politics.
“How long!” he demanded loudly.
“Six minutes until impact with the station,” the pilot hissed, then shoved past Spencer and into the hall.
“How long does he have left to change course?” Spencer asked the rest of the crowd in general.
“About four,” someone murmured.
The image of the crawlspace had been intruding on his thoughts the whole time, but now another image went off in his head like a camera flash. Spencer blinked hard and mumbled, “Stay put?” His head ached all of a sudden, and he pressed his palms to his forehead. What was going on?
He tried to reconcile the two impressions that he was getting, but his headache was getting worse. He smelled something familiar, and with a sharp stab of fear realized it was oranges.
He was having a seizure.

Levi's Rock - Chapter One - A Death Wish - Part Three

2008-11-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

Chapter One: A Death Wish (cont.)

Every member of the crew—forty-six all told—was on deck except Spencer Fyodorim and Stan Robinson. It had taken just about every hand to secure the station; they would be cleaning up the mess hall for days. Six men had hauled themselves—by means of the emergency railings—through the halls at low-gravity down to engineering to restore systems and prep the station for rotation again. It had taken hours, but now everyone was back on their feet, literally and figuratively.

Several of the crew were holding portable video units and replaying footage both from inside and outside the ship. Of particular interest were the scenes where Spencer seemed to be vomiting in all directions at once. Understanding the physics that made this possible did not in any way lessen the comedy, apparently.

Hawking had chosen Stan Robinson to go make the rookie’s first rescue. This was tradition: Robinson was the last man to be rescued. It gave the crew a little balance, something of a pecking order, and a chance to redeem themselves after a humiliating ordeal.

Robinson’s ‘disaster’ had been merely stalling out in deep space; he was in a high-speed vehicle with a miscalculated fuel reserve, and he had meekly contacted the station for pick-up only after hours of attempts. He had tried gleaning fuel; he had tried re-routing power from every other system; the “autopsy” crew—the boys who took the ship apart for its return to the client—even found evidence that Robinson had attempted to breach the hull, thereby propelling the ship back to the station on precious air.

By the time Robinson returned with Spencer, the two should have been well-acquainted and—hopefully—on fairly even terms. But they weren’t.

The crew had crowded into the bull-pen—where the deck crew usually waited while the deck was open to space, decompressed while ships launched and landed. As soon as the shuttle was magnetically grounded, the deck sealed off, and atmosphere restored, the men poured in. They were disappointed at the greeting they got. When Robinson got off the shuttle, he was stone-faced. He reported to Hawking and then hung back to see Fyodorim’s welcome.

The crew had seemed ready to hoist Spencer on their shoulders a minute ago, but now they hung back as Spencer lowered himself from the shuttle. He had splashes of vomit on his coveralls; he was as stone-faced as Robinson had been; and when he met the eyes of his crewmates, they looked away. Spencer seemed to know they had been enjoying his predicament, and they gathered that he had no sense of humor about it.

Now Spencer looked around at them with a mixture of disapproval and weariness. He scanned the crowd and made straight for Hawking, and the crowd parted before him with uncomfortable faces. Hawking seemed no more eager to see him than the crew now.

“Well?” Spencer demanded.

“Well what?”

Spencer’s brow creased. “Did I do something wrong?”

There were some snickers and snorts at this—though they were quickly stifled. Then Hawking heard one of the men repeat the question to someone behind him. It would not be long before it would be passed around as a joke.

Hawking shook his head. “Better head to debriefing, Mr. Fyodorim.”

Spencer studied Hawking’s face for a moment, then turned and walked off the deck. The clang of the door behind him was followed by the muffled laughter of his crewmates recounting his brief inaugural adventure. He wondered what Graeber had to say.

“I’d say you’re having trouble making friends,” was the first thing Graeber had to say.

Spencer looked around the table at Graeber, Hawking, Trask, and Daly—all of his superiors, at least until they got around to firing him—and didn’t see any reason to take the bait. He returned a stubborn gaze to Graeber.

“Please,” Graeber drawled, “offer us an assessment of the Ghail.”

The four men on the weighty side of the table regarded Spencer with poker faces.

“Well,” Spencer began, “first of all, I would declare it unfit for human transport.” Someone snorted at this, but Spencer didn’t see who. “I went by the book during departure, followed procedure for disconnecting from the station, and then engaged a course that was designed to stress the ship.”

“I dare say you accomplished that,” Graeber conceded dryly. “So what went wrong?”

Spencer’s eyebrows went up. “What do you mean? Nothing went wrong.” He looked around at the others. “If you mean, how did the ship respond to the stress, then I would say it responded poorly, that it was built inadequately, and that the designers have some research to do. However, as to the test itself, everything went just fine.”

Graeber nodded at Daly, who was in charge of overseeing autopsies.

“The autopsy crew agrees with you,” Daly began, “as to the stress on the ship; both simple and complex maneuvering significantly impacted the frame. It’s built like a juice carton; probably modeled after ships that are supposed to be full to capacity with cargo, not with loose passengers. However, the causes behind the ship’s actual separation into two pieces are in question. Were you aware of the explosion just prior to separation?”

Spencer concentrated, but did not remember two explosions. He spoke slowly. “Are you referring to explosive decompression of the main cabin?”

Daly shook his head. “No. What you perceived as decompression was actually a minor explosion. It could have been much greater.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “When you first engaged minimal thrust to put the required distance between the Ghail and the station, it apparently burst a seal in the fuel delivery system. It was a defect in the part itself. Actually, an alarm did sound—though it was the wrong alarm.”

Spencer spoke without thinking. “The fire alarm.”

