Voyage

by E M Gale

  “No, I don’t want to hurt you.”

  I thought he was genuine and anyway, I needed to trust someone with this experiment. And out of all the people I knew, he already knew what I was. I considered him for a moment, and then fished the cocktail stick out of my pocket.

  “Do you know what wood does to vampires?” I asked him.

  “Well, there are mixed reports. I think it hurts them more than metal, though I don’t know why… And apparently, you can kill a vampire with a wooden stake through the heart.”

  ‘Yeah, that’s just the sort of detail I would be happy if people could forget.’

  “Right,” I said, mostly to distract him from contemplating my murder. I thrust my left hand out on the table, palm down, and held out the cocktail stick in my right hand palm up. “I want you to stab me with this.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  ‘Yup.’

  “Don’t you know what wood would do to you?” he asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘Nope. And I really need to find out, but I need someone there to help me out if it all goes wrong. I can’t ask my friends since they don’t know I’m a vampire. I could ask the major but I’m not sure I can do that without giving myself away as not the person he knows. The captain doesn’t trust me, so that leaves Cleckley, who at least is a doctor. And I had better find out what wood does before someone shoots me with a crossbow bolt.’

  “I’m trying to help you out here, Cleckley,” I said through gritted teeth.

  ‘OK, so maybe I’m not as calm as I appear. It is, after all, possible that being stabbed with wood will kill me even if it isn’t through the heart.’

  “Right.” Cleckley rubbed his nose nervously, pushing his glasses up. “Isn’t there another way? I am a doctor, we’re supposed to do no harm.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, right, do no harm to what? Doctors commit large-scale genocide every time they prescribe antibiotics.”

  Cleckley blinked. “That is a weird way of looking at it,” he commented. “You care about bacteria then? Does that mean vampirism is a bacterial infection?”

  ‘What?’

  I suspected I looked confused and that seemed to change his mind.

  “OK, forget that last question,” he said.

  ‘Right.’

  “Look, you want to do weird experiments on me, whatever, but I need to know what wood will do before some blasted pirate aims a crossbow at me.”

  “So, you don’t know what wood does?”

  ‘Uh-oh, I’ve said too much again. Curse my stupid mouth.’

  “You’ve never done this before?”

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  “In two hundred-odd years no-one’s managed to stab you with wood? Not even with a cocktail stick?” Now he looked impressed. I sighed and leant back in the chair. “You’ve never even gotten a splinter?”

  ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

  I rolled my eyes at him, mostly because I didn’t have a response. It occurred to me at that moment how funny the whole thing was. I was hiding the fact I was a vampire from my friends and hiding the fact that I was a time traveller and not a bicentenarian from the crew.

  “So,” he said, leaning back in his creaky chair and crossing his arms, “why do you want to find out now, when you’ve been fine so far?”

  ‘Damn! Another question I don’t have a decent answer to.’

  “To help you.” I smiled a charming smile. “I thought I ought to repay you getting me this gig by letting you find out something useful.” I frowned. “Of course, it’s your fault I’m a merc and pirates are going to shoot crossbows at me.”

  He smiled. “It was the captain who chose that. After all, where did you expect that we’d put you? The bridge?”

  “Sounds good to me, then I could learn to pilot this bird.”

  Cleckley laughed. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the captain has given orders for you not to be even allowed onto the bridge.”

  I raised my eyebrows at that. I’d not tried to go up there as I really didn’t want to meet the captain again. Nevertheless…

  “But I swore not to steal his ship. Why is he so distrustful?” I cried, waving my hands wide.

  ‘Captain Clarke. It has a nice ring to it, actually.’

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  I shrugged.

  ‘I’d probably not trust anyone with a ship I owned, but I’d be far more subtle about it. I had no ideas about mutiny until the captain suggested it. Why was he putting such ideas in my head? Surely that wasn’t a good move on his part.’

  Cleckley smirked.

  “By the way, whilst we’re on the subject of the captain’s paranoia, I wanted to ask you, what happened to the rest of the crew? Did they mutiny or is the ‘captain’ a successful mutineer himself?”

