“We have an operative on the ground,” Falkirk said. “He has a small window to make contact with us. Then we’ll be on our way.”
He had rehearsed the line many times, and still it came out hollow. The Mournfuls had pushed the hardest for peace. They stood to gain the most from it. For the first time since implementing this plan, Falkirk needed to embellish.
“Tranquility went to great lengths to put this operative in place,” he said. “They regard his intelligence as essential. As you can see by our new heading.”
Each of the officers glanced at Ruiz, and Falkirk knew then that they had discussed it among themselves already. The tightened muscles in their jaws gave it away. At some point earlier that day, they must have devised a plan to confront him. When he reached for Ruiz’s glass, the lieutenant commander covered it with his hand. “I’m okay.”
Falkirk had considered offering a toast to the end of the conflict with the wolves. No one seemed interested, so he allowed them to sip their whiskey in peace.
“I don’t always agree with the orders we get,” Falkirk said. “But, like it or not, Tranquility sees a bigger picture than we do. And this ship is a tool for them. Do you have something specific to raise, Lieutenant Commander?”
Ruiz twirled the glass on the table with his fingertips. Falkirk had called his bluff. He invited criticism, but knew that the first officer could not give voice to it.
“Sir, if I may,” O’Neill said. “We’ve been working to improve some of the long-range radars. If we fly at a slightly higher altitude, we can use them to scan a wider area without going too deep into Mournful territory. That way we can get to the Mudfoot more quickly.”
“Thank you, but no,” Falkirk said. “Tranquility wants the Mournfuls to see the ship. A reminder of the deal they struck with us.”
“There’s something else to consider,” she said. “Three of our crew members failed to report for duty when we disembarked. All of them canine.”
“I read the report,” Falkirk said. “There will be more deserters before this fever breaks. That’s why what we do in the next few days is so crucial.”
Go ahead, say it, Falkirk thought. Say you don’t trust me. He glanced at Bulan and Unoka. The orangutan busied herself with her food. Unoka lowered his eyes. O’Neill and Ruiz must have tried to bully them into confronting the captain. If there was a plan, they were not on board. Not yet, anyway.
“Sir,” Ruiz said, rubbing his chin, “I want to take full responsibility for what I’m about to suggest. The other officers don’t know about it.”
“Go ahead.”
“We have a full complement of marines on board. I’d like to extend their shifts. Put three of them in engineering. Three more on the bridge.”
“The bridge?”
“We have six dogs on board—”
“Plus me,” Falkirk said.
“I’m not counting you, sir, you know that. But we have six.”
Falkirk waited for him to finish his point.
“After what happened at Cadejo,” he stammered, “and after the attacks in Hosanna, I think it’s for the best.” Ruiz looked around the room as if asking for support. Only O’Neill met his gaze.
“And the course correction prompted this?” Falkirk said.
“Many things prompted it.”
The questions would continue to mount in the coming hours. Falkirk knew that. He needed to give Ruiz something, if only to buy some time.
“I don’t mean to offend, sir,” Ruiz added. “I know we’re supposed to be past this. I know what it says in the Hosanna Charter about all the species coming together. No one above the other. I still believe it. But we’re on our own out here. And people have tried to take this ship from us before—”
“You’re right,” Falkirk said. “You have a responsibility to the crew. I understand.”
Ruiz exhaled.
“A team in engineering, and a team at the armory,” Falkirk said. “But not on the bridge. People are already on edge. We don’t need to shove them over.”
Ruiz nodded. O’Neill’s shoulders went slack.
Bulan rapped her knuckles on the table. “Can we move on to dessert now?”
“Yes, for Christ’s sake!” Unoka said.
The tension drained from the room. Falkirk pressed a button on the table that summoned the chef. For a few blissful minutes, the banter returned. Bulan made fun of the beads of sweat on Ruiz’s lip. The first officer wiped it away. Falkirk sat and listened, chuckling mechanically at the right moments.