Hawking’s eyes closed, and a curse formed on his lips.

Daly nodded. “This was an opportunity for you to halt all maneuvers and assess the ship.”

“I knew it was erroneous.”

“How? How did you know?”

Spencer shook his head slowly. “I guessed,” he admitted.

Daly went on. “The burst seal should have been reported as such. Nevertheless, a fire is also serious enough to warrant an abort. Yet you continued with your flight plan. The seal went unnoticed—which in itself might not have negatively impacted your test run. This was compounded, however, by the aggressive nature of the maneuvers you chose for the ship’s paces.

“A leak occurred within the compartment where the fuel cells were stored. By the time you applied full acceleration—after, of course, bucking the ship around like a wild ass for a while, resulting in decreased structural integrity—there was enough leaked fuel to have lit up space for a while. You were basically sitting on a torch. It should have turned the whole can into one of those old-style rockets and landed you in another solar system.” Daly chuckled at this image, but a look from Graeber put him back on track.

“Luckily for you there were two separate explosions. The first one was the leaked fuel exploding, and that was the one that split the ship in two. If the ship hadn’t actually broken apart at that point, you probably would have been obliterated in the second explosion. So, you’re only alive because you wrecked your ship.” Daly looked around at the others. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

“And you won’t ever again,” Graeber barked.

“If I may,” Hawking interrupted, “I would like to clarify a few things. First of all, we’re talking about several design flaws: the seals on the fuel cells are antiquated and—I checked—obsolete; the overall structural integrity of the ship was weak-sauce before Fyodorim laid hands on it; and there is still the matter of the safety measures we’re not discussing. Can someone tell me why?”

Trask spoke up, startling Spencer. The man had not moved a muscle this entire time. “The ‘matter of the safety measures,’ as you put it, is completely irrelevant. You saw how he responded to a fire alert. I doubt all the alarms going off at once would have stopped him.”

“You’re probably right,” Spencer blurted out rashly. “It would have just looked like a universal systems failure.”

Trask’s gaze went from impassive to piercing in a heartbeat. He leaned forward slightly, and Spencer leaned back slightly without even knowing it. “But Mr. Fyodorim, that’s exactly what should have happened.” He was speaking calmly, but his voice was intense somehow, threatening. “Prior to the explosions, you had an imminent hull breach, an electrical systems failure, and a fuel leak that—even if it did not cause an explosion—would have poisoned everyone in the main cabin if you had actually had any passengers. Every alarm on that ship very well should have gone off simultaneously; and if that had happened, and if you had responded with any reflexes, you would have been back safe on this station hours ago—and perhaps the whole ship might be in one piece.”

Graeber sighed deeply. “Which is why you’re off the hook on this one,” he groused.

Hawking slumped visibly, relief washing over him.

Spencer looked around, confused. “I don’t get it.”

Daly laughed. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, kid.”

“What’s a horse? And why is this all suddenly someone else’s fault?”

“It’s hard to see from the pilot’s position sometimes,” Hawking explained, “but, from where we were sitting, what happened to you was even more of a surprise to us than it was to you. Do you realize how connected we were to what was going on? How do you think the crew got the video of you puking everywhere?”

Spencer grimaced.

“We only realized afterward that there were no warnings—no alerts, no alarms, nothing—before the ship blew apart. Now, either there were some serious failings in the central computer or—”

“Someone sabotaged the computer?”

Graeber nodded slowly. “We’re investigating; so are the Pathways officers. It’s happened to us before—happens to all the test-piloting firms from time to time—when someone wants to make sure a new ship doesn’t get built. Of course, this time it’s a little more serious—”

“I could have been killed.” He said it so matter-of-factly that everyone looked up at him.

Daly chuckled again. “Hey, that’s every day around this place, kid.”

Spencer shrugged and shook his head. “Well, better luck next time, I guess.” Perhaps Hawking saw the statement for what it was, but everyone else passed it off as test-pilot bravado.

“After all,” Graeber had often said, “you gotta have some kind of a death wish if you want to work here.”

That night, after the last of the crew had laughed himself to sleep—probably watching that clip again—Spencer lay awake considering the irony of the day. Someone he had never met had tried to kill him, and it had nothing to do with him but with someone who felt threatened by a ship being built.

It hadn’t been so long ago that he had tried to take his own life, and today he had come that close to losing it again. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

He turned on his tablet again and began to draw.

Levi's Rock - Chapter One - A Death Wish - Part Two

2008-11-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

Chapter One: A Death Wish (cont.)

Hawking barged into the crew quarters as though angry—merely out of habit—and found the newest member of the crew in a hammock, drawing on a lap computer with a stylus. Spencer Fyodorim holstered the stylus and sat up, but his eyes flicked only briefly at Hawking before resting on the floor.

“On your feet, Fyodorim. You’ve got work to do.”

They were both on their way out the door at a brisk pace before either spoke again.

“So, I’ve been approved?”

“Everything checks out. Surprised?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s good. Have you ever piloted anything larger than a Dreg?”

Spencer lagged a little, confused.

Hawking enjoyed a smirk while Spencer couldn’t see it. ‘Disappointed with your first assignment, Spence?’ he sensed. “Speak up,” he barked over his shoulder.

Spencer shrugged. “I didn’t know there was anything larger than a Dreg—except the place they park the Dregs,” he grumbled as they kept moving.

Hawking rounded a corner quickly, his long legs giving him a natural lead, and Spencer jogged to keep up. “And why is that?” Hawking quizzed as they moved up a ramp toward the lift.