  Cleckley looked troubled.

  “Well?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Spill it.”

  “How do you know we’re short on crew?” he asked, not looking me in the eyes.

  I sighed. “It’s obvious.”

  ‘Why else would the captain be so eager to sign up five completely untrained people, one of whom he doesn’t trust as far as he can throw her? Of course, he doesn’t know I’m untrained, but leaving that aside for the moment, he did have to train my friends up in the job.’

  “We had a run-in with pirates,” Cleckley said.

  I waited for him to expand on that, but he didn’t. “And?”

  He frowned. “We lost about thirty people in all. Ten dead, and the other twenty deserted at Ragnarok IV.”

  I sighed and shook my head.

  ‘This is why I should have spent more time in the bar listening to the gossip and less time jumping at the first job offer that came my way.’

  “They threw a grenade into the bar.”

  “Doesn’t the door to the bar get locked shut when the alarm goes off?”

  “It does now.”

  “Oh.”

  ‘A grenade… nasty.’

  “Don’t pirates attack all the ships in the area? Why would they change ship? Surely no one would want to be stuck on Ragnarok IV, right?”

  Cleckley looked evasive. He picked up a plastic, squishy ball shaped like a brain and started kneading it with his hands.

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  “Or… is there something special about this ship that might make it a target, perhaps?”

  Cleckley said nothing but stared at me.

  “Or this crew perhaps?”

  His heartbeat sped up. He was sweating and giving off a strong scent of anxiety.

  ‘Is he scared? Of me? Or of the captain?’

  I took a punt.

  “It’s the captain, isn’t it? Who did he piss off? What is he up to?”

  Cleckley looked up at me in surprise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I smiled.

  “Come on, tell me about the captain. There’s something odd about him, isn’t there?”

  He sighed and I kept up the silent stare.

  ‘I think I’m on the wrong scent here.’

  “Didn’t you see the people who attacked last time? Which species were they?”

  “No, I didn’t see them.”

  I looked at him. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, what did the mercs say about it?”

  “Well, nothing to me.”

  “What about the ones who jumped ship?”

  He shrugged.

  “It didn’t occur to you to listen to their gossip if you wanted to find out what had happened?”

  “I’m a doctor! I don’t listen to the grunts’ gossiping.”

  I shook my head sadly.

  “Uh… not that you’re a grunt, of course.”

  ‘Whatever. I suppose I could always ask them myself. Discreetly. But discretion probably won’t go down that well with mercs.’

  He looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know anything else… but back to what we were talking about.”

&
nbsp; ‘Oh, yeah, the cocktail stick.’

  I looked down at my hand. The cocktail stick wasn’t there, or on the desk…

  ‘Ah, I’m chewing on it. Great. Well, obviously cocktail sticks don’t give off splinters. That was bloody stupid, Clarke.’

  I handed Cleckley the slightly soggy cocktail stick with an apologetic grin. He put on gloves and handled it as if it was a biohazard, which I supposed it might well be.

  “You’ve never gotten a splinter in two hundred years?” he asked incredulously.

  I shrugged and pulled a silly grin.

  “OK, then, I’ll do it. Put your hand out.”

  I looked at him suspiciously.

  “Oh, come on, you asked me to do this.”

  ‘True.’

  “Well… yes. But you have to promise that you’ll help me if it does something bad. Like pull it back out again.”

  He looked at me. I think he was amazed that I didn’t trust him.

  ‘He wouldn’t last a day in politics.’

  He got some bandages out from a drawer and laid them on the table.

  “I promise I’ll do whatever I can to save you.”

  I was pretty sure he was genuine and anyway, I had no choice. I had to know.

  “OK.” I took a deep breath.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Your hand?”

  I glared at him.

  “No need to be quite so jittery.”

  ‘Huh, it’s not your life we’re experimenting with.’

