Resilience

by Fletcher DeLancey

  The first crack appeared. “I, um. I thought there was provocation. But now I know they weren’t threatening me. At first, I mean.”

  Ekatya knew exactly how she had learned that. Dr. Wells had been none too pleased to find seven injured crew members pouring into her medbay lobby. The lecture she had unleashed on Rahel was already making its way around the gossip circuit.

  What Rahel didn’t know was that after Dr. Wells had spoken to Warrant Officer Roris—who had made the initial call to medical—she had then come to Ekatya’s office and launched into another tirade, pointing out that bullying was a Class Three offense and if she weren’t bound by her oath, she would have tossed the injured crew members into the nearest waste reclamation tank. “If they’re going to behave like little shits, they ought to swim with it,” she had snapped, before turning on her heel and exiting without waiting for dismissal.

  “They weren’t threatening you at first,” Ekatya repeated. “Which implies they threatened you later. But I don’t want implications. I want facts.” She rested her forearms on the desk and interlaced her fingers. “You’re a First Guard. If you’d had a normal career in the Alsean Defense Force, you’d probably have fifty or more Guards under your supervision now. Tell me, what would you do if a Guard in your command wouldn’t tell you the truth about what happened in a fight? If she made you guess about the chain of events?”

  For the first time, Rahel met her eyes. “I’d make sure that Guard—” She stopped, her bearing softening as the realization hit. “Knew who was in charge and what my expectations were,” she finished weakly.

  Ekatya nodded. “Have I made my expectations clear?”

  “You want the facts.”

  “All of them,” Ekatya clarified. “Now sit down and tell me what happened.”

  She had to give Rahel credit: her account did not vary from that of Warrant Officer Roris except where it filled in the gaps. Roris had seen the fight purely from a physical perspective, but Rahel had felt the aggression and threat. Ekatya could only imagine how powerful that must have been, particularly for an Alsean with a grand total of eight days in an alien culture.

  “I apologize, Captain,” Rahel concluded. “I know this wasn’t what you hoped for.”

  “You’re right. I hoped my crew members would have better ethics than to bully the newest arrival. And better sense than to attack an Alsean warrior with an extended stave in her hand.”

  Rahel stared at her with wide eyes. “You’re not—”

  “I’m not sending you back to Alsea, no.” Ekatya watched her erect posture go loose and added, “That doesn’t mean you’ll escape punishment. You continued the fight after the threat was removed. That’s no more acceptable here than it would be on Alsea. We don’t have empathic Alsean healers here. We can’t heal bones in one day. You’ve put seven members of this crew out of commission for several duty shifts, and that’s a loss to ship’s readiness.”

  “I understand.”

  “But,” Ekatya lifted a finger, “I’m also aware that you could have caused much more damage than you did. You targeted non-vital areas, and you hit each of them once. Just enough to put them down.” She looked at the broad-shouldered, powerfully built woman across from her and marveled at the idiocy of those troopers. They had just finished a virtual reality weapons training—which was, in part, about distinguishing threats—and promptly failed a real-life application.

  She knew about the unsavory gossip regarding her acceptance of Rahel on the crew. Theories varied from “political stunt” to “empathic spy for the captain” to “personal favor to the Lancer of Alsea,” the last accompanied by distasteful speculation as to why that favor might be owed. In truth, Rahel had done her a favor by so quickly establishing that she was a skilled soldier and not to be trifled with. It would probably take less than two days for word to reach every member of the crew.

  “I’m assigning you to the medbay cleaning detail for the next seven days,” she said. “You’ll continue your tours and training with Dr. Rivers, but when you’re not with her, you’ll report to Dr. Wells.”

  “Yes, Captain.” By the look on Rahel’s face, this was one step up from damnation. “Shall I start now?”