“It's impractical. Anything bigger than a Dreg sucks too much fuel on accel and decel—plus the Dregs are difficult enough to maneuver as it is. I guess I just assumed that for the number of passengers you can fit in a Dreg, they're just about the limit of efficiency.”

“You assume correctly. Some greedy bastard is hoping to make an advance in colony transports and win over the commercial transports; my guess is that he's built a whale of a ship with crappy materials and almost no engine. It's just a giant balloon with a fuel tank strapped to it—a death trap for whoever charters one.”

“So they want us to test it?”

Hawking stopped suddenly and turned to face Spencer. “They want us to go on and on about how well-made it is and how smooth the ride is. So, my question is: what do you think I want you to do?”

Spencer took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “I'd guess you want me to shake the damn thing apart.”

Hawking snorted, then turned and moved on. “That's exactly what I want you to do,” he called back.

Spencer shook his head and ran to catch up.

Graeber joined Hawking on the observation deck. Below, through several layers of transparent shielding, they could see the enormous ship—called a Ghail—connected by a short docking tube to the side of the space station.

“He out there already?” Graeber asked, settling himself in a chair.

“Yes, he should be loose any minute now,” Hawking replied, moving from console to console, activating remote cameras and communications inside the Ghail.

“Is he checked out on the Ghail?”

“No. I didn’t give him anything to read, and he got no simulations. But he has flown the Dregs before.”

“He said that?”

“No; it’s in his file.”

“So you’re setting him up to fail?”

“With that monster? At least if he does, it will be a spectacular mess.”

On the big screen, Spencer appeared. He was sitting perfectly still, eyes closed. Graeber looked from the screen to Hawking and back again.

“Is he meditating?”

“I have no idea.” They waited for a minute or two. Graeber was cycling through some other views of the interior of the Ghail on one of the monitors. Hawking was pinging some of the instrument monitors to be sure they weren’t just getting echoes.

Finally, when Graeber started outright fidgeting in his seat, Hawking leaned down to the commlink, but just as he did so, Spencer launched into action on the screen.

His eyes snapped open. He knew what to do. The idea was to force the inevitable—to make the unexpected happen now, while the ship had only one passenger—and there was only one way to do that: stress. The ship would have to experience sudden and compounded stresses. He set to work quickly planning it out.

Ships had always been easy for him. Spencer adjusted the consoles and familiarized himself with the controls almost at a glance. He was a little surprised that Hawking didn’t bring him up to speed on the ship before turning him loose, but it made almost no difference.

“You want me to shake this thing apart?” he murmured. “Let’s do it.”

Hawking choked on his coffee.

“What did he say?” Graeber barked.

“I didn’t catch it,” Hawking lied, thumbing the audio off.

Graeber mashed his palms against his temples. He mumbled, “Anything beats retirement. Anything beats retirement.”

Spencer’s hands flew over the controls. With one hand, he was disengaging the connection to the space station, and with the other he was keying in a fairly ambitious flight plan. The moment the proximity signal from the docking tube went silent, while Spencer was still fastening the five-point harness across his abdomen, the Ghail lurched forward and an alarm sounded. It was distant—not in the pilot’s cabin, but somewhere else in the cavernous ship.

There was a fire somewhere.

“What was that?” Graeber demanded. An alarm was also sounding on the control panel in the observation deck. He thumbed a control on his armrest, and two of the auxiliary screens changed to Ghail schematics. Nothing unusual showed up.

“It’s nothing; there are always some bugs in the internal monitoring,” Hawking hedged, but he looked uncertain, and Graeber noticed.

Spencer ignored the alarm, assuming it was erroneous, but he hoped Hawking was paying attention. If there really was a fire, then what he was about to do would be more dangerous than he intended. Hawking had at least two minutes to warn him before the flight plan got ‘frisky’.

The Ghail was now a good distance from the station, and Spencer did some quick mental calculations. ‘Far enough,’ he decided. With the ship still in the middle of a rolling turn, he fired a pair of breaking thrusters and braced himself for the bucking in store. There was one violent whiplash, and Spencer cursed as his head struck the headrest. He was fairly certain the hull had just been breached; the buck was probably explosive decompression of the main cabin.

The ship attempted to continue with the flight plan, but all that happened was a slow turn—and only half the ship turned, Spencer gathered, as the creak and groan of metal told him that the ship was wrenching in two.

Then the tail section exploded, propelling Spencer and the control room into a spin—and away from the station at high speed. As Spencer flip-flopped, his stomach flip-flopped as well. He opened his mouth to call for help on the commlink, but, “Oh no,” was all he got out of his mouth before the vomit started flying.

Graeber saw the hull of the Ghail spinning toward them—the rear of the ship—and ignored the fact that his newest crew member was now whipping off into space somewhere. “Ben,” he drawled, strapping himself into his seat, “you sure can pick ‘em.”

Hawking sounded an alarm and slapped the console in front of him to communicate with the entire facility. “Attention, crew: brace for impact! I repeat: brace for impact!” He switched off the intercom and, to Graeber, said, “So, what do you think? I’m guessing the rotation of the station should deflect—”

At the moment of impact, Hawking was slammed into the console. He would have a mottled bruise across his chest for weeks, but what would really hurt later were Graeber’s next words. The lights threatened to go out, but power held, except that the station was slowing in its turn—causing everything to come loose and float.

Hawking tried to hold onto the console, but only succeeded in shoving himself up to the ceiling and then rebounding right into Graeber, who appeared perfectly composed, still strapped into the command seat.

“Well, Ben,” Graeber chuckled, “you have virtually assured yourself that I will never retire.”

