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.”
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The Crew of the Jealous Mistress: Part One: Meet the Crew
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Dark Glass - Chapter One - A Wayward Child
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Levi's Rock - Chapter Four - For Talented Pilots - Part Two
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.”
“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.”
Monday, December 1, 2008
Levi's Rock - Chapter Four - For Talented Pilots - Part One
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.”
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.”
Friday, November 28, 2008
Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part Three
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.”
“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.”
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part Two
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.
“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.
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