The Hundred Worlds

by J. F. Holmes

  ***

  Captain Mikael Dorn

  “…and when I got the chance, I took the promotion. I mean, my own ship, exploring the stars? Who wouldn’t jump at that, right?” Dorn finished.

  “Naturally. How long has it been since you took command of the Beowulf?”

  “That’s complicated,” Dorn explained. “Your sense of time and internal calendar get all screwed up out there – between all the different orbital mechanics on all the planets and ports, having a constant rotating schedule on ship, and the occasional bit of confusion with relativity, it’s a mess trying to keep things straight. Subjectively for me? I’ve been a captain for four standard years by Terran reckoning, but five and a half years have passed back home.”

  “Fascinating.” Guest was laying it on thick. “That’s gotta be tough on the family life.”

  “It can be,” Dorn agreed. “Came home to an empty house two years back; my ex is living in Lakeland, Florida now with my girls.”

  “Yes, we know.” Guest agreed, and Dorn felt the temperature in the room plummet ten degrees…

  ***

  “…so, when his bitch of an ex stole everything, well, we’d known each other for years and spent a lot of time out in the black together. He’s tall, dark, and handsome, the captain of his own ship. I used to work for MicroApple, and while that pays reasonably well, scouting means it’s us against the world, making our own way, what’s not to love?” Crosby gushed.

  “Sounds like a match made in the heavens, Danielle. I hear you’re no slouch in the brains department either, is it true you can calculate turnovers in your head?”

  She was a puzzle, Danielle thought. Alternating between snappish and friendly, pissed off and helpful. It didn’t help that she was stunning, a statuesque brunette with her hair in an elaborate braid that hung past her shoulder blades. She didn’t swing that way, but knew the woman was, objectively speaking, gorgeous, and Danielle couldn’t help but feel a little relieved that she was in here, and not off seducing Mika in some other interview room. She knew it was just her insecurities twisting her mind, but it bothered her regardless.

  “Guilty as charged, the math comes to me instinctively. Obviously you have to run it through the system, but I’m usually accurate to within a minute or two, and if you just bump the turnover point five minutes earlier, you can make minor adjustments when you’re down to less than a light second away. It’s pretty straightforward, really.” Her mind was whirling. The lawyer had been worse than useless, but she couldn’t just sit there ignoring every question they asked, could she?

  The room they were sitting in was mostly dark – the corners were deep shadows, and there was a single desk with a crummy stiff-backed chair for her to sit in, a carafe of water, and two plastic cups. There was a much nicer chair opposite her, but that seat was occupied. Her interviewer was wearing a very stylish, beautifully tailored suit that betrayed no hint of her identity. She hadn’t identified herself or who she worked for, but she’d been waiting in the room when those armored security guys had delivered her and removed the filter mask. She could have been any number of clerks, administrators, professionals or…

  Shit.

  Citizens.

  “Easy for you to say…for some people, the math is pretty opaque. I know I couldn’t do it in my head,” the citizen said. “How long would it take for the Beowulf to reach, say Straite II? It’s on this side of the sun right now, about fifty-two light seconds away.”

  Danielle thought for a moment, and Farrell could see her calculating variables in her head, plotting her ship’s 20G acceleration curve.

  “A little less than five hours total transit. Call it 455 on the safe side.”

  Farrell was impressed. Her monitor, Dickson, had calculated that distance out for her and fed her the answer via her own implants – actual transit time would be 297 minutes, plus a bit. That was scary.

  ***

  “…I fucking panicked. But yes, as Odin is my witness, it was self-defense and the judge believed me. It was as simple as that.”

  “That’s a helluva story, Brooklyn,” Citizen Bauer said. “Can’t say I blame you one bit.”