Levi's Rock - Chapter One - A Death Wish - Part One

2008-11-07T08:08:00.000-08:00

Chapter One: A Death Wish

Setting: Marques Space Station, Upper Earth Orbit

Graeber chewed on the unlit cigar and kneaded his forehead with calloused hands. He was eyeing a stack of flimsies on his desk and thinking about sliding the whole stack into the incinerator slot in the wall—

The door opened and Hawking walked in. “Don’t do it,” he chuckled.

“You don’t know how close to retirement I am,” Graeber growled. As the door closed behind Hawking, Graeber thumbed the locking protocols under the arm of his chair and activated a scrubber in the ceiling. Before Hawking was even seated, Graeber had the cigar lit and was reclining, eyes closed, forehead smoothing out, shoulders relaxing.

“I know exactly how close to retirement you are,” Hawking laughed. “You’re so close, you’ll never do it. You’ve got enough credit to live on forever—which you won’t, if you keep up with those—and you still do rotations up here, where you’re not needed. Why don’t you at least stay planetside and run things from a hammock?”

Graeber laughed at that. “You wish, boy.”

“Yes, I do—and not just because you’re thirty years older than me and seventy pounds fatter—I think I’ve earned a little trust. You don’t have to check up on me like this.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?” Graeber asked, eyes opening, real concern on his face.

Hawking smiled. “Just checking.”

Graeber shook his head.

“No, apparently it’s more serious than that,” Hawking continued. “You’re up here every three months because you can’t stay away—you’re obsessive about it. You need to be put in a home for old folks. Admit it: your life is over. You’re dried up and useless. Step aside for the younger generation.” He smoothed his hair comically.

Graeber puffed away in silence.

“Hey,” Hawking soothed. “You know I’m only joking, right?”

“You think you are,” Graeber groused.

They sat in silence for a while.

“Tell me about this problem-child you’ve adopted,” Graeber said finally.

“Oh, him,” Hawking groaned, but Graeber noted that he seemed grateful for the change of subject. “Well, he’s not a child; in fact he’s too old to be a test pilot.”

“Then why’d you hire him?”

“I talked to him. For two hours.”

Graeber’s eyebrows went up. “Smart?”

“No one who applies for this job could be called that. No, it was just his knowledge of ships. He seems to have been a test pilot somewhere else.”

“Seems? You didn’t check?”

“Of course I checked,” Hawking objected, genuinely hurt. “You won’t believe what I found.”

“Is it in this stack somewhere?” Graeber gestured at the flimsies with disdain.

“No, I didn’t make any copies of this,” Hawking murmured, offering a slip to Graeber.

The slip was some new-fangled pocket device, and Graeber had difficulty figuring out how to plug it into the wall terminal, but when he did so the screen filled with pages quickly. Graeber yanked the cigar out of his mouth and coughed. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah, that was going to be my whole report on this guy—just those two words, with a date and my initials.”

“Is this a scam? Maybe he fudged some of this.”

“He doesn’t even know I looked for it. I hired him on the spot; why would he need to make any of this up?”

“On the spot? Just because he knows a lot about ships?”

“I trust my instincts. He seemed sincere, he knew his job, and he said he’d accept any payscale. I thought the worst case scenario would be firing him after the background check.”

“What about running off with one of our ships—or crashing one into the station?”

“He hasn’t flown anything yet.”

“What are we paying him to do, then?”

“We’re not; he’s paying to lay over here until his paperwork goes through.”

Graeber grunted. “I’m suspicious already. Why isn’t he still planetside?”

“He was never on-planet. He came in a relay ship.”

“A cargo freighter? From where?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Hawking said, standing. “Finish reading my report, and then talk to him yourself.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to give him his first assignment. Now that the boss has approved him, there’s no sense paying him to sit around, right?”

“Who says I approved him?”

“You will. Come see him when he gets back.”

Graeber grunted and turned back to the wall terminal. He let out a low whistle and began reading. “Spencer Fyodorim. Hmph. Where’ah you from, kid?”

* * *

The entire crew wanted to know the answer to that question.

Ever since Spencer Fyodorim had set foot on the station there had been something to complain about—and usually it was loss of sleep. Forty-seven pilots—soon to be forty-eight when Spencer was official—slept in five overlapping shifts that rotated through three different bunkhouses. There were some mats, some hammocks and a lot of cots; some men slept with isolation equipment such as tents or blindfolds and earplugs; one of the bunkhouses had sounds piped in—machinery and air recycling noises, some of which were sounds the actual equipment no longer made, but which had been recorded and looped to lull the older pilots to sleep; and one of the bunkhouses had been graffiti-ed into an eyesore by several pilots who reasoned that it didn’t affect anyone’s sleep.

What did affect everyone’s sleep was being put in a rotation with the rookie.

From the day that Spencer had arrived, he hadn’t gone one night without waking up at night—usually screaming—and then becoming almost amnesic about the episode. When asked about it, he would have trouble remembering anything. Not that many of the crew asked him about his episodes; most of them staunchly ignored him. After all, he was not—strictly speaking—part of the crew yet.

Generally speaking, what happened in the crew quarters was the crew’s business—like the graffiti, or the gambling, or the occasional “family member” coming to visit—so Hawking knew from the outset that he shouldn’t interfere with how any new crew member acclimated himself to the group. The trouble was that Spencer didn’t seem to be acclimating himself at all. Scorned at meals and ignored anywhere else, Spencer moved about as though he were the only occupant of the station—it seemed that he was giving everyone else the silent treatment and not the other way around.