He would miss these people. They deserved better from him.
In the dead of night, Falkirk curled on the deck beside his bed. After years of sleeping on the floor of a pen, he could never get comfortable on a mattress. The ship’s engines purred through the deck plates, though at a different pitch with one of the turbines missing. A dull nightlight glowed in the corner, shielded by a stack of books Falkirk had moved while rummaging through his things. Beside him, the few items that he would bring with him for his journey lay in a neat row: a hunting knife taken from the armory, a poncho that could double as a tent, a sidearm, and a belt. All of it would have to fit inside of his uniform. He figured the gun would not arouse suspicion, given that Ruiz asked for more armed guards on the bridge. If the first officer asked, Falkirk would say, “This is what you wanted, remember?”
In the morning, he would steal some protein rations from the mess hall. As he pondered how many he could reasonably take, he realized that he had nothing sentimental to carry with him. No good luck charms or jewelry. He was truly his mother’s son. In their days at the shelter, surrounded by snow in every direction, she whittled him down until he became as sharp and true as an arrowhead. It kept him alive and focused, and left little room for anything else. She would have been proud.
Though he needed sleep, Falkirk dragged himself to his desk. One more chore to complete. From the top drawer, he removed a folder, now worn and creased from weeks of flipping through it. Inside were all the printouts relating to the al-Rihla. Maps, reports, itineraries, manifests. One by one, he tore them into pieces and dumped the bits of paper into the waste bin.
The last set of documents consisted of Captain Vittal’s reports to Hosanna. He skimmed to the last page, where the final message cut off and the al-Rihla vanished. With an icy professionalism, Vittal described her situation. “Adrift,” she wrote. “Engine room flooded. Propulsion and navigation disabled.” She gave her last known coordinates after sighting an Alpha. And then, a list of the missing, by name, species, rank, and assignment. Eleven people. The eighth person was listed as D’Arc: canine, midshipman, zoology. At the end of the line, a pair of parentheses housed a single word: pregnant.
It was the reason why he was doing all this, and he still could hardly believe it. Life—a future—had taken root in this barren soil.
He couldn’t tell Mort(e). There was no telling how the cat would react. How could a choker like him understand any of this? Mort(e) had no memories of children being born, growing, spiraling away from their families, and becoming little galaxies unto themselves. Falkirk’s first pups, Amelia and Yeager, would have been almost old enough to enlist in Tranquility, had they survived. They should have been here, helping to protect this fragile peace. They would have been so much more patient than Falkirk and the others of his generation. They would have listened to the people who wanted to defect to the wolves, rather than writing them off. They would have shown all those lost souls a different path. A way to hope again.
Falkirk’s walkie-talkie beeped, startling him. “Captain, this is the bridge,” Ruiz said, sounding tired yet determined at the end of his shift.
Falkirk unrolled the jacket to retrieve the device. “Captain here. Go ahead.”
“Sir, you told us to inform you when we crossed the border.”
“Thank you. Do we still have contact with Tr
anquility?”
“No. The signal cut out about an hour ago. As we expected.”
The communications range had expanded in the last few months, with more wolf packs allowing the Sanctuary Union to build radio towers. But they had flown far beyond the last one, and now the Vesuvius was on its own.
“Sir.”
“Yes, Ruiz.”
“I’m calling you from your office. I didn’t want anyone to hear.”
Falkirk knew what was coming. “Go ahead.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with this mission?”
“We’ve been over this, Lieutenant. You know what I know.”
“I’m just saying . . . you could tell me. If you needed to.”
Falkirk lowered his head. Through all of this, no one had offered to simply help him, or even to listen to him. The man whom he would betray now extended his hand, perhaps the most hopeful thing between their two species since the uprising began. Falkirk could do nothing with it.
“Ruiz, I can promise you that this will be resolved tomorrow,” Falkirk said. “All of it. And then we’ll be on our way. You have my word.”