  “But it seems once I’d gotten away with murder once, my idiot buddies were determined to rope me into shitty setup after shitty setup. I talked my way out of a few, threw a few of my idiot buddies to the dogs for their trouble, and then I got charged again. This time it was my word against a dead guy’s, and so long as I could explain why I’d shot him five times in the back, I was golden. So I did, and I was. There was an ‘innocent’,” Avery laughed, “and ‘I feared for their safety’. Gave a few details, but easy stuff I could remember. I spun them a story about having seen that asshole murder puppies for shits n’ giggles, and knowing what he was capable of, etcetera etcetera, and I walked. The judge even thanked me. I was contributing to a lower crime rate – one less shithead predator on the streets, he said. Well, he didn’t use those exact words, but that was pretty much what he said.”

  This stuff was gold. Pratt was paying special attention to Avery through the monitors. He’d pretty much written off Dorn and Cosby completely, but Avery showed promise. He didn’t know why the engineer’s profile hadn’t come across his desk before, but this was all going along very nicely. Mostly sociopathic with a hint of compassion, he’d killed before, twice, and was still more or less well-adjusted… the kid was perfect. Pratt started paying attention again.

  “I never wanted to just settle though. Fuck that noise. I got me a scholarship, which turned into an apprenticeship, which turned into another scholarship, and now here I am, sitting in a dark-ass ominous cell with some spook who thinks he’s gonna make me his friend and wants to know all about my shitty childhood. I call shenanigans, Citizen. Just tell me what’s up.”

  “Switch to Plan B,” Pratt sent to Bauer. On screen, Bauer gave the monitor a quick nod and was back at it again.

  ***

  Dorn’s hatch opened, and another citizen leaned into the room and passed a pad to the thug across the table.

  “Thanks, Jeffery,” the female citizen said as the hatch clanged shut again. “See? This is what I’m talking about, Mikael, these…logs, these sensor readouts, these all show signs of tampering.”

  “What? What do you – may I?”

  “Of course you can, there’s no secrets here, at least not on my side, Captain. While we’ve been here chatting, my investigators were pouring over your ship’s logs from top to bottom. This is all evidence that you’ll receive as part of the tribunal’s disclosure process, no harm in you seeing your own handiwork now…”

  Dorn reviewed the pad, swiping through sensor logs, comms logs between the Beowulf and her two sister ships. None of it made sense.

  “This isn’t accurate…”

  “Well, that’s what I brought you down here for; of course it’s not accurate. That’s the problem, Mikael. You can’t alter a starship’s records without root access. But if you’ll look…here,” Guest stabbed a part of the pad with her finger and swiped left, “you can see where all the metadata was altered, by your authority, to erase the record of you opening fire on your helpless colleagues…”

  “No, that’s not true, it didn’t happen like that at all!” Dorn protested. “I don’t have that level of access!”

  “…and here’s where you deliberately sabotaged your own ship, killing the Wheaton twins and one of your own engineers. I mean, opening fire on your allies, that’s awful. Killing your own people and pinning the whole matter on some nameless, faceless space boogeyman, that’s pretty goddamn cold. What I can’t figure out is your motive. My boss was suggesting, if we got some cooperation from you, we should maybe see about recruiting you – everything we’re seeing suggests you’d be well suited for certain roles within Community Services & Crime Reduction.”

  “I never – I didn’t – I haven’t killed anyone!” Dorn protested. “When I said it wasn’t accurate, I meant our records can’t be altered! No one aboard ship h
ad root access, and no one has been aboard our ship since we touched down!”

  Guest shook her head and frowned. “I can see you’re going to be stubborn, Mikael, and that’s kind of a pain in my ass. I don’t like to play silly-buggers with starship captains who ought to know better, ought to have more integrity, ought to deserve the trust their crew placed in them. But you yourself know exactly what your ship’s own records mean.”

  Dorn heard the words, but he wasn’t listening anymore, and there was a sharp pain developing at the base of his skull that made it feel like his brain was swelling too big for the inside of his head. This is impossible.