Some of the men complained enough to Hawking that he moved Spencer to the guest quarters, which was a nice-sounding name for solitary confinement. The guest accommodations amounted to little more than a tiny room sequestered in a wing of the facility populated by computers so that little, if any, sound reached the room. It was a privilege reserved for visiting observers, usually commercial dealers insisting on a completely unnecessary first-hand look at the testing process. Isolating them from the crew served two purposes, since it also allowed the men to belligerently bad-mouth the client in the bunkhouses. Boys will be boys, after all.

While Spencer spent a few days in the guest quarters, the men wasted no time in venting about him and his nightmares back in the bunkhouses.

“Always under attack, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, or some planet coming apart under his feet.”

“Sounded like a name that one night, didn’t it? Laurie? Dora?”

“Nah, man, he was callin’ for his mama when he woke me up.”

“Oh, not one of those. Brinker, how’d you cure that one momma’s boy?”

“Didn’t. I just drugged him every time he was on my rotation.”

“Well you shoulda drugged this guy. What’d you give what’s-his-face?”

“I ain’t sayin’—I might need to use it on you one of these days.”

“You know, he had an attack right in the mess hall today.”

“An attack?”

“What do you mean? You mean like a seizure?”

“Pretty much. He started talkin’ funny, and the next thing we knew? He was passed out right on the table.”

“Did Hawking see it?”

“When’s the last time Hawking ate in the crew mess, genius?”

“Well, did you tell him?”

“What for?”

One day, Spencer awoke in sick bay with the distinct impression that he’d struck someone across the face. He looked around for the attending medic, but finally decided he was alone. He sat up slowly, felt no ill effects, and eventually got dressed and left before anyone returned to check on him.

Watching on a monitor in an adjacent room, one of the station’s nurses—a man named Ecksel—pressed a cold pack to his eye. He’d had his instructions from the pilot who’d delivered Spencer to sick bay: write no report, give no treatment, attempt no retribution. Ecksel felt sorry for Spencer and wanted to help him with the seizures, but Spencer hadn’t seemed like he was having a seizure when he closed Ecksel’s left eye for him.

The story the pilot told him had intrigued Ecksel, however, so he began doing some research on the type of seizure Spencer was having. He included all the variables as they’d been related to him: Spencer got a medium- to severe-headache just before the attacks; he had commented more than once about a smell like oranges during an episode; he spoke clearly, perhaps a bit louder than usual; and he seemed to need to complete some urgent task—and if impeded, he would lash out or black out immediately.

Such had been the case today. Spencer arrived in the company of the pilot, but apparently the pilot had told Spencer they were headed for the observation deck. When Spencer found out they were at sick bay, he fought both the pilot and the nurse briefly and violently. Then without any warning, he turned off like a switch had been thrown somewhere.

Ecksel found some reading material on his planetlink about unusual behavior during semi-conscious states, and he stayed up all night reading.

Hawking didn’t find out about the seizures first-hand or from the crew; he read about them in one of a series of eye-opening documents that turned up in the paper trail that was Spencer Fyodorim’s past. He’d hint cryptically to Spencer each time they crossed paths at what he’d learned, but the two did not chat casually. Both seemed to feel that this would be detrimental to Spencer’s already rocky relationship with the rest of the crew.

After only a few nights being sequestered from the rest of the crew, Hawking realized the error he’d made; relations between Fyodorim and the crew were worsening as long as Fyodorim was treated like an outcast. He put Spencer back on rotation with the other men in the bunkhouses, but advised him to see the station medic for a sedative to suppress the dreams.

Hawking never followed up on that visit, but for the next two weeks Spencer did not wake up at night. The crew were mute on the matter, but Hawking was willing to settle for indifference—for now.

Hawking suffered Spencer—and overrode protests from the crew—for one simple reason: he could tell where Spencer belonged.

In fifteen years Hawking had run through so many pilots that he felt like he had a sixth sense about them. He looked at some and knew they weren’t worth keeping around—the kind that would get themselves killed or someone else killed, or the kind that whined and moaned about the milk-runs but wouldn’t stick their necks out for the dangerous trips.

He especially loathed the ones that sat around talking about the ship they were going to buy some day—the ones that were fascinated with one ship, or one class of ship, to the exclusion of all others, so that every conversation eventually came around to their pat recitation of the specifications of their dream ship.

A good pilot, in Hawking’s opinion, could be read quite neatly by the way he talked about ships: finding something interesting or noteworthy in any class or make of ship; demonstrating a wide knowledge not only of engine lore but also of the history of ship design; or clamoring for the chance to fly the unusual ships that came in—not just the sleek, the fast, or the expensive.

Unfortunately, as Hawking had also learned, some of the best pilots were lost in testing ships that were death traps from the drawing board up. There was no way to predict who would be lost, and it was not worth hiring fools and hoping they would be the ones taken. Great pilots all too often met death on terms they gladly chose for themselves: at high velocity, and in the vast emptiness of space.

For this reason, Hawking was determined to keep Spencer around. Perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that they’d struck a chord when talking about ships they’d flown; perhaps it was a character-driven hunch; but more likely it was the simple belief, on Hawking’s part, that a pilot only belonged in one place.

And if he was wrong about Spencer, so what? Every pilot should have that chance to see death coming—and not blink. Let Spencer Fyodorim get himself killed out here one way or another. If Hawking read his past right, he’d earned it.

So, there was one point on which everyone—including Spencer—was in agreement, though no one had put it to words: that if Spencer met with an unfortunate accident testing a ship, it would not bother them much.

The crew saw nothing about him that impressed them much; Hawking saw it all, but respected Spencer’s decision; and Spencer was ready to die—though as of yet no one, not even Hawking, knew why.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Zero - Fyodorim's Child

2008-11-05T07:59:00.000-08:00

Chapter Zero: Fyodorim’s Child

In the thin, inadequate atmosphere of Kiyos, there were no shooting stars.

