The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  “No,” Roger said, staring at her.

  She nodded. “It wasn’t on that occasion. Just a few weeks earlier, he stepped in front of a bullet for me. He saved my life. He was…” she paused as she realized the truth of what she was about to say. “He was my best friend.”

  “He was a good man?” Roger asked. There were tears in his eyes.

  She nodded again, this time slowly and resolutely. “One of the best I’ve known.”

  “My mother,” he muttered, “she was angry at him. She said that he was a coward. That he left Earth instead of facing up to his decision to leave us.”

  Don Templeton had shared with Staples the self-realization about his sexuality that had brought his marriage to an end, but he had been vague about the details. “I can’t comment on that, Roger. All I can tell you is that the man I knew was brave and good. He loved you very much. He had pictures… I sent them to you.”

  “We got them. We spread his ashes in the Gulf of Mexico. He always liked it there. Are you sure I can’t come with you?”

  “Yes, Roger.” She looked him levelly in the eye. “Please go home and live a good and safe life. Sometimes I think I might actually be able to live without Don in my life. I know I couldn’t live with myself if his son got hurt on my watch.”

  He sighed, and Staples thought she saw relief in his face. She surmised that a sense of honor had brought this young man to the moon on a quest to learn about his father, and perhaps that honor might demand more of him, but what he needed was to go home, to mourn, and to move on with his life. “Will you do something for me?” he asked.

  “I can try,” she offered.

  “Can you kill the man who killed my father?”

  Staples was stunned for a moment. She should have seen it coming; it was such a trope. She wondered if he were asking her because it was a trope, because it was expected of him.

  “I’m sorry, Roger, I don’t kill people,” Staples replied. Yet, her mind said, and then Victor’s not a person. “But I can promise you that I will do everything I can to bring him to justice. And if I can tell you all about this one day, I promise you that I will.”

  He looked at her with a pained expression. He clearly wanted more from her.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s all I can give you.” She bent to pick up her bags, then walked past him. He watched her disappear down the tubeway and into her ship.

  Chapter 6

  As Gringolet finished deceleration towards Mars, weightlessness took over, and Bethany brought them around to face the red planet. This was the time that the crew usually readjusted their rooms in preparation for landing. It had been a four-day journey from Luna, and they were scheduled to make delivery of their cargo on Tranquility the following day.

  From her captain’s seat in the cockpit, Staples watched the dimly-lit Phobos move in its swift orbit. The last time they had come this way, she reflected, there had been three Nightshade vessels on an intercept course bent on their destruction. A small armada of Martian militia ships from an apparently secret base on Phobos had answered that threat. Though the newly-revealed Martian navy had saved their lives that day, they had done so purely to obtain information that Brutus had promised them. Once they had it, they had released it to the entire system, which had discredited a major Earth nation and changed humanity’s view of the galaxy forever.

  A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed Staples as once again she saw the telltale glint of sunlight on metal. A familiar ship was rounding Phobos and headed right for them. There was only one, but it was the Pride of Ares, and that was enough to make her palms start sweating. She had seen the vessel before, but that was after the shock of Amit’s attack and Templeton’s death, and she hadn’t really given it much attention. Now she had a moment to admire its contours, and there was no denying that it was impressive.

  The Pride of Ares was perhaps twice the size of Gringolet. Staples’ ship was a commuter vessel first, and though it was more than capable of defending itself, it was not specifically built for combat. The ship before her was quite obviously made for war. It presented a much longer but slimmer profile than Gringolet. If her ship was a cone, then the Pride of Ares was an oblong cylinder. Row after row of flak guns lined her sides, and there were eight missile ports visible just in the nose. The engines dominated the back quarter of the vessel, and they looked capable of pushing the hundreds of tons of warship at considerable thrust. Staples thought that the Martian Navy, still derisively called separatists by many, must have hollowed out half the moon to build a ship of her size in secret.

  She couldn’t help but feel intimidated, though she was not particularly surprised at their greeting. If she were honest with herself, she hadn’t really expected to avoid this confrontation, but she had hoped to nonetheless.

  “Coms request from the Pride of Ares,” Evelyn said. “It’s Bao.”

  Both Evelyn and Charis looked at Staples expectantly, but Bethany kept a wary eye on the other ship.

  “Don’t make any adjustments, Bethany,” Staples cautioned her. “I don’t want them thinking we’re trying to run.” Her eyes flicked to Evelyn. “Okay, on my surface.”

  Staples disengaged the surface from its dock in the arm of her chair, and a second later Bao’s hard features and perfectly trimmed crewcut appeared. Behind him she could see the bridge of the Pride of Ares where a dozen or so officers in drab olive were hard at work at various stations. Staples didn’t know at what point a group of well-organized separatists could be called a navy, but she thought that they had made the transition rather effectively.

  “Admiral Bao of the Martian Navy Vessel Pride of Ares,” he stated.

  “I remember who you are,” Staples replied informally. She held the surface in her lap so that she could look down at it. “You weren’t calling yourself ‘admiral’ the last time we met.”