Silence on the other end. “We’ll arrive at our destination at 0730,” Ruiz said coldly.
“Good. Thank you.”
“Bridge out.” The device beeped and went dead.
The piece of paper had crumpled in Falkirk’s fist. He hardly noticed. Falkirk tore it apart and dropped the debris into the trash. He curled into a ball and listened to the engines, the heartbeat of the ship that he would never hear again.
The double doors slid open, releasing a whoosh of cool air.
“Captain on the bridge,” Harris called out.
Falkirk stepped through the threshold and immediately took stock of the room. O’Neill tapped on her keyboard. Bulan pinched the mouthpiece on her headset. Unoka steered the ship southwest, away from the sunrise and into a rapidly brightening horizon. Parish pointed at Warner’s screen and whispered something. Ruiz approached from the captain’s chair, holding a tablet with the latest commands and other reports.
Everything was in order except for one thing: Falkirk’s pistol hung from his belt, tilting it at a slight angle and pressing against his thigh. It caught Ruiz’s attention right away. The lieutenant commander slowed his gait and glanced at O’Neill, who acknowledged him with a light flick of her chin. Yes, take a good look, Falkirk thought.
“Five minutes until we reach the coordinates, sir,” Ruiz said.
Falkirk took the tablet from him. “Any activity on the ground?”
“Minimal. Another pack moved toward the border during the night.”
Falkirk tapped the screen and scrolled through a series of timestamped maps of the area, displayed in silvery night vision. Red arrows indicated the Mournful packs moving to the south, toward the edge of their territory. Circles showed suspected Mudfoot marauders—though at this point, Tranquility regarded any refugees, deserters, and merchants straying into the valley as potential insurgents. Falkirk placed his fingers on the screen and expanded one of the circles. Instead of showing him something useful, the screen metastasized into a pixelated jumble.
He turned to Bulan. “Any contact with the Mournfuls?”
She covered her mouthpiece. “No, sir.”
The room brightened as the sun emerged from a cloud bank. On the ground, the dormant trees cast long shadows on the snowy forest floor.
“The operative has one hour, thirty minutes to make contact,” Falkirk said.
“Hour, twenty-six,” Ruiz corrected.
“Do you already have a course plotted for the Mudfoot territory?”
“Of course,” Ruiz said with a smile, his first in some time.
A red light blinked over the operations panel, where Ensign Warner sat. Falkirk tried not to react.
“Sir,” Warner called out, “we have a fire alarm on deck one.”
It was beginning. His plan, his stupid, foolish plan that would mean the end of the life he had built from nothing. All the instincts he tried to hide while serving as captain suddenly revealed themselves. His tail jumped. His tongue forced its way out of its mouth, grasping for cooler air. His senses heightened. He could still turn away.
“Have you alerted any crew in the area?” Falkirk asked.
Warner pressed his earpiece with his finger. “Yes, but . . . they’re saying they detected some smoke. No fire.”
Ruiz tensed next to him. More heads turned to Warner’s post.
“Patch the crew in,” Falkirk said. Warner pressed a few buttons on his console, then pointed to him. “This is the captain,” Falkirk said. “What are you seeing down there?”
Someone yelled in the background, while another crew member spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Some kind of malfunction in the torpedo room,” a woman’s voice said. “Might be in the wiring.”
Falkirk nodded to Ruiz. He needed to really sell this next part, to throw off any suspicion. “You ordered an inspection the other day, right?”
“Yes, sir. All that circuitry is supposed to be switched off until we can get a full refit.”
Falkirk pretended to be annoyed at his answer. “I’m going down there. You keep the bridge. If it’s a short circuit, this won’t take long.”
“Wait, sir,” Ruiz said. He pursed his lips to keep them from quivering. “Are you sure? I could do it.”
“My first assignment was in the lower decks,” Falkirk said. “Let me do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Falkirk headed for the door. “Bulan, if we hear from this operative, patch him directly to my com.”