  I put my left hand out on the bandages and breathed slowly and deeply to quell the rising panic. Cleckley didn’t let me panic for long before stabbing me through the flap of skin between my thumb and index finger.

  The shock went up through my body, but worse, my left hand was completely numb and pinned to the desk. I couldn’t move my right hand to remove the cocktail stick. My limbs felt heavy and were immobilised. I tried to move my head and focus my eyes on Cleckley instead of my hand, but I couldn’t even do that. I tried to blink, I couldn’t. Then I realised that my entire body was paralysed.

  ‘Oh, this isn’t good. I can do nothing but hope that Cleckley keeps his word. Shit.’

  “Are you OK?” asked Cleckley, “You look really pale, uh, more so than usual.”

  ‘Come on, pull the damned thing out and help me, Cleckley! Now’s not the time to dick around! I can’t move, I don’t even think I’m breathing! Help!’

  He pulled the cocktail stick out and I could feel my body again. I felt like crying with relief and I only just managed not to. My hand started to bleed, and then all the colour left the world and suddenly everything sounded as if my ears were underwater. I tried to look around, but, and it took me a moment to notice this, I couldn’t see anything. I knew where Cleckley was, as I could smell perfectly, but I couldn’t see.

  ‘Odd, I really do seem to rely on my sense of smell.’

  “Clarke? Clarke! Where did you go?” said Cleckley. Even muffled, I could still hear that he sounded frightened.

  Suddenly, everything shifted back into colour and I could see again. I held up my left hand. The wound had healed but there was a decent amount of blood on the bandage.

  Cleckley was staring at me, his mouth open. I picked up an empty mug advertising nanotech heart monitors–with, wouldn’t you know it, a grinning heart armed with a skipping rope–and put the bandage in it. Then I lit the bandage with my lighter. Cleckley was so put out by something else that he didn’t seem to mind my bandage-burning stunt.

  “You… you vanished!” He looked utterly shell-shocked.

  “I… what?”

  The fire alarm went off, the sprinklers turned on and a few mercenaries ran into the office with a hose.

  ‘Oh, of course the mercs would get the job of fighting fires. How embarrassing.’

  They emptied a few gallons of water over me and the mug as both Cleckley and I sat there stunned.

  “Thanks, guys,” I said, water dripping off my nose and forehead. The human mercenaries chuckled, but the orc who was with them, Gromley, looked consternated.

  “Sorry, ma’am-sir,” Gromley said, “but we thought there was a fire.”

  “You causing trouble, Clarke?” asked the dreamy-eyed mercenary called Stonewall.

  “No. Was being medicalised.”

  ‘Asking for good English in this situation is asking a little too much.’

  “Ah,” they said.

  “Good job he didn’t bless it first, eh?” said Petey, pointing at Stonewall. Then they left the office making more stupid jokes about holy water. Cleckley still looked shocked.

  “Sorry.” I shrugged guiltily. “I didn’t think about sprinklers.”

  “My office! It’s soaked!”

  “Yeah, I’m, er… really sorry.” I tipped a few sodden, brightly coloured notebooks into the bin. “Is there anything I can do to help tidy this up?”

  He had recovered enough to prevent me from throwing the rest of his clutter into the bin as well. So I unpinned and unplaited my wet hair.

  “No, it’s fine, Clarke, my computer seems to have survived, so it’s only my freebies.”

  “I’m really, really sorry,” I said, wringing my hair out onto the carpet. He stared at his office’s new water feature.

  “Just… go, Clarke. You’re dismissed.”

  “You sure? I can help tidy.”

  “Just go.”

  I nodded and scarpered.

  * * *

  I sighed as I plodded my sodden way across the medical bay. The orderlies on duty laughed at me as I dripped past them. Then, as I headed towards my quarters, I turned a corner and saw Rob.

  “Hey, Clarke.” He looked at me appraisingly for a moment. “I now pronounce you winner of the starship corridors’ wet tee-shirt competition.” He grinned. “Of course you’re the only entrant, but don’t let it get you down.”

  I glared at him.