  The man offered a thin-lipped smile. “Our coming out party went rather well.”

  “Well bonny for you,” she said half-heartedly. She glanced up at the other ship through the window. They were slowing to match Gringolet’s speed, which was near zero relative to Mars. “What can I do for you?”

  “You have something of mine, Captain Staples. I want it back.” Though his face remained impassive, there was no mistaking the menace in his voice.

  “I don’t have a thing of yours,” Staples replied.

  “You’re going to make me say it?” he asked rhetorically. “Fine. I want Amit Sadana back. I know you kidnapped him.”

  “You said something. The last I checked, people were not things, Admiral Bao, and you cannot own them.” Staples did her best to play the part of a noble hero overcome with righteous indignation, but she was well aware of the warship bristling with armaments that was slowly approaching her vessel. She suddenly felt like an amateur sleuth who stumbles into the operation of an elite intelligence agency. She was out of her league, and both she and Bao knew it.

  “Don’t play semantic word games with me, Captain,” Bao warned humorlessly. “I’ll call that terrorist anything I want. You handed him over to us. Why did you turn around and take him?”

  Staples considered denying that they had Sadana, but she didn’t think she could dissemble that well, and there seemed little point. Bao might have been bluffing, but she didn’t think so. He knew she had Sadana.

  She sighed. “I need him.”

  “You might have asked,” he countered.

  She shrugged. “You might have said no. If I asked and you said no, then-”

  “I would have known you wanted him and moved him,” he interrupted her. “I get it. Still doesn’t make it right. You and I should be friends.”

  “Are we not?” Staples asked. The question seemed silly to her, but it was worth a shot.

  Bao frowned. “We were. We could be again. Maybe I should say that we’re not exactly enemies. Yet.”

  “Meaning…?” she asked.

  “Meaning I know you can’t land in North America without being arrested immediat
ely. You probably can’t land anywhere on Earth without at least risking arrest. If you make an enemy of the Martian Navy, you might find your crew running out of populated planets to visit.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “I can’t imagine Charis or John would feel good about Gwen never getting a chance to get off ship.” Out of the corner of her eye Staples saw Charis stiffen at the sound of her daughter’s name. “And what about Bethany Miller? Mars has been known to extradite wanted criminals to Earth in certain circumstances or as a special favor.”

  He was trying to get a rise out of her, and Staples had to work to master her emotions. She more or less succeeded and said, “I get it. You don’t have to threaten my crew.”

  “We’re the good guys, Captain Staples,” Bao said, and Staples could see that he believed it.

  “Honestly, I was planning to give him back,” Staples said, tiring of their fencing.

  “I’m sensing a ‘but’ coming,” he replied.

  “But you were torturing him and holding him without due process. That’s not in the good-guy book that I read.” She realized how lame that sounded only after she said it.

  Bao shrugged. “Terrorists are enemies of the state. There are a dozen clauses that let the Martian government treat him any way we like.”

  “Why do you keep calling him a terrorist?” she asked.

  “He orchestrated two attacks on civilians in public places. First an attack in a restaurant on Titan Prime, then on the streets of Las Vegas. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that he also killed a member of your crew. To make matters worse, he will only tell us that God told him to do it. What would you call him?”

  A pawn, Staples wanted to say, but that would risk giving away too much. If Bao suspected that she and her crew knew who had manipulated Sadana, they too might find themselves in rocky cells hidden in the back streets of Mars. Instead she said, “A human being.”

  “You have a loose definition,” he replied dismissively.

  Staples laughed aloud as she thought of the sentient program occupying her ship’s computer core and no doubt monitoring her conversation. “I can’t argue with you there.” She composed herself. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you were torturing another human being. If I hand him over to you, that makes me complicit.”

  “Ah, a moral quandary,” he said, his tone indicating that moral quandaries weren’t particularly interesting to him. “What do you need him for?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” she replied immediately.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly.

  “You know I could take him. I could take your ship.” He said it conversationally, as if he had said I could take that candy from that baby.

  “In orbit around Mars? Attack and board the ship that you just saved from the rogue warships a month ago? Someone’s got to be watching us up here. Are you sure you want that kind of press? People might start thinking that you’re not the good guys.”

  That seemed to make Bao hesitate, but only for a second. “In the interest of our… continued friendship,” he said, managing to sound magnanimous, “I’ll grant you two days with him. Do what you need to get done, then hand him over. If you attempt to leave Mars with him before then, we’re going to have problems. If you kill him, we’re going to have even bigger problems. But if you hand him over, I think we can forget that this ever happened. I’ll even promise that no harm will come to him.”

  His last sentence was an overt and transparent lie designed to let Staples feel better about delivering Sadana back into the hands of his former torturers. If Staples had been a less morally consistent person, it might have been enough to let her lie to herself. She wasn’t.

  “Two days,” she said, and cut coms. She didn’t know how exactly to solve the problem of their prisoner in just two days, but she hoped at least that it was enough time to get what they needed out of him.

  Staples ran into Overton on her way down towards their prisoner.