“Aye, sir.”
The doors whooshed open. Falkirk winced when they closed behind him with a gentle kshh. He realized that he did not do what he had planned to do since this began: take one last look at the bridge, his bridge, his greatest accomplishment. It was too late now.
He took a flight of stairs to the bottom deck, where the engines vibrated through the floor. There, he passed a pair of marines in the corridor, rifles strapped to their shoulders. Both were humans, with freshly shaved scalps that reflected the track lighting overhead. They straightened when they saw him. At the end of the bulkhead, another pair of guards waited. Two more humans with guns to make him more nervous. Just beyond them stood the door to the torpedo room.
The two marines stepped away from the wall and blocked Falkirk’s path. One of them, a boy of nineteen, scrunched his nose and mouth, as if flexing a muscle he could not hold. Behind Falkirk, the two other marines closed the gap.
“Captain!” Ruiz shouted from the other end of the corridor.
“What’s going on?” Falkirk said. But he already knew. It made sense that Ruiz would do it here, in a confined space, away from the senior staff. Falkirk was almost proud of his first officer.
Ruiz arrived at the phalanx of guards, out of breath. “I’m placing you under arrest. As of this moment, I am taking command of this ship.”
One of the braver marines reached out and gripped his arm. Falkirk wrenched it free in one quick movement.
“That fire alarm was your signal, wasn’t it?” Ruiz said. “Once you decided to respond to it, you left me no choice.”
Falkirk snorted. “Think about what you’re doing here, Ruiz. What are you going to say at your court martial? That you arrested me while I was doing my job?”
“I’m going to tell them that there were no orders to go to Mournful territory. You made it all up.”
Ruiz had been monitoring him this entire time, ever since he first set foot on the Vesuvius. Not because he wanted to, but because he had lived through the war, like all these other humans, and could never let go of it. Falkirk pictured this man rummaging through his things, tracking his keystrokes on a computer. Collecting data. All to make sure that this animal, this thing that had once been a pet, cou
ld be trusted.
In the second it took Falkirk to glance at his sidearm, a gloved hand swiped it from its holster.
“I gave you the chance to talk to me,” Ruiz said, his voice breaking. He turned to the marines. “Put him in the brig. Keep him away from the others.”
The men tried to frog-march Falkirk along the corridor, but he held his ground. “What others?”
“Bulan and Unoka,” Ruiz said. “And the six dogs.”
“Ruiz, listen to me—”
“No,” Ruiz snapped. “Take him.”
As the marines pushed and pulled him, Falkirk glanced at the torpedo room door. So close. An escape hatch. He could have simply dropped out of the ship with a parachute and no one would have realized. His backpack waited for him there, hidden beneath a loose deck plate. Someone might find it long after his court martial.
The phalanx of humans marched him past the room, and he felt his entire life dropping away into an abyss. His sight went hazy, as it often did out in the snow. He imagined everything covered in white, in every direction, the way the world looked on the day he changed. And he could hear his mother’s voice, carried in the wind. The white takes you, she had said, the last words she ever spoke to him. He thought he could run from it, but the blankness of it all had no end.
Ruiz’s walkie-talkie clicked on. “Bridge to the captain, come in!”
“Captain speaking. Go ahead.”
The panicky voice from the bridge said something that Falkirk could not make out. Ruiz’s face dropped. The man pressed the walkie-talkie close to his mouth.
“Can you shut it down?” Ruiz asked.
Falkirk did not hear the answer, as the marines shoved him forward with a grunt.
“Wait!” Ruiz called. He ran toward Falkirk. The marines waited for him. “What did you do?” he said.
“Nothing,” Falkirk replied.
Ruiz drew his pistol but kept it pointed at the deck. “One of the torpedoes just armed itself. And the hatch is sealed. Now you better tell me what the fuck is going on.”
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