  “In a moment. Rahel,” she said deliberately, signifying that this was no longer a dressing down, “I wish I could tell you that every member of my crew is as open-minded as my section chiefs. I didn’t choose my chiefs solely for their skill and experience. I also wanted to be sure they would fit with my ideals. But they chose their own officers, and those officers chose staff, and some of my crew were assigned here by Fleet. Most of them are everything I could hope for. But not all.”

  “You can’t take responsibility for everyone.”

  “I do take responsibility—for their actions. What I can’t do is regulate how they think. You shouldn’t have to feel prejudice and fear, but you will. I know you’ll never cause empathic harm. I’ve made sure this crew knows that as a mid empath, you’re not even capable of it. That doesn’t mean they all believe me. There’s a political faction in the Protectorate . . .” She hesitated. Every time she spoke of this, the rage came with it, and she did not want Rahel to sense that.

  “The Defenders of the Protectorate. Lhyn told me about them.”

  “She told you everything?”

  “Not verbally. I wondered why she would react that way about a political faction, even if they’re against everything she stands for. Then I looked them up on the newscoms.” Rahel’s expression darkened. “Now I know why she understands things that someone like her shouldn’t have to know about.”

  Ekatya nodded, not trusting her voice or emotions if she said anything else on the topic of Lhyn’s torture. “Then you know why some of this crew won’t trust you. And even those who know you’re safe might still be uncomfortable knowing you can sense them. You’re the first of your kind, a pioneer. It won’t be easy.”

  “I know.”

  “But Salomen chose you. I hold your oath by proxy, and that means I chose you, too, just like I chose my section chiefs. I’m holding you to a higher standard. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Captain.” Even sitting, Rahel somehow grew taller. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Try to do it without breaking any more bones, all right?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Good. Dr. Wells is waiting for you. You’re dismissed.”

  Rahel stood up and held a fist over her heart while quickly lowering her head. “Thank you.”

  The Alsean salute took some getting used to, Ekatya mused. She watched her newest officer stride for the door and said, “You should know one more thing. When those seven get out of the medbay, they’re assigned to a cleaning detail, too. For fourteen days.”

  Rahel’s mouth quirked in a tiny smile, as if she were afraid to let it show. She nodded again and vanished out the door.

  Ekatya reactivated her screen and called Dr. Wells on the intraship com. As soon as the doctor appeared, she said, “Rahel Sayana is on her way. I’m impressed; she’s already scared to death of you.”

  “Not quite what I was striving for,” Wells said ruefully. “Did you decide on the sentence for the bullies?”

  “Mm-hm. One of my section chiefs gave me the idea. If they’re going to behave like little shits, they ought to work with it, don’t you think?”

  An approving smirk lit her face. “You assigned them to waste reclamation?”

  “Two weeks of it. On the night shift.”

  “Does Rahel know that?”

  “She knows their sentence is twice as long as hers, but not what they’re doing. I left that for you to share when the time is right.”

  “You’re more of a psychologist than I gave you credit for, Captain.”

  “Didn’t you know that’s in the job description?” Ekatya signed off and leaned back in her chair, thinking of Rahel’s expression when she mentioned learning about Lhyn’s story.

  The security footage from the training room had been
impressive, to say the least. Rahel’s reflexes were lightning fast; she had gone through six opponents as if they were standing still. The entire fight had taken less than twenty seconds.

  Apparently, Alseans weren’t merely stronger than Gaians. They were faster, too, or at least the highly trained warriors were. Which meant she had an experienced, hypercompetent warrior on her ship who already felt protective of Lhyn—and could sense threats.

  Once Rahel was through her punishment week, Ekatya knew what her next assignment would be.

  4

  Chases and braces

  By the end of her first shift on cleaning detail, Rahel concluded that Captain Serrado was either a brilliant commander or an evil one. Now that she knew what this punishment entailed, she would gladly have chosen the brig instead.

  Dr. Wells had greeted her without a trace of the earlier anger and turned her over to a subordinate, who led her to a lower deck. There she was introduced to the horrors of medical laundry, stained with fluids and occasional solids that she did not want to think about. The Phoenix had rendezvoused with a passenger ship that had experienced a gastrointestinal virus outbreak, and the medbay was full of patients in varying states of distress.