Sarah Lynne Fyodorim lamented this fact as she sat by her son’s bed, smoothing his warm forehead and looking out the window at the stark sky, impossibly clear in her opinion, after living so many years on a planet with a thick and polluted layer of gases, water vapor, and smog. The stars never twinkled, either—so much for that lullaby, she thought dully—and they were out all the time. There was never a first evening star appearing on which to wish.

She briefly considered actual prayer, but she almost feared what it would bring. The last time she had prayed, almost two years ago, her sister Miriam had showed up at her houseport the very next day. Apart from her own battles with Miriam, Lynne had no desire to subject her husband to the type of high-toned, sanctimonious barrage that Miriam would be bringing with her when she came.

If she came, Lynne reminded herself. As spooky as Miriam’s last visit was, it could have been a fluke. A coincidence, her husband called it.

Yet she knew it wasn’t. Lynne had known before she got down on her knees—by her son’s bedside, just the way she was now—that if she raised one word to the heavens for help, it would come in the form of her overprotective and zealously pious sister.

The boy in the bed stirred. His six-year-old body squirmed between the sheets. He was uncomfortable, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She saw his eyelids part ever so slightly.

“Mommy?”

“Spencer? I’m here.”

“I’m cold.”

Lynne hurried to pull another blanket up, and she tucked it carefully around him as he curled up on his side. There was a little sweat on his forehead, and she wiped at it while whispering to him, urging him back to sleep.

As soon as he was back to sleep, the love and protectiveness took a backseat to the fear again. It wasn’t just fear for his health, either. It was fear of what he was becoming, what was happening to him—fear of why he was lying here in the first place.

Two years ago, when Spencer had just begun school, it had happened for the first time. Spencer had fallen down at play and become unresponsive. The doctor at the school had called it a seizure; Spencer was unconscious, he had developed a high fever, and he hadn’t woken up from it for almost twelve hours. He hadn’t exhibited any symptoms that led them to believe it would recur, but it had been frightening enough as a single event. At the eleventh hour of his coma, Spencer’s shaking, hysterical mother had knelt by his bed and prayed for the first time since their arrival on Kiyos.

Miriam had arrived the next day to take care of her.

Miriam was not there to take care of Spencer, who appeared perfectly healthy the next morning and required no assistance to do anything. He ran about the house, played and shouted, and generally enjoyed an extra day home from school—especially with his father home—and Greg Fyodorim told Spencer that he had taken the day off just to be with his favorite boy, which had been true when he had contacted the mining office.

The next day, however, Greg played absently with Spencer while keeping an eye on his wife—and his sister-in-law.

Miriam was serene and steady, but her manner was incisive and her tone unforgiving as she investigated her nephew’s experience. She asked Lynne a thousand questions, and she went to town to see the school doctor—and Spencer’s instructor—with a thousand more.

Greg had only one question: why had Miriam shown up? Although his wife insisted it was a coincidence, he didn’t really believe it and neither, he was sure, did Lynne.

Miriam’s home on Serpeset was more than a week’s journey and required at least one change of destination—it sometimes took her two weeks to arrive after she announced her intention to “drop in” on them. And yet she didn’t arrive two weeks after Spencer’s seizure. She arrived the very next day. She must have left long before the fact.

But what was even more disturbing was that she had announced herself at the houseport—speaking through the airlock as the taxi uncoupled and skimmed away—as having “come to attend to her nephew,” and not simply to inquire after his health. In order to have known about Spencer’s health, she would have had to be in contact with Lynne or Greg—or the school or the doctor—during transport, which was a rare luxury, even for someone as wealthy as Miriam had become.

Greg was certain that she had somehow known about the whole incident before she arrived, but he never did find out how. He questioned so many people about it that he began to get huffy answers.

“For cryin’ out loud, Greg! What do you think we do—sit around and talk about you behind your back? Who even knew Lynne had a sister?”

“I never heard of your sister-in-law before last week, and I hope I never hear of her again—she’s a little creepy, to tell you the truth.”

“Greg, we’ve been through this already with her; nobody called anybody or did anything except the doc, and that includes Spencer’s instructor, Miss Laudáme.” This was from the director of the school, trying to head off Mr. Fyodorim before he attempted to interrogate Spencer’s already rattled teacher.

But Miss Laudáme did have a story to tell them, and it was one that would affect them all differently.

It would frighten Lynne initially, and then unnerve her every time she recalled it, which was infrequently as she had a tendency to push it from her mind.

It would infuse Greg with remorse and a strange sense of relief—and bring him closer to his son than he might have otherwise been.

It would send Miriam away with a triumphant secret, and cause her to announce before she left that she hoped she would be seeing them again soon.

Miss Laudáme’s story was very similar to the one told Lynne today by Spencer’s new instructor, Mister Guth. Yes, Spencer had smelled a smell in the room that no one else could smell—oranges about to go bad—and, yes, he had passed out.

However, before he had passed out, Spencer had spoken somewhat lucidly for about three minutes—expounding extemporaneously about mankind’s journey to the stars. To his four-year-old classmates, it was gobbledy-gook, but to Miss Laudáme—and then to Mister Guth two years later—it sounded not only coherent but elaborate and philosophical. Miss Laudáme had commented that he might have been quoting a teleplay or an informational lecture he’d heard; she suggested that he had fallen into a hypnotic state or begun reciting from photographic memory. Mister Guth, when pressed by Lynne, admitted that this idea sounded plausible, with one detracting point: “If he was repeating something from memory, I’d like to know where it’s from; I’ve never heard anything like it in my life.”