  Chapter 5

  “…Alright, Ms. Crosby, it’s time to start discussing the incident itself. I always spend some extra time at the beginning of an interview just getting to know whoever I’m talking to, it’s frequently the first and last time I ever get a chance to speak to them. There’s an old trope from the early 21st century where this tremendously significant event in someone’s life changes their destiny forever – but for someone else, that same event is ‘Just Tuesday’. I don’t want you to think I don’t realize just how big a deal this is for you, and I think by spending a bit of time getting to know each other up front, we can reach a better resolution on this whole mess.”

  Danielle found herself nodding with the woman as she explained. Then the citizen continued, “So why don’t you start from the beginning, and tell me how your boyfriend sabotaged the Tianlong and the Sternenkonig.”

  Danielle Crosby shook her head, confused at first, and stunned. The accusation came out of nowhere, and it took her more than a moment to process what the citizen had just said.

  “I, um, I’m afraid I really don’t know what you’re referring to, ma’am.”

  “Danielle, that’s crap, and you and I both know it,” Farrell snapped. “The sooner you can explain how you guys cooked your books, the sooner we can take this before a tribunal and get this sorted out. I’m trying to help you, but people are dead, Danielle, and it’s Mikael’s responsibility, Mikael’s fault. Those ships were worth a quarter billion standard credits apiece, and they were the property of the UN.”

  “The UNES,” Danielle corrected.

  “I beg your pardon?” the citizen replied.

  “They were UNES ships, they don’t belong to the UN itself. We’re a separate agency completely.”

  “Is that some bullshit the lawyer told you? That by being UNES, it made you special? If there’s a U and an N next to each other, lady, we own it, and don’t let some legal beagle confuse you. Half a billion credits scattered all over the Shiva system, and seventeen dead spacers. Someone’s going to have to pay for that, and right now, everything points at Mikael. Work with me here. If we’ve got this wrong, we need to know.”

  We didn’t cook the books though, Danielle thought. You need root access for that, and that level of system access isn’t granted to the crew, to avoid exactly this kind of accusation.

  “Ma’am, I can’t read your mind but, whatever it is you think we did, you’re wrong. I’m just the astrogator; I plot stars, set the course, and work the Fold Drive. The damage the Beowulf sustained in the attack killed DeLancey and the Wheaton twins, and I know nothing about what happened beyond that. I can tell you what happened after the explosions…” Danielle offered, and the citizen nodded.

  “Then let’s start there,” she replied…

  ***

  The hatch clanged open, and a second citizen joined the first. Avery still didn’t know what to call his interrogator, but the first guy got up out of his comfy chair right away and stepped back from the table to allow this other thug to have a seat.

  “Hi, Brooklyn, pleased to meet you. I’m Pete Pratt, and I’m a citizen with Community Services. Sorry about the rough treatment there back in the hold; we’ve got some serious concerns about the death of your colleagues, the circumstances that led to Ms. Torres’ Flying Dutchman for what, nine hours? The deaths of all hands aboard the Tianlong and the Sternenkonig, and the loss of both craft. It’s been a shitty go for you and your crew, hasn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “I was reading up on your background, and I’ve gotta say, Brooklyn, your story growing up, a self-made man, it’s pretty damn impressive.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And obviously more recent events have brought you to our attention as well. Is it true that you more or less single-handedly figured out the vector Torres was launched on, narrowed down the cone of scope of where she could have been thrown, and developed the search pattern that let you guys recover her?”

  “Yep.”

  ***

  “Alright, Captain, let’s pretend for a moment that your ship’s logs weren’t a complete and utter smoking gun that implicates you, possibly for treason. Why don’t you tell me your version of events?”

  “Finally…well, we dropped out of Fold space on the edge of the system, as we’d expected to, and we started our in-system burn. There were two gas giants, a massive comet that proved to be very lucrative – it was seriously high on the frozen Helium H3 content – and then we were through to the inner system, approaching the cold edge of the habitable zone.”