  “Hey,” he said. “Heard about Bao. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Christ, this is a small ship,” she muttered. She spent a minute relaying the highlights of her conversation with Bao to him.

  “So what’s the problem?” Overton asked.

  “The problem is we can’t give him up yet.”

  “Because Brutus says we need him to find Victor,” Overton said.

  She shrugged. “That’s what he says.”

  “So get the information and be done with it,” Overton said as if it had not yet occurred to her.

  She sighed with frustration at his simple approaches to the complex problems that faced them. “We’re working on it, as you know. This job should give us just enough to buy a new automaton body for Brutus, which he needs, especially if he’s going to work on that surface from AR-559.”

  “Fair enough,” he nodded. “Brutus doesn’t want the surface tied into the computer core of the ship, I get that. What about after we get what we need from Sadana?”

  Staples stared at him for a moment as they floated in the grey hallway. “They were torturing him, Carl.”

  “Yeah, I caught that part. Not sure why that’s our problem.”

  “Are you comfortable handing a man over to be tortured?” she asked, more curious than accusatory.

  “Not especially, but we’re not handing him over for that purpose. We’re just handing him over. What Bao does to him is between him, the law, and his conscience, assuming he has one.” He scratched his spikey hair absently. “Look at it this way. You apprehend a criminal. You turn him over to the police. If they mistreat him, that’s not your fault.”

  She shook her head as he spoke. “Imperfect analogy. What if you know the police will mistreat him?”

  “There are systems in place for that,” he replied. “And ways to engage them. Call the damned ACLU or something. I’m not convinced there’s some higher moral obligation to defy the law in this case. Especially when the person you’re fighting to save killed the man who used to have my job.”

  Staples winced. “It’s Sophocles all over again. Laws of man or moral law.”

  Overton smiled without humor. “Did Templeton get your literary references?”

  She shook her head again. “Not too much.”

  “Well, glad I’m not falling short on that front. I know the guy was kind of your moral compass, and I’m not sure I can be that, but I’ve got a talent for practicality. So let’s break it down: what happens if we hand Sadana over to Bao?”

  “He gets tortured for information.”

  “Maybe,” Overton added. “Okay, what happens if we don’t hand him over?”

  She pursed her lips for a moment, not wanting to admit it. “Bao takes the ship, takes Sadana, and he gets tortured for information. Probably. And I get to sleep at night.”

  “So is this about making an actual difference in the universe, or is it just about assuaging your conscience?”

  Staples groaned. “Don had an annoying habit of pointing out my potential misjudgments too.”

  Overton gave her a quizzical look. “I thought that was the job.”

  Anyone else but Kojo Jang might have looked silly belted to a grip bar in the hallway outside Amit Sadana’s room-made-cell, but Jang appeared both relaxed and intimidating. The sidearm clipped to his belt didn’t hurt the impression.

  “Captain,” he greeted her as she pushed her way down the corridor.

  “Mr. Jang,” she replied in kind, keeping her address formal. “I appreciate you being out here. I know it can’t be fun. Everyone else is flipping their rooms right now.” She stopped herself with a bar across the hallway from him.

  “It is part of the job, Captain” he said resolutely. “These rooms are not meant to hold people in for long periods of time. The man is unquestionably a danger and thus must be guarded.”

  “I don’t think he’s planning on going anywhere, but I still need you out here. As much to protect him as to guard him, I think.”
>
  “Do you really think a member of this crew would come after him?” Jang asked gravely.

  “No, I don’t think so, but I don’t want a repeat of what happened with Quinn and Parsells.”

  He looked at her in confusion. “Why would there be? Piotr Kondratyev is dead.”

  She cursed herself silently. She had had so much on her mind that she hadn’t been watching her words. “Yes, no, of course he is. He’s dead.” She struggled not to stammer more as she met his eyes.

  He regarded her silently for several moments, and she willed herself to do something, to say something that would distract him, but she could think of nothing that didn’t make her look even more suspicious.

  “You know, Captain,” he said speculatively, “I never quite understood why Mr. Kondratyev would try to kill Quinn and Parsells. Everyone was so angry with him at the time that they accepted his confession as a matter of course, but it has come to bother me since. I cannot think of any motive he might have had.” He continued to gaze at her intently.

  “Kojo…” she said, but she found that she had nothing to add.

  “It wasn’t him,” Jang said finally, not with a sense of revelation but with certainty. “Which means he covered for someone. Not Yegor Durin; the man was already dead. Durin was his only friend, so he was not covering for someone voluntarily. You or Mr. Templeton must have put him up to it. I remember,” he pointed a finger at her. “You prompted his confession.”

  Staples watched her security chief work backwards through the clues. It was like watching a cascade of dominoes that she was powerless to interrupt, and it was only a matter of time before the last one fell.

  “Did you try to kill them?” he asked rhetorically. “No. I was with you when we opened that door. You did all you could to save them. Which means you are protecting someone.” His eyes widened. “And there is no one on this ship you would go to greater lengths to protect than our pilot, Ms. Miller.”