Both times, Lynne had asked that Spencer’s instructor write down as much as they could remember of the speech, and when Miriam had come to visit the first time, Lynne had presented her with Miss Laudáme’s attempted transcription—the paper folded and unfolded and crumpled from being read and re-read all night as Lynne sat, sleepless by the window of Spencer’s room.

Tonight, as Lynne sat by Spencer’s bedside, she found herself folding and unfolding Mister Guth’s version of the speech. As she knelt resignedly by the bed, she let it fall to the floor, where Miriam would find it the next day.

Greg Fyodorim stood in the dark hall just outside the door in a tempest of indecision. He had never spoken to Lynne about the visions he’d had. He didn’t think she would want to hear about them now—and he certainly didn’t want Miriam finding out. It was the kind of revelation that would surely put them in almost daily contact.

Miriam, he thought with a mixture of weariness and contempt, would seize on this strange ability with religious zeal. He imagined, with a sick stomach, her incredulous joy at discovering father and son shared the ability.

“So you both are granted visions of the future? And you say yours come after periods of deep meditation? Is that like prayer—are you saying they come when you are praying? Do you realize what you are saying? Have you discussed your revelations with your son?”

The real worry was not that Miriam would visit more often; she was not, after all, unpleasant or troublesome. She spent most of her visits chatting with Lynne and praising Spencer, and she frequently had kind words for Greg.

What got his hackles up was her inevitable foray into religious education for his wife and child. Miriam could suddenly steer the conversation from any topic rather abruptly to its religious origins. She wasn’t proselyting for one faith, but rather seemed to be an expert on a thousand different forms of divine interpretation.

Miriam had had no difficulty at all equating Spencer’s seizure with some kind of holy demonstration—an act of God incarnate. How much more clear to her would Greg’s description sound: “Ever since I first went into the mines as a boy, I have practiced staying calm and slowing my breathing, keeping myself prepared for any emergency. Sometimes when I am sitting very still and breathing very slowly, I see things. Then those things happen.” He might as well simply say to her, “I have dreams, and those dreams come true.”

Not for the first time, Greg made the decision not to talk to Lynne or Miriam about it.

But he made himself a different promise: that on Spencer’s twelfth birthday, when he was of legal age to begin working the mines, Greg would talk to him about the visions.

He hoped that by then these seizures would be dim memories.

Levi's Rock - Prologue - The Man and the Monster

2008-11-03T07:43:00.000-08:00

Prologue: The Man and the Monster

Premonitions are tricky things.

Recently released prisoner 8083426—what was left of the man who had once gone by the name Duwan Metrona—was having a very clear impression of what he should do. He felt that he should walk across the room and pick a fight with the tall man half-dozing in his seat. He felt that he should wait for the man to hit him a few times and then kill him swiftly. What is more, he felt that he could do it.

Time was on his side. For one thing, the off-world transport was delayed. There were already vendors from rival transport companies courting passengers in this terminal with vouchers for their own travel lines. In addition, a Pathways officer was leading a dog through the terminal carefully; even if the flight should finish its preparations, 8083426 felt certain that there would be another mysterious delay.

Metrona had nothing to fear from the officer. This ex-felon was carrying no weapons, no drugs, no bag at all—just some folded papers in his pocket that designated him a priority passenger with a one-way ticket to a distant rock out in space: his chosen home for however long he could hold out before making another mistake that would send him on the run again, or back to prison.

The tall man, with eyes closed and breathing slowly through his nose so that he almost appeared to be meditating, was an imposing figure. 8083426 noted the special boots, the blue color of his workshirt, the way his hair was matted down—and then looked under the chair to the dirty duffel bag, where he spotted the identification tag. It was red and had a disk attached to it of the kind distributed to mine workers; it was a sniffer for certain gases and a radiation level indicator.

A miner, he thought. Great.

He thought about the blows that a miner might dish out; he wasn’t sure he’d withstand more than a few before—

He gasped and clutched his face and forehead as the pain exploded between his eyes. Very like a migraine, forcing him into a penitent posture in his own seat, the mental image of him grappling with the miner asserted itself again. He gripped his head and squeezed his eyes shut, the ringing sound that always accompanied these visions now trailing off like a train in the distance.

He raised his head a little and peeked out between slitted eyelids. The miner was still asleep.
He stood up slowly and began walking over to meet him.

Gregor Fyodorim was not asleep. He could not sleep anywhere that was so brightly lit or widely open; he needed a cramped room and heavy darkness. For the last few nights, while he waited for his off-world paperwork to go through, he had slept under the bed in his hotel room, the blankets pulled down to block out the lights from the window. The phrase “city that never sleeps” no longer held any attraction to him.

Years working in mines had taught him the value of meditation—especially when the dangers of the profession reared their ugly heads—and he had spent many hours sitting in collapsed tunnels, slowing his breathing, concentrating on happy memories or math problems or even projects he would never have time to complete, all the while trying not to expend energy or air panicking or hoping for rescue.

He had been rescued a few times; other times, he had decided he could wait no longer, and he made the risky decision to claw his own way out. Risky because he could have forced another cave-in; risky because he could have used up his last oxygen over-exerting himself or hyperventilating; risky because he didn’t always know whether the tunnel he was digging into was just another sealed off section, a slightly larger tomb in which to die.

The meditation was not helping much in this situation. He was trying to keep from panicking, but fear gripped his heart. It was a fear for which there is no remedy, a fear every man must face—and face alone. The ring was in his pocket. What if Delynne had changed her mind?