  Sheets, towels, medshirts, trousers, and cleaning cloths all made their way down through the recycle chutes located in every treatment room. Most of the process was automated, as the materials traveled from the collection bins into either the sterilization equipment or the incinerator, but now and again some offending material got stuck or went the wrong way. This would stall the system, requiring a worker to pull the material and send it on. Rahel quickly learned that the pieces needing manual handling were invariably the most disgusting ones.

  From there, she was sent up three decks to clean a surgical bay, which made dirty laundry seem appetizing. Thankfully, the nurse in charge took care of the used instruments. Though Rahel was no stranger to blood, seeing it on those shining implements gave her stomach a turn she would never admit to.

  Her job was collecting the medical waste that littered the room and bagging it for later disposal. As the two of them worked, the nurse explained that he had already engaged the full-room decontamination process, rendering the waste largely inert. Care still had to be taken, of course, and incineration remained the best method of disposal. The incinerator Rahel had heard of in the laundry was really a diverted flow from the surf engines. Directed through a special processing chamber, the extreme heat quickly reduced waste to sterile ash, which was then repurposed as an ingredient in matter printer base material.

  Bagging medical waste was disgusting, but Rahel enjoyed the final step of the cleaning. The nurse led her through the door, locked it, and activated the decontamination process for the second and final time. They watched through the window as planes of blue light swept every surface in the room.

  Worst of all the assignments was when she learned how to change linens in the occupied treatment rooms, accompanied by a nurse who dealt with the patient while Rahel stripped the sheets. She saw more of these patients than she ever wanted to, but more than that, she felt them. Something about being sick or injured magnified Gaian emotions, and her blocks were insufficient at such close range. She had a splitting headache by the end of her shift and wasted no time getting out—but was stopped at the brink of freedom by Dr. Wells.

  Rarely had Rahel encountered a person with a more deceptive exterior. Dr. Wells looked unassuming, with her average height and small bone structure. Her eyes were nearly as green as Lhyn’s but slanted like Rahel’s, and her cheekbones were so pronounced that they seemed more Alsean than Gaian. She wore her light brown hair in an exotic twist at the back of her head, improbably held in place with two wooden sticks. Her slim stature and delicate features made her seem fragile, but when she growled with that thundercloud on her face, everyone in the medbay cowered.

  The thundercloud was nowhere to be seen now. “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  Dr. Wells raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know. It’s been a difficult day for you. How are you? Any empathic effects?”

  The anger came out of nowhere. Dr. Wells had been instrumental in making this a difficult day for her, and suddenly she was solicitous? Her concern was sincere, but in this moment Rahel did not care. Not even in her long-ago trainee days had she been so publicly humiliated as she was by this morning’s lecture in the middle of the lobby. Alsean instructors expected mistakes and helped their students learn from them. They did not destroy any peer respect the student had worked so hard to earn.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated. “Is there another test you want to put me through, or may I go now?”

  Dr. Wells eyed her, then deflated as she shook her head. “No tests. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Not if I see you first,” Rahel muttered under her breath as she left.

  For the next three days, she lived for her morning tours and training with Lhyn, suffered through her punishment shifts, and avoided Dr. Wells and her intrusive inquiries whenever possible.

  But she couldn’t avoid the emotions. They pounded against her until her blocks inevitably failed and the headache built. It reached a crescendo at the end of her shift, subsided to a barely tolerable level by the next morning, and built again on her next punishment shift. Every day, the crescendo was higher.

  On the morning of the fifth day, Lhyn took her to meet Commander Przepyszny, the section chief for operations. He was quite tall, though not as tall as Lhyn, and had the beginnings of a soft belly pressing against his tool belt. His dark skin and high forehead complemented the thick, kinky silver hair that stood straight up for the length of a finger and ended at a perfectly level cut.