  He paused for a moment, trying to recollect, then continued, “Our sponsors for the trip were especially anxious for us to find a planet we could colonize, and the more the better. The moment they had a colony site, they were going to send equipment through the wormhole junction by frigate, get the wormhole stable, and start sending through colonists. Like, a million of them or more. It’s India, a million people is less than half of one percent of their population. So our focus was on finding habitable planets for them to colonize A-Frickin-Sap.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “We had just reached the edge of the cold zone, when the Tianlong just…exploded. No warning, no notice, nothing on sensors, just…bam. Gone. I had maybe two, three seconds to react before the Sternenkonig went too, and I was about to shout a warning when we were holed and Bill died.” Dorn paused to collect himself. “We had loads of time to review our sensor logs –”

  “I bet you did,” the citizen challenged him, but Dorn ignored her.

  “– and as best we can tell, it was a high-velocity stealth penetrator round, something inert and dense, with no terminal guidance, because we would have, should have seen it.”

  “Now you’re just making shit up,” the woman said, exasperated. “Space is too enormous for someone to deliberately hit a ship with a sabot round; there’s too much chaos in the system, and even aiming off by one one-hundredth of a percent of a degree means the shot misses by miles.”

  “I agree…” Dorn said.

  “Good, now –” Citizen Guest replied.

  “…for human tech.”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘for human tech’, Citizen. We’ve never been to this system before, and we still don’t know if its planets are inhabited by intelligent life. Although two – correction, I forgot about the Venture, make that three demolished scout ships and one maimed Beowulf suggest we poked the hornets’ nest. For stingers, the hornets throw high-velocity stealth penetrator rounds.”

  ***

  “Alright,” Danielle took a breath. “Alright. We’d been tasked with surveying the Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu, and Ganesha systems by the Indian representative on the Survey Council. You know they’re always pushing for start-up colony potential to relieve their population pressure, well, they ponied up big time for this and had us hitting four systems they’d had their eye on for a long time. They were pretty sure there were planets in the habitable zone and needed more details, more intel. If we fucked up the mission, the penalties would be extensive, but for every day we returned early, we were offered a bonus.

  “We’d arrived in system and were burning for the core. By sending three scout ships, we were able to triangulate just about every astral body and planet –”

  “Spare me the lecture,” Farrell snapped, but then softened. “Sorry,
that came out wrong. Please, I understand about the theory of how surveying works, but the difference between theory and reality is that in theory, there isn’t one. What went wrong?”

  “Right, well, long story short, we were at max acceleration, and the survey of the system was to take about two weeks. We were just approaching the cold edge of the hab zone when we were hit. There were no proximity warnings, no nothing; one moment we were cruising along working our instrumentation and the next, we’ve got a hole in the bulkhead, I’ve got Wheaton’s half-digested lunch painting my hair and the back of my seat, and his forearm is resting on Mika’s primary readout display. The air was whistling out and our suit helmets slammed down, trapping me in my little bubble with bits of Bill dripping down my collar. It was fucking gross.”

  ***

  “…Your turn, then, Brooklyn, explain to me what happened?” asked the citizen.

  “I don’t know a fuckin’ thing, man, I’m the goddamn engineer! Our sensor ops were so much spaghetti sauce when we got cored, and they’re the only two who could really testify as to what was on their board in the moments before they died. I have one job – keep the ship alive. I maintained the intrasystem drive. I maintained the Fold system. I swabbed the goddamn decks, and I cleaned the goddamn shitters. I don’t know a damn thing about the moments that led up to all hell breaking loose – things were fine, things were fine, things weren’t fine. It was that fast.”

  “Thanks, Brooklyn, I appreciate your candor and your keeping a clear head on your shoulders. We’ve been talking to both your captain and your astrogator, and I’d like to replay a clip from the recordings of the interview next door.”

  Pratt produced a tablet, queued up a video, and pressed play. The cell in question looked a lot like the one he was in. Bare walls, desk, water, single lightbulb in the ceiling. The camera looked over Crosby’s shoulder as she sat at a desk opposite one helluva foxy lady.