He almost fell into rehearsing the proposal again, but he changed his focus, forcing her image from his mind, determined not to spend the next six hours—or more, he grimaced—dreading what might be the happiest moment of his life. He thought instead about the man in the prison-issue clothing sitting across from him.

Greg hadn’t had his eyes open in almost an hour, but he was sure the man was still there. He couldn’t have said why he was so sure, but he was certain nonetheless. The terminal was crowded, there were passengers, attendants, security personnel, vendors, even a couple of actual officers wandering about—and yet, Greg had a clear picture in his mind of this man, this ex-prisoner on his way to who-knows-where, and he was sitting across from Greg and staring at him.

He wouldn’t sit there for long, though. Just a few minutes ago, Greg had been trying to slow his breathing and the premonition came over him like a bucket of ice water: Greg saw himself ripping the guy’s head clean off his shoulders.

He would have been embarrassed to tell anyone about this. Even his crew would have been shocked to hear him describe it. He could see the whole fight playing out in his mind, starting with some petty provocation on the ex-con’s part and ending with Greg flying into a rage and twisting the poor guy’s head around.

He took a long, slow breath. He opened his eyes. Then he stared in disbelief.

The guy was gone. There was no one in the whole row of seats across from him. He sighed with visible relief—

A smack on the back of his head and a voice in his ear sent a trickle of cold water down his spine. “I’m right here, genius,” the voice hissed, and Greg turned quickly to find the prisoner sitting in the row of chairs behind him.

Greg got up out of the seat and turned to face this dead man walking. What he saw should not have made him feel threatened. The ex-prisoner was a scrawny man, shorter than average—which made him puny next to Greg—carrying no bag and apparently hiding no weapon, for his shirt and jacket were both open, and wearing boots so old that Greg could only come to the conclusion that they had belonged to the man before his stint in prison and now they had been returned to him.

Just below his collar bone was the number designating this guy prisoner number 8083426, and Greg repeated this number to himself reflexively, perhaps meaning to file a report with Pathways. The irony of this thought would give him a chuckle later.

For his part, 8083426 just lounged in his chair as though waiting for something.

“What’s the matter, caveman, scared?”

Greg snorted, the idea both ridiculous and too true to be anything but funny. “I’m only scared of one thing,” he confessed, “and that’s me ripping your head off. Who are you, anyway?”

The little man in the prison-issue clothing traded the smirk for a scowl. Greg waited, but no introduction was forthcoming. So much for talking his way out of it.

“Not much for conversation?” Greg pressed.

“I’m not much for girls like you becoming miners when you’d be more useful servicing real men, if you know what I mean,” the ex-con chuckled, and finished with a gesture that shocked an older couple sitting nearby.

Greg shook his head, grabbed his bag, and turned to sit somewhere else. Behind him, 8083426 vaulted the row of seats and stepped up behind him.

It looked like he was not going to be able to get Greg to fight him, and he could feel the migraine starting, so it was more than just serendipitous that at that moment the Pathways officer guiding the dog through the terminal stopped right in front of an apparently newly-wed couple returning from a vacation. The wife managed to look thoroughly confused; the husband panicked and took off running, and suddenly there was shouting and barking ringing through the terminal.

8083426 took advantage of the distraction, tapped on Greg’s shoulder, and took a swing at the miner’s jaw.

Greg had been hit before—many times—and usually while drinking, so he knew what it felt like to be hit when your guard was down. He shook it off well, but he lost his cool; in less than a minute, he went from ‘completely in control’ to ‘runaway train.’ What he didn’t realize until too late was that, after that initial punch, the ex-con didn’t make a move to defend himself or to strike a second time.

Greg, on the other hand, rang the guy’s bell with the first punch—an eye-mashing blow from the right—and then followed up with a left to the jaw that should have knocked the guy out cold. He did fall down, apparently out for the count, and Greg turned back to his bag, nursing his own jaw a little.

A security officer was approaching—the only one not trying to assist in the arrest of the drug-smuggling couple—and Greg raised his hands, ready to explain the whole thing—

With no warning, Greg was suddenly staggering under the weight of his opponent—who had jumped on his back and was now trying to get a hammerlock around Greg’s neck. The two men careened one way and then another—then as they neared the security officer, 8083426 swung one foot out, connecting neatly with the officer’s throat, and as the officer choked and blacked out, Greg gave up hoping for outside help.

He used his vice-like grip to extricate himself from the headlock. In another moment, Greg had the man up in the air and pitched him into an empty row of seats—landing him approximately where he had been when Greg first laid eyes on him. Then Greg started to go to the security officer’s aid, but decided to keep an eye on his dancing partner instead.

Although he shouldn’t have gotten up—again—it was no surprise to Greg this time when he did. Launching himself at Greg’s midsection, 8083426 managed to knock the wind out of Greg, but in a moment Greg had turned him, clamped an arm around his neck, and begun tightening the hold.

Greg was waiting for his friend to pass out—or for the decidedly lax security to return and zap them both—but at about the same time that he realized the strangle-hold wasn’t working, he was assaulted by the vision he’d had earlier. He realized that if he applied just a little pressure it would look like an accident; he could say he was just defending himself, and he would have plenty of witnesses to the repeated attacks. He couldn’t seem to get the guy to pass out, he couldn’t understand it, and if he just leaned forward on the guy a little he would probably snap his neck.

He looked around at the bewildered crowd, most of whom had probably never witnessed the type of drunken brawls where Greg had learned to fight guys like this. What would they say later? Probably something like, “He was a madman, officer! He just wouldn’t stop!” But would they be talking about 8083426 or Gregor Fyodorim?

He made his decision quickly, and hoped he would not regret it later.