  He laughed. “Drink?”

  I glared more.

  “I meant in the bar. Once you’ve gotten out of those wet clothes.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.

  I started to imagine him bursting into flames from the heat of my glare and then stopped on the off chance that he might.

  “Ooo, scary look! OK, I’ll meet you there in ten.”

  “Yeah, sure.” I had been told I was off-shift once the doctor was done with me.

  “Cool.” He just stood there, grinning at me for a bit, and then said, “Uh, can you invite Jane and Mark on the way down too? I think Anna’s already waiting there.”

  I nodded mutely as water from my hair dripped down my nose. I puffed air out of my mouth to remove the drip. Rob chuckled.

  I went back to my quarters. I showered in warm water, washed my hair and pulled it into my habitual style, two plaits that I then pinned up over the top of my head. It was a neat style that was good for getting my hair out of the way. I found clean, dry clothes and headed out. I was halfway down to the bar before I realised I’d forgotten to round up the troops, so I sighed to myself and went up towards Jane’s room.

  As I approached her room I noticed that there two people in it. Their hearts were beating rather fast and…

  ‘Oh, I see. Heh.’

  I didn’t need to knock or even listen at the door to realise what was going on. That was vampiric senses for you.

  ‘Well, Jane and Mark can screw each other if they like.’

  I decided to leave them to it.

  ‘I wonder if Anna and Rob know about this? And anyway, I thought Mark liked Anna.’

  I sauntered into the bar. I’d spent too much time in the mercenary rec-room; this one looked far too clean to me. The normal bar had large viewscreens that showed the starry sky of space, although it was also well-lit, which would have made it hard for normal humans to really see what was out there. I could make out millions of stars, but not quite as many as when I looked out of my viewscreen with the lights off. I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure whether it was a window that showed us directly what was
outside of the ship or a viewscreen that just displayed the view from the surface.

  Most of the ship didn’t have carpet, but the ship’s main bar did. It was a pointless luxury, in my opinion, and this carpet wasn’t even sticky with drinks. The main barroom also had a genuine, if compact bar, and one of the catering girls was behind it pouring beers. There were no alcohol-filled vending machines up here. No training weapons or pool cues either. The seats were a deep red colour to match the red and gold of the carpet and the light fake pine of the unscratched tables.

  I tried not to visualise what it would have looked like after a grenade had been thrown in.

  Rob and Anna were seated at one of the low tables. I bought an unchilled red wine and went to join them.

  “Hey, guys,” I said. Anna looked slightly miffed to see me, but I wasn’t sure why. So I just smiled at them both and sat down.

  “Well, where’re the others?” asked Rob.

  ‘Ah, that.’

  I smirked. “Couldn’t find them. They didn’t answer the door.” Then I realised that I had given away that they were in the same quarters, but neither Rob nor Anna noticed this.

  At that point, a posse of about ten of the mercenaries swaggered into the bar. Their shift had just ended as well and it seemed they fancied a bar without spare weapons for a change.

  “’Lo, Clarke!” hollered Cliff, one of my s  mates, as they wandered over.

  “Hi, guys,” I said, noticing Rob’s frown. I was slightly worried that he might start the anti-mercenary line now, with them all there.

  “I heard Gromley soaked you. He’s rather upset about it,” said Connor.

  “What, the good doctor set you on fire?” piped up Tim.

  “Nah, I started the fire,” I said. “Accidentally.”

  “You in the habit of burning up people’s offices now?” said Petey.

  Anna looked at me in surprise. “You all right, Clarke?”

  “Yeah, I just got soaked by a load of over-eager mercenaries. I guess they were having fun pretending to be firefighters or something brave and foolish like that.”

  A few chuckled at that. Oddly, a few frowned too.

  ‘Intriguing, why would a merc be offended at that?’

  “So why’d you burn down the doctor’s office?” Cliff asked me.

  ‘Great, now the rumour’s spreading. By tomorrow the gossip will be that I was rescued from a blazing inferno that was once the med bay.’