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.