  “Call me Zeppy,” he said, shaking her hand with crushing strength. Though others had attempted that as a means of establishing superiority, his emotional signature held no such intentions. He simply had that strong a grip and didn’t realize it.

  “Zeppy?” Rahel held her hand behind her back and flexed it, working out the cramp.

  “Nobody can pronounce my last name and I can’t be bothered to teach everyone.”

  “Plus it’s a good description for him,” Lhyn put in. “Or it would be if he replaced the e with an i.” She gave Rahel an expectant look.

  This was a test, then. A lingual implant worked only for hearing and speaking; it did nothing for the written language. Every day after their morning tour, Lhyn drilled her in the Common alphabet and the words most often used in schematics and signage. For Rahel, who had spent most of her childhood in one library or another, learning to read a new language was a thrilling puzzle.

  She looked up at the ceiling, picturing the letters in her mind. With the i in place of the e, it would be pronounced . . .

  “Zippy,” she said experimentally, and received an instant translation from her implant. “Does that mean you’re fast?”

  Lhyn beamed, pride and warm approval washing outward.

  “I’m organized.” Zeppy indicated the door in the bulkhead behind him. “Are you ready to see the heart of the Phoenix?”

  “I toured engineering two days ago. They said that was the heart of the ship.”

  “They would,” he scoffed. “Engineering could produce all the power in the galaxy and it wouldn’t do any good without operations. We keep it flowing.”

  “Maybe they’re the heart, while you’re the arteries and vessels,” Lhyn said diplomatically.

  He narrowed his eyes, then gave a short nod that did not shift a single hair on his head. “I’ll accept that. Shall we?” He tapped the small pad to the right of the door, which immediately slid open as the hidden scanner recognized his face. Rahel stepped toward it.

  Lhyn didn’t move. “I’ll see you at the other end of the tour,” she said.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Not fond of enclosed spaces, remember? That’s about as enclosed as it gets.” Lhyn looked past her into the opening, t
hen shook her head and turned away. “Call me when you’re done.”

  “Damn shame, that is,” Zeppy said as they watched her walk down the corridor. “I don’t believe in capital punishment, but there are times when I’d make an exception. Seeders, I’d do it personally.” Satisfaction rippled through the air. “The captain almost did. Wish I’d been there to see it.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Got ten minutes alone with the asshead who hurt Dr. Rivers and taught him what hurting really means. Broke his knee and smashed his jaw into a thousand pieces.”

  Rahel tried and failed to imagine the perfect officer of her admittedly short acquaintance beating up a prisoner. “That doesn’t seem like something she’d do. Not unless it was self-defense.”

  “Oh, it was.” The satisfaction thickened. “She did him the favor of taking off his restraints, and he attacked her. Damn stupid fool didn’t realize he played right into her hands. Gave her the perfect excuse and by the Seeders, she took it. I heard she put him down in three moves.”

  “How do you know this?” Rahel was still skeptical.

  His gray eyebrows rose. “This is Fleet. Gossip goes through here faster than a quantum com. Somebody in Tlahana Station security saw the footage, and away it went. There isn’t a person on this ship who didn’t cheer when they heard it.” He turned abruptly and stepped through the door. “Come along, then.”

  Rahel followed him into a narrow passage that stretched straight back from the opening. Though the light level was normal, it seemed darker due to the close walls and the profusion of conduits, pipes, ducts, and grouped cables that snaked along them, as well as overhead and occasionally underfoot. The latter were covered by low, three-sided ramps that allowed Zeppy and Rahel to walk up and over the obstruction, protecting them from tripping but increasing the danger of cracking their skulls against overhead pipes.

  Zeppy rattled off an impressive litany of labels as he walked and pointed in various directions. “That carries power to half this deck. That one? Power to the other half. Feeder duct to the carbon scrubbers. Fresh air outflow. Sewage, you never want to need access to that one. Reclaimed water. Intraship